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their contact with Native peoples of the Amer-
icas had no impact, and the fact that they had
been to the Americas was not known beyond
their homelands. Exchanges between the civ-
ilizations of the Americas, Europe, and Africa
that define the world as it is known today
began with Columbus. The symbolic weight
that comes with that distinction, however, is a
different matter. Once ignored and forgotten,
Columbus’s actual deeds—and misdeeds—
are newly appraised with the arrival of each
centennial anniversary of his first voyage.
In 1892 most residents of the 44 U.S. states
then in existence viewed Columbus as an icon
of national progress. The scene was quite
different 100 years later, when filmmaker/
historian Zvi Dor-Ner and coauthor William
Scheller anticipated the controversy of the
imminent Columbus Quincentennial. In
Columbus and the Age of Discovery,their book
accompanying the 1991 PBS television series,
Dor-Ner and Scheller enumerated various
attitudes with which Columbus is remem-
bered in modern times: He is reviled by Native
Americans, revered by Italian- and Irish-
American Catholics, and viewed in complex
shades of gratitude, revulsion, or indifference
across the Caribbean, Central America, South
America, and Europe.
Inthe year that followed Dor-Ner and
Scheller’s series and the accompanying book,
the absence of consensus was inescapable.
The city of Genoa, Italy, celebrated its native
son. Native American groups and the city of
Berkeley, California, declared an alternative
holiday, Indigenous Peoples Day—not to be
confused with the annual August 8 United
Nations–sponsored global holiday, Interna-
tional Day of the World’s Indigenous People—
to avoid honoring Columbus’s legacy of
conquest and genocide. While 500 sailing
ships raced from Spain to the Bahamas to
commemorate Columbus’s navigational feats,
Spanish embassies in Latin America tensely
increased security, as Indian groups demon-
strated in Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, and
Colombia. New York City hosted two parades:
one celebrating the Spanish lineage of Co-
lumbus’s voyages, another to honor his Italian
heritage. Schoolchildren visited reconstruc-
tions of Columbus’s ships. Italian-American
and American Indian groups confronted
each other in Denver, Colorado. Perhaps no
town in the Americas illustrated the divided
perceptions better than Sandwich, Massachu-
setts, where the board of selectmen unani-
mously approved two resolutions offered by
local residents: one lauding Columbus for
bringing Christianity, immigration, and cul-
tural exchange to the New World, the other
condemning him for bringing war, disease,
and cultural destruction.
While the morality of Columbus’s actions
and his symbolic importance deserve to figure
in appraisals of him as a historical figure, they
are only part of the story. A more illuminating
recent trend instead pays increased, respectful
attention to all implications of the transforma-
tion of the Americas that started in 1492,
allowing a multidisciplinary look at what the
subsequent meeting of cultures has meant to
the modern world. This approach to what has
become known as the Columbian Exchange
opens ways of understanding how the “age of
discovery” influences—and is influenced by—
studies of ethnicity, religion, science, art, tech-
nology, language, and nature. Credit for
initiating this concept goes to Alfred W. Crosby,
whose The Columbian Exchange: Biological
and Cultural Consequences of 1492(originally
published in 1972) details how the Americas
and Europe were profoundly changed by bio-
logical factors, including transatlantic move-
ment of deadly diseases, as well as the
introduction of crops and animals to lands
where they were previously unknown.xiv B Discovery of the Americas, 1492–