Throughout our years in school, we have learned that Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue with his three ships and, in doing so, “discovered America”.

We were taught that Columbus was a hero and a pioneer who discovered what is currently the United States of America. Fun fact: all of that is wrong.

Columbus never set foot on North American soil. He didn’t even get to where he wanted to go (India) because he was so bad at math. Instead, he ended up on southern islands like Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

There, he ended up slaughtering its inhabitants because they didn’t have gold (they didn’t even know what gold was) and never discovered anything at all. He was also credited with discovering that the Earth is round, which is false.

People had already figured out that the Earth was round long before Columbus came along. His expedition was a huge waste of time and resources, yet somehow he’s ended up as the sole discoverer of America in history books.

Recently, the television show “Adam Ruins Everything” did a segment about how everything we’ve learned about Christopher Columbus is wrong, talking about everything stated above and just how he became this figure head (all with cited sources).

So, how did Columbus become this “hero” that’s in every single history textbook?

It’s all because of an author named Washington Irving, who wrote “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” He wrote the first biography on Columbus and changed a lot in order to make it a better story and to sell more copies.

So, everything that we know about him is a lie. Why, then, is he still celebrated?

Even though Columbus didn’t discover America, it doesn’t mean that our country wasn’t founded on the genocide of a whole civilization.

Whether it was Columbus or someone else looking for glory, the Native American population suffered in the end, and a lot of people seem to overlook that. Even if you didn’t know all of this about him, everyone knew that Native Americans were in America first and were slaughtered in the end.

We should’ve stopped celebrating him a long time ago. I think it’s time to change the history books so that they talk about the real Christopher Columbus and how he didn’t do anything but kill people and struggle with math.

We shouldn’t throw parties for people that “discovered” America. It was already discovered and inhabited long before anyone else came into the picture.