Columbus Day
Columbus Day is a national holiday in many countries of the Americas and elsewhere. It officially celebrates the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas on October 12, 1492. The landing is celebrated as Columbus Day in the United States, but the name varies on the international spectrum. In some Latin American countries, October 12 is known as Día de la Raza or.
About Columbus Day in brief
Columbus Day is a national holiday in many countries of the Americas and elsewhere. It officially celebrates the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas on October 12, 1492. The landing is celebrated as Columbus Day in the United States, but the name varies on the international spectrum. The Dominican Republic, the epicenter of this great historical event, celebrate this day as \”The Discovery Of the Americas\”. In some Latin American countries, October 12 is known as Día de la Raza or. This is the case for Mexico, which inspired Jose Vasconcelos’s book celebrating the Day of the Iberoamerican Race. Some countries such as Spain refer the holiday as Dia de la Hispanidad and Fiesta Nacional de España where it is also the religious festivity of la Virgen del Pilar. The day was first enshrined as a legal holiday in the U.S. through the lobbying of Angelo Noce, a first generation Italian, in Denver. The first statewide holiday was proclaimed by Colorado governor Jesse F. McDonald in 1905, and it was made a statutory holiday in 1907. In 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus and New York City Italian leader Generoso Pope, Congress passed a statute stating: “The President is requested to issue each year a proclamation designating October 12 as Columbus day’” In 1942, President Roosevelt would have the removal of the designation of Italian Americans as “enemy aliens” and create Columbus Day as a federal holiday.
In 1966, Mariano A. Marcca, from Buffalo, NY, founded the National Columbus Day Committee, which lobbied to make Columbus Day a federalholiday. In that year, the elderly Italians living in the US who had been unable to acquire citizenship due to a literacy requirement were offered citizenship to 200,000 living Italians. In the early 1990s, President Obama signed legislation to create a federal Columbus Day holiday. The legislation was signed on October 11, 2001. It was signed by President Obama and signed into law by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on October 9, 2007. It is the first federal holiday to be named after a single person. The holiday is celebrated in the Dominican Republic where Christopher Columbus first set foot in what is now Luperón, a small town on the north coast of the DominicanRepublic side of the island of Hispaniola. The name of Hipañola was given to the island to honor the queen Isabel of Spain. Columbus’ first voyage to the New World on the Spanish ships Santa María, Niña, and La Pinta took approximately three months. Columbus and his crew’s arrival to the Americas by Spain, followed in the ensuing centuries by other European powers; and the transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, and technology between the New world and the Old World, an event which is referred to by some anglo-saxon late 20th century historians as the Columbian exchange.
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This page is based on the article Columbus Day published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 19, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
