Editing Historical revisionism (section)

=== New World discovery and European colonization of the Americas ===
In recounting the [[European colonization of the Americas]], some history books of the past paid little attention to the [[indigenous peoples of the Americas]], usually mentioning them only in passing and making no attempt to understand the events from their point of view. That was reflected in the description of [[Christopher Columbus]] having discovered America. Those events' portrayal has since been revised to avoid the word "discovery."<ref>Kay Larson, and Edith Newhall, "It's a Map, Map, Map World" [https://books.google.com/books?id=i-MCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA97 ''New York Magazine'' Nov 1992 25#43 pp 97+  online] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170210131803/https://books.google.com/books?id=i-MCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA97 |date=February 10, 2017 }}</ref>

In his 1990 revisionist book, ''The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy'', [[Kirkpatrick Sale]] argued that [[Christopher Columbus]] was an imperialist bent on conquest from his first voyage. In a ''New York Times'' book review, historian and member of the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Committee [[William Hardy McNeill]] wrote about Sale: 
:he has set out to destroy the heroic image that earlier writers have transmitted to us. Mr. Sale makes Columbus out to be cruel, greedy and incompetent (even as a sailor), and a man who was perversely intent on abusing the natural paradise on which he intruded."<ref name = William>William H. McNeill, [https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE5DD1739F934A35753C1A966958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all Review of Kirkpatrick Sale's ''The Conquest of Paradise''] {{Webarchive |url= https://web.archive.org/web/20200414092420/https://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/07/books/debunking-columbus.html |date=April 14, 2020 }}, ''[[The New York Times]]'', October 7, 1990.</ref>

McNeill declares Sale's work to be "unhistorical, in the sense that [it] selects from the often-cloudy record of Columbus's actual motives and deeds what suits the researcher's 20th-century purposes." McNeill states that detractors and advocates of Columbus present a "sort of history [that] caricatures the complexity of human reality by turning Columbus into either a bloody ogre or a plaster saint, as the case may be."<ref name = William/>