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Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden released a statement on Columbus Day that instead celebrates Indigenous People’s Day — an emerging rival to the federal holiday. Biden’s statement made no mention of the Italian discoverer Christopher Columbus and Biden spokesmen did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether he also is celebrating Columbus Day. Biden’s statement on Monday said, “Our nation has never lived up to our full promise of equality for all — especially not when it comes to the rights of the indigenous people who were here long before ships arrived from Europe.”

he first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster. — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by...

On October 12, 1492, the Genoan navigator Crisforo Colombo first reached land in the Western Hemisphere. Columbus takes a lot of ribbing these days, for having thought he was in another part of the world, for not really being the first to discover the Americas, for having worked for a different country than the one of his birth, for never admitting that he had discovered a whole new land mass. But, buried beneath these minor complaints, his accomplishments were enormous.… He did what had never been done before, showing amazing creativity, political skill, and determination. Yes, Columbus does deserve a...

“There are but 155 years left … at which time … the world will come to an end,” wrote Christopher Columbus in his book “Libro de Las Profecias,” composed in 1502 between his third and fourth voyages. Columbus continued: “… The sign which convinces me that our Lord is hastening the end of the world is the preaching of the Gospel recently in so many lands.” Though his predictions were off, Columbus’ writings revealed his motivation for setting sail on his first voyage Aug. 3, 1492, with the Nina, Pinta and the Santa Maria. He sought to find a sea...

Another Columbus Day came and went...although not as such in Minneapolis, which voted this year to honor Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead, a time to reflect on the price American Indians paid for the greed and ruthlessness of my European ancestors. Yet it is ironic that Columbus should take the blame, for he was our first “multicultural” hero. An Italian Catholic who sailed for Spain, Columbus was one of a handful of celebrated Americans who did not fit neatly into the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant mold. The worst strike against Columbus was that he was a Roman Catholic. Catholics had a special...

Your highnesses, as Catholic Christians and Princes devoted to the Holy Christian faith and to the spreading of this faith, and as enemies of the Muslim sect and of all idolatries and heresies, ordered that I should go east, but not by land as is customary. I was to go by way of the west, whence until today we do not know with certainty that anyone has ever gone there. He sent me that I might bring the true faith to the Indians. ~ Christopher Columbus There are many reasons for defending what crucially needs to be defended, that except...

Spain said Friday it would extend by one year a law that makes it easier for descendants of Jews who were forced to flee five centuries ago during the Inquisition to get citizenship. The law - which aims to correct the "historical mistake" of sending Jews into exile in 1492, forcing them to convert to Catholicism or burning them at the stake - came into effect in October 2015 and was set to expire in October 2018. But government spokesman Inigo Mendez de Vigo said Spain's cabinet had agreed to extend the measure by one year until October 2019. So...

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...

Monday, February 16, 2015 A Revisionist Muslim History of America Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blogTurkish President Erdogan’s claim that Columbus encountered a mosque in Cuba (the explorer actually saw a rock whose shape he compared to the dome of a mosque) and a Saudi Imam claiming that Columbus had sailed to America to attack Muslims are typical of an emerging genre of Muslim revisionist history that lays claim to America based on an imaginary earlier Muslim presence here. While these examples may be laughable, Muslim historical revisionism has taken root in academia. It can be found...

Christopher Columbus wrote that he sailed in February 1477 to an island a hundred miles beyond Tile (Iceland). This trip, which would have led him to Greenland according to the distance he mentioned, was questioned many times in the 20th century. Arguments against accepting his claim have been that ice and snow would not have allowed him to make an expedition to the North in winter, and that the details he had given about the size of the tides (26 braccia) were far too overstated to be taken seriously. Taking into consideration new research concerning the change of climate at...

Archaeologist Kristján Ahronson has concluded that Kverkarhellir, a manmade cave between waterfall Seljalandsfoss and farm Seljaland in South Iceland, was partly created around 800 AD, before the settlement of Iceland, which, according to sources, began in 874... “Kverkahellir, along with Seljalandshellir, is remarkable as it is part of a number of cave sites in southern Iceland, manngerðir hellar [‘manmade caves’], that are marked by cross sculpture.” ... Ahronson would not state that theories that the crosses may have been made by papar, monks from the British Isles who were said to have lived in Iceland before the Norse settlers, may...

