Happy Columbus Day 2019! What does one do to traditionally celebrate the holiday?

They must also hate the Scots for not commemorating Robert the Bruce's defeat of Edward II at Byland.

And the English aristocracy for not commemorating the Battle of Hastings.

According to the Google Doodle it's Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau's 218 birthday. I don't even know who Joseph Plateau is.

In 1775, Lord Dunmore, Royal Governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation offering freedom to all slaves of revolutionaries who were willing to join him under arms against the rebels in the American Revolutionary War. Five hundred Virginia slaves promptly abandoned their Revolutionary masters and joined Dunmore's ranks. The governor formed them into the Ethiopian Regiment, also known as Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment.

During the war, tens of thousands of slaves escaped, having a substantial economic effect on the American South. An estimated 25,000 slaves escaped in South Carolina; 30,000 in Virginia, and almost one-quarter of the slave population in Georgia. Slaves also escaped in New England and New York, often joining the British forces occupying New York for freedom. While thousands went to the British lines for freedom (and the British evacuated nearly 4,000 Black Loyalists to Nova Scotia and other colonies after the war), others took advantage of the wartime confusion to migrate to other areas of the colonies.

Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment, composed of escaped slaves, was probably the first black regiment in the service of the Crown during the revolution. By December 1775 the regiment had nearly 300 black people, including its most famous member, an escaped slave called Titus, then known as Tye. In later years, he became known as Colonel Tye as an honorary title for his military skills. Private Tye and his comrades believed that they were fighting not just for their own individual freedom but for the freedom of enslaved black people in North America