So where do we get the idea that people thought the world was flat? Washington Irving — the man who wrote the short stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” among other things — wrote a biography of Columbus in which he wanted to make Columbus out to be a great man. Since he could not very well say that Columbus was a hero because he had bought into bad numbers from Toscanelli, Irving decided to say that he was a brilliant visionary who was the first to realize that the earth was round, playing on the stereotype of medieval ignorance. Irving was a great writer of fiction,
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