The Naming of America
The Naming of America

Author: Martin Waldseemüller

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 146

ISBN-13:

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This new book features a facsimile of the 1507 World Map by Martin Waldseemuller - the first map ever to display the name America - and tells the fascinating story behind its creation in 16th-century France and rediscovery 300 years later in the library of Wolfegg Castle, Germany, in 1901. It also includes a completely new translation and commentary to Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann's seminal cartographic text, the Cosmographiae Introductio, which originally accompanied the World Map. John Hessler considers answers to some of the key questions raised by the map's representation of the New World, including "How was it possible for a small group of cartographers to have produced a view of the world so radical for its time and so close to the one we recognize today?"; and "What evidence did they possess to show the existence of the Pacific Ocean when neither Vasco Nunez de Balboa nor Ferdinand Magellan had yet reached it'." There are no easy answers, and yet, as this fascinating book reveals, this group of unknowns created some of the most important maps in the history of cartography, and afford us a glimpse into an age when accepted scientific and geographic principles fell away, spawning the birth of modernity.

Amerigo
Amerigo

Author: Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2008-12-18

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 030751255X

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In 1507, European cartographers were struggling to redraw their maps of the world and to name the newly found lands of the Western Hemisphere. The name they settled on: America, after Amerigo Vespucci, an obscure Florentine explorer. In Amerigo, the award-winning scholar Felipe Fernández-Armesto answers the question “What’s in a name?” by delivering a rousing flesh-and-blood narrative of the life and times of Amerigo Vespucci. Here we meet Amerigo as he really was: a sometime slaver and small-time jewel trader; a contemporary, confidant, and rival of Columbus; an amateur sorcerer who attained fame and honor by dint of a series of disastrous failures and equally grand self-reinventions. Filled with well-informed insights and amazing anecdotes, this magisterial and compulsively readable account sweeps readers from Medicean Florence to the Sevillian court of Ferdinand and Isabella, then across the Atlantic of Columbus to the brave New World where fortune favored the bold. Amerigo Vespucci emerges from these pages as an irresistible avatar for the age of exploration–and as a man of genuine achievement as a voyager and chronicler of discovery. A product of the Florentine Renaissance, Amerigo in many ways was like his native Florence at the turn of the sixteenth century: fast-paced, flashy, competitive, acquisitive, and violent. His ability to sell himself–evident now, 500 years later, as an entire hemisphere that he did not “discover” bears his name–was legendary. But as Fernández-Armesto ably demonstrates, there was indeed some fire to go with all the smoke: In addition to being a relentless salesman and possibly a ruthless appropriator of other people’s efforts, Amerigo was foremost a person of unique abilities, courage, and cunning. And now, in Amerigo, this mercurial and elusive figure finally has a biography to do full justice to both the man and his remarkable era. “A dazzling new biography . . . an elegant tale.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review) “An outstanding historian of Atlantic exploration, Fernández-Armesto delves into the oddities of cultural transmission that attached the name America to the continents discovered in the 1490s. Most know that it honors Amerigo Vespucci, whom the author introduces as an amazing Renaissance character independent of his name’s fame–and does Fernández-Armesto ever deliver.” –Booklist (starred review)

Amerigo Vespucci and the Naming of America
Amerigo Vespucci and the Naming of America

Author: Frederick A. Ober

Publisher: Blurb

Published: 2019-10-23

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 9781714130054

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The continent of "America" is named not after Christopher Columbus, but rather his contemporary navigator and explorer, Amerigo Vespucci-and this book tells his story, and how his name came to be given to the New World. Drawing heavily upon Vespucci's own writings, this work provides a little-known insight into the background, voyages, discoveries and life of the Florence-born explorer, who ended his life as the "pilot navigator" of Spain. In that position-the most senior post in charge of mapping out the new world-Vespucci's genius was acknowledged across Europe, and the accuracy of his maps superseded all others. Vespucci not only mapped out vast areas of the New World, but also personally undertook at least four major voyages of discovery himself, working alternatively for the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. Never taking any personal credit or wealth, Vespucci's low-key approach meant that he was overshadowed by the more outgoing explorers of his age-men such as Columbus-yet, as his papers show, he knew them all and provided much valuable knowledge to all those who asked him. Finally, in a move which would have been as much a surprise to himself as anyone else, the continents of both North and South America were named after him-because of a strange quirk of history, described in full in this book.

Amerigo Vespucci, Pilot Major
Amerigo Vespucci, Pilot Major

Author: Frederick Julius Pohl

Publisher:

Published: 1966

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13:

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Presents excerpts from the book "Amerigo Vespucci, Pilot Major" by Frederick J. Pohl and provided online by Millersville University of Pennsylvania. Features information about Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512).