When getting lost made history

Columbus Day arrived and departed with little fanfare this year, a reminder of the tension between history and how the story has been told in classrooms. That tension is rooted, at least in part, in how we first learned it. As mid-century students, we were compelled to memorize dates as if history were a row of fence posts: 1215 for the Magna Carta, 1517 for the Reformation, 1607 for Jamestown, 1776 for the Declaration, 1789 for the Constitution, and 1492 for when Christopher Columbus “discovered America.” That last entry was always a source of mild discomfort, because like the folkloric figures who bring gifts on holidays, the claim was so illogical on its face that we could only wink and move past it.

The tale had been manufactured long before. Nineteenth-century schoolbooks hammered it in with tidy phrases about the “seas of darkness” and “lands unknown,” and they did not hesitate to call Columbus the “discoverer of America.” Those lines ignored an obvious fact that any child in Nebraska might have understood if someone had said it plainly: millions of people had already lived here for thirty or more millennia. The continent did not need to be discovered by Europeans; Europe was merely surprised to find it.

To be fair, those old primers reflected the worldview of their age. They celebrated daring voyages, new trade routes and the spread of Christendom. They also cleaned up the mess. When violent clashes and disease followed contact, the text often emphasized the kind simplicity of the noble savages and moved on. That framing hardened into a civic myth that, in too many classrooms, has outlasted cursive handwriting and diagrammed sentences.

Today, most classrooms try to tell a fuller story. Students read journal excerpts, Indigenous accounts and maps that reveal Columbus’s greatest mistake: not that he thought the world was round—educated Europeans, and anyone who had been far enough out at sea to see the curvature of the horizon had accepted a spherical Earth—but that he miscalculated its size. He believed Asia lay a short sail west. He was not the first to imagine such a route, only the most persistent promoter – and he was wrong by thousands of miles.

That said, there remains something worth studying in the man and his moment. The seamanship was real. The political salesmanship was undeniable. The willingness to keep going when crews considered mutiny still inspires, yet courage in the face of being utterly lost can’t be the whole lesson for children whose ancestors were here long before 1492—or for those whose ancestors came later, tangled in the consequences.

So what to do with Columbus Day? Drop it entirely, some say. Others prefer to use the calendar as a teachable moment alongside Indigenous Peoples’ Day, to acknowledge survival, sovereignty and to celebrate the cultures that did not vanish.

I’m OK with the latter. We can hold two thoughts in our heads at once: that the voyage mattered, but the old “discovery” language does not. We should be able to retire the myth while keeping the inquiry alive.

Maybe the better headline for schoolchildren—and for the rest of us—is simpler and truer: in 1492, Europe arrived with advanced technologies. What followed changed the world for everyone. If we teach that with clarity and humility, perhaps it will not rely on the discovery myth to matter. It will need only honest memory and the wisdom to ask what kind of discovery we hope our children will make next.