Answer:
Columbus initiated an event, called the most important historical turning point of modern times. The beginning of the binding together of the globe, not just politically and culturally, but also environmentally, in ways that were deeply productive, shattering, and destructive at the same time. It was a discovery for Columbus, but not for the people of the Americas, who knew where they were. Historians often called that by the neutral term, ‘encounter’, a world-changing one.....
The very first thing was to refute the later myth that was spread by the American writer Washington Irving that claimed that the knighted contemporaries thought that the world was flat, and only the brave and visionary Columbus revealed that the world was round.
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No educated European thought that the world was flat at the time... Washington Irving and others propagated the story for building up a heroic image, a rendering of Columbus as a hero, and as a rebel that would establish him as a man of science, modern, and always struggling against what Irving and others condemned as the religious orthodoxies of the Catholic Church. In the process of building up that image, those partisans of Columbus severely distorted both Columbus and his contemporaries.
