Christopher Columbus was a narcissist.
He believed he was handpicked by God for a mission that no one else could fulfill.
After 1493, he signed his name "xpo ferens" - "Christ bearer".
His stated goal was to amass enough wealth to retake Jerusalem.
His arrogance led to his downfall, the downfall of millions of Native Americans, and ultimately to his resurrection as the most enduring icon of the Americas.
In 1496, Columbus was governor of a colony in Santo Domingo, and what is now the Dominion*** and State was a job he hated.
He could not convince the other "colonizers", especially those with titles of nobility, to follow his lead, that they were not colonizers in the traditional sense.
They went to India to get rich quick.
Because Columbus could not control their desires, the royal family considered him an incompetent administrator.
The colonies were largely a social and economic failure.
Columbus failed to deliver on the wealth he promised the king of Spain, and he kept asking for additional financial support, which the king reluctantly provided before 1500, and the situation in Hispaniola was so bad that the king sent Francisco de Bobadilla to investigate.
The first thing Bobadilla saw were four Spanish "mutineers" hanging from the gallows.
With the king's authorization, Bobadilla arrests Columbus and his brothers for malfeasance and sends them to Spain in chains.
Columbus waited seven months for an audience in court.
He refused to remove the chains before the meeting, and even asked to be buried in chains in his will, which he was allowed to do on his last voyage from 1502 to 1504, even though the Spanish rulers wanted Columbus to disappear.
He died in 1506 and was barely mentioned by historians until he was resurrected as a symbol of America, Christopher Columbus in chains (public **** domain), and in the mid-18th century, scholars brought long-forgotten documents about Columbus and the early history of the New World to light.
, the most important of which was Bartolome de las Casas's three-volume History of the Indies, which was suppressed in Spain because it documented Spain's brutalization of indigenous peoples.
His descriptions of Spanish mistreatment of Indians laid the foundation for the Black Legend.
His narrative "portrays the Negro" as repressed, cruel, parochial, intellectually and artistically backward.
Whatever Spain's motives, the conquest of the Americas destroyed native cultures and brought centuries of African slavery.
"They would cut off an Indian's hand and leave them hanging by a layer of skin.
They would test their swords and manly strength on captured Indians and bet that one punch would cut off their heads or cut their bodies in half.
[I]The cruel captain traveled many leagues and captured all the Indians he could find.
As the Indians refused to tell him who their new masters were, he cut off the hands of some and threw others to the dogs, who were thus torn to pieces, and another, the personal diary of Christopher Columbus on his first voyage in 1880.
The Wall Street Journal caught the attention of Gustavus Fox, Abraham Lincoln's Assistant Secretary of the Navy, who made the first attempt to reconstruct the route of Columbus's first voyage.
His renewed scholarly interest in Columbus was accompanied by a political motivation to deny Spain any remaining *** in the Americas .
Spanish colonies in the Americas declared independence one by one from the early 19th century.
Simón Bolivar and other leaders of the Creole Revolution espoused a classical philosophy that somehow emphasized their Roman origins, that is, "Spanish America" was transformed into Latin America.
The last attack took place during the American invasion of Cuba and the six-month-long Spanish-American War of 1898.
Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory and this year marks the 100th anniversary of the purchase of U.S. Treasury bonds.
Columbus would probably have fallen back into obscurity if not for American arrogance.
In 1889, France hosted what critics called the most spectacular World's Fair ever.
Its crowning achievement was the Eiffel Tower, which stood on the "Champs de Mars" in Paris and stretched from the plaza of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, to the Court of Honor and the Great Basin. The Court of Honor and the Great Basin look west.
The Project Gutenberg eBook formalized the idea of the Columbian Exposition, and after Paris, the United States set out to prove to the world that it was the equal of Europe by hosting its own World's Fair.
No one thought the theme of the exhibition was laudable, but the stage was set when Washington Irving, the American writer and author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, attempted to revitalize his sagging career by writing in English the first biography of Christopher Columbus, published in 1828.
, his tinkering created a great hero, whose legend was celebrated by the Bazaar: 'He was a natural genius who seemed to form himself.'
From the very beginning he had to fight against poverty and obstacles, acquiring a fearless courage in bravery and overcoming difficulties.
", the Columbian Exposition and the World's Fair were held on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in the New World.
On October 12, 1892, President William Harrison opened the fair.
That same day, the Pledge of Allegiance was introduced in America's schools, and Chicago created the "White City" - a series of nine "palaces" designed by America's greatest architects.
Just outside the White City is a more rugged midway, the *** same feature of the carnival and fairgrounds.
The fair gave visitors their first taste of carbonated soda, cookies and juicy fruit gum.
A giant 264-foot-tall Ferris wheel transported 36 cars, each carrying 60 people, on 20-minute trips.
In the six months after the Columbian Exposition opened, more than 28 million tickets were sold.
Columbus was the darling of the 19th-century mass media, and 71 Columbus effigies hang in a large gallery.
According to Irving, Columbus became the embodiment of the American dream.
He was the son of a simple wool weaver with a big dream, who challenged the greatest scholars of his day and boldly went where no one had gone before.
Even better, he was Italian.
The United States could deny Spain's involvement in the discovery of the New World, Christopher Columbus was considered a hero (in the public **** domain), and President Harrison declared a national holiday to coincide with the opening of the Columbian Exposition - Columbus Day.
Officially recognized by Congress in 1937, the pendulum swung again in 1992 as the United States prepared for the 500th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the Americas.
The devastating impact of his "discoveries" on the indigenous peoples of the Americas led ****ers to denounce Columbus as a "****", a man who died more than 500 years ago.
The Columbus legend is still being dismantled.
His story illustrates the blurred line between myth and history - how an architect of destruction can become a symbol of a nation.
Above: Portrait of Christopher Columbus (public **** domain), the article "Columbus, of all people, William Francis Keegan's Bee a National Symbol was originally published in Conversation. Conversation and republished under the Creative Commons license.
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