Mr. Shenkman is the editor of HNN and the author of several books about the myths of history, including, Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of American History.

Thomas Friedman, the NYT columnist, is selling his newest book with a clever title: The World Is Flat. A summary of his argument was featured in the NYT Magazine on April 2, 2005.

In the article he reiterates one of the most common assumptions about Columbus. Namely, that Columbus, by sailing west to go east, proved"definitively that the world was round." Friedman doesn't say that Columbus proved the world is round. He hedges. He says proved"definitively" the world is round, as if to indicate that some people, perhaps many people, thought the world was round but didn't know for sure. But it's essential for his argument that Columbus did something about proving the world was round. Otherwise the columnist's metaphor--and he loves his metaphors--falls flat. It works only because people generally believe that it was a momentous event in history that we discovered in the 15th century that the world was round. Now in the 21st century we are discovering it's flat. Ha!

But we didn't discover the world was round in the 15th century. Whether Friedman knows the truth or not and it's hard to say because he so artfully hedges his statement by including that little modifier, definitively, it is well known among scholars that the Columbus story is, as they say, pure moonshine. As Professor Jeffrey Burton Russell explained in his book, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Praeger, 1991),"there were no skeptics" in the 15th century about the world's sphericity."All educated people throughout Europe knew the earth's spherical shape and its approximate circumference. This fact has been well established by historians for more than half a century."

Of course, not all historians know that the myth, which has been traced to Washington Irving's biography of Columbus, has been decisively exploded. The late librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin, included the myth in all its glory in his 1983 book, The Discoverers. He even had a theory to explain why Europeans were so dumb as to believe the earth was flat when the ancients had proved it was round. They were the victims, he wrote, of the"Great Interruption," a"Europe-wide phenomenon of scholarly amnesia [which] ... afflicted the continent from A.D. 300 to at least 1300."

Does Thomas Friedman know the truth? Perhaps someone can ask him and let us know.

Footnote #1: In the opening chapter of his book Friedman relates that Columbus headed to the Indies in search of spices, among other things. This is yet another myth, as HNN debunked here in the fall of 2004.

Footnote #2: In one of the stories on the Pope's funeral, the Toronto Star managed to bring up the flat earth myth. A story published on April 7, 2005 claimed:

In the 2nd century AD, Ptolemy, an Egyptian astronomer, proved mathematically what everyone had thought: The Earth was a globe. Except the early Church wanted it to be flat, with Jerusalem at the centre, like the hole in a CD, and so it became for more than a thousand years. The historian Daniel Boorstin called this"the Great Forgetting."

And so the myth goes on.