THE NAMING OF AMERICA: FRAGMENTS
WE'VE SHORED AGAINST OURSELVES

BY JONATHAN COHEN



The name America (applied to present-day Brazil) appeared for what is believed the first time on Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 world map, known as the Baptismal Certificate of the New World, and also America's Birth Certificate. [More]
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América, no invoco tu nombre en vano
[America, I don't invoke your name in vain]
Pablo Neruda, Canto General

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Two thousand seven marks the 500th anniversary of the naming of America — that is, the Western Hemisphere, the vast body of land stretching from the northernmost reaches of Canada to the southern tip of Argentina, which, until the middle of the last century, was commonly called the American continent. The present quincentenary offers the perfect occasion to consider the cultural matter of what's in a name, not just any name, but the one that has come to be known in every corner of the world, rightly or not, as the name of the United States.
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AMERICA, we learn as schoolchildren, was named in honor of Amerigo Vespucci, for his discovery of the mainland of the New World. We tend not to question this lesson about the naming of America. By the time we are adults it lingers vaguely in most of us, along with images of wave-tossed caravels and forests peopled with naked cannibals. Not surprisingly, the notion that America was named for Vespucci has long been universally accepted, so much so that a lineal descendant, America Vespucci, came to New Orleans in 1839 and asked for a land grant "in recognition of her name and parentage." Since the late 19th century, however, conflicting ideas about the truth of the derivation have been set forth with profound cultural and political implications. To question the origin of America's name is to question the nature of not only our history lessons but our very identity as Americans.

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." (This theory is currently being promoted by white supremacists of the so-called Christian Party, who are intent on preserving the nation's Nordic character, and who argue that the Norse Ommerike derives from the Gothic Amalric, which, according to them, means "Kingdom of Heaven.") 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.

And yet, despite the issue of who discovered America, we are still confronted with the awesome fact that it was the voyages of Columbus, and not earlier ones, that changed the course of world history. Indeed, as Tzvetan Todorov, author of The Conquest of America (1984; tr. Richard Howard), has argued, "The conquest of America … heralds and establishes our present identity; even if every date that permits us to separate any two periods is arbitrary, none is more suitable, in order to mark the beginning of the modern era, than the year 1492, the year Columbus crosses the Atlantic Ocean." Columbus clearly made a monumental discovery in showing Europe how to sail across the Atlantic; Vespucci's great contribution was to tell Europe that the land Columbus had found was not Asia but a New World (and that a western route to Asia involved yet another ocean beyond it). The naming of America, then, becomes essential to a full understanding of our history and cultural values — ourselves — especially when considered in terms of the range of theories about the origin of the name.

The Maya Connection

The most explosive, haunting, