__1454: __ Amerigo Vespucci is born in Florence, Italy. He'll give his name to two continents. Vespucci, the son of a notary, went to work for the Medici banking house. They dispatched him as an agent ...

“Amerigo Vespucci, who gave his name to America, was a pimp in his youth and a magus in his maturity,” writes Felipe Fernández-Armesto in his new biography (Random House, 231 pages, $24.95). His ...

Drawn half a millennium ago and then swiftly forgotten, one map made us see the world as we know it today... and helped name America. But, as Toby Lester has discovered, the most powerful nation on ...

Create an account or log in to save stories. The map, printed the year after Christopher Columbus' death, invoked the written accounts by Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci, who deduced the land to the ...

The year was 1507. A landlocked German cartographer created a surprisingly accurate map of the world, and used the word "America" to honor explorer Amerigo Vespucci. This is believed to be the first ...

Perhaps its most remarkable feature was a new continent. On the left of the map were two land masses across the Atlantic; the northern one marked “Parias” while the southern one was named “America”.

In 1507 a German geographer named Martin Waldseemüller drew two maps of the known world. As research, he used the recent account of Florentine Navigator Amerigo Vespucci, who said he had found a new ...

Colin Moffat (Letters, 14 October) claims Columbus was responsible in some way for the naming of America and denies that the word was derived from the name of Amerigo Vespucci, whom he describes as ...