The Discovery of America

Did Columbus discover America?
• This question usually leads to theories of “ alternative”
discoverers -- Phoenicians, Vikings, the Chinese, Egyptians,
etc.
• Eviatar Zerubavel, a sociologist at Rutgers, has turned this
question in a different direction:
• When did Europeans mentally discover America?
• Or, in other words, when did it become clear that they were
looking at something entirely new?
• The answer is complex, but Zerubavel suggests that it took
at least three centuries for the Americas to be recognized for
what they were as separate continents, and hence the
discovery is not an “event” but a process.
The Globe before Columbus
• No one (or at least no one who could read, and probably
very few others) prior to Columbus regarded the earth as
flat.
• The question was rather one of how land was related to
water on the globe.
• The assumption, based on the records of ancient Greek and
Latin texts as well as more recent travels (such as that of
Marco Polo), was that all land formed essentially one
continuous landmass, divided into three “continents,”
surrounded by ocean.
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