COLUMBUS DAY

You don’t have a buy a party hat or uncork the champagne. It’s a minor holiday. But Columbus Day is still worth celebrating, and those who attack it are worth rebutting.

The focus should not be the navigator himself. He was a courageous, if misguided, explorer, who set sail for China, thinking the globe was much smaller and not knowing a vast landmass would block his journey. When he died 14 years later, he still believed he had landed in Asia, still thought baseball and football teams should be named “the Indians.”

What the holiday really commemorates is a much larger event that forever changed the world: the opening of the Americas, North and South, to a permanent connection with Europe. That has continued unabated for over 500 years and led to momentous achievements, from mass democracy to mass prosperity.

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