Word: columbus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...American continental coast from Tierra del Fuego to the Aleutians in the west and Baffin Bay on the east coast is such a vast catchment area for the globe's wind and water currents that it is inconceivable that non-native people should not have fetched up there before Columbus. But the essence of discovery is that the voyage is repeatable. It entails documentation -- logs and records. The discoverer is the person who gets from known A to unknown B, returns to A, and can then get back to B again. Columbus' claim to be a discoverer is, admittedly...
...feat is Eurocentric in essence; as the world's focus shifts toward the Pacific, the ocean of the future, Ferdinand Magellan and Captain James Cook -- the latter being a better candidate for the greatest mariner and "encounterer" in human history -- may assume the same dimensions for our descendants that Columbus had for our immediate ancestors. But in the meantime, we should not allow our reaction against the myth of Columbus as Renaissance Ulysses, Romantic hero and near saint to obscure his actual achievement...
Planned more than a century ago as a tribute to the landfall of Christopher Columbus in 1492, a five-story lighthouse now, finally, thrusts itself into the sky over Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. Aggressively supported by the nation's octogenarian President Joaquin Balaguer, the project will cost, when all the finishing touches are completed, about $20 million. It will also, when the switch is pulled, put on quite a show: 147 giant beams projecting a cross of light 3,000 ft. into the Caribbean night. The lighthouse comes equipped with its own power generators, which was a prudent...
...grandiose new lighthouse already looks like an anomaly, while the old poverty huddling at its edges seems all too contemporary. Overarching light and enforced darkness, cheek by jowl. The Manichaean contrast is altogether fitting for this, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' world-shattering voyage, which is itself increasingly seen in opposing terms of black and white. The Columbus quincentennial officially kicks off this Columbus Day, Oct. 12 -- but it has even now generated enough contrast and controversy to outlast its appointed year and, quite possibly, this decade...
...heart of the hubbub lies a fundamental disagreement, not so much about Columbus himself as about the Columbian legacy. What, in other words, did the enigmatic Genoan set in motion when he first reached the New World? In one version of the story, Columbus and the Europeans who followed him brought civilization to two immense, sparsely populated continents, in the process fundamentally enriching and altering the Old World from which they had themselves come...