He called it the Universalis Cosmographia, or Universal Cosmography. It already was called "America". He was the main sponsor of John Cabots voyage that landed in newfoundland from … Turtle Island: The Original Name for North America . The most interesting question of all is why America was named after a guy who was otherwise so obscure. Only later would this area be given a unifying name—America—and the people labeled “Indians” by Europe. How America Got Its Name The Story of How America Got Its Name. Turtle Island was renamed North America after a Spanish explorer, Amerigo Vespucci . From Amerigo to America. Comprised of 12 wooden panels, it was eight feet wide and four-and-a-half feet tall. this is unusual in that a country was named off the for-name and not off a surname [as it was thought that only royalty did this]. It was named after Richard Americ the sheriff of Bristol, whose family coat of arms (the stars and stripes) also formed the basis of the US flag (long before Washington). Christopher Columbus and How America Got its Name QUESTION: Christopher Columbus and How America Got its Name ANSWER: Here’s the story of how America got its name. 'america' derives from an Italian cartographer and merchant called Americo Vespucci. Before that time, there was no name that collectively identified the Western Hemisphere. Christie's auction house says a two-dimensional globe created by Martin Waldseemüller was the earliest recorded use of the term. North America was known as Amexam/Northwest Africa and later parts of it was named by the so-called Indians, Turtle Island, who came to North America about 12,000 years ago. Just how did America get to be named after Amerigo Vespucci, who was fairly obscure? Is it possible assuming the identity of two entire continents of nations could be just another “land grab” by a nation so hellbent on achieving superiority that it would bowl over entire races of people and cut in the proverbial line just for the United States to be called “America”? History of the United States America before colonial times For thousands of years, Indians were the only inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. The Americas (also collectively called America; French: Amérique, Dutch: Amerika, Spanish and Portuguese: América) comprise the totality of the continents of North and South America. In an accompanying book, Waldseemüller published one of the Vespucci accounts; this led to criticism that Vespucci was trying to usurp Christopher Columbus' glory. We have focused on five geographical areas of the region to represent the variety and complexity of peoples and cultures before 1492: the Caribbean, Middle America, the Andean region, the South Atlantic, and North America. After returning to Florence, he suspected that Christopher Columbus was not correct in assuming that … The name Turtle Island comes from the Aboriginal Creation story. On September 9, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted a new name for what had been called the "United Colonies.” The moniker United States of America has remained since then as a symbol of freedom and independence. Mind you, the so-called Black People were already here, approximately 40,000-50,000 years before the so-called Indians. For centuries it was argued that Amerigo Vespucci was a fraud who had never traveled to the continent that bore his name and did not deserve to have either of his names applied to anything. The name America was first recorded in 1507. Along with their associated islands, they cover 8% of Earth's total surface area and 28.4% of its land area. This extremely rare work contains the first suggestion that the area of Columbus' discovery be named "America" in honor of Amerigo Vespucci, who recognized that a "New World," the so-called fourth part of the world, had been reached through Columbus' voyage. The people who lived there before? They had wandered into North America from Asia about 15,000 years ago. At the same time that Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, one of Italy's future explorers, Amerigo Vespucci, was born in Florence. I understand that it may have been a blunder by an early map-maker. In 1507, a German cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller was drawing a map of the world—a very serious map. The Anishinaabek are one of the most widespread nations of the Aboriginal People of Turtle Island. Benjamin Franklin popularized the concept of a political union in his famous "Join, Or Die" cartoon in 1754. In 1507, Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the new continent America after the feminine Latin version of Vespucci's first name. The name America was firmly rooted by the end of the 1500s, Crawford said. Granted, naming a new land is largely a symbolic gesture, given that the Europeans didn't control these areas for some time. Here’s the story of how America got its name. The most common theory about the origin of America's name is that the country is named after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer who reached the New World in 1502. It is an irony of history that the name "America" did not come from Christopher Columbus.That distinction belongs to a … On September 9, 1776, the Continental Congress formally declares the name of the new nation to be the “United States” of America.