His voyage was the one that led to millions of Native American's being slaughtered and changed the entire hemisphere forever. Duh!

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The onset of the Little Ice Age compromised the Viking route and made any permanent presence in the Americas impossible. Columbus' voyages, on the other hand, brought about the European conquest and settlement of the Americas.

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Because the Vikings were "savages" and not cultured Europe. I mean, c'mon, what kind of literalist crap are you spewing? We all know that Columbus didn't discover anything, because there were people already here, and because barbarians from Scandinavia were already looking for plunder in Newfoundland. What Columbus did was find a new land for cultured European settlers. Regardless of the merit of his actions, surely you can at least recognize why he is important and why viking raids are not.

By the way, thank you for your careful analysis of Columbus and his intentions. I was unaware that you knew what it was like to live in 1492. I'm sure it was a pretty nice place. Right? I mean, some could argue that you are imputing present day values to a different era, but not me. I think exploring a strange and hostile land is the same now as back then.....

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Columbus is in the history books because his voyage publicized the Americas to mainstream Europe of the time. The Viking route in the north was dongerous and all but cut off in the mid-1400's with the death of the Greenland settlements, and other early European voyages didn't bother to publicize their landings. Columbus did, and it got all of the rich European nations sending fleets of colonists across the Atlantic, which made all the difference.

Still, the history books should be corrected about the whole "discovery" nonsense.

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Colón should probably be credited with the first voyage(s) that paved the way for permanent European settlement of the western hemisphere, and that is the sole distinction that he deserves.
Circumstances didn't favour the Scandinavians.
I'm not going to attempt to defend Colón, but his actions were little more than a mirror of the age in which he operated. If say, the English or the Danes had been equally equipped and had they made landfall in areas that had given them an in on such established empires such as the Aztec and Inca, you can be sure that the two latter would have received the same treatment that the Spanish who followed Colón dished out.
Northern Europeans and North American historians love to vilify the Spanish invasion of America, without fully addressing the behaviour of Norhtern Europeans in the lands that they did conquer, and conquer is the appropriate word.
If anything, my argument around Colón is his pedigree. There isn't enough hard evidence to support the claim that son of a rag-selling family from Genoa is the same person that the Italians wish to claim; especially when CC himself, in a letter to his brother Diego, acknowledged that he wasn't the first admiral in the clan.
Plus, a common Genoese rag-peddler could not have married so high above his station - he married a Portuguese noblewoman.
Colón's demands in such matters as coat-of-arms and titles, are a clear indicator of the mindset of men of his era.
The supposed contributions of heroes and statesmen; Washington, Jeferson, etc., should be also be revised.

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If you ever get a chance, you should look at the original journals of Columbus and his contemporaries (like Michael Cuneo) - vivid accouts of religious piety and divine inspiration, slave capture raids where the youngest children were routinely killed, and the rape of captive native women. Is this what we call European culture? When Columbus came to the realization that the region he found was very poor in gold, and that the gold trinkets he saw were rare items, he decided that he would switch to slave trading to make money. He wasn't even good at this, so he was returned to Spain in chains. The local Indian populations were rounded up to work on plantations, and when they had been killed off, that's when the massive importation of African slaves to the Caribbean began. The native population of Hispaniola was reduced from 3 million to a few hundred... isn't that genocide? Quite comparable to the Holocaust, isnt it?

Columbus fits the myth of European social, moral and scientific superiority that's been so heavily promoted for centuries to justify colonial policies and fits into all that crap about "Manifest Destiny" and "the White Man's Burden." The facts are different - for example, we now know that the Renaissance was fueled by knowledge preseved by Arabic cultures - particularly mathematics and economics, but also chemistry. The Vikings don't fit the superior European myth, and neither do the Chinese, who may also have reached the Americas some 2000 years ago.

A more complete description of colonialism

This is a quote from an introduction to JRR Tolkiens "Lord of the Rings" which sums it up well:

"We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers- thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams."
-Peter S. Beagle

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instead of taking the slant that it is the OVERCLASS of any and every race or culture that is to blame.

Yes, no doubt columbus was rapacious. That is why he was on top. And the indian chiefs who faced him were also ruthless. For every person columbus murdered or raped, those chiefs no doubt matched him, murder for murder, rape for rape.

And the overclass as always seeks to portrary the struggles of history as race against race, instead of portrarying it as pawns of the overclass pitted against each other by their respective overclass.

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While Columbus was hardly the first European in the Americas, he has a couple of legs up on the Vikings. Some have been detailed by other posters already--the fact that the Viking settlements really didn't take, for a whole lot of reasons that probably have little to do with the relative merits of Vikings as traders or explorers.

But the Big C did a couple of other things that were pretty groundbreaking. One was accidental: he showed the Western Ocean was navigable with the technology of the time. That is, by cheating on the smallest possible radius for the Earth as then calculated (Erastothanes actually had a better estimate, but Columbus didn't like it) he said the boats they had could make it to China from Spain -- barely. (Educated people and sailors knew the Earth was a sphere when they thought about it at all. Nobody thought ships that sailed out of sight over the English Channel dropped off the Earth on the way to France).

The problem was water. If you are on a boat for a month and a half and you have no islands to stop at for water, you are in deep trouble. In Columbus' day, the largest ships could only hold a certain amount of water and still leave room for cargo and such. While there are ways to get water from salt seawater most of them aren't terribly efficient for a large crew. This meant that if you took the best available estimates for the radius of the Earth available in the 15th century, and knew the approximate distance to the coast of China overland, it was no great feat to figure how long (approximately) it would take a ship to get to Spain from China. The answers were not good.

For those that wonder, the Vikings didn’t do the trip in one shot – they stopped in no less than three different places on the way (Columbus only had one option) and they didn’t have to sail that far between stops. The far North Atlantic is in that sense far more hospitable to smaller ships, especially during a warming period.

Columbus' contribution was to basically, by force of personality, convince somebody that what amounted to a suicide mission was possible. He gambled big, and he was right—though not in quite the way he hoped.

In any case, the other big deal is that Columbus showed there was a southern/northern route across that ocean, and proved that the Portuguese were right that there was something beyond the Azores and Cape Verde (the Portuguese weren’t terribly interested in heading west anyhow since the pickings on the islands weren’t all that good). He also established the first permanent links with Europe, for good and ill. Without the gold he and those who followed him brought back, Spain might have developed into a modern capitalist economy, like the Dutch did later and the Italians were doing at the time. In one sense, one could argue that he was single-handedly responsible for stunting Spain’s development, leaving them to a medieval mode of production and setting the stage for a nation to be consistently and badly misgoverned for three hundred years. (This argument can be better outlined in David Landes’ book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations).

So on balance I'd say he deserves to be in the history books for the same reason that John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson do and John Hanson doesn't deserve the same amount of space.

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Wikipedia, imperfect though it may be, does it's usual good job:

... Columbus is commonly credited as the first European to see the Americas because of the profound impact his contact wrought on history. His voyage marked the beginning of European exploration and colonization of the Americas. ...

[On his 3rd voyage,] Columbus returned to Hispaniola on August 19 to find that many of the Spanish settlers of the new colony were discontent, having been misled by Columbus about the supposedly bountiful riches of the new world. Columbus repeatedly had to deal with rebellious settlers and natives. He had some of his crew hanged for disobeying him. A number of returned settlers and friars lobbied against Columbus at the Spanish court, accusing him of mismanagement. The king and queen sent the royal administrator Francisco de Bobadilla in 1500, who upon arrival (August 23) detained Columbus and his brothers and had them shipped home. Columbus refused to have his shackles removed on the trip to Spain, during which he wrote a long and pleading letter to the Spanish monarchs. They accepted his letter and let Columbus and his brothers go.

