Workshop To Make And Register A Representation Agreement: Fill & Download for Free

Hi Gaurav, thanks for the A2A,Congratulations on completing your first draft! That in itself is a major accomplishment. Now it is time to fine tune and polish it into a publication ready manuscript.There are a number of steps you can take. Regardless of which publishing path you decide to follow, you need to make sure your book is market ready before you let it loose on the world.Print:Get your first draft printed. It doesn't cost very much, but it is always a good idea to have a hard copy of your original work. Some editors will only work with a paper copy, some will want both paper and digital, some only want digital. It is a personal preference. If your book sells well, this original draft could become very valuable as an artifact for your heirs.Editing:Once you have a first draft, you need to begin the revision process. There are a number of options here:Put the book away for at least three months. Don't look at it! Pull it out and read it yourself. You will see so many little things that could be done better. Revise to draft #2 before you employ any of the following:Hire an editor. You can search online or if you are a member of a writers group, look there. You want somebody who actually knows what they are doing, not just your friend. Get someone who knows books and the market. Check references. Expect to pay about a months wages for quality work.Barter. Do you have friends who are writers? Swap projects and edit each others work. If your friend is a poor writer, expect poor editing, if they are skilled, they can prove invaluable.Use Beta Readers. Choose 3 - 5 people to read your draft and give feedback. Collectively, they may be able to provide the equivalent of a skilled editor. Many writers are part of a writer's circle and carry out this function in a sort of workshop environment. Some writers will use this before going to the professional editor to shorten up that process and save money.Most publishers still have staff editors. If you go this route, expect to have your book ripped apart and reassembled into something that is market ready, though not necessarily what you would like. Remember, they work for the publisher, not you. To get this far you need to have a pretty good draft that has been taken on by an agent.A little clarification needs to be made between line editing, proof-texting and literary editing. Proof texting looks for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors only. Many software programs (word, wordperfect, scrivener, etc.) do this automatically, though they are incapable of detecting things like homonyms or wrong words. Line editing goes a little bit further and will suggest better word choice and identify poor sentence structure or faulty dialogue, but will not identify plot inconsistencies or character issues. For that you need literary editing.Revision:Once through a first edit, you will need to revise your draft to include the necessary changes, then send it back to the editor for further work. You can expect this process to take anywhere from two to ten revisions, depending on your and your editor's skill level. You can expect to rewrite entire chapters, move things around, or even delete entire scenes or chapters and maybe even have to write new ones to make the story work.Manuscript:It is called a manuscript because it used to be hand written. With modern technology it is usually in a digital format. This is the market ready book, edited and formatted for publication. This is the thing you shop out to agents or publishers. If there are illustrations they are attached as files with notation in the manuscript as to where they go. If you decide to print your manuscript, put the illustrations in the body of the work.7Publish:There comes a point of diminishing returns, where any further improvements are so few and so minor that its not worth spending the time and money to do another revision. It is time to let your baby make it or break it out in the world.Again, there are a number of options:Self PublishYou can upload an eBook directly to a number of platforms. Amazon, Kobo, iBook, Barnes and Noble all provide online publishing for free. You set the price, they take a share of any that sell. There is no paper or hardcover option.If your book is not too large, you can get it printed and bound in the format of your choice by Print-on-demand companies. The cost per volume goes down the more copies you buy. They do not provide any marketing assistance or register copyright or ISBN. It is up to you to do these things if you want. Some writer's will do the eBook thing and then get a dozen or so copies printed for family and friends.Publishing servicesPublishing services offer professional results on a fee for service basis. They usually market this as packages with more services bundled for more money. Some will refer to this as partnership or vanity publishing. They will provide everything that a traditional publishing house offers for a fee that you pay up front. Many of these are subsidiaries of traditional publishing houses. You can contract with them to do everything from editing, formatting, cover design and layout, through to marketing, promotion, representation to television and movie companies and more, but all on a fee for service basis. Remember, you have to pay up front, and they do not tell you if your book is any good or not. If it doesn't sell, you are out your investment. If it does sell, you need to sell a lot of copies to recoup. They will do the copyright registration and ISBN for you and put your book into the national or worldwide distribution system. Your book can show up in your local