The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus

A gifted historian presents a definitive book on Columbus―his life, his legacies, and the controversies that outlived him.
Christopher Columbus was born Cristoforo Colombo, in the autumn of 1451 in the Mediterranean port city of Genoa, and he died in the Spanish city of Valladolid in May 1506, as don Cristóbal Colón. More than five centuries later, we are still arguing over his life and its significance. Millions if not billions of people have learned his name. Most have some sense of what he did, that it was momentous, a great achievement, an act of primacy. But was his achievement “great” because he “discovered America” and thus made possible the hemisphere’s “great” nations? Or was it an apocalyptic catastrophe for tens of millions of Indigenous and African peoples?
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