Today is Columbus Day (second Monday observance) - 2011

from Writer's Almanac (Garrison Keillor, Minnesota Public Radio)

Today is Columbus Day. On October 12th, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on an island in what is now the Bahamas.
For hundreds of years, Europeans had traded with China and India along the Silk Road, an overland trade route that ran through Central Asia. The Mongol Empire controlled the land all the way from the Middle East to China, and under Mongol rule the Silk Road was safe to travel -- that was the era when Marco Polo traveled to China to meet Kublai Kahn. But the Mongol Empire dissolved, and the Ottoman Empire invaded Constantinople in 1453 and blocked European access to trade routes. No more silk, spices, tea, porcelain, ivory, or opium. So European leaders invested in trying to find a new trade route to Asia. Most explorers were heading east, traveling down and around South Africa. Columbus wanted to head west.
It is a common myth that Columbus persevered in the face of a society that thought the earth was flat. In fact, just about all educated Europeans knew that the earth was spherical. King Ferdinand of Spain was skeptical of Columbus not because Ferdinand thought the earth was flat, but because he thought Columbus was way off in his theory of the earth's circumference, and that Asia was much further west than Columbus had calculated. Ferdinand was correct, of course, but eventually he and his wife Isabella changed their minds, and sponsored Columbus. He sailed from Spain on August 3rd, 1492, with three ships: the Santa Maria, the Nina, and the Pinta.
In the early morning hours of October 12th, the captain of the Pinta, Juan Alonso Pinzon, spotted land. Ferdinand and Isabella had promised a lifetime pension to the first person to spot land, so Columbus claimed that he had actually seen light the night before, but delayed the announcement until he was sure. So Columbus got the pension, and Pinzon didn't get anything. The island they landed on is part of what is now the Bahamas, but Columbus was convinced he had made it to Asia, and called the indigenous people "Indians."