Why is Christopher Columbus credited with discovering the New World?

I guess the better question would be, why is Columbus credited with being the first European to discover the New World?

Leif Eiriksson got there a good 500 years before Columbus.


I understand that this never became common knowledge in Europe, but because of this, history treats it almost as though it never happened.


So tell me DU Historians, why is Eiriksson not given his proper due, while Columbus is still accorded an honor that is not truly his?

My daughter is now in 8th grade but I recall in her grade school books that they are now starting to include the fact that the Vikings made it here first and are down-playing Columbus as the first. I think its just a matter of time before this knowledge "filters" down. Look at evolution. Even with tens of thousands of scientific papers and the catholic church acknowledging its validity 55 years ago, we can't even get the word mentioned in the public schools of many school districts.

just recently forgave Copernicus for saying the earth revolved around the sun..when he said it he was excommunicated.

:shrug:

...he was great at blowing his own horn.

After Ericksson there was no mass migration to the new world. In fact it could have been because of Ericksson that there was not. Ericksson's experience was "go to the new world and get killed" while Columbus' experience was "go to the new world and get rich". Columbus sparked exploration of the new world and thus gets credit for the discovery.

Along the same lines, Cook didn't discover Australia. The Dutch were there a century earlier but they saw no value in it and didn't advertise their find. Same story.

It's not the first person who gets there, but the first person who successfully markets getting there.

:bounce:

He's considered the inventor of the telephone because...

He beat Elisha Gray to the patent office by 1 hour.

although his tales on the pub circuit were embellished a little too heavily for him to take Erikson's kind of credit.

What made Columbus different was that he was the first ture imperialist to land in the West.

Columbus landed near Central America, where Europeans were able to pursue God, Gold and Glory. The Norths- and Irishmen landed in an entirely different area culturally.

would have been here about 200 years before Leif.

What about all the native Americans who crossed over the Bering Strait and were here before either one of them?

I guess because they're brown, they get even LESS credit.

The people who were already living there had obviously already discovered it long ago.

The point was, the first people to truly "discover" the western hemisphere were the ancestors of the people who were already living there before the Europeans.

There have been some finds lately that suggest that there was an earlier migration before the Native Americans of a different group perhaps more closely related to today's Ainu who eventually died out.

Oh and I think the reason Columbus and the Spaniards are given credit as the first Europeans is because they stayed.

I just saw "discovered" and went into "that's not true, mode." My 5-year-old has already popped up and told his kindergarten teacher that's it wasn't possible for Columbus to "discover" a country with Native Americans already living there. :)

Pardons.

it first! He was merely one of the first of many, many invaders.

North and South Columbia, we have North and South America. They two continents are named after another Italian explorer named Amerigo Vespucci.

It's all in who's at the right place at the right time.

Columbus thought he'd found a new way to the Indian Ocean...

Jessica vs. Johnson.... oh the hypocrisy, the spinning, the yarns, the inequality of treatment, the unbalanced coverage, thank gawd Jessica is a truth teller, probably much to the disdain of this WH.


http://www.com.edu/intercom/news.cfm?newsid=45
>>The ambush of the Army's 507th Maintenance Company in Iraq, on March 23 was deadly. Of the 33 soldiers who made a wrong turn into the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah, 11 were killed and six were captured. The deadly battle produced what the media is calling the war's most enduring hero, a West Virginia teen-ager named Jessica Lynch.<<

>>Johnson and Lynch were wounded in the same battle. They were both captured on the same day, both wounded severely by the Iraqi soldiers, but Lynch gets all the fame. According to "A Tale of Two Soldiers," found at www.bet.com, Johnson was shot through both legs and was held prisoner for 21 days. She returned home but without the media flurry and official hype that her friend and comrade-in-arms Jessica Lynch enjoyed.

Johnson walks with a limp and is unable to stand for long periods of time due to her injuries. With so many soldiers killed and wounded in Iraq, shouldn't all receive the same media attention? And in the case of Johnson, doesn't she deserve the same monetary benefits as Lynch?

According to "A Tale ...," Johnson is receiving 30 percent disability benefits for her injuries, whereas Lynch is receiving 80 percent. That amounts to a $600 to $700 difference per month. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who plans to plead Johnson's case at the White House, the Pentagon and to members of Congress, is quoted in "A Tale ..." as saying, "Here's a case of two women, same (unit), same war, everything about their service commitment and their risk is equal .... Yet, there's an enormous contrast between how the military has handled these two cases."<<

none of the others who managed to get here did anything with it.

Columbus was hired by Spain to find a new trade route. He didn't find what he was looking for, but he found something better and was sent back to exploit it. He not only wandered into the New World, he colonized it.

So, while technically he didn't "discover" anything, he certainly "discovered " it for the Spanish, who had no idea it was really there, even though they may have heard rumors.

That thing with Vespucci was more vengeance PR than anything else. The Italians knew Columbus hated Genoa for laughing at him, and wanted to trash his name. What the hell, Columbus found his place with Spain and vowed never to return home, so they owed him nothing any more. They acted like they didn't owe him anything in the first place-- when they pretty much threw him out.

Now, Italians here call him their hero. Go figure...

... when folks weren't particularly happy with the realization that their expensive investment in Columbus' finding an alternate route to Asia and India was a failure. It's mostly the same today: the difference between "pure" science and "applied" science is in the economic interest funding it. (That's why relatively few discoveries have been exploited by their discoverers. Disappointment and blame-mongering blinds folks to the part of the glass that's half-full.)

