https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/09/goodbye-columbus/
This Monday is the federal holiday called “Columbus Day” to honor a man who was once lauded as a great mariner and courageous explorer, whose exploits led to the European discovery of the Americas.
But in recent decades, Columbus has been demonized and accused of all manner of atrocities against the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
The attacks on Columbus are part of the broader denigration of Western Civilization as racist, exploitative, and imperialistic. A major source of the assault on both Columbus and Western Civilization is a widely used history textbook by the late Howard Zinn, A Peoples’ History of the United States. Zinn was more of a Marxist polemicist than a legitimate scholar, and the book has been panned, even by left-wing historians who express concern about the damage that politicized history could do to their profession.
As Mary Graber has pointed out in her scathing critique of Zinn, his chapter on Columbus was plagiarized from Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth, a book for high schoolers, first published in 1976 by Hans Koning. As she and others, including Robert Royal and Armando Simon, observe, contemporary accounts contradict the portrait of Columbus painted by the likes of Koning and Zinn. He, like most men, was imperfect but far from the moral monster described by these modern leftist writers.