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Why We Should Not Celebrate Columbus Day

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Americans celebrate so many holidays and enjoy their days off without truly knowing the history behind the events leading up to the creation of these “sacred” days. Elementary school students all around America learn the rhyme “in 1492 Columbus sailed the Ocean blue” and celebrate his “discovery” of America. Columbus Day has been celebrated for two hundred years. Although the American population does not know all the details about Columbus. He was a greedy person and essentially started slavery in the United States. People should not celebrate Columbus Day because Christopher Columbus is not the heroic and courageous man many believe him to be.
The United States should not celebrate Columbus Day because Columbus killed many Native Americans. …show more content…

Although he was brave enough to choose the long and dangerous route, he was not a good person by ethics and morals. The colonists should have been celebrating a different man instead. People often celebrated Columbus “because the early United States was fighting with England, not Spain. John Cabot ‘discovered’ Newfoundland in England’s name around 1497 and paved the way for England’s colonization of most of North America,’ he explains. ‘So the American colonist instead turned to Columbus as their hero, not England's Cabot’”(Flanagin 3). Due to disagreements with England, Colonists turned to a non-Englishman as their hero. This caused the false celebration of Columbus and since history is easy to follow, the holiday continued.The people of the United States failed to look at the other side of Columbus which reflects him as a valueless person. Therefore, we should not celebrate Columbus Day.
Although Christopher Columbus was a great explorer, discovered many lands, and paved the way for other explorers, his bad actions like greed, slavery and rape overshadow most of his good accomplishments. Thus, he is not the kind of person who deserves a holiday named after

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