Although he regained his freedom, he did not regain his prestige and he lost his governorship. ...

Columbus as hero

Traditionally, Columbus is viewed as a man of heroic stature by Americans subject to Euro-centric public school and Columbus-glorifying textbooks. …

In the United States, the admiration of Columbus was particularly embraced by some members of the Italian American, Hispanic, and Catholic communities. These groups point to Columbus as one of their own to show that Mediterranean Catholics could and did make great contributions to the USA. The modern vilification of Columbus is seen by his supporters as being politically motivated.

Columbus as villain

There is distinct information, specifically in Christopher Columbus' own diary, outlining the inchoate stages of exploiting the natives that had originally migrated from Asia to the New World. The Spaniards were quick to take advantage of both Columbus' findings and of the native people that were found in America. … The genocide and atrocious acts committed by the Spanish against the natives (the Tainos in particular) are well documented in terrifying detail by Bartolomé de Las Casas in his letters and book A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. After Columbus' death in 1506, the genocide of many Indians made Bartolemé de Las Casas persuade the Spaniards to use African slaves instead. …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus

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Several of you pointed out that the Vikings’ settlements didn’t take, and that’s a big difference. So, yeah, ‘ole Chris deserves a place in the history books.

But let me clarify that the book I was leafing through made no mention whatsoever of earlier European travelers.

On the other hand, I clearly remember learning about Roanoke Colony in my American history classes.

Just to refresh your memory:

The first English Colony of Roanoke, originally consisting of 100 householders, was founded in 1585, 22 years before Jamestown and 37 years before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts, under the ultimate authority of Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1584 Raleigh had been granted a patent by Queen Elizabeth I to colonize America.

This Colony was run by Ralph Lane after Sir Richard Grenville, who had transported the colonists to Virginia, returned to Britain for supplies. These colonists were ill-prepared and not particularly clever, because, although they depended upon the local Indians for food, they also antagonized the Indians by such tactics as kidnapping them and holding them hostage in exchange for information. Unfortunately for the colonists, who were desperately in need of supplies, Grenville's return was delayed. As a result, when Sir Francis Drake put in at Roanoke after destroying the Spanish colony of St. Augustine, the entire colony returned with Drake to England.

So it doesn’t seem that permanence is required to get yourself a note in the history books.

Anyway, I think the Viking story is interesting enough to merit at least a brief mention. If there’d been even a footnote, I wouldn’t have found it worth writing about.

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Along with the many omitted Vikings, there is also serious evidence of African arrivals in the Americas before Columbus...one classic source on that is Ivan Van Sertima's They Came Before Columbus.

Columbus is celebrated precisely because his coming lead to conquest and genocide, I think. I mean, what else can we conclude? Countless indigenous nations were here already. Black folks came before him. Vikings came before him. But none of those things lead to white (and eventually capitalist) domination of the Americas. And none of those things are celebrated, or even remembered most of the time. Columbus' arrival was the arrival that signalled the beginning of the shift from idigenous political economies networked across this hemisphere to the dominance of (in bell hooks' words) "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy." And that's why the dominant histories, which are inevitably a product of the dominant institutions and their dominant ideologies, celebrate him.

-- S.N.

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Humanity is not native to the Western Hemisphere. One way or another, everybody here is an immigrant.

The first settlers were actually "primitives" now called Clovis peoples. One bunch traipsed over from Siberia by way of the land bridge uncovered during the glacial retreat some 15,000 years agone, but they seem to have been predated by another group that came over by sea across the Atlantic; probably in open, kayak like boats.

(Thank you, Discovery Channel.)

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Your reference to the Clovis people is pretty much right. We have solid evidence for their entry into the North American continent following the last glacial recession.

But, to date, there is absolutely no conclusive evidence that places prehistoric Europeans in North or South America. The best Pre-Clovis site, Monte Verde, Chile, is on the Pacific Coast, not the Atlantic, and implies a fast costal migration originating from Asia. Furthermore, all mitochondrial DNA evidence places extant Native Americans in the Asian lineage.

