Columbus wasn't the first person to discover America; he was the last...
A prominent poster who no longer seems to be around tried to go to the mat with this claim around ten years ago, and well, his BYU education didn't hold up against my "bleeds red" background. And it wasn't that I studied CC in college (although if you're going to have any grasp of literature, one of my majors, you have to have a strong background in history and solid research skills).
The individual largely responsible for this distortion was a Dominican friar named Bartolomé de las Casas. He arrived in this hemisphere as a young man (18), accompanying his father. He was originally a slave trader (exploiting Native Americans, of course), but had his "come to Jesus" moment early, joining the order in 1506.
De Las Casas came to view the native people of this hemisphere as almost "fragile" and ill-suited for the labor they were conscripted into (he had no such compunctions against enslaving Africans).
There's considerably more, and I apologize if this seems like the sort of "black-and-white analysis" I holler about regularly. However, one factor responsible for the "resurrection" of de Las Casa's beliefs and history was the Spanish-American War of 1897. Since de Las Casas generally vilified the Spanish, he was used as an effective "propaganda device."
The real issue, as I see it, is "presentism," which is defined as "uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts."
Actions in history were "committed" by flawed human beings, and many of the stories about them were written by historians who were similarly flawed, albeit in different areas.
...(usually new historians) revise history every decade or so for presentist reasons--at least to speak to the contemporary readers and to include the currently known data, in a way similar to Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shifts in science. That they consider previous accounts, and their writers, to be "flawed" for doing the same thing bodes that our present takes on things will also be viewed as flawed within a generation. And yet we push them as if they're the truth...
My "background" as far as being a trained historian goes is quite weak (which is why I keep a few authentic sorts available for feedback).
That's not true of my "clinical background" or my rhetorical writing education. What I see is your statement--which I saw as quite controlling and patronizing--consists entirely of "process comments" rather than speaking to "content."
I brought up the term "presentism" to better define the "historical reality" of the past, not to indulge in an irrelevancy of "events occurring in the present."
I would ask you--politely, I hope--to speak to the facts rather than bring your "personal reality" to the discussion because many of us have markedly different perspectives.
That's a ten dollar way of noting you just stuck a straw man situation into the rhetoric.