The truth about Christopher Columbus

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Editor's note: David M. Perry is an associate professor of history at Dominican University in Illinois. He writes regularly at the blog How Did We Get Into This Mess? Follow him on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) -- In October 2013, my daughter came home from school excited about Christopher Columbus. He had come to visit her class! During his visit, he told the children that he had figured out the world was round and then bravely led his crew to discover America. Then they all made telescopes.

As a father and history professor, I was caught off-guard. Columbus actually didn't figure out the world was round. He didn't really discover America, either. And telescopes weren't around until about a century after Columbus died. But what do you tell a 5-year-old who has bought into a myth? And how do you do it without constructing an anti-myth, pegging the explorer as one of the most evil people to walk the Earth? What should we tell our children about Columbus?

I asked that question of William Phillips, professor of history at the University of Minnesota and co-author of "The Worlds of Christopher Columbus," and of LeAnne Howe, the Eidson Professor in American Literature at the University of Georgia and an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation. In both cases, professors started from the same principle: Tell the kids the truth.

David M. Perry

The story goes that Columbus had to persevere against the odds to get support for his venture, because everyone but him believed the Earth was flat. This just isn't true. The ancient Greeks proved that the Earth was round about 2,000 years ago, and one even used the shadow of the Earth on the moon during an eclipse to estimate its circumference. The problem for Columbus is that he was bad at math and worse at geography, and everyone with an education knew it.

"He failed to get funding for a long time," Phillips wrote, "because his calculations of the earth were on the small side, he thought that dry land covered more of the sphere than it does, and he believed Japan was some 1500 miles off the coast of China." In other words, most people knew roughly the distance between the west coast of Europe and the east coast of Asia but believed it was filled with a vast ocean in which Columbus would surely die.

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Columbus was stubborn. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he refused to give up his plan, and because he was so stubborn, he kept fighting for funding until he finally broke through to the Queen of Spain. His stubbornness also, as both professors noted, kept him from ever admitting that he hadn't reached Asia. For Columbus, the idea of a whole new continent and unknown peoples just didn't fit his worldview.

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The truth about Christopher Columbus