📜 History & Origins
Columbus Day commemorates Christopher Columbus's first landing in the Americas on October 12, 1492, an event first celebrated in the United States in 1792 by the Columbian Order (Tammany Hall) in New York. Italian Americans embraced it as a celebration of heritage, and President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed a national observance in 1892. It became a federal holiday in 1937. Since the 1990s, growing recognition of the violence and displacement Columbus's arrival brought to Indigenous peoples has led many states and cities to rename the day Indigenous Peoples' Day, first adopted by Berkeley, California in 1992.
