Humans have known the earth is round for thousands of years (2018)
history.com
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By the time of Aristotle in the late 300s, though, there was pretty substantial evidence that the Earth was round and Aristotle collected it all together. Broadly, the arguments could be put into two categories: empirical arguments and theoretical arguments.
The empirical arguments were pretty clever. Astronomers noted that whenever there was a lunar eclipse, the shadow of the Earth was always curved the same way. Since lunar eclipses occurred at different times and different locations on the sky, it could only produce the same shadow if the Earth itself was spherical. Another argument relied on a somewhat fortunate coincidence that one of the brightest stars in the sky, Canopus, is right on the horizon at the latitude of Greece. Astronomers noticed that they could see this star low on the horizon when the traveled to southern cities like Alexandria, but could not see it in northern cities like Athens. This also implied that the Earth was round. Later on Eratosthenes was able to use this principle to measure the size of the Earth and got the answer right to within 1% (although he probably got a bit lucky since he seems to have made two mistakes which partially cancelled each other out).
Aristotle's theoretical justification for a round Earth wasn't too far off the mark, either. His basic argument was that because matter tends to fall to the center of the Earth, if the Earth was some other shape, the matter would rearrange itself until it achieved a spherical shape. His theory of motion was all wrong, but the basic idea that a system with radial forces would produce spheres was correct.
(Shameless plug: I do a podcast on the history of astronomy, so if you want to hear more on the subject I have much more to say [1].)
Thanks for the podcast link, how deeply astronomy is intertwined with history is fascinating, subscribed!
He also assumed that the southern city (Smyrna) was exactly on the Tropic of Cancer. In fact it's a little north of it, but this assumption partially compensated for using too small a change in elevation. Then at another point he rounded up his answer to get a number that was divisible by 360 which further compensated for the original error and he ended up with a final result that was surprisingly good.
https://www.history.com/news/the-viking-explorer-who-beat-co...
So when he claimed "I can reach the far east by sailing around the other side of the world in X days, as it's just a distance of Y miles" that was against common knowledge of that time, and everyone knew that a trip like that would take 2Y or 3Y miles, something unfeasible with the technology of that time.
The only reason his ship didn't perish halfway like everyone expected them to, is that there just happened to be a continent halfway that they stumbled upon. Columbus is a prime example of "task failed successfully".
It's kind of weird to laud one specific explorer, yearly. Before the late 1800s, Columbus Day wasn't really a thing, so it's not like that sort of lauding expresses a widespread innate desire.
Instead, Columbus Day celebrations in the US need to be seen through the lens of xenophobia, as the then-newly immigrated Italian American celebrate a sort of Pride Day in the face of racism (they were not seen as really white) and religious bigotry (most were Catholic, not Protestant).
It's also kinda weird that the century-long love-boner for Columbus caused so many people to omit any open discussion about how horrible a person he was, and the brutal policies he put into place. When do we teach that to the kids?
Not really any more weird that celebrating a politician yearly, or a civil rights leader yearly, or a religious figure yearly. I don't think it would be weird at all to have an Armstrong or Neil-Buzz Day or whatever (in fact, it's a bit weird we don't have one, since flying to the Moon seems like a bigger deal than sailing to the New World).
> It's also kinda weird that the century-long love-boner for Columbus caused so many people to omit any open discussion about how horrible a person he was, and the brutal policies he put into place. When do we teach that to the kids?
I'm not sure if he was uniquely horrible in any meaningful way. I know some folks try to argue this, but it seems pretty tenuous. All explorers & conquistadors were, for the most part, pretty brutal bounty hunters.
It seems like you’re continually answering your own question about why we should no longer hold these people up on pedestals.
And revisiting horrible actions of historical figures that has taken the shine off them is hardly confined to Columbus, or even focused on him. I’d say the increased visibility of owning, raping, and murdering slaves by the American founding fathers has been more prominent.
