This is what Columbus would do for the rest of his days: sail around the Caribbean, murdering indigenous people. He died thinking that he had been doing all of this in India, never realizing he had set foot on lands that European navigators didn’t know existed at the time.

Over the next few hundred years, Columbus wasn’t well known until Washington Irving, who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, authored the first major English biography of Columbus in 1828. The positive story of Columbus — how he proved the Earth was round and discovered America — was embraced by Italian immigrants to America, who were in search of an American hero as they faced discrimination and persecution in the US.

“To help prove that Italians were a part of the American story, Italian Americans latched onto Irving’s version of Columbus, and promoted it like crazy,” Conover said. “And that’s the true story of how an incompetent and vicious nobody became the national hero we celebrate today.”