Pity poor Leif Ericsson. The Viking explorer may well have been the first European to reach the Americas, but it is a certain Genoan sailor who gets all the glory. Thanks to evidence that has until now consisted only of bare archeological remains and a bunch of Icelandic legends, Ericsson has long been treated as a footnote in American history: no holiday, no state capitals named after him, no little ditty to remind you of the date of his voyage. But a group of Icelandic and Spanish scientists studying one mysterious genetic sequence - and one woman who's been dead...

A native woman kidnapped by the Vikings may have been the first American to arrive in Europe around 1,000 years ago, according to a startling new study. The discovery of a gene found in just 80 Icelanders links them with early Americans who may have been brought back to Iceland by Viking raiders. The discovery means that the female slave was in Europe five centuries before Christopher Columbus first paraded American Indians through the streets in Spain after his epic voyage of discovery in 1492...

Ptolemy's Geography, America and Columbus: Ancient Greeks and why maybe America was discovered Michael Lahanas Aristotle: “there is a continuity between the parts about the pillars of Hercules and the parts about India, and that in this way the ocean is one.” [As] for the rest of the distance around the inhabited earth which has not been visited by us up to the present time (because of the fact that the navigators who sailed in opposite directions never met), it is not of very great extent, if we reckon from the parallel distances that have been traversed by us... For...

A Danish art conservator claims that the controversial Vinland Map of America, published prior to Christopher Columbus's landfall, may not be a forgery after all. "We have so far found no reason to believe that the Vinland Map is the result of a modern forgery," says Renè Larsen of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Reuters first publicized his results last week but provided none of the skepticism being voiced by veterans in the field. The map mysteriously emerged in a Geneva bookshop in 1957 depicting a "new" and "fertile" land to the west that Viking explorer Leif Eriksson...

Norwegian arhaeologists are puzzled by a find which indicates an Inca Indian died and was buried in the Oestfold city of Sarpsborg 1000 years ago. The remains of two elderly men and a baby were discovered during work in a garden, and one of the skulls indicates that the man was an Inca Indian. There is a genetic flaw in the neck, which is believed to be limited to the Incas in Peru, says archaeologist Mona Beate Buckholm. The Norway Post suggests that maybe the Vikings travelled even more widely than hitherto believed? Why could not the Viking settlers in...

Leif Erikson Day, 2004 By the President of the United States of America A Proclamation More than 1,000 years ago, Leif Erikson led his crew on a journey across the Atlantic, becoming the first European known to have set foot on North American soil. Every October, we honor this courageous Viking explorer, his historic voyage, and the rich heritage of Nordic Americans. Immigrants from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden and their descendants have made great contributions to our Nation in the fields of business, politics, the arts, education, agriculture, and other areas. Nordic Americans have also made a significant...

Egg island is a flyspeck of land (0.2 square miles) at the end of a string of small islands extenting west from the northern end of Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas. Along with its near neighbor Royal Island, Egg was proposed as the landfall in 1981 by Arne B. Molander, a retired civil engineer. Molander has been a tireless advocate for his theory since, although his efforts so far have failed to convince anyone that the idea has merit.

ISRAELITES WERE IN AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS! By Pastor Alan Campbell 1992 marked the 500th Anniversary of Columbus' voyage of discovery from Spain to what was then known as the New World in 1492. No doubt there were those who who exploited the celebration of this event to emphasize the Hispanic as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon element in American Culture and society. However it is becoming an increasingly well known and documented fact, that not only were there North Europeans on the American continent long before the voyage of Columbus, but also that Phoenicians/ Israelites sailed from the Middle East through...

Henricus Martellus, a German cartographer working in Florence in the late 15th century, produced a highly detailed map of the known world. According to experts, there is strong evidence that Christopher Columbus studied this map and that it influenced his thinking before his fateful voyage. Martellus' map arrived at Yale in 1962, the gift of an anonymous donor. Scholars at the time hailed the map's importance and argued that it could provide a missing link to the cartographic record at the dawn of the Age of Discovery. However, five centuries of fading and scuffing had rendered much of the map's...