bookstore right alongside the other authors. (if you pay for the returns option) Some publishing service providers will bear part of the cost in a partnership type agreement.Traditional PublishingThere two ways into the traditional publishing world;Find a literary agent to represent you, orMake a name for yourself through self-publishing, internet writing or becoming famous in some other way and the publishers will come after you.There is no cost to you up front. The publisher makes their money by selling your book. You get paid a royalty. The publisher takes the largest percentage, but they take all the risks. About 1 out of 1000 queries are successful in becoming published this way, but the potential benefits are very large, even into the millions of copies sold.There is nothing like that day when the publisher sends you your first copy of your published book. To crack that cover and see you words in a real book is truly amazing.Good luck, and good writing!

Q. What are the misconceptions about Christopher Columbus?Columbus proved the “flat Earth” theory wrong.Columbus was Italian.Columbus was a successful businessman and a model leader.Columbus committed genocide.Columbus believed he had discovered America.Columbus introduced syphilis to Europe.Columbus died unknown in poverty.Columbus did nothing significant.Excerpts from articles below in full:American Revolution created the Columbus most of us over the age of 30 learned in grade school. Prior to the late 18th century, he was a historical footnote with no connection to the 13 colonies. An Italian, he sailed under a Spanish flag and landed in no part of the modern-day mainland United States. Yet when the need to develop a national history with no discernible connection to Britain arose during the Revolution, early Americans seized upon him.First voyage. Modern place names in black, Columbus's place names in blue (wikipedia)The politics of the Revolution disqualified the other contenders. Henry Hudson was British. Giovanni Caboto (anglicized as “John Cabot”) sailed for Britain. Juan Ponce de Leon was already in use as a hero in Spain. Giovanni da Verrazzano met an end unbefitting any proper national hero, having been eaten by Carib Indians in 1526.Columbus had flaws as well. Until his death, he publicly insisted that he had in fact landed in East Asia as he originally intended. He was neither an especially talented mariner nor a success at founding a colony in the New World. The only detailed history of Columbus and his voyages widely available in colonial libraries was written by a Scotsman, James Robertson, in 1777. The author took a racist, ethnocentric tone, depicting Columbus as an explorer of noble intent bringing civilization to the savages. Importantly, Robertson also historicized Columbus as a man stifled by the rigid ways of the Old World and yearning to set his own course. The metaphor was not subtle, and revolutionary America embraced it.The voyages of Christopher Columbus (wikipedia)Columbus-mania swept the nation beginning with the war, because he became, with the help of Robertson’s history and the flood of epic poems and odes to him, a symbol for the go-it-alone, trailblazing spirit of the American people. Adopting “Columbia” as an informal name for the budding nation implied that, like Columbus, the colonies were shedding the yoke of the Old World.Towns and streets beyond counting, including state capitals in South Carolina (1786) and Ohio (1812), were named for him. In 1784, King’s College in New York City restyled itself Columbia University. Many publications—Columbian Magazine (1786), Columbian Museum (1791), the Columbian Register, the Columbian Weekly Register—appropriated his name. The political organization that eventually became the powerful Tammany Hall political machine in New York was founded in 1786 as the Columbian Order. In 1791, the Territory (later District) of Columbia was established as the national capital. A year later, Robert Gray, sailing the Columbia, scouted the Pacific Northwest, christened the Columbia River, and named the entire region Columbia (which survives north of the border today as British Columbia). And in 1798, Joseph Hopkinson wrote the original national anthem, “Hail Columbia.”Two events conspired to ensure that the American affection for Columbus was no passing fad. First, Americans turned the tricentenary of Columbus’s 1492 voyage into a massive celebration.Second, the publication in 1828 of Washington Irving’s The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. This stunningly inaccurate book purported to be a history and codified the version of Columbus who “sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred ninety-two” taught to generations of American children. Exemplary of Irving’s myth making was the mangling of Columbus’s motivation for the voyage of 1492. The real Columbus studied Portuguese sailors’ maps, concluded that Southeast Asia lay just beyond the map edges, and set out to prove it. Irving’s Columbus sailed to prove that the world was round, thumbing his nose at European elites who insisted it was flat. Throughout the book, Columbus is valiant, intrepid, and eager to shed Old Europe—not coincidentally, exactly the qualities the United States saw in itself.The Flagship of Columbus and the Fleet of Columbus. 