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In today’s edition:

Happy Columbus Day, or Indigenous Peoples’ Day, or, in many cases, regular old Monday (see: me working today).

This has got to be the federal observance for which Americans’ mileage most varies, and as author C.W. Goodyear writes, the holiday’s modern complications are matched by an equally complicated (and interesting) history. The enduring Columbus Day, he says, is basically an accident.

Goodyear explains how a spate of particularly anti-Italian violence in an already anti-Italian era of U.S. history prompted President Benjamin Harrison to observe in 1892 the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing in the Americas. It was meant as a one-off holiday to fight anti-immigrant sentiment by lauding a famous Italian, but Italian Americans loved it, and it stuck.

How ironic that “a holiday that was popularized, in part, to atone for America’s past crimes against one group of people,” Goodyear writes, “is now being reevaluated for how it neglects those committed against another,”........

© Washington Post