COLUMBUS LABYRINTH
Historians treat it as axiomatic that each new generation, by building on past scholarship, knows more than those that went before. By this logic, we must know more about Columbus than scholars did in 1892 during the fourth Centenary. Unfortunately, that is not the case (or at least it was not 10 years ago).
Popularly, much lore that was common cur- rency about Columbus a century ago has been lost, and, in scholarship, few American histori- ans now specialize in the sorts...