Columbus Day, the national holiday, is coming up in the United States.
Columbus Day is slated each year for the second Monday in October.
This year, that falls on October 13.
That means the upcoming weekend will be three days for many people. The day became a federal holiday in 1937. The holiday was proclaimed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt largely because of intense lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, an influential Catholic fraternal benefits organization, according to History.
Some states decline to recognize the day, such as California and Hawaii, while others celebrate it on different dates.
Still others celebrate the day under a different name. Native Americans’ Day, for instance, is the name in South Dakota. Seattle voted this week to change the day to Indigenous People’s Day.
The controversy attached to the day is widespread.
John Oliver recently explored the topic on his show, saying “Columbus became famous for his discoveries, specifically the discovery that you can discover a continent with millions of people already living on it, that has also been visited by Vikings around 500 years earlier.”
Oliver noted that many school students don’t learn about what Columbus did as governor of the Caribbean islands where he landed.
“What they tend not to learn are the parts of Columbus’ life where where he kidnapped native Americans and sold them into slavery, had his men slash them to pieces and through disease and warfare killed roughly half the population of Haiti.
Also despite what some students are taught, Columbus did not prove the world was round.
“Contrary to popular belief, most educated Europeans in Columbus’ day understood that the world was round, but they did not yet know that the Pacific Ocean existed,” said History. “As a result, Columbus and his contemporaries assumed that only the Atlantic lay between Europe and the riches of the East Indies.”
