Editing Washington Irving (section)

===Impact on American culture===
[[File:John Quidor - Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane - Smithsonian.jpg|thumb|upright=1.4|right|[[John Quidor]]'s 1858 painting ''[[The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane]]'', inspired by Washington Irving's work]]
Irving popularized the nickname "[[Nicknames of New York City|Gotham]]" for New York City,<ref>{{cite web|last1=Migro|first1=Carmen|title=So, Why Do We Call It Gotham, Anyway?|url=https://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/01/25/so-why-do-we-call-it-gotham-anyway|website=NYPL.org|publisher=New York Public Library|access-date=October 27, 2017}}</ref> and he is credited with inventing the expression "the almighty dollar". The surname of his fictional Dutch historian Diedrich Knickerbocker is generally associated with New York and New Yorkers, as found in New York's professional [[basketball]] team The [[New York Knicks|New York Knickerbockers]].

One of Irving's most lasting contributions to American culture is in the way that Americans celebrate Christmas. In his 1812 revisions to ''A History of New York'', he inserted a dream sequence featuring [[St. Nicholas]] soaring over treetops in a flying wagon, an invention which others dressed up as Santa Claus. In his five Christmas stories in ''The Sketch Book'', Irving portrayed an idealized celebration of old-fashioned Christmas customs at a quaint English manor which depicted English Christmas festivities that he experienced while staying in England, which had largely been abandoned.<ref>Kelly, Richard Michael (ed.) (2003), A Christmas Carol. p.20. Broadview Literary Texts, New York: Broadview Press, {{ISBN|1-55111-476-3}}</ref> He used text from ''The Vindication of Christmas'' (London 1652) of old English Christmas traditions,<ref name=BTR>{{Cite book |author=Restad, Penne L. |year=1995 |title=Christmas in America: a History |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=0-19-510980-5 }}</ref> and the book contributed to the revival and reinterpretation of the Christmas holiday in the United States.<ref>See Stephen Nissebaum, ''The Battle for Christmas'' (Vintage, 1997)</ref>

Irving introduced the erroneous idea that Europeans believed the world to be flat prior to the discovery of the New World in his biography of Christopher Columbus,<ref>See Irving, 1829, Chapter VII: "Columbus before the council at Salamanca", pp. 40–47, especially p. 43.</ref> yet the [[Myth of the flat Earth|flat-Earth myth]] has been taught in schools as fact to many generations of Americans.<ref>Grant (Edward), 2001, "God and Reason in the Middle Ages",  p. 342.</ref><ref>Grant (John), 2006, p. 32, in the subsection "The Earth – Flat or Hollow?" beginning at p. 30, within Chapter 1 "Worlds in Upheaval".</ref> American painter [[John Quidor]] based many of his paintings on scenes from the works of Irving about Dutch New York, including such paintings as ''Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman'' (1828), ''The Return of Rip Van Winkle'' (1849), and ''[[The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane]]'' (1858).<ref>{{cite book | last1 = Caldwell | first1 = John| last2 = Rodriguez Roque| first2 = Oswaldo| editor = Kathleen Luhrs| others = Dale T. Johnson, Carrie Rebora, Patricia R. Windels| title = American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art| volume = I: a Catalogue of Works by Artists Born By 1815| year = 1994 | publisher = The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Princeton University Press | pages = 479–482}}</ref><ref>{{cite book | editor = Roger Panetta|title = Dutch New York: the roots of Hudson Valley culture | year = 2009 | publisher = Hudson River Museum | isbn = 978-0-8232-3039-6| pages = 223–235}}</ref>