Why is America called/named America ????

Question

My son has this as a question in his school homework. I remember reading about this one time but for the life of me cannot remember why it is so.....
Thank You,
Amberwolf.x

Thank You everyone for your great answers, i remembered it was something to do with a mapmaker but couldn't remember name omg.

My son is only 13yrs old, and gets loads of homework btw {too much at times, i feel}. And this is the first time he has asked me for any help relating to his schoolwork..

Hi Bill, I am well except a little bit of pain in my left leg from a tattoo i had done yest. lol... Hope you are keeping in fine fettle and errmm do i know you by the way lmao hahaha!!.

Thanks again all, and i hope you are all having a great day/night.

Ttfn, Amberwolf, xx

Answer 1

Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine transatlantic explorer who was a navigator with Christopher Columbus in 1499, and the first geographer to realise that the Americas were separate continents.

Althought historians still dispute over it.

Answer 2

Amerigo Vespucci--he later took the Latin name Americus Vespucius--a Florentine merchant and astronomer turned adventurer and navigator, made 4 voyages to the western hemisphere, the 1st a private Spanish expedition in 1497, the others in 1499, 1500, and 1503. Vespucci's voyages were to the land now designated as South America, and he was the 1st to perceive that this was a land unknown to Europeans and he therefore suggested it be called Mundus Novus--New World.


Vespucci never once suggested the New World be named for him. That came about through an unusual chain of circumstances. While abroad, Vespucci wrote numerous letters about what he saw to friends. Apparently, an unsavory author got hold of some of these letters, rewrote and sensationalized them, and published them as Four Voyages, attributing them to Vespucci. The published letters have since been proved to be forgeries. However, 2 authentic letters written by Vespucci--one to his patron, the notorious Italian nobleman Lorenzo de' Medici, the other to an old schoolmate, Piero Sodorini--were located by scholars in Florence during the 1700S.


But it was one of the counterfeit letters that inspired the baptizing of the New World. This letter was published by the Academy of the Vosges in Lorraine during April, 1507. It was read by a young German cartographer, Professor Martin Waldseemuller, who was working at the academy with 4 other scholars, preparing an updated version of Ptolemy's Geography. Waldseemuller, impressed by the so-called Vespucci letter describing the New World, included it in his book, Cosmographiae introductio. In his Latin text, Waldseemuller also wrote the following: "But now, since these parts have been more extensively explored, and another 4th part has been discovered by Americus Vespucius (as will appear from what follows); I see no reason why it should not be called Amerigo, after Americus, the discoverer, or indeed America, since both Europe and Asia have a feminine form of name from the names of women." The map of the New World was published separately, and what is now Brazil was then boldly named "America."

Answer 3

The country was named after a mapmaker named Amerigo Vespucci. Many people consider that to be a wrong choice because he was the first to map the country, not discover or establish it.

Answer 4

It was named after Amerigo Vespucci- a merchant and explorer who voyaged to South America many times and eventually had the whole continent named after him by a mapmaker.

Answer 5

It was named after Italian mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci

Answer 6

The name America had been current ever since a German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, named the continent after explorer and navigator Amerigo Vespucci in 1507 - Wikipedia.

Answer 7

This is just what i found:

It is an irony of history that the name "America" did not come from Christopher Columbus. That distinction belongs to a German writer of geography.

In a further twist of events, America was named after Amerigo Vespucci, a 15th century Florentine merchant who owned a business in Seville, Spain, furnishing supplies for ships, preparing them for mercantile expeditions.

How do we explain what seems to mock the reality of history?

Stirred by the achievements of Columbus and envious of the reputation his discoveries brought, Vespucci endeavored to cultivate Columbus' friendship and trust. Seven years after Columbus' first voyage and while Columbus was still alive, Vespucci accompanied an expedition that consisted of four ships. They sailed past the eastern coast of South America, and visited Trinidad, which Columbus had named the preceding year. On his return to Europe Vespucci wrote letters with glowing descriptions of the newly discovered countries. He called the lands he had visited a "New World."

