- Phillips, William D. and Carla Rahn. The Worlds of Christopher Columbus. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
This book describes the life of Christopher Columbus as well as the broader historical and societal contexts of his discovery. It reveals how an eternal obsessiveness people had for exploring routes to Asia at the time before Columbus influenced himself, and how the age he lived in affected his rise and fall. These narrations will help me define how and to what extent the trend of his age determined his actions, as to better assess if he was a hero or a villain, or even he had no choice or awareness in being either.
- Schuman, Howard, et al. “Elite Revisionists and Popular Beliefs: Christopher Columbus, Hero or Villain?” Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 69, iss. 1, 2005, pp. 2-29.
In this article, the authors present a public view toward Christopher Columbus’s character through a national survey. As I may want to demonstrate what attitudes Americans hold toward Columbus, data provided in this article will be able to showcase the fact.
- Klapp, Orrin E. “American Villain-Types.” American Sociological Review, vol. 21, no. 3, 1956, pp. 337-340.
This article investigates what characteristics villains have in an American point of view. This will help determine in what aspects Columbus can be viewed as a villain, and what behavior and actions of his help decide that.
- Markovits, Julia. “Saints, heroes, sages, and villains.” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, vol. 158, no. 2, 2012, pp. 289-311.
The author exhaustively discusses the multi-facetedness of moral goodness, among several others. Her discussion about the complexity of being good will help me generate a more comprehensive assessment of Columbus in terms of ethics.
- Jolley, Susan Arpajian. “In Search of a Hero, in Search of Self.” The English Journal, vol. 97, no. 2, 2007, pp.23-28.
This article provides individual viewpoints toward who can be a hero, as in which a teacher summarizes project results of her students about heroism. Conclusions her students drew were based upon their interviews of people around them, with subjects being carefully chosen, and their reflection of heroic figures they studies in the past. Their results are largely subjective, thus providing me with individual thoughts on what makes a person a hero. I may reflect on their thoughts on defining characteristics of heroism, thus prompting my own idea about whether Columbus was a hero or not.