This is an IHeart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

For generations, students in American elementary schools were taught that Christopher

Columbus fell the ocean blue to discover America in 1492. Today, that lesson is changing in schools

across the country. Here to tell the real story of Christopher Columbus is Lawrence Burgreen,

who wrote the definitive biography, Columbus,

The Four Voyages. Let's take a listen.

Hello, my name is Lawrence Burgreen, and I've written a book about Christopher Columbus,

Columbus, the Four Voyages.

Of all the books I've written, I think this has been the most challenging and the most controversial because Columbus's reputation has been changing all by the month.

He's a figure that we all know about, and he's been devalued almost beyond recognition torn down from statues, discredited over and over, as if it were the first time.

But as I discovered, the criticism of Columbus, intense criticism, was there almost at the beginning. It seems to get rediscovered with each generation.

He's been hated, considered a genocidal monster. I would like to discuss Columbus in three

dimensions, if you will, to give a sense of what he was really like as a person, with his flaws at all.

The flaws were huge, but also so were his accomplishments.

There's a reason why we remember Columbus.

He tied together with his four voyages, the old world and the new.

First of all, who was Columbus?

Christopher Columbus, Colombo was born in Genoa in 1451.

He was the son of a weaver.

He went to sea at 14, which was common, and he had a very rough beginning.

He sank in a bottle off the coast of Portugal. He managed to paddle safely to shore on a piece of wreckage.

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