Some years later Vespucci's letters were published and read by Martin Waldseemuller, a noted geographer, and Mathias Ringmann, a schoolmaster. Recently-arrived from Germany to the province of Lorraine, they were attracted to the town of Saint-Die because of a newly-established print shop. Both men were engaged in working on a reproduction of Ptolemy's treatise on geography, to which they were adding a preface.

After reading the account of Vespucci's travels in "Quatre Navigations d' Americ Vespuce," they decided to incorporate Vespucci's voyage into the treatise. Ringmann, acting as editor, wrote in his introduction: "There is a fourth quarter of the world which Amerigo Vespucci has discovered and which for this reason we can call 'America' or the land of Americo."

Apparently ignorant of the discoveries and achievements made by Columbus fifteen years earlier, Ringmann continued: "We do not see why the name of the man of genius, Amerigo, who has discovered them, should not be given to these lands, as Europe and Asia have adopted the names of women."

Their work was published on April 25, 1507 under the title "Cosmographiae Introductio." It marked the first time the word AMERICA appeared in print

Answer 8

After Amerigo Vespuci. America sounds like Amerigo.

Answer 9

Named after an early explorer: Amerigo Vespucci.

Answer 10

Traditional history lessons about the discovery of America also raise questions about the meaning of discovery itself. It is now universally recognized that neither Vespucci nor Columbus "discovered" America. They were of course preceded by the pre-historic Asian forebears of Native Americans, who migrated across some ice-bridge in the Bering Straits or over the stepping stones of the Aleutian Islands. A black African discovery of America, it has been argued, took place around 3,000 years ago, and influenced the development of Mayan, Aztec, and Inca civilizations. The records of Scandinavian expeditions to America are found in sagas — their historic cores encrusted with additions made by every storyteller who had ever repeated them. The Icelandic Saga of Eric the Red, the settler of Greenland, which tells how Eric's son Leif came to Vinland, was first written down in the second half of the 13th century, 250 years after Leif found a western land full of "wheatfields and vines"; from this history emerged a fanciful theory in 1930 that the origin of "America" is Scandinavian: Amt meaning "district" plus Eric, to form Amteric, or the Land of (Leif) Eric.

Other Norsemen went out to the land Leif had discovered; in fact, contemporary advocates of the Norse connection claim that from around the beginning of the 11th century, North Atlantic sailors called this place Ommerike (oh-MEH-ric-eh), an Old Norse word meaning "farthest outland." But most non-Scandinavians were ignorant of these sailors' bold exploits until the 17th century, and what they actually found was not seriously discussed by European geographers until the 18th century. Further, other discoveries of America have been credited to the Irish who had sailed to a land they called Iargalon, the land beyond the sunset, and to the Phoenicians who purportedly came here before the Norse. The 1497 voyage by John Cabot to the Labrador coast of Newfoundland constitutes yet another discovery of the American mainland, which led to an early 20th-century account of the naming of America, recently revived, that claims the New World was named after an Englishman (Welshman, actually) called Richard Amerike.

Resurrecting the ideas of Jules Marcou, a prominent French geologist who while studying North America argued, as did other 19th-century writers, that the name America was brought back to Europe from the New World; and that Vespucci had changed his name to reflect the name of his discovery. Specifically, Marcou introduced the name of an Indian tribe and of a district in Nicaragua called Amerrique, and asserted that this district — rich in gold — had been visited by both Columbus and Vespucci, who then made this name known in Europe. For both explorers the words Amerrique and gold became synonymous. Subsequently, according to Marcou's account, Vespucci changed his Christian name from Alberico to Amerigo.

It is all interesting but no one knows for sure where the name came from or when it was brought to Europe.

But for your son's school work the answer would probably be Amerigo Vespucci . :-)