As everyone knows, 1492 was the year Christopher Columbus sailed three small ships across the Atlantic Ocean. But that is only a fragment of the story of what transpired around the world in that year.

There was much more happening in 1492, including events of notable significance. And those events weren’t only occurring in Spain and America; they were occurring all over the world—politically, socially, culturally, technologically, artistically, architecturally, religiously, and more. So why do most children learn little more than that “In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”? It’s a narrow, stripped-down, simplified fact that leaves out much of the important history that was unfolding in all parts of the world.

Presented in a month-by-month format segmented into individual days, this book provides a global view of that momentous year. Readers will meet an array of famous people, as well as a few fictional characters in accurate settings. Some of them have familiar names, like Michelangelo Buonarroti, Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolaus Copernicus, Desiderius Erasmus, Albrecht Dürer, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Lucrezia Borgia, Martin Luther, and Christopher Columbus, who was born Cristoforo Colombo but was known as Cristóbal Colón in Spain. Others, like King Casimir IV of Poland and Lithuania, the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II, the Bantu king Nzinga a Nkuwu, the Inca ruler Huayna Capac, and the Spanish sailor Martin Pinzón, are lesser known, but they, too, are important threads in the fabric of 1492.

This is not an Anglocentric view of events but a global adventure that includes China and Japan—where Columbus thought he was headed—the Americas he found, the diverse European and Muslim worlds, Russia, India, Africa, Egypt, and Jerusalem, as well as Australia, Iceland, and Hawai’i. It presents a multicultural approach that illustrates the outsized influence that one year can have on the course of history.