Who first claimed that before Columbus most people thought the world was flat ?

sportsherald

"In a 1991 book, "Inventing the Flat Earth," retired University of California professor Jeffrey Burton Russell explains how the myth was perpetuated in the 1800s by writers including Washington Irving and Antoinne-Jean Letronne. In 1828, Irving wrote "The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus," which sounds like a biography but is mostly fiction. It says that Europeans learned from Columbus's trips to the New World that the planet was round. Letronne insisted that early Christian writers thought the Earth was flat. Though they did not, he was widely quoted for many years." -from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/busting-a-myth-about-columbus-and-a-flat-earth/2011/10/10/gIQAXszQaL_blog.html Some people still claim to believe the world is flat: http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=48&Itemid=65 Apr 06 12, 3:39 PM