400th Anniversary Issues of 1893. (On ships.)But even compared to the late 18th century, nothing can match the Columbus Fever achieved in 1892–93 as the country celebrated the 400th anniversary of his voyage with the Chicago World’s Fair, the “Columbian Exposition.”His many faults: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold,” as he rounded up 1,500 Arawak inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles to sell them in Spain. Bartolome de Las Casas, in his 1561 account based on accounts from Columbus’s crew, depicted Columbus as a man for whom casual killing was a leisure activity …Five myths about Christopher Columbus (washingtonpost.com)1. Columbus proved the “flat Earth” theory wrong.In an early scene in the 1992 Ridley Scott film “1492: Conquest of Paradise,” Columbus, played by Gérard Depardieu, gazes out at the Atlantic Ocean with his son. He tells the boy the world is like the orange he is peeling: round, not flat. In this traditional rendering, Columbus is an enlightened scientific figure, a pre-Galileo surrounded by obscurantists determined to scuttle his plans. We owe this myth to Washington Irving, who Americanized Columbus in a best-selling 1828 biography. Already known for Rip Van Winkle and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving was a dedicated Hispanophile who researched Columbus’s life and voyages while living in Spain in the 1820s. Despite careful scholarship, Irving peddled the “all American” idea that Columbus was a hands-on seafaring man willing to challenge immobile academics who couldn’t see past the horizon.In reality, that the Earth is more or less spherical was not news in Columbus’s day. The question was size, shape and how much of it was covered by oceans. Columbus would eventually opt for a smaller, pear-shaped world vs. the rounder orange.Toscanelli's notions of the geography of the Atlantic Ocean (shown superimposed on a modern map), which directly influenced Columbus's plans.Florentine mathematician Paolo Toscanelli is credited with inspiring Columbus’s voyage, but neither Toscanelli nor Columbus could convince Portugal’s court of its feasibility. Spanish cosmographers were similarly unmoved when Columbus met them in 1486, but the Catholic monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, were intrigued. They gave Columbus a stipend and kept him on hold. Portugal was pushing east to Asia by rounding Africa. Would Spain be left out? The monarchs granted Columbus another audience in early 1492. In April, an agreement was signed in the shadow of the Alhambra. Columbus was now “admiral of the ocean sea.”Columbus before the Queen, as imagined by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, 18432. Columbus was Italian.The National Italian American Foundation calls the Columbus Day parade in New York “the most visible and accessible manifestation of our Italian American Pride,” and Italian Americans have led efforts to oppose changes to the holiday’s focus nationwide.But when Columbus lived, there was no such thing as an Italian; Italy did not exist until 1861. The best evidence suggests that the explorer was born in a village near Genoa, which is part of Italy today. To his deathbed, he proudly claimed Genoa as home. In Columbus’s lifetime, Genoa was a fiercely independent republic with its own language, currency and overseas colonies. Its commercial ties to Castile and Aragon, in modern-day Spain, were intimate. Genoese trading colonies in Seville, Barcelona and Lisbon were sizable. Some Genoese who married locally were naturalized Castilian, Catalan or Portuguese subjects.Those cozy relationships helped give rise to a crop of Columbus “birthers.” Catalan, Majorcan, Ibizan, Portuguese, Greek, Sephardic Jewish, Sardinian, Polish and even Scottish claims have been made by a mix of serious scholars and crackpot theorists. Most historians believe that Columbus was Genoese, but they hesitate to call him “Italian,” partly for the reasons stated above, and partly because Columbus left home early and moved around a lot.3. Columbus was a successful businessman and a model leader.An early American archetype, Columbus has long served as a model entrepreneur. Columbus Day blog posts and articles have included “3 Business Lessons Learned from Christopher Columbus” and “5 Lessons in Leadership Effectiveness from Christopher Columbus.” These inspirational essays boil down to memorable bullet points such as: “Find an opportunity where the wind is at your back.” One asks, “Do you have a Columbus in your company?”By all accounts, Columbus was a confident risk-taker who knew hot commodities. He sailed the West African coast seeking gold in the early 1480s, then moved on to the sugar of the Madeiras, where he married a Portuguese noblewoman, Filipa de Perestrello. Columbus also knew the North Atlantic’s cod fisheries, but there was no romance in fish. He wanted the spices of Asia, lovingly described by Marco Polo.Had Columbus reached Asia, perhaps he’d have proved a keen entrepreneur. As it happened, he landed on Caribbean shores, in a densely populated region that was economically impenetrable for an Old World trader. Some gold was available, but it was not used as currency. Captives could be had, but they weren’t sold in open markets. Columbus presumed soon after landing that he could make friends and trade for gold and slaves following Portuguese practices in West Africa, yet with a few exceptions, there was no market economy in the Americas to match those of the Old World.Failing to understand this, Columbus quickly made managerial mistakes, some fatal. He planted a colony on the north shore of Haiti and named it La Navidad. When he returned on his second voyage, everyone at “Christmas town” was dead. Columbus launched another settlement, named La Isabela for his royal patron, that met much the same fate.Archaeologists have found that La Isabela was constructed like a hybrid Genoese-Portuguese trading post of the sort found in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Africa. It was intended to survive by trade rather than self-sufficiency, prompting