All the way through high school I learned how Christopher Columbus took an orange and demonstrated to the educated elite of Europe how the earth is round and how if you sail around the earth you won’t fall off, as the smart guys all thought, but, rather, return to your point of origin.

Where in the primary sources does this story come from? Which primary source shows us that the educated people of 1492 thought that the world was flat? An examination of the primary sources shows that everyone Columbus was speaking to knew the world was round. They just thought it was bigger than Columbus thought it. He was wrong.

It’s harder work to look at all the original sources and come up with your own conclusions. But is it better history to rely on what other people tell you the sources say?

I am currently reading a book called “Blood and Roses”, about 15th century England, during the Wars of the Roses. The author, Helen Castor, is a fellow in history at Cambridge University. She bases her book on a collection of 1,000 letters written by three generations of a family known as the Pastons. That’s a rare and valuable find!