Oct 10, 2011 11:24am

As today's metropolis Day celebrations begin, rating Columbus' 1492 achievement in the New World, here are whatever little-known facts most the someone famous by Italian-Americans crossways the United States.

 

1.   When the  Columbus Day Holiday Began

In the U.S., it's sometimes reportable that the domestic pass began in 1971, but that's actually the fellow when legislature denaturized metropolis Day to the ordinal weekday of October. In reality, metropolis Day became a domestic pass such earlier, in 1937.  At that time, President historiographer Roosevelt declared the pass would verify locate on Oct. 12 (the fellow metropolis prototypal landed in the Bahamas).  But the prototypal famous metropolis Day occasion in the U.S. took locate in New royalty City in 1792, daylong before it became a domestic holiday.

 

2.   Columbus' Journal Was Intended for an Audience

When historians investigate direct sources from Columbus' voyages, they aren't datum clannish diaries. They're evaluating proportionality witting for the explorer's sponsors, those he refers to as the "Most Christian, High, Excellent, and Powerful Princes, King and Queen of Spain."  In that sense, it's all doable that these journals were embellished, with whatever facts manipulated in Columbus' favor.

 

3.   Columbus' Bones Are Still Shrouded in Mystery

It's ease blurred where Columbus' clappers were eventually ordered to rest.

When metropolis died in 1506 his relic were condemned to a kinsfolk mausoleum in Seville, Spain. But nearly 40 eld after his son requested that the relic be settled in the Cathedral of Santo tenor in the top of the friar Republic, where he witting to be buried. In the New 1700s the clappers touched to Cuba, and 100 assemblage after they returned to Seville. But in 1877 clappers scarred as those of metropolis were institute by cathedral workers in the friar Republic.  Those clappers hit since been interred in the metropolis Lighthouse in Santo Domingo.

In  2006, the assemblage of the 500th day of Columbus' death, a forensic aggroup institute polymer from clappers belowground in a cathedral in Seville matching the polymer from Columbus' brother, Diego. But at the time, the administrator of the metropolis Lighthouse insisted Columbus' relic had never mitt the friar Republic.

 

4.  Pope Rejected Bid for Columbus' Sainthood

In 1882 the Knights of Columbus, a Christian men's fraternity, based dweller Americans who rallied for metropolis to be constituted as a fear because they said he had brought Christianity to the Indians. Catholic person XIII, however, unloved that letter because metropolis had an base son with Beatriz Enríquez de Harana, his mistress.

 

5.   Columbus Brought Citrus to the New World

The story books state metropolis forcibly scored a aggregation of plunder from the islands he visited, making soured with gold, parrots, spices, and manlike captives from Haiti, an island he after named Hispaniola.  The "riches" entertained his land sponsors, King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I, who were resource the voyage.  During the process, metropolis also carried dweller items to the New World.  In 1493, the assemblage of Columbus's ordinal voyage, he brought citrus production seeds to the West Indies and the trees ended up in the West Indies, Mexico, and Florida.