While putting together bonus material for the digital book of Emergency, I came across longer versions of a lot of the chapters and information in the book. It’s actually amazing how much of a book ends up on the cutting room floor. So I thought I’d share an excerpt from my research here that you may find interesting.

THE FOUNDING OF AMERICA

History, if you look at the word, is just a story. If you look at old history books, the facts, names, places, and stories change from era to era. We mold it to serve the purposes, priorities, and messages of the culture at the time. But the deeper you go into the rabbit hole of the original source material, the more you find out that the stories that aren’t in the history books tell you a lot more about our culture than the ones that are.

Christopher Columbus, for example, when he discovered continental America, wasn’t just searching for gold and spices. He wasn’t just trying to forge a new trade route to Asia. He was actually racing against the clock. The world was about to end, he believed, and his mission was to save as many souls as he could before it did. The year it was supposed to end was 1656, according to his Book of Prophecies, which he prepared for the King and Queen of Spain upon his return in order to get funding for his fourth and final expedition.

In his letters to the crown, Columbus explained that his voyages to the new world were part of a larger Biblical prophecy. According to his interpretation, they were the first step toward the liberation of the holy land of Jerusalem from Muslim domination, which would be followed by the coming of the Antichrist. The money he plundered from the new world he hoped to use to start this end times crusade: after reading The Crusaders’ Book of Secrets, he decided that it would cost exactly 210,000 gold florins.

“For the voyage to the Indies neither intelligence nor mathematics nor world maps were any use to me,” wrote Columbus, who described in his logs hearing heavenly voices in his head. “It was the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy. Joachim, abbot of Calabria, predicted that whoever was to rebuild the temple on Mount Zion would come from Spain.” This would then trigger, he continued, “the end of the religion of Mohammad and the coming of the Antichrist.”

So, from the day it was discovered, North America was a portent of doom – a catalyst for a coming apocalyptic war that would pit Christians against Muslims. And its purported founder, rather than being cut from the same cloth as great statesmen like Thomas Jefferson, was more akin to the religious zealots the CIA keeps a close watch on. Most disturbing of all, this zealotry is the majority opinion in the country today: According to a 2002 survey, 60 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies in the Book of Revelations will literally come true – and, of those, one in five believe it will happen in their lifetime.

Of course, Columbus wasn’t the only Old World explorer credited with discovering America; he shares that honor with Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer and cartographer. Unlike Columbus, who went to his grave thinking that his voyages had been to India, Vespucci knew he’d been to the New World.

In 1507, a German map-maker named Martin Waldseemuller named the massive land masses in the Atlantic after Vespucci – even though Columbus had beaten him to the new world by five years. “The fourth part of the earth . . . has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci,” Waldseemuller wrote, explaining his choice. “Inasmuch as both Europe and Asia received their names from women, I can see no reason why anyone would have good reason to object to calling this fourth part Amerige, the land of Amerigo, or America, after the man of great ability who discovered it.”

Waldseemuller included with his maps a copy of the document that inspired this decision – the Soletti Letter. Credited to Vespucci, the Soletti Letter is the forefather of today’s supermarket tabloid. It describes a land of wanton and free sexuality, full of native women with tight private parts who lust after European men. The locals, according to the letter, are “excessively libidinous and the women much more than the men; for I refrain out of decency from telling of the art with which they gratify their immoderate lust.” The bawdy letter even describes a race of giant women.

The problem with the account is that most of it is fiction. Though credited to Vespucci, it was grossly embellished by over-eager printers who, at the dawn of the printing press, knew that sex would sell better than the dry, scholarly accounts of a ship cartographer.

So not only was America founded on apocalyptic evangelism, it was founded on crass entertainment and marketing hype. And, judging by TMZ, Kim Kardashian, Steve H. from Denver, and Jersey Shore, it stands to reason that, since the discovery of America, nothing has changed? We’ll still buy anything.