Columbia is usually depicted unaccompanied and as a goddess-like human. She is portrayed with auburn, brown, and sometimes black hair. Her clothing varies; e.g., a simple white garment, a dress of various colors, draped in a U.S. flag. She is often illustrated with a liberty cap and holding an American flag, and sometimes wielding a shield with the coat of arms of the United States on it.
She is also known as "Miss Columbia", implying that she is unmarried.
The earliest type of personification of the Americas, seen in European art from the 16th century onwards, reflected the tropical regions in South and Central America from which the earliest European travelers reported back. Such images were most often used in sets of female
personifications of the
four continents. America was depicted as a woman who, like Africa, was only partly dressed, typically in bright feathers, which invariably formed her headdress. She often held a parrot, was seated on a
caiman or alligator, with a
cornucopia. Sometimes a severed head was a further attribute, or in prints scenes of cannibalism appeared in the background.[2][3]
18th century
Though versions of this depiction, tending as time went on to soften the rather savage image into an "Indian princess" type, and in churches emphasizing conversion to Christianity, served European artists well enough, by the 18th century they were becoming rejected by settlers in North America, who wanted figures representing themselves rather than the
Native Americans they were often in conflict with.[4]
Massachusetts Chief Justice
Samuel Sewall used the name "Columbina" for the New World in 1697.[5] The name "Columbia" for America first appeared in 1738[6][7] in the weekly publication of the debates of Parliament in
Edward Cave's The Gentleman's Magazine. Publication of parliamentary debates was technically illegal, so the debates were issued under the thin disguise of Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput and fictitious names were used for most individuals and place names found in the record. Most of these were transparent anagrams or similar distortions of the real names and some few were taken directly from
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels while a few others were classical or neoclassical in style. Such were Ierne for Ireland, Iberia for Spain, Noveborac for New York (from
Eboracum, the Roman name for
York) and Columbia for America—at the time used in the sense of "European colonies in the New World".[8]
By the time of the
Revolution, the name Columbia had lost the comic overtone of its Lilliputian origins and had become established as an alternative, or poetic, name for America. While the name America is necessarily scanned with four syllables, according to 18th-century rules of English versification Columbia was normally scanned with three, which is often more metrically convenient. For instance, the name appears in a collection of complimentary poems written by Harvard graduates in 1761 on the occasion of the marriage and coronation of King George III.[11]
The name Columbia rapidly came to be applied to a variety of items reflecting American identity. A ship built in Massachusetts in 1773 received the name Columbia Rediviva and it later became famous as an exploring ship and lent its name to new Columbias.
After independence
No serious consideration was given to using the name Columbia as an official name for the independent United States, but with independence, the name became popular and was given to many
counties,
townships, and towns as well as other institutions.
In 1784, the former King's College in New York City had its name changed to
Columbia College, which became the nucleus of the present-day Ivy League
Columbia University.
In 1786, the name Columbia was given to the
new capital city of
South Carolina. Columbia is also the name of at least 19 other towns in the United States.
In 1791, three commissioners appointed by President
George Washington named the area destined for the seat of the United States government the territory of Columbia. In 1801, it was organized as the
District of Columbia.
Columbian should not be confused with the adjective
pre-Columbian, which refers to a time period before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492.
Personification
As a quasi-mythical figure, Columbia first appears in the poetry of the African-American
Phillis Wheatley in October 1775, during the Revolutionary War:[13][14]
One century scarce perform'd its destined round,
When Gallic powers Columbia's fury found;
And so may you, whoever dares disgrace
The land of freedom's heaven-defended race!
Fix'd are the eyes of nations on the scales,
For in their hopes Columbia's arm prevails.[15]
Especially in the 19th century, Columbia was visualized as a
goddess-like female
national personification of the United States and of liberty itself, comparable to the British
Britannia, the Italian
Italia Turrita and the French
Marianne, often seen in
political cartoons of the 19th and early 20th century. The personification was sometimes called Lady Columbia or Miss Columbia. Such an iconography usually personified America in the form of an Indian queen or Native American princess.[16]
The image of the personified Columbia was never fixed, but she was most often presented as a woman between youth and middle age, wearing classically draped garments decorated with stars and stripes. A popular version gave her a red-and-white-striped dress and a blue blouse, shawl, or sash, spangled with white stars. Her headdress varied and sometimes it included feathers reminiscent of a Native American headdress while other times it was a
laurel wreath, but most often, it was a
cap of liberty.
