Good, Columbus is an FF who radicals give a uniquely unfair shake compared when compared to his contemporaries.
His contemporaries don't have holidays named after them.
lol, no s[inks]t Sherlock.
Hint: we don't venerate Columbus because of what he has in common with his contemporaries, ffs
We celebrate his discovery for permanently connecting two previously unknown-to-each-other halves of the world, and the resulting cross-cultural and economic exchange that fundamentally altered the trajectory for practically all people on the earth. His voyages are debatably the singular most transformational event in world history.
Fun fact. Columbus was an absolute piss-poor Navigator. His calculations about the size of the Earth was much smaller than those widely-held - - and generally correct - - by learned men and other Navigators of the day. By Columbus distorted miscalculations, he believed he could sail the relatively short distance from Europe to the Indies. And of course the vast majority of educated man of the. Knew that the world was round rather than flat. Columbus disproving the Flat Earth theory is a grade school myth from the 50s.
The only reason Columbus became immortalized by his so-called Discovery, rather than becoming an historical footnote about a lost voyage that never returned, is that his incorrect calculations gave him enough rope to reach the heretofore unknown ( to early Renaissance Europe) continent of North America. Columbus only blundered into such success because he was stupid in his calculations, and simultaneously utterly pigheaded enough to disregard the well-reasoned mathematical calculations of most Scholars who correctly estimated the earth size.
I get it that in the end Columbus, albeit fueled by ignorance and stubbornness, actually did go ahead and discover America for large-scale European colonization ( no, the brief failed Vinland colonies centuries earlier don't begin to count). But the best analogy I can think of is imagine if one of those Flat Earth idiots launching themselves in the space with a homemade rocket like the guy who recently killed himself doing so, actually somehow survived and made some unintentional and unrelated, but nevertheless groundbreaking, Discovery in the process.
Sure, Larry schmelzer may have inadvertently broken Untold ground in (e.g.) particle physics while launching himself into the sky despite everyone telling him he was ignorant bordering on crazy trying to prove the Earth was flat, and we thank him for his fortuitous discovery, but do we really think it's worth naming a national holiday schmelzer day to honor the guy's blind stupidity and amazing luck?
Oh, and even doing that of course also requires ignoring the fact that Larry was a gang leader whose men specialized in whole scale human trafficking, serial rape, and mass murder.
