Where in the U.S. don’t officially celebrate Christopher Columbus Day?
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Christopher Columbus Day is a national holiday in many countries of the Americas and a federal holiday in the United States, which celebrates the anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas on October 12, 1492.
The first Christopher Columbus Day in the United States festival took place on October 12, 1792, when the Columbian Order of New York held an event to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the famous landing.
Many Italian Americans regard Columbus Day as a celebration of their legacy. The day was first consecrated as a legal holiday in the U.S. through the lobbying of Angelo Noce, a first-generation American, in Denver. Colorado governor Jesse F. McDonald announced the first statewide holiday in 1905, and in 1907 was created as a statutory holiday.
It is the nation’s oldest continually existing celebration, with the Italian-American community’s annual Columbus Day Parade, which Nicola Larco established in San Francisco in 1868.
The celebration of Columbus Day in the United States started to decrease at the end of the 20th century (The practice of U.S. cities abandoning Christopher Columbus Day to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day began in 1992 in Berkeley, California ). The states of Alaska, Maine, New Mexico, South Dakota, Hawaii, Vermont, and parts of California, including, for instance, Los Angeles County, don’t recognize it and have each replaced it with celebrations of the day of Indigenous Peoples. In Oregon and Washington, Christopher Columbus Day is not an official holiday.
Iowa and Nevada don’t celebrate Columbus Day as an official holiday, but the states’ governors are “authorized and requested” by statute to proclaim the day yearly. Several U.S. states have eliminated the day as a paid holiday for state government workers while keeping it either as a day of recognition or as a legal holiday for other intents, including California and Texas.
The map below shows the regions of the United States that don’t officially celebrate Columbus Day.