inhabitants to engage in suicidal raids on neighboring indigenous villages. Columbus’s misunderstanding of local economies and his failure to adapt to local conditions cost not only Spanish lives but also countless indigenous ones.4. Columbus committed genocide.On Columbus Day in 1989, the late Native American activist Russell Means led an American Indian Movement protest, pouring buckets of fake blood over the Columbus statue in downtown Denver while Italian Americans paraded in the streets. (Columbus Day was inaugurated in Denver in 1907.) The city’s parades were canceled for a decade. AIM activists are not alone in charging Columbus with mass murder, and in recent years several cities and states have instead started celebrating “Indigenous People’s Day” or “Native American Day.”But if we judge Columbus on what we know from the historical record, is that the right charge? He definitely saw profit in enslaving and selling native peoples kidnapped from Caribbean shores. Once he made allies among what he called “good Indians,” Columbus advocated fighting and enslaving native groups he presumed to be cannibals. By 1500, he and his brothers had sent nearly 1,500 enslaved islanders to European markets to be sold. Even “friendly” indigenous peoples were forced to mine gold en masse, speeding death from malnourishment, overwork and disease.Columbus was clearly no friend of native peoples, but a document discovered 10 years ago in Simancas, Spain, suggests he was an equal-opportunity tyrant. Witnesses testified that his brief government of Hispaniola was marked by routine cruelty not only to the native Taínos but also to Spaniards who defied or mocked him. A woman who reminded Columbus that he was the son of a weaver had her tongue cut out. Others were executed for minor crimes.Colonialism is never pretty, and in his treatment of native peoples, Columbus was following Spanish and Portuguese trading and slaving practices. We may charge him with genocide by negligence (if there is such a thing), but it is harder to prove intent. Columbus wanted living and multiplying subjects to tax and govern. He was not interested in depopulating newly acquired territories.Was Columbus an active protector of Native Americans? No. Did he wish to eliminate them? No. Did genocide directly result from his decrees and his family’s commercial aims? Yes.5. Columbus believed he had discovered America.For decades, U.S. schoolchildren learned that in “fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” on his way to “discovering” the New World. By the 1992 quincentennial, though, new academic scholarship had begun to seep into elementary and secondary history lessons. Today, few people claim that Columbus was the first European to sail to the Americas. Evidence for medieval Norse voyages and colonization is overwhelming.What did Columbus himself think he was doing, though? He never believed he had landed somewhere that Europeans weren’t otherwise aware of, and thus America was named for another navigator, the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, who recognized the “newness” of South America. Columbus thought he was discovering some parts of Asia not described by Marco Polo or other Western authorities. He also believed he had found a new maritime route to the East Indies that would circumvent Muslim-controlled land routes and waterways.Columbus's copy of The Travels of Marco Polo, with his handwritten notes in Latin written on the marginsAs Nicolás Wey-Gómez has recently shown, sailing south to the tropics was perhaps Columbus’s main innovation, since he wanted to reach the Spice Islands first. From there, he could travel to China from a safe commercial base — the fortified trading post he had tried to establish on Hispaniola. Columbus’s geographical stubbornness seems strange today, but he was hardly alone in refusing to believe that he had stumbled onto continents that were unknown to contemporary authorities. The fact of an entirely new world inhabited by many millions of previously unknown people was simply too much for most educated Europeans to grasp.If Columbus did discover something, it was the true extent of the North Atlantic trade wind circuit. Portuguese mariners had already observed this wind-and-current system, but Columbus went much further, proving over his four voyages that transatlantic sea travel in the age of sail was far more certain than anyone had imagined.For true discovery, we must go back at least 13,000 to 14,000 years before Columbus. Recent research confirms that the first humans to reach the Americas migrated from northeast Asia to North America via a temporary isthmus or by short island hops in the Bering Strait and along the Alaskan and British Columbian coasts. In several waves, these earliest Americans made their way south and east, rapidly settling and altering two vast continents and numerous islands.For Native Americans, Columbus’s fateful arrival prompted 523 years of resistance. Whether we call it Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day, Oct. 12 merits [email protected] 5 Misconceptions About ColumbusStatue of Columbus in Lavagna, Genova, Italy By Dreamstime1. Columbus set out to prove the world was round.If he did, he was about 2,000 years too late. Ancient Greek mathematicians had already proven that the Earth was round, not flat. Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C.E. was one of the originators of the idea. Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E. provided the physical evidence, such as the shadow of the Earth on the moon and the curvature of the Earth known by all sailors approaching land. And by the third century B.C.E., Eratosthenes determined the Earth's shape and circumference using basic geometry. In the second century C.E., Claudius Ptolemy wrote the "Almagest," the mathematical and astronomical treatise on planetary shapes and motions, describing the spherical Earth. This text was well known throughout educated Europe in Columbus' time.Columbus, a self-taught man, greatly underestimated the Earth's circumference. He also thought Europe was wider than it actually was and that Japan was farther from the coast of China than it really was. For these reasons, he figured he could reach Asia by going west, a concept that most of educated Europe at the time thought was daft — not because the Earth was flat, but because Columbus' math was so wrong. Columbus, in effect, got lucky by bumping into land that, of course, wasn't Asia.The Columbus flat-earth myth perhaps originated with Washington Irving's 1828 biography of Columbus; there's no mention of this before that. His crew wasn't nervous about falling off the Earth."Columbus map", drawn c. 1490 in the Lisbon workshop of Bartolomeo and Christopher Columbus2. Columbus discovered America.Yes, let's ignore the fact that millions of humans already inhabited this land later to be called the Americas, having discovered it millennia before. And let's ignore that whole Leif Ericson voyage to Greenland and modern-day Canada around 1000 C.M.E. If Columbus discovered America, he himself didn't know. Until his death he claimed to have landed in Asia, even though most navigators knew he didn't.What Columbus "discovered" was the Bahamas archipelago and then the island later named Hispaniola, now split into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On his subsequent voyages he went farther south, to Central and South America. He never got close to what is now called the United States.So why does the United States celebrate the guy who thought he found a nifty new route to Asia and the lands described by Marco Polo? This is because the early United States was fighting with England, not Spain. John Cabot (a.k.a. Giovanni Caboto, another Italian) "discovered" Newfoundland in England's name around 1497 and paved the way for England's colonization of most of North America. So the American colonialists instead turned to Columbus as their hero, not England's Cabot. Hence we have the capital, Washington, D.C. — that's District of Columbia, not District of Cabot.3. Columbus introduced syphilis to Europe.This is hotly debated. Syphilis was presented in pre-Columbus America. Yet syphilis likely existed for millennia in Europe, as well, but simply wasn't well understood. The ancient Greeks describe lesions rather similar to that from syphilis. Perhaps by coincidence, an outbreak of syphilis occurred in Naples in 1494 during a French invasion, just two years after Columbus' return. This sealed the connection.But aside from descriptions of syphilis-like lesions by Hippocrates, many researchers believe that there was a syphilis outbreak in, of all places, a 13th-century Augustinian friary in the English port of Kingston upon Hull. This coastal city saw a continual influx of sailors from distant lands, and you know what sailors can do. Carbon dating and DNA analysis of bones from the friary support the theory of syphilis being a worldwide disease before Columbus' voyages.4. Columbus died unknown in poverty.Columbus wasn't a rich man when he died in Spain at age 54 in 1506. But he wasn't impoverished. He was living comfortably, economically speaking, in an apartment in Valladolid, Crown of Castile, in present-day Spain, albeit in pain from severe arthritis. Columbus had been arrested years prior on accusations of tyranny and brutality toward native peoples of the Americas. But he was released by King Ferdinand after six weeks in prison. He was subsequently denied most of the profits of his discoveries promised to him by Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.After his death, though, his family sued the royal crown, a famous lawsuit known as the Pleitos colombinos, or Columbian lawsuits, lasting nearly 20 years. Columbus' heirs ultimately secured significant amounts of property and other riches from the crown. Also, most European navigators understood by the end of the 15th century, before his death, that Columbus had discovered islands and a large landmass unknown to them.5. Columbus did nothing significant.With all this talk of a hapless Columbus accidentally discovering the New World, as well as the subsequent genocide of native cultures, it is easy to understand the current backlash against Columbus and the national holiday called Columbus Day, celebrated throughout North and South America. This isn't entirely fair.While Columbus was wrong about most things, he did help establish knowledge about trade winds, namely the lower-latitude easterlies that blow toward the Caribbean and the higher-latitude westerlies that can blow a ship back to Western Europe. Also, while Columbus wasn't the first European to reach the Western Hemisphere, he was the first European to stay. His voyages directly initiated a permanent presence of Europeans in both North and South America.News of the success of his first voyage spread like wildfire through Europe, setting the stage for an era of European conquest. One can argue whether the conquest was good or bad for humanity: that is, the spread of Christianity, rise of modernism, exploitation and annihilation of native cultures, and so on. But it is difficult to deny Columbus' direct role in quickly and radically changing the world.Christopher Wanjek is the author of the books "Bad Medicine" and "Food At Work." His column, Bad Medicine, appears regularly on LiveScience.Columbus Day: Biggest Misconceptions