Christopher Columbus.

I thought Jens response to the Christopher Columbus reading was both insightful and informative. I myself remember learning about Columbus in grade school. I was even taught a poem to remember him. The poem was " In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue" It's a cute little poem and because of it I never forgot aboutColumbus.
I was a little surprised about the iformation in the reading about him because from my studies as a child I remember that the theory of the earth being flat was proved wrong but I didn't know that he had four voyages. I only knew about the one and that was the one where he landed in America. Even the whole landing in America thing I was told was an accident. I was told that in reality he left Spain and was intended on going to another place to look for gold and got lost and ended up here in America. I think that's the trouble with history and things where many sides of a story can be told. we never know what the real truth is. All we can do is gather everyone's account of events and put that together. In a way that's what our history is. Just a bunch of diffferent perspectiver of history's events from different people. We can't really know what was exagerated or what was the truth. A major question I always consider when reading about Christopher columbus and other parts of history is Did things really happen the way they say and were things really like that.
I found it facinating that there were letters and some kind of record of how things were then. That way there can't be speculation about certain things. By having those letters there is some kind of actual proof of those events. Just like that book, The Diary of Anne Frank. I surely can't deny the events she described in her diary entries because they were the actual diary entries she wrote while her and her family were in hiding. I wish I could get some perspectives on what it was really like but none of my relatives are not quite that old.