Why There Are Still 149 Statues of Christopher Columbus in the U.S.
At least 36 monuments to Columbus have been removed since the 1970s. But most Americans aren’t ready to scrub the explorer's name from the calendar.
A statue of Christopher Columbus — one of many in the U.S. — watches over Columbus Circle in New York City.
Photographer: Nikada/E+ via Getty Images
More than 6,000 places in the U.S. took their name from Christopher Columbus. There’s Columbus in Ohio (and Indiana and Arkansas and New York and Wisconsin, and many other states), not to mention the District of Columbia.
There are streets and avenues and traffic circles and parks, along with lakes and rivers and mountains — defining features of the nation’s civic and natural geography. Back in the day, Columbus was an attractive figure to revolutionaries looking to establish their own distinctly American mythology as they separated from monarchies abroad. Later settlers heralded Columbus as paterfamilias as they pushed westward, embracing him as the guiding spirit of Manifest Destiny.