FWIW, Icelanders (aka "Norsemen"), hunter/gatherers of the sea, settled Greenland in the Tenth through Fifteenth Centuries. Norsemen/Vikings are also responsible for settling much of what's now known as Russia, from around Moscow and to the north. They weren't particularly fastidious about "mixing their blood" (and other body fluids) with conveniently indigenous people.

I think the mapmaker was Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian.

... to Columbus. He also explored (South) 'America' (New World, as it was then known) in 1503. He didn't have the burden of expectations of finding Asia/India ... so he wrote about his voyages. Thus, he got publicity.

Vespucci started out as a trusted employee of Lorenzo Di Medici, and ended up as the chief of Spanish naval operations. His career was a bit more illustrious than Columbus'

Be that as it may, this story of the naming of the New World seems credible:

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15384b.htm

"It may be remarked that, at the time of the discovery of America, as is now clearly proven, the narratives of the voyages of Vespucci were more widely disseminated, by far, than were those of the voyages of Columbus, and that Florence was the chief centre for the diffusion of news on the discovery of the New World. To the close relations that existed between Gianfrancesco Pico, Duke della Mirandola, and Florence, and between Gian Francesco and the learned German, Matthew Ringmann, who, in 1504, edited one of the most important editions of the "Mundus novus", under the title of "De ora antartica per regem Portugalliae pridem inventa", and to the close relations between Ringmann and the geographer Martin Waldseemuller (Hylacomilus), is due
the fact that when, in 1507, Waldseemuller published the celebrated work "Cosmographiae introductio", at Saint-Dié, in Lorraine, he gave the name of America to the New World, arguing that, since the three continents then known, Europe, Asia, and Africa, had names of women, it was proper to give the newly-discovered continent also the name of a woman, taking it from the baptismal name of the discoverer of the new continent, Vespucci. Many attempts were made to name the New World Columbia, as justice seemed to demand, but all such efforts failed."

As far as Hagar and his ilk are concerned, the Norse were reknowned seafarers and raiders. The Danes apparently happily skipped across the Atlantic, claiming Iceland and Greenland, and undoubtedly hit North America, and possibly even South America, too.

Iceland and Greenland are fairly well documented, although the Norse weren't all that big on writing down their exploits. The Americas may have posed larger problems than they were able to handle, though. While they were adept at killing off all of the English and Irish they could find, a boatload or two of them would likely find the entire Iroquois Nation a bit much to handle should they have arrived with their usual charm.

Not a bit surprised that the remains of any of their settlements would be hard to find.

To justify the extermination of the people he found.

Talks of Christopher Columbus is sure to incite controversy or discussion and here it no different. Yes Leif Erickson was the first European known to have arrived in the New World before Columbus. There have been plenty of other theories that suggest that the continent was visited by different groups other than Europeans. Regardless of this however Columbus WAS the one who made the existence of such land known and created the age of exploration. The irony of arguing about the "invasion" of this continent by Europeans is that all of us would not exist if such a discovery had not been made. The significance of Columbus' discovery was that by making it known he brought Europeans over here, which in turn led to the creation of our country. Did he enslave the native people's, yes. It was wrong and led to genocide of millions. Yet it is foolish to deny the significance of his discovery.

History Mystery: Ancients in America
Long before Columbus sailed to North America, this hemisphere may have been visited by other Europeans, ancient Romans, Chinese and Japanese - even the ancient Egyptians!
<http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa080700a.htm>

QUOTES:

Page 1

Pottery:
Roman pottery was unearthed in Mexico that, according to its style, has been dated to the second century A.D.

Inscriptions:
Near Rio de Janeiro, high on a vertical wall of rock - 3,000 feet up - is an inscription that reads: 'Tyre, Phoenicia, Badezir, Firstborn of Jethbaal..." and dated to the middle of the ninth century B.C.

Pictures:
An experienced botanist has identified plants in an ancient fresco painting as a pineapple and a specific species of squash - both native to the Americas. Yet the fresco is in the Roman city of Pompeii.

Lots more astounding stuff can be found on Page 2 of this article with dates going back to almost 3000BC.

The Melanesians, a dark-skinned race in this Pacific islands (e.g., Samoa) are thought to be the product of ancient African traders and Polynesians. As were the ancient Olmecs in Mexico.

Previous discoveries of the 'New World' did not result in the existence of the two hemispherically separated landmasses becoming general knowledge to peoples on both sides. The Vikings came the Vikings disappeared. Native peoples had discovered the New World thousands of years before --but forgotten the old world. The Vikings' discovery didn't pass into general knowledge in their own homelands let alone the rest of the Old World. It became the stuff of myth and legend because it was so transitory and because their culture didn't preserve straight up chronicles and regular record keeping. And surely outside of Scandanavia damn few even would have heard of the legend.
Columbus' "discovery" happened at a time in world history when record keeping, economic organization, military organization all ensured the discovery was lasting. Soon anyone living in civilization in the Old Hemisphere knew of and believed in the factual existence of the "New" continents. And people living in the New Hemisphere likewise learned, to their sorrow, of the indubitable, factual existence of peoples from the Old Hemisphere.

Many got there before them. It's who did it and got enough attention. The new world and rock were brought into the mainstream by Colombus and the Beatles. Respectively.

:silly:

where did Chris and Leif and Amerigo get the maps that they were following. And who the heck invented navigation using magnets and the stars?

Tnere is archaeological evidence of massacres in South America. The victims were apparently of African ancestry, and were wiped out by the invaders now known as American Indians. So it may well be that African blacks were the first to populate the area.

I've been following controversies on the peopling of the Americas. Brazil does have what might be very early sites.

But where's the evidence of massacres?