What an interesting statement. You praise Armstrong for being an explorer, for going to the Moon, thus putting him in the category of "mostly pretty brutal bounty hunters".
I suppose you think the same of all those polar explorers, and of Jacques Cousteau and other undersea explorers.
Because it sounds to me like you don't have a consistent argument here.
> I'm not sure if he was uniquely horrible in any meaningful way. I know some folks try to argue this, but it seems pretty tenuous.
I've looked into it. It seems he was unusually horrible even for his time. And unique for his status on introducing the genocidal encomienda system to the Americas.
I think you're just being purposefully obtuse here, as I don't think I'm doing that at all. The fact that explorers 500+ years ago were brutal conquerors is orthogonal to the fact that exploration itself should be celebrated.
> And unique for his status on introducing the genocidal encomienda system to the Americas.
I mean this to me just reeks of bias, mainly because it's quite well-known that indigenous peoples of the Americas were already well-versed in slavery, and encomienda is just slavery with extra steps. What exactly did Columbus "introduce" here?
You left out a few caveats. You mean that state sponsored explorers with the mission of bringing in money to the state, including by taking gold and slaves, were brutal conquerors.
Other explorers were not brutal conquerors. You need money to conqueror.
Pytheas, the Greek explorer who first visited what is now Great Britain and Ireland, was not a brutal conqueror.
Marco Polo, 800 years ago, was an explorer who not a brutal conqueror. The same for Ahmad ibn Fadlan, the Muslim diplomat and explorer who went to the Volga Bulghars, and for Ahmad ibn Rustah Isfahani, another Muslim explorer of Europe and Asia.
The Polynesian explorers of the Pacific were not brutal conquerors - there was no one to conquer. The same for the explorers that reached Iceland, the Canary Islands, and other uninhabited places. And for the polar explorers, and space explorers.
The fishermen who explored the Grand Banks in the early 1500s did so for fish, not to conqueror land or people.
The Roman explorers who went to south and east Asia, did not do so to conquer. They did so to trade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romans_in_sub-Saharan_Africa points out the Roman explorations across the Sahara "had mainly a commercial purpose. Only the one conducted by emperor Nero seemed to be a preparative for the conquest of Ethiopia or Nubia."
Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, the Italian explorer who entered the court of the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, did not go to conquer the Mongols.
That's a good number of counter-examples, yes? At the very least it sure does seem like you need a few qualifiers to your blanket statement.
> I mean this to me just reeks of bias
I mean, your choice of picking Columbus's first voyage just reeks of bias too, so it's getting pretty stinky here.
> and encomienda is just slavery with extra steps
Really? That's the argument you want to make?
The point is that he's unique because he's one who introduced that abominable system to Americas.
Yes, there were other forms of slavery. Then again, there were other explorers. The world was well-versed in exploration before Columbus was even born. If you diminish the uniqueness of Columbus's brutality, you end up also diminishing the uniqueness of his first voyage.
Yes, someone else could have introduced the encomienda system. And someone else would have made the trip across the Atlantic had Columbus not managed it.
And someone else would have been the first person on the Moon had Armstrong caught the flu or been in a bad accident, thus preventing him from flying that mission.
> exploration itself should be celebrated
Because it's called "Columbus Day", not "Exploration Day", and because the holiday started not in celebration of exploration but as a sort of Italian Pride festival to overcome American xenophobia against the newly-arrived non-white/non-Protestant immigrants.
If you're going to rebrand it, that's fine. But since your idea of "explorer" is closely tied to some pretty horrid behavior, I don't think you'll get much support.
But isn't that literally what Columbus day celebrates? His first voyage to the New World, not the man himself in particular, all the bad stuff he did, not even his later voyages necessarily. At least that's how I understood it.
> But since your idea of "explorer" is closely tied to some pretty horrid behavior, I don't think you'll get much support.