Discovery Channel, History Channel, and the like are great for entertainment, but their science is often sensationalized and oversimplified. But that doesn't mean I'll stop watching!

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The reason Columbus gets the credit (or blame, depending on your viewpoint) is simple: He DOCUMENTED WHAT HE DID AND WHERE HE WENT SO OTHERS COULD USE THE INFO.

If the Vikings had written it down and gotten the word out to others, then they might be called "discoverers". But they came, they went, and left no trace, not in the New World, or in the written memory of their fellow Europeans.

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There is a possibility that a 6th century Irish Monk, Saint Brendan the Navigator, actually visited America first.

In 1976 a fellow by the name of Tim Severin built a replica boat and proved it was possible for the Irish monk to have sailed across to New Foundland.

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Columbus was the first one to bring about permanent European settlement in the Americas. The Vineland settlement left behind so little that it was considered myth until the 20th Century. No one, but no one, would consider Columbus' landing in the US myth because of the huge impact it had. Read Lies My Teacher Told Me. There's a great chapter called "The True Importance of Columbus."

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The same reason Colombus is celebrated is the same reason the guys on US currency are idolized: national power.

Colombus is symbolic of Europe conquering the territory of ths US. It doesn't matter what outsider "discovered" this land -- what matters is who "discovered" it in the name of 500 years of genocide against the indigenous population.

Same as with the guys on the US money. Jackson, ironically, conducted genocide against the indigenous population. Lincoln killed hundreds of thousands of Americans -- and not to destroy slavery, which he very clearly stated. He did it for national power, just like Jackson.

National power, that's all it is. That's why the scope of US aggression is not fully taught in children's history books, even where mentioned.

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BTW, good discussion starter. It's an important topic that deserves thoughtful consideration.

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Historian Glenn Morris says Christopher Columbus was "a murderer, a rapist [and] the architect of a policy of genocide that continues today."

This makes about as much sense as saying that Montezuma was a murderer, torturer, cannibal (all those human sacrifices) and the arhictect of corrupt Mexican policies whic continues today.

And he had bad breath.

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Not only Europeans came to AAAmerica Before Colombus but also Libyans.Look up a book titled "America B.C."for more info

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I don't know what to think of the Kensington Runestone, could easily be a hoax/joke, but it could be real. If so then the Vikings got all the way to Kensington MN.

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Seems that many people are missing the point of the article; that is, Columbus/Colon was not the first European to "discover" the New World and that he didn't really discover anything just landed. But now allow me to digress. I always find it interesting that history books talk of Jamestown and Plymouth when Henry Hudson discovered the Hudson River in 1609 and the Dutch built a fort (sounds like settelement to me) where the present city of Albany NY is now. It was called Fort Nassau. It was built in 1614, approx. six years before 1620 and the founding of Plymouth.

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The actual history that happened is far more interesting then the cookie-cutter versions that have been incorporated into the American grade school curriculum - that's probably why kids generally dislike history, because it has been turned into 'Bible story' moralization lessons. Historical figures are treated as 'heros' to teach the notion that political leaders should also be admired and looked up to. The Vikings confuse the story, and they don't really fit into the moral tale, no matter how interesting the history of Viking exploration may be.

It is a notion that people like Levi Strauss (the intellectual godfather of the PNAC, the CPD, and all the neocon ideologies) endorsed - the need to teach children about the great wonderful nature of the American global empire and the glory of its history. Genocide, profitteering, robber barons, slavery - these are all issues that grade school history glosses over. Instead of real history, you end up with sappy Walt Disney moralization stories. This is a weird kind of propaganda - similar to the Nazi-era education of children, where the glories of the German past were continually trumpeted. You will still find many history teachers today who agree with this strategy - history as social and moral indoctrination, rather then as a factual business.

