Never made any sense to celebrate Columbus as, among other reasons, he never stepped foot in what would become the US. Verrazzano makes way more sense if they want an Italian explorer to venerate.
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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why's it even gotta be an explorer? I would be proud to salute a bronze 
on a street corner
Mount Rushmore but it’s just the cast of Jersey Shore carved into the side of a pizzeria in Dyker Heights.
EYY, IM COLONIZIN HERE!!
it is about erasing the contributions of millions of Italian Americans who helped build this nation.
Wait a minute, are you saying your only objection is that you just want a day? This is simple enough, rename 9/11 to "
Day" — that is when Italians became white, no?
that is when Italians became white, no?
A bit before my time, did that happen?
I don't know, it's a reference to this video
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Asked for comment, Christopher Columbus’s ghost said: “I wasn’t Italian, wtf”
Famed explorer Christopher Columbus was likely Spanish and Jewish, according to a new genetic study conducted by Spanish scientists that aimed to shed light on a centuries-old mystery.
Scientists believe the explorer, whose expedition across the Atlantic in 1492 changed the course of world history, was probably born in western Europe, possibly in the city of Valencia.
That's wild. Although I think they need to do a bit more digging on this:
They think he concealed his Jewish identity, or converted to Catholicism, to escape religious persecution.
Also the government that just expelled the Jews and was investigating the conversos for years on suspicion of crypto-judaism isn't handing a fucking fleet to one.
jewish heritage =/= practice or personal identification
I thought it was established he was from Genoa? I didn't realize it was a disputed thing
I thought the same thing until i look it up today, i guess the claim in the past was that he was from a genoan merchant family
It turns out rich europeans were just crackers from the isle of saltine
Italians demand we memorize all their little city states and islands. No more.
He was, he was just sponsored by Spain
This is the joke:
"Germany" is too unified in this map for my liking, should look more like this:
Inject this straight into my veins!
The joke is that Italy wasn't a unified state? Columbus wasn't an Italian as in "a citizen of the Italian state," but it's still the Italian Peninsula. One can argue about the precise inception of Italian nationhood and how that maps on to Columbus's biography, but I don't think statehood itself is likely the way to do that except if you're trying to talk about a minority group within Italy's territory being folded into Italian identity when it wasn't previously part of the nation of Italy.
Though I guess, based on how some sociologists and linguists talk about it, perhaps it would be more accurate to say he's "Italic" or something, as though that would communicate something to most people and have anything to do with what label he himself would or wouldn't say applies to him. That's a back-formation from how they say "Turkic" or "Iranic" though, I don't really know.
Look its impossible to put nationalism back in the bag but it's important to contemporize nationalism as something that was created and unfamiliar to people wrapped up in the current territorial extents and national myths of the nations. The only people talking about italy in 1492 were nerds like Machiavelli and mostly through a nostalgia towards the roman empire.
He would have identified as from Genoa which, as indicated, is along the coast next to the Italian peninsula. He would not have seen himself as a co-nationalist with Sicilians for example (i.e. Tony Soprano). Italian, as being used by the Congressman, is an anachronism. That's the joke.
I looked it up and apparently Genoa was pretty separate from Italian nationhood prior to unification, so on that basis the original joke is fair enough.
I still think the map isn't a good account of why and also Genoa clearly is mostly on the peninsula, like 80% (but for the initial prompt I admit this doesn't matter without people addressing the area in a collective way like they did for Greek city states).
I finally received purpleworms approval for a throwaway joke. I feel like the famous Turkish Hero, Constantine the Great.
I further grant that that's a good one and made me laugh.
Hell yeah. Now we’re getting somewhere.