I very explicitly say the exact opposite (to quote myself: exploration and brutality are orthogonal), and at this point it's becoming obvious you're just arguing in bad faith.
No, not primarily and not historically.
President Harrison's 1892 proclamation praised Columbus because "Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment", and because of his "devout faith". He drew a parallel between Columbus's enlightenment and that of the recently introduced "system of universal education". See https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-335-4... .
While yes, it was held on "four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America", it was not a holiday for purpose of celebrating that voyage. It was a day to encourage the "patriotic duties of American citizenship."
It must also be seen in context of white xenophobia, and the 1891 lynchings of 11 Italian-American immigrants in New Orleans.
"As part of a wider effort to ease tensions with Italy and placate Italian Americans, President Benjamin Harrison declared the first nationwide celebration of Columbus Day in 1892, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Italian explorer's landing in the New World" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_New_Orleans_lynchings
Now, that is not the modern-day Columbus Day. That effort started in the 1930s by the Knights of Columbus, a male-only Catholic Fraternal organization who wanted to promote a Catholic as being also American. They chose the name "Knights of Columbus" back in the 1880s because, to quote them:
"When founding the Knights of Columbus, Father Michael McGivney picked Christopher Columbus as a namesake for the organization because in a time when anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant feeling ran rampant, the American public embraced this famous explorer." - https://www.kofc.org/en/news-room/articles/honoring-columbus...
Bear in mind that Americans mostly knew about Columbus through Washington Irving's best-seller "biography" about him. The scare-quotes there are because that book told falsehoods, like the idea that educated people at the time thought the earth was flat. It did not describe Columbus's brutal orders. That's because Irving's book was not written to be historically correct, but as a way to promote American nationalism.
"Literary critics have noted that Irving "saw American history as a useful means of establishing patriotism in his readers, and while his language tended to be more general, his avowed intention toward Columbus was thoroughly nationalist"." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_Life_and_Voya...
Furthermore, in 1882 when the KoC started, the US was finishing it's own conquest of the native population, and looking towards expanding its own (short-lived) empire, which by 1900 included Cuba and the Philippines.
So it's not like Americans at that time were against violent attacks on people they considered savages. They were doing something similar!
Again, very little of this is a celebration of exploration. It's using that one event as a hook to promote that Italian immigrants and their descendants, and Catholics, can be patriotic Americans.
> to quote myself: exploration and brutality are orthogonal
To quote you: 'All explorers & conquistadors were, for the most part, pretty brutal bounty hunters.'
That is not true about explorers.
Your discussion about orthogonality is that someone can be an explorer and be a brutal bounty hunter, and those two can be separate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_century
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_by_ordeal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_wheel
etc.
I doubt Columbus's conquest was uniquely brutal for its time. The distinctive fact about him is that he discovered America, and kicked off the events that led to the formation of the US.
"Uniquely brutal" is a very high bar. I trust you didn't mean it as a rhetorical technique to require demonstration that no one else was as brutal as he was, before acknowledging that he was brutal even for his time?
Since you argue that Columbus was unique in "that he discovered America", then he is also unique for being the first European to lead slave raids of indigenous Americans, and the European to introduce the genocidal encomienda system.
And he was brutal. If Bobadilla's accusations of Columbus's brutality are correct, then Columbus's conquest was exceptionally brutal, even to other Spaniards of the time.
From Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus
"Bobadilla reported to Spain that Columbus once punished a man found guilty of stealing corn by having his ears and nose cut off and then selling him into slavery. He claimed that Columbus regularly used torture and mutilation to govern Hispaniola.[l] Testimony recorded in the report stated that Columbus congratulated his brother Bartholomew on "defending the family" when the latter ordered a woman paraded naked through the streets and then had her tongue cut because she had "spoken ill of the admiral and his brothers"."
Columbus was removed as Governor of the American due to these accusations, though later pardoned by the royals.
When do we teach this history of Columbus in school?