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Because white people write the history books, thats why.

And although the Vikings were white, they were also the LAST Europeans to become Christians.

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If anyone else has read 1421, there is compelling evidence that the Chinese landed in America and established colonies before Columbus. Far enough before that Columbus may have actually been carrying maps copied from the Chinese showing exactly where America was. Also, hate to bash the Discovery and History channels (they have some great programs) but Native Americans were here long before Clovis. Estimates of arrival in North America range from at minimum 30,000 years ago to well over 100,000 years ago. Clovis were hanging around about 15,000-20,000 years ago. (if memory serves me correct) Given dispersion patterns and archeological evidence, proof is on the side of older dates.

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I had a rather good history teacher all four years of high school - he did take the time to point out that CC wasn't the first European to land in the Americas, but since his was the discovery that ultimately resulted in the European colonization/invasion/atrocities/(word of your choice here), he gets the credit..."like it or not, history's generally written by the winners" was the first thing he told freshmen in Western Civ.
Anyhoo...we also learned that while CC wasn't exactly the nicest guy in the world, if you really want to find the rapacious bastard conquistador who pillaged the Mexicans in the name of Spain, you ought to look at Hernan Cortes. THERE'S your guy "who has the blood of literally tens of millions on his hands"; CC was the Otto von Bismarck to Cortes' Hitler.
[rant]Of course, this is all rather academic...history is said and done, and while learning about the stories of the losers is valuable and interesting, there's no use carrying a huge burden of guilt over it. Even if CC had personally slaughtered every last native man, woman, and child, I wouldn't feel responsible at all; it happened hundreds of years before I was born and there's absolutely nothing I can do to change it. Sure, I'll make an effort to insure something like that never happens during my lifetime, but frankly I'll be damned if the past is going to be held against me. [/rant]

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It is not just Columbus who has become controversial in recent years.

The closest my country could come to Columbus is 18th century English explorer Captain James Cook.
Cook did not discover New Zealand - nor did he claim to - that was done some time earlier in the 17th century by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman. [sorry not sure of my dates here]
But it was Cook who got down the first halfway accurate navigational maps of NZ - he did make some mistakes. And it was he who first contacted the native Maori. Some encounters with the Maori went well, others didn't.
[I should say that the Maori came to NZ from Polynesia some 1100 years ago - they were extraordinrary navigators, and they did not have maps or compasses!]
For a long time, Cook was respected if not revered here. He was the man who put NZ on the map, and claimed it for the British Empire - there was still a bit of that attitude lingering when I was at school. And his tragic death at the hands of natives in Hawaii made him a martyr for the forces of civilization.
In more recent years, he has not been seen in quite the same positive light. Many feel that he did considerable damage to native cultures. And that at times, his handling of diplomatic relations between his crew and native populations left a lot to be desired.
The only thing that is perhaps indisputable, is that he was a groundbreaking explorer.

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But then again, my history classes rarely relied on textbooks. We usually looked at multiple resources put together by the teacher for our lessons. We learned about the Vikings, Giovanni Caboto, Jacques Cartier, etc. We even learned about the potential voyage of the Irish Saint Brendan to the New World in 530AD, and about the Basque fishermen and whaler's seldom recorded journeys to the new world. Columbus was just a footnote. Technically, he wasn't even in North America. Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) is generally regarded to be the first in North America that lead to permanent settlement when he landed at Bonavista, Newfoundland in 1497.

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There is evidence that Africans and Asians explored and settled in North and South America long before Columbus, and perhaps before Erikson. That doesn't matter either.

The point is that the indigenous nations had hundreds of thriving civilizations long before Europeans raped, pillaged and murdered them into near extinction.

Columbus unleashed the tide of European genocide and imperialism. For this he should be reviled.

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My daughter attended a private progressive grammar school. When she was 10 she came home and announced, "Christopher Columbus was the first Italian to discover America."

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