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1507Reputable source · 2 sourcesWell documented

A Map Gives the New World the Name America

A German mapmaker credits an Italian navigator's letters for recognizing that the new lands were not Asia at all

On the timeline · around 1507 · Conquest and CircumnavigationConquest and CircumnavigationA Map Gives the New World the Name America150215041506150815101512

Quick facts

Navigator
Amerigo Vespucci
Cartographer
Martin Waldseemuller
Year
1507
Vespucci's own term
Mundus Novus (New World)

What happened

The Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci sailed on Spanish and Portuguese expeditions along the South American coast in the years after Columbus's voyages, and argued in his own accounts that the land was not part of Asia, as Columbus believed, but a previously unknown continent, which Vespucci called Mundus Novus, the New World. In 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller published a geography book with a world map that labeled the southern landmass "America" in Vespucci's honor. Vespucci himself kept using the term Mundus Novus, but Waldseemuller's name stuck.

Why it matters

Waldseemuller's map is the first known document to use the name America for any part of the Western Hemisphere, and the label spread through European geographic circles until it applied to both continents. Vespucci's real contribution was recognizing a fact Columbus never accepted: that the Americas were not Asia.

How we know

The Mariners' Museum's Ages of Exploration entry on Vespucci names the 1507 Waldseemuller map and describes how the label America entered common use despite Vespucci's own preferred term.

Sources

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Part of a timelineThe Age of Exploration27 events · How Portuguese and Spanish voyages connected the world's oceans between 1415 and 1600, and what that connection cost the people already living thereView all →