> and kicked off the events that led to the formation of the US
What an odd focus. Using the exact same argument, Henry the Navigator also kicked of the events that lead to the formation of the US, because of his work to initiate what is now called the Age of Discovery.
And he was unique for that.
When is Dom Henrique day?
Here’s even a comic for you.
Of course, in the sense of "i discovered this wonderful restaurant, you have to see it". /s
Early European explorers and conquerors described finding large-scale farming, cities, extensive trade networks, empires, warfare, and of course slavery. Archaeology and the remaining records of those people confirm European accounts.
We can condemn Columbus for many things, but neither he nor the Europeans who followed introduced violence and slavery to the New World. They did introduce novel pathogens which led to large-scale, if somewhat accidental genocide (prior to a germ theory of disease).
For example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_among_Native_Americans...
But this is the bon savage trope, which itself is quite problematic.
It's not hypocritical.
Italy as a nation dates from around 1861. Columbus came from the Republic of Genoa.
> Though the modern state of Italy had yet to be established, the Latin equivalent of the term Italian had been in use for natives of the region since antiquity; most scholars believe Columbus was born in the Republic of Genoa.
Referring to the people of the peninsula as "Italian" dates from medieval times, not ancient. In Columbus' time the Genoese, the Venetians, the Sardinians, etc. would not have referred to themselves as Italian, as that Roman term for a province (not a single people) had fallen away with the Roman Empire a thousand years earlier.
Yeah, no: https://petrarch.petersadlon.com/canzoniere.html?poem=128
Historians mostly agree that Columbus came from Genoa — then an independent principality among many others that eventually coalesced into Italy the nation state. But Columbus lived in Portugal and Spain and married a Portuguese woman, obtaining Portuguese citizenship. And he spoke fluent Castilian Spanish. We don’t know how Columbus identified his nationality, but when he got funding from the Spanish crown he did so as a subject of Spain, not of Genoa or Portugal.
I think the original point, nit-picking really, intended to point out that Columbus and the modern nation-state called Italy have different timelines, and “Italian” did not yet exist as a political identity at that time, though the concept of Italy as a geographic region, or Italians as a people more alike than not by culture, history, and language did exist in Columbus’ day.
Perhaps most relevant, at the time Columbus could not ask any king or queen of Italy to fund his voyage because no such kingdom existed.
Because you are “American”?
There are plenty of terrible people - living and dead - that are worthy of disdain. But the dead, like children, can’t speak for themselves so they’re decent as far as avatars go re: making a point.
Like who?
If they are as bad or worse than Columbus they should probably not be celebrated
> held to today's ethical and legal standards
What Columbus did was pure evil, no matter how slavery was justified in his own culture
The Tainos and other island tribes were cursed to have gold jewelry. If they had never had it the Columbian discovery of the Americas may not have been that much bigger a deal than the Viking discovery of the Americas.
Short Summary: Global Nomadic sea-going nation on Arctic Ocean.
> Of course, his “discovery” wasn’t new either as the Americas had been known to indigenous people for thousands of years, and Vikings since the 11th century
It ofc notably does not include the Americas. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdapfel
Of course he didn't think the earth was flat, it was everyone else who did. Until he proved it was round!
> Despite a persistent legend, neither Columbus nor his Spanish patrons thought Earth was a finite plane instead of a round planet. And you can blame one of the United States’ greatest authors for creating a myth that still surrounds one of history’s best-known figures ...
> It’s almost certain that in the 1490s, nobody thought the earth was flat. According to historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, “no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat.”
Pre-Socratic Greeks, like Xenophanes, lived on the coast and went to sea, but thought the world was flat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophanes
Until 1600s or so, Chinese people thought the world was flat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#East_Asia , even though many Chinese people lived on the coast and sailed the seas.
On the other hand, historical "science" has always been primarily a vehicle for propaganda, and there is no reason to expect that it would be any different in our times. So I guess this book is simply par for the course.