Another myth countered in Bethells book is the idea that, up until the 14th century, there was a long-standing, wide-spread belief that the earth was flat. The flat-earth myth was first heavily promoted by Washington Irving, the creator of Rip Van Winkle, in the early 19th century and later popularized further by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. The latter two, Draper a medical school dean at NYU and White the founder of Cornell University, wrote highly influential books promoting the existence of the flat-earthers in the late 1800s. Their works were among the first to pit so furiously religion against science.
The goal of these writers was to project religious persons, with a heavy focus on the Catholic Church, as being anti-science, anti-learning and as having actually repressed the idea that the earth was spherical for hundreds of years. As a result of their version of history becoming the scientific mainstream, Christopher Columbus has been erroneously transformed into a bold rationalist who overcame ignorant churchmen and superstitious sailors by proving that the earth was not flat. Reality would say that there was no reason to prove that the earth was round because very few people believed anything else. Thanks to nineteenth-century revisionists, history books tell a different story.