and Exploring the Era of First ContactFamed painter and illustrator N.C. Wyeth created a series of murals in 1927 for National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C., including this one showing the ships of Christopher Columbus’s voyage of discovery. (Photo courtesy NGS)Christopher Columbus’s landfall in the Western Hemisphere on October 12, 1492, is commemorated throughout the Americas and elsewhere with various emphases, including celebrations of exploration, history, cultural heritage, cultural diversity, and more. It has also been seen as a dark day marking the beginning of centuries of violence, disease, and oppression for the people who already dwelt on these shores.It is of course all of these things. There were good and bad aspects of all groups and populations involved in the history that began on that day. One thing is certain though: It was going to happen sooner or later. With only so much land on Earth, eventually the branches of the human family that had been growing separately on two hemispheres were bound to meet again. When they did, there would be conflict, disease, and misunderstanding, as well as trade, cultural exchange, inspiration, and the sheer thrill of discovery. (Scott Wallace on today’s uncontacted tribes.)As things turned out, that moment of reunion began in earnest on October 12, 1492. To explore this pivotal moment in the story of our species, I spoke with Tony Horwitz, author of A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America. (Read more about Vikings in America.)What do you see as the biggest misconceptions people have today about first contact?Tony Horwitz: Many Americans imagine that Columbus landed in what is now the United States. Actually, he landed first in the Bahamas and never touched this continent. Many people also believe that the European chapter of our history begins with the English at Jamestown and Plymouth. In fact, by the time they arrived in the early 1600s, the Spanish, French, and others had been exploring and settling the continent for a century.Another common misconception is that this continent was wild and lightly inhabited by nomadic natives before Europeans arrived. The reality is that there were millions of natives, enormous mound cities that rivaled European settlements in size, agriculture and trade routes, and other practices that had shaped the land in many ways. This wasn’t a virgin or primitive wilderness.A dark spot in the history of the Western Hemisphere is the amount of violence and destruction toward the indigenous inhabitants (Read community stories from the Pine Ridge Reservation). Were there Europeans actively working for a different approach? How did they fare?TH: Yes, there were members of the clergy in particular, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas (known as “Defender of the Indians”), who opposed the exploitation and slaughter of natives. Even some conquistadors, like Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, came to believe that natives should be treated with humanity. The Spanish also established missions and sought to peaceably convert natives and live alongside them. But the lust for land and riches, epidemic disease, and other forces proved much more powerful than the humane impulses of a few.N.C. WYETH’S MURALS FOR NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ALSO INCLUDE THIS MAP OF THE ROUTES OF EARLY EUROPEAN EXPLORERS IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE. (PHOTO COURTESY NGS)It may have started at this moment, but there were hundreds of years of interaction between the cultures. What are some of the things of value or joy you found exploring this forgotten era?TH: The greatest joy, for me, was reading accounts that convey the wonder and strangeness of people encountering places and cultures that are entirely new to them. This is an experience we simply can’t have today, no matter how far we travel. How do humans who have never seen, or in some cases even imagined, each other behave when they first come face to face? How do they communicate? Get along?No two stories are the same and many of them are filled with touching and even comic detail. For instance, newcomers and natives often exchanged food, with natives gagging on English mustard and Frenchmen griping that the native fare was insufferably bland. Natives marveled at writing, this magical communication that didn’t require sound, and Europeans—who were generally filthy and malnourished—were struck by how tall, healthy, and clean the natives seemed. Europeans also expressed amazement upon first seeing buffalo, or alligators, or even fireflies. Things we regard today as commonplace were alien and wondrous. I found myself seeing my own country through fresh and newly appreciative eyes.Finally, different cultures come into contact all the time. What about first contact in the New World makes it of particular interest or value for us today?TH: I’ve written about early contact in other parts of the world, too, for instance Captain James Cook’s exploration of the Pacific in the late 1700s. In Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and other places, that history is well known. But Americans, in general, aren’t aware of the early contact that occurred in their own country, often in their own backyard: in Florida, Texas, California, New York Harbor, and other points all along the eastern seaboard. The Spanish were even roaming Kansas in the 1540s.This forgotten history influenced the late-arriving English colonists, and it helped shape the world they found here and the society they created, which we in turn have inherited. The notion that our national story somehow begins in 1776, or with the