In 1493, Christopher Columbus wrote a letter that would change the landscape of the modern world. The letter praises the rich natural assets of the islands Columbus encountered, and he portrays the “extraordinarily timid” native people he met there as “so unsuspicious and so generous” they are “like fools”. A master of ‘self-promotion and propaganda’: Columbus depicted by the artist Emile Lassalle in 1839. “What he did achieve, he didn’t recognise he’d done,” says Professor William Phillips, a Columbus expert at the University of Minnesota. As for Columbus’s letter, “it was self-promotion and propaganda” – a 15th-century example of fake news.

Source: The Guardian October 01, 2023 22:24 UTC