work and dozens of articles and textbooks and, more recently, blogposts, the Columbus myth is alive and well in the United States. The cosmologist Lawrence Krauss recently invoked it. President Obama equated opponents of clean energy to people who opposed Columbus on the grounds that the earth was flat. The president received much applause when he said (at 0:55 in the video):

If some of these folks [opponents of clean energy] were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the flat earth society. They would not have believed that the world was round.

More recently still, Chris Impey, an astronomer at University of Arizona who claims to be interested in and knowledgable about history, fell prey to the Columbus myth in a lecture posted onLida R. Tompkins, his wife, of Washington, D. C., during the calendar year 1932, and both prior and subsequent thereto, were the members of a partnership known as Charles H. Tompkins. Each partner owned a fifty per cent interest in the partnership whose business was buying, selling and holding real estate and securities for investment purposes.
In 1928, said Charles H. Tompkins partnership and a corporation known as McPherson Square Corporation, acquired together at a total cost of $145,000 property in the city of Washington, consisting of land and an office building thereon. There was a first deed of trust in the principal amount of $79,000 on the entire property, given in 1926 by a former owner to two trustees to secure first trust notes in that amount held