Pilgrims’ landing in 1620, is a creation myth. If we want to truly understand this land we inhabit, including the environment, it behooves us to know the true story of what happened here a long time ago.Read Christopher Columbus’s Journal on Project GutenbergKhan Academy 's US history intern Becca examines some common misconceptions about Christopher Columbus's voyage to the New World.Christopher Columbus - WikipediaThe Truth About ColumbusHistorical Record Shows Christopher Columbus Actually Was A Great ManThe Invention of Christopher Columbus, American HeroA statue of Christopher Columbus is shown at New York's Columbus Circle, August, 2017. (AP Photo / Bebeto Matthews)In 1892 The Youth’s Companion—a national magazine for kids edited by Francis Bellamy (the socialist minister better known for writing the Pledge of Allegiance)—offered its readers a program to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Every school in the nation, the magazine solemnly intoned, was to follow it to the letter.Students and war veterans were to gather around the school flagpole at 9:30 am and begin by reading President Benjamin Harrison’s ode to Columbus, followed by the flag raising, the singing of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” a Bible reading chosen by local religious dignitaries, and finally performing an original Columbus Day song commissioned for the occasion.Columbus’s quadricentennial was 100 years in the making, and it would take nearly another century for a more critical and historically accurate picture of Columbus to creep into the American consciousness.The American Revolution created the Columbus most of us over the age of 30 learned in grade school. Prior to the late 18th century, he was a historical footnote with no connection to the 13 colonies. An Italian, he sailed under a Spanish flag and landed in no part of the modern-day mainland United States. Yet when the need to develop a national history with no discernible connection to Britain arose during the Revolution, early Americans seized upon him. He was a blank slate on whom post-Revolution Americans could project the virtues they wanted to see in their new nation. Then, as now, the process of writing Columbus was one of defining what it means to be American.In 1775 Phillis Wheatley, a 14-year-old free African-American girl, wrote a poem to George Washington that so moved the general that he distributed it widely. In it “Columbia” was used as an allegorical representation of the American nation, no doubt a riff on the female figure of Britannia. Though written examples of “Columbia” as old as 1761 exist, young Wheatley’s correspondence with the most popular man in the colonies made it, in today’s parlance, go viral.Soon Columbia and Columbus were appearing in songs, poems, and essays in newspapers around the colonies. Historian Claudia Bushman cataloged nearly 100 of the surviving odes, most of which are awful. Columbus went from a minor figure in the history of European exploration to an American hero almost overnight.Why? Even then, people knew that Europeans, including Vikings and Portuguese fishing fleets, had visited or sighted North America before Columbus. And other explorers of Columbus’s era have better claims to “discovery” of the land that we now call the United States. But the politics of the Revolution disqualified the other contenders. Henry Hudson was British. Giovanni Caboto (anglicized as “John Cabot”) sailed for Britain. Juan Ponce de Leon was already in use as a hero in Spain. Giovanni da Verrazzano met an end unbefitting any proper national hero, having been eaten by Carib Indians in 1526.Columbus had flaws as well. Until his death, he publicly insisted that he had in fact landed in East Asia as he originally intended. He was neither an especially talented mariner nor a success at founding a colony in the New World. Other than to allow him to begin bouncing around the Caribbean doing capricious and cruel things to its inhabitants, his famous voyage accomplished little.Yet almost nothing was known about Columbus in the American colonies at the dawn of the Revolution, and this worked in his favor. The few written records of his voyages, including a biography by his son Ferdinand and a 16th-century history by Bartolome de Las Casas, were unavailable in the New World and were not translated into English until much later. The only detailed history of Columbus and his voyages widely available in colonial libraries was written by a Scotsman, James Robertson, in 1777. The author took a racist, ethnocentric tone, depicting Columbus as an explorer of noble intent bringing civilization to the savages. Importantly, Robertson also historicized Columbus as a man stifled by the rigid ways of the Old World and yearning to set his own course. The metaphor was not subtle, and revolutionary America embraced it.Columbus-mania swept the nation beginning with the war, because he became, with the help of Robertson’s history and the flood of epic poems and odes to him, a symbol for the go-it-alone, trailblazing spirit of the American people. Adopting “Columbia” as an informal name for the budding nation implied that, like Columbus, the colonies were shedding the yoke of the Old World. Historical accuracy was irrelevant.Towns and streets beyond counting, including state capitals in South Carolina (1786) and Ohio (1812), were named for him. In 1784, King’s College in New York City restyled itself Columbia University. Many publications—Columbian Magazine (1786), Columbian Museum (1791), the Columbian Register, the Columbian Weekly Register—appropriated his name. The political organization that eventually became the powerful Tammany Hall political machine in New York was founded in 1786 as the Columbian Order. In 1791, the Territory (later District) of Columbia was established as the national capital. A year later, Robert Gray, sailing the Columbia, scouted the Pacific Northwest, christened the Columbia River, and named the entire region Columbia (which survives north of the border today as British Columbia). And in 1798, Joseph Hopkinson wrote the original national anthem, “Hail Columbia.”Columbus monument near the state capitol in Denver, ColoradoTwo events conspired to ensure that the American affection for Columbus was no passing fad. First, Americans turned the tricentenary of Columbus’s 1492 voyage into a massive celebration. Statues and monuments began appearing around the country. