section_path: Legacy
section_name: Legacy
paragraph_text: Legacy
  
  The voyages of Columbus are considered a turning point in human history, marking the beginning of globalization and accompanying demographic, commercial, economic, social, and political changes.
  
  His explorations resulted in permanent contact between the two hemispheres, and the term " pre-Columbian " is used to refer to the cultures of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus and his European successors. The ensuing Columbian exchange saw the massive exchange of animals, plants, fungi, diseases, technologies, mineral wealth and ideas.
  
  In the first century after his endeavors, Columbus's figure largely languished in the backwaters of history, and his reputation was beset by his failures as a colonial administrator. His legacy was somewhat rescued from oblivion when he began to appear as a character in Italian and Spanish plays and poems from the late 16th century onward.
  
  Columbus was subsumed into the Western narrative of colonization and empire building, which invoked notions of translatio imperii and translatio studii to underline who was considered "civilized" and who was not.
  
  The Americanization of the figure of Columbus began in the latter decades of the 18th century, after the revolutionary period of the United States, elevating the status of his reputation to a national myth, homo americanus. His landing became a powerful icon as an "image of American genesis". The Discovery of America sculpture, depicting Columbus and a cowering Native maiden, was commissioned on 3 April 1837, when U.S. President Martin Van Buren sanctioned the engineering of Luigi Persico 's design. This representation of Columbus's triumph and the Native's recoil is a demonstration of supposed white superiority over savage, naive Natives. As recorded during its unveiling in 1844, the sculpture extends to "represent the meeting of the two races", as Persico captures their first interaction, highlighting the "moral and intellectual inferiority" of Natives. Placed outside the U.S. Capitol building where it remained until its removal in the mid-20th century, the sculpture reflected the contemporary view of whites in the U.S. toward the Natives; they are labeled "merciless Indian savages" in the United States Declaration of Independence. In 1836, Pennsylvania senator and future U.S. President James Buchanan, who proposed the sculpture, described it as representing "the great discoverer when he first bounded with ecstasy upon the shore, ail his toils past, presenting a hemisphere to the astonished world, with the name America inscribed upon it. Whilst he is thus standing upon the shore, a female savage, with awe and wonder depicted in her countenance, is gazing upon him."
  
  The American Columbus myth was reconfigured later in the century when he was enlisted as an ethnic hero by immigrants to the United States who were not of Anglo-Saxon stock, such as Jewish, Italian, and Irish people, who claimed Columbus as a sort of ethnic founding father. Catholics unsuccessfully tried to promote him for canonization in the 19th century.
  
  From the 1990s onward, a narrative of Columbus being responsible for the genocide of indigenous peoples and environmental destruction began to compete with the then predominant discourse of Columbus as Christ-bearer, scientist, or father of America. This narrative features the negative effects of Columbus' conquests on native populations. Exposed to Old World diseases, the indigenous populations of the New World collapsed, and were largely replaced by Europeans and Africans, who brought with them new methods of farming, business, governance, and religious worship.