President Donald Trump renewed the focus of Columbus Day to be celebrated on the second Monday of October, reclaiming the explorer’s “extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue,” according to the president’s proclamation.
Since 1971, the second Monday in October has been federally recognized as Columbus Day to commemorate Columbus’ discovery of the Americas in 1492, celebrate Italian-American heritage, and acknowledge the 1891 lynchings of 11 Italian Americans. In 2021, former President Joe Biden issued the first presidential proclamation of Indigenous Peoples’ Day to be observed on the same day, following backlash toward Columbus.
The “current hostility to him is ill informed,” Felipe Fernández-Armesto, professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and author of “Columbus on Himself,” told CNA. “He was understandably conflicted about the people he encountered on this side of the ocean, but, by the standards of his contemporaries, his most characteristic judgments about them were highly positive.”
“Columbus Day is commendable — instituted in expiation of the worst lynching in U.S. history … Columbus suited a project of national reconciliation because he was, for most of the history of the U.S., a unifying figure.” Fernández-Armesto added: “He should remain so today.”
“He was not guilty of most of the excesses of cruelty that interested enemies at the time and ignorant critics today ascribe to him. His history was uniquely significant: He was genuinely the discoverer of viable routes to and fro across the Atlantic — reconnecting, for good and ill, formerly sundered cultures and enabling the world-transforming exchange of ideas and people, commerce and life-forms,” he said.
“It’s hard to think of anyone whose impact on the hemisphere has been greater,” Fernández-Armesto said.
In an Oct. 9 proclamation, Trump wrote the previous years have been a “campaign to erase our history … and attack our heritage.” To combat this, Trump formally declared the day will be recognized as Columbus Day in honor of “the great Christopher Columbus and all who have contributed to building our nation.”
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