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia all held parades led by costumed actors portraying Columbia and Christopher Columbus. Who better to lead the nation’s first opportunity to celebrate a history that was not connected to Britain and had not happened within living memory?Rather than fade, the mythologization of Columbus only intensified. Joel Barlow’s epic (and nearly unreadable) poem The Columbiad (1807), for example, was narrated by an angel. Judging by the popularity of the poem, few at the time thought attributing divine guidance to Columbus (read: America) was overwrought.The second key turning point in weaving Columbus into the fabric of American identity was the publication in 1828 of Washington Irving’s The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. This stunningly inaccurate book purported to be a history and codified the version of Columbus who “sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred ninety-two” taught to generations of American children. Exemplary of Irving’s myth making was the mangling of Columbus’s motivation for the voyage of 1492. The real Columbus studied Portuguese sailors’ maps, concluded that Southeast Asia lay just beyond the map edges, and set out to prove it. Irving’s Columbus sailed to prove that the world was round, thumbing his nose at European elites who insisted it was flat. Throughout the book, Columbus is valiant, intrepid, and eager to shed Old Europe—not coincidentally, exactly the qualities the United States saw in itself.But even compared to the late 18th century, nothing can match the Columbus Fever achieved in 1892–93 as the country celebrated the 400th anniversary of his voyage with the Chicago World’s Fair, the “Columbian Exposition.” No monument was too grand, no speech too florid or obsequious, and no projection of the nation’s desire to assert itself too obvious for the America of 1893. Francis Bellamy’s program for schools was, if anything, restrained by the standards of that year.Eventually, time chipped away at this hero Columbus. Irving’s fables of 1828 remained in history books, oral traditions, and school curricula throughout the 20th century. But the legend began to share space with a growing, if still insufficient, recognition of the atrocities that Columbus inflicted upon the population of the Americas during the so-called Age of Exploration. His landing in 1492 was downgraded (appropriately) from a “discovery” to the more prosaic “encounter” or “exchange,” as Americans slowly admitted that the word “discovery” is a poor description of a man landing on an island where other people already lived.More importantly, as more Americans have grown (slightly) more comfortable with confronting the darker aspects of history, discussion of Columbus’s enslaving, summarily killing, and dispossessing the populations he encountered rose above a whisper for the first time during the much-subdued 500th anniversary in 1992. Historians and cultural critics persuasively asserted that glorification is unbefitting a man who wrote, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold,” as he rounded up 1,500 Arawak inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles to sell them in Spain. Bartolome de Las Casas, in his 1561 account based on accounts from Columbus’s crew, depicted Columbus as a man for whom casual killing was a leisure activity. Once again Columbus was a surrogate, this time for an America making a clumsy and overdue effort to grapple with a shameful part of history.Colonial Americans adopted Columbus as a cultural icon because of the practical need to construct a national historical identity that excluded Britain. Celebrating Columbus, for much of American history, has been an exercise in projecting onto him the virtues we would like to see in ourselves and our country.Today, in an America learning to accept the Columbus legend as a hagiography, using Columbus as a national metaphor feels dated and naive. Only willful ignorance of the historical record can preserve him today as the enlightened voyager who discovered and brought blessings upon an unknown land.But the real Columbus—not the constructed myth—should resonate in contemporary America. Columbus set off to find Asia, landed in the Caribbean, and, until his death, insisted in the face of overwhelming evidence that it really was Asia. Rather than celebrate what he did achieve, admit that fortune had something to do with his success, or recognize the horrors he wrought, he unapologetically defended himself and blamed any suggestion of failure or incompetence on others. Americans of the 18th century rescued the then-obscure Columbus from the history of European imperial conquest for political reasons unique to that era. They could not have known how perfect a cautionary tale the real Columbus would be for the United States of 2017.Edward Burmila is an assistant professor at Bradley University. He lives in Chicago and blogs politics at Gin and Tacos.