Let's be clear: the first human beings to discover the Americas crossed over the freezing (or frozen) waters of Beringia circa 20,000 years ago.
If you insist on commemorating the first Europeans to discover North America, let's be clear about that too: Norwegian explorers made their way west from Greenland, sailed down the coast of Baffin Island, and settled in modern-day Newfoundland more than a thousand years ago.
Columbus was a late-comer. He never set foot in North America, he never saw it, was entirely unaware of its existence, and has a holiday only because of the political power of Italian-Americans in Tammany Hall politics early in American history.
If we're being honest about celebrating early North American explorers, we should be commemorating the people who walked or sailed across Beringia, and their descendants who first explored the unsettled vastness of the Americas.
This has nothing to do with political correctness, and has everything to do with celebrating the human need to explore beyond the frontier, to go and discover what's over that next hill, and the unceasing hope for a better life.
In families and small tribes, in the frozen and unforgiving north, they crossed into the Americas with whatever they could carry or drag. Their children and their children's children explored and peopled two vast and undiscovered continents.
