“In fourteen hundred and ninety two/Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” That little rhyme was something I learned I don’t know how many years ago, and it has proved to be a faithful friend. I never had any trouble remembering the date of Columbus’s famous voyage. Columbus did not sail the ocean blue, of course. He sailed out into the unforgiving Atlantic Ocean. However the couplet: “One miserable August day/Columbus sailed the ocean gray” would be neither memorable nor useful. Popular history is not what happened but what we imagine that we remember. Colorful characters and big events are memorable, especially if they can be made into poetry. There were some scurrilous verses – which I can’t repeat on radio – that helped British schoolboys remember the names and the peculiar characteristics of the six wives of Henry VIII. Paul Revere made a famous ride to warn that the British were coming, although I don't know what was so alarming about that. “Listen my children and you shall hear/Of the