The Debate Over COLUMBUS.

• Author: Brown, Bryan
• Position: TIMES PAST: 1492

Christopher Columbus's journey to the New World transformed the globe. But 525 years later, many Americans are now taking a hard look at his legacy.

Probably no single journey changed the world more profoundly than that of Christopher Columbus. For hundreds of years, his story was the stuff of legend: how the Italian navigator sailed west from Spain in 1492, braving uncharted seas, and "discovered" America.

The Founders of the United States often cited Columbus as an inspiration for their experiment of a nation dedicated to the idea of freedom. In fact, the young country was often referred to as Columbia in honor of the explorer. And generations of Americans have celebrated him on the second Monday in October: Columbus Day.

But today, many Americans are questioning Columbus's legacy. The explorer couldn't "discover" a place where millions of people already lived, they say. Worse, honoring him ignores how he--and the waves of European settlers who arrived in his wake--forced the indigenous peoples of the Americas off their land.

To professor Leo Killsback of Arizona State University, Columbus Day is not a time of celebration but a reminder of "historic crimes" against Native Americans.

This point of view has inspired a growing trend. Last year, Boulder, Colorado, voted to transform Columbus Day into Indigenous Peoples' Day.

"The day should not be about the people who came but the people who were already here," says Mayor Suzanne Jones. More than 30 other cities and the states of South Dakota and Alaska have similar celebrations. (Some continue to observe Columbus Day as well.)

But according to Charles C. Mann, a journalist and author of the books 1491 and 1493, Columbus's contact with the Americas so revolutionized the ecologies, economies, and political systems of Europe, Asia, and Africa that Columbus Day deserves to be observed, even if it isn't celebrated.

"Columbus is so important," he says. "The historical changes that stem from European reach into the Americas are just incalculably large."

So was Columbus someone who should be celebrated? Five hundred and twenty-five years after he set sail, Americans are grappling with that question.

Columbus's Voyages

Born in the Italian city of Genoa, Columbus was a man of great ambition. In 1492, he persuaded Spain's king and queen to fund a journey to what Europeans called the Indies--China, Japan, and India.

Columbus was convinced by the ancient writings of travelers that those lands held great treasures of gold, silver, silk, and spices.

At the time, Europeans' contact with Asia was rare because getting there was so difficult. The trip--by ship around Africa and Asia or over land routes controlled by hostile armies--was long and dangerous. But Columbus proposed a bold new scheme: to reach Asia by sailing west through open sea.

Like other people of his time, Columbus didn't know that two continents would be in his way: North and South America. So when he landed in the Bahamas on Oct. 12, 1492, after an 11-week journey from Spain, Columbus thought he had reached the Indies (see map, facing page).

That December, Columbus claimed an island in the Caribbean Sea for Spain, calling it Hispaniola. (Today, the island is split into Haiti and the Dominican Republic.) The explorer praised the island's people, the Taino, for their generosity, yet he also let his men loot and kidnap the Taino in search of the tribe's riches.

Columbus made three other journeys to the New World, as Europeans soon began calling the Americas. (He never set foot in North America.) With each, the Taino suffered. Many were sold into slavery. Countless others died from smallpox and other European diseases to which they had no resistance. Within decades, most of them had been wiped out.

Yet Columbus's voyages transformed the world. European powers rushed to build settlements in the New World (see timeline). When the native people got in their way, scholars say, the newcomers pushed them aside.

Later, after the U.S. was founded and began expanding west across the continent, Congress repeatedly forced treaties on Native Americans that stripped them of their ancestral homelands. America was built "on lands which Indians were essentially forbidden to keep," says Ron Welburn, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Benjamin Railton, a professor at...