Make sure you're subscribed to Two Issues, etc.

Type Issues, etc. in your podcast provider, hit that subscribe button, and leave us a five-star review.

This will make it easier for other podcast listeners to find issues, etc.

Along with the founding fathers and almost every single American historical figure, Christopher Columbus has fallen on tough times.

Now, that didn't begin with the recent spade of vandalism and iconoclasm in American culture.

It started well in the 20th century.

Americans who thought very positively of Christopher Columbus now generally think very negatively about him.

What would happen if we tried to expunge him from our culture altogether?

Welcome back to Issues, etc. I'm Todd Wilkin joining us for a biography of Christopher Columbus.

Dr. Bradley Berzer, he's professor of history and Russell Amos-Kritcher in American studies at Hillsdale College.

Author of several columns on Christopher Columbus for the imaginative conservative.

Dr. Berzer, welcome back.

Hi, Todd. Thank you. It's always good to talk to you. It's been a few years.

What are some of the most popular progressive myths about Christopher Columbus?

Well, he's become a hated figure, really. I think a symbol of everything that's wrong with Western civilization.

It started in the 1960s and it was part of the new left and you see this in some of the movies that came out in the 1960s.

But a complete revision of the Western and what the Western was about and a kind of anti-John Wayne movement in Hollywood, like Little Big Man and other movies such as that.

And so in the 1960s, there really just became a kind of anti-American mythology.

And Columbus was tied into that, of course, because he is the great discoverer of America.

And so he became this great symbol. I mean, to the point where we get into the 1980s and into the 1990s,

and you have people like activist and actor Russell Means, who I loved in the last of the Mohicans,

but he makes a statement that someone like Columbus is as bad as Hitler.

...