Early in
World War I (1914–1918), the image of Columbia standing over a kneeling "doughboy" was issued in lieu of the
Purple Heart medal. She gave "to her son the accolade of the new chivalry of humanity" for injuries sustained in the World War.
In World War I, the name
Liberty Bond for savings bonds was heavily publicized, often with images from the
Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World). The personification of Columbia fell out of use and was largely replaced by the Statue of Liberty as a feminine symbol of the United States.[17]
After
Columbia Pictures adopted Columbia as its
logo in 1924, she has since appeared as bearing a torch similar to that of the
Statue of Liberty, unlike 19th-century depictions of Columbia. The Columbia Pictures logo is the most famous and prominent display of Columbia to many current Americans.[according to whom?]
Statues of the personified Columbia may be found among others in the following places:
The naming of the
New World and of the newly independent country of
Colombia after Christopher Columbus in the early 19th century is discussed at
Colombia § Etymology.
The element
niobium was first called columbium, a name which some people still use today. The name columbium, coined by the chemist
Charles Hatchett upon his discovery of the metal in 1801,[20] reflected that the type specimen of the
ore came from America.[21]
Columbia Records, founded in 1888, took its name from its headquarters in the District of Columbia.
Columbia Pictures, named in 1924, uses a version of the personified Columbia as its logo after a great deal of experimentation.[22]
CBS's former legal name was the Columbia Broadcasting System, first used in 1928. The name derived from an investor, the Columbia Phonograph Manufacturing Company, which owned Columbia Records.
A personified Columbia appears in Uncle Sam, a graphic novel about American history (1997).
The setting of the steampunk video game BioShock Infinite is the alternate reality city of Columbia, which makes frequent use of Columbia's image. Columbia herself is believed to be an archangel by the citizens.
Political cartoon from 1860 depicting
Stephen A. Douglas receiving a spanking from Columbia as Uncle Sam looks on approvingly
A defiant Columbia in an 1871
Thomas Nast cartoon shown protecting a defenseless Chinese man from an angry Irish lynch mob that has just burned down an orphanage
Columbia in an 1865 Thomas Nast cartoon asking the government to allow black soldiers to vote
Columbia (representing the American people) reaches out to oppressed Cuba with blindfolded Uncle Sam in background (Judge, February 6, 1897; cartoon by
Grant E. Hamilton).
^Donald Dewey (2007).
The Art of Ill Will: The Story of American Political Cartoons. New York University Press. p. 13.
ISBN9780814719855. Retrieved February 1, 2020. (Minus the torch and the book, Columbia herself had been called 'Liberty' long before F. S. Bartholdi's sculpture was dedicated in New York harbor in 1886.)
^Higham, John (1990).
"Indian Princess and Roman Goddess: The First Feale Symbols of America"(PDF). Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. 100: 48. Retrieved July 3, 2022. America alone was a savage. An early predilection for exhibiting her as a naked cannibal, toying with a severed head or a half-roasted human arm, gave way in the seventeenth century to less threatening but still muscular images. She became, for example, a barbaric queen, borne aloft in a giant conch shell, scattering baubles from her cornucopia to the European adventurers crowding below [...].
^Bernard F. Dick. The Merchant Prince of Poverty Row: Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 40–42.
Sources
Higham, John (1990). "Indian Princess and Roman Goddess: The First Female Symbols of America", Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. 100: 50–51, JSTOR or
PDF
Le Corbeiller, Clare (1961), "Miss America and Her Sisters: Personifications of the Four Parts of the World", The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 19, pp. 210–223,
PDFArchived 2019-08-05 at the
Wayback Machine
George R. Stewart (1967). Names on the Land. Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston.