Historical Columbia

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Columbia is a poetic and the first popular name for the (present-day) United States of America. It was also the origin of the name District of Columbia. The moniker dates from before the American Revolution in 1776 but fell out of use in the early 20th Century. Exceptions to this trend include the song Columbia, Gem of the Ocean, still occasionally sung, and the song Hail, Columbia, an early anthem of the United States now used as the anthem of the Vice President of the United States. It is still featured as CBS's name, the Columbia Broadcasting System, Columbia University in New York and Columbia Pictures.

Columbus was not a hero of the British colonies until the middle 18th century and the growing feeling of nationalism among the colonies. The English had always emphasized John Cabot and Sebastian Cabot, and downplayed Christopher Columbus, for political reasons. But for the emerging United States, the Cabots made poor national heroes and were "shadowy agents of a British king", while Spain no longer posed a serious threat. The new nation began to look back to Columbus as a founding hero, and with that change of attitude, the name Columbia became increasingly popular (Stewart, p. 172).

Advocates for naming the United States "Columbia" continued to press for the name even after the United States Constitution made the name "United States of America" official. According to George R. Stewart, the name "United States" was criticized for being too long, inaccurate, and unpoetic, and that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 would have been the ideal time to change it. The two people most likely to have argued for a better name, according to Stewart, were Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. But Jefferson was in France at the time and Franklin was old and "no longer vigorous." Thus the nation remained the "United States," but popular support for "Columbia" remained and the name was given to many counties, towns, townships, and "a great river." Just before the Constitutional Convention, in 1786, South Carolina gave the name "Columbia" to their new capital city.

The proper noun "Columbia" is a name widely used in English derived from that of Christopher Columbus. Therefore, it was used in a broader sense to refer to the Americas. The term "Pre-Columbian" refers to the time before the arrival in the Americas of Columbus and other European explorers.

Columbia was also a female national personification of America, similar to the male Uncle Sam, the British female Britannia and male John Bull, the Italian Italia Turrita and the French Marianne, often seen in political cartoons through the early 20th Century (see illustration at right); the character is still used by Columbia Pictures, though the current incarnation looks very different.

The term Columbian was used to mean "from the USA" and there have been suggestions that it should be used again as an alternative word for "American", but has not re-entered general use. The establishment of the nation of Colombia in 1819 resulted in the name "no longer being available as a national name" for the United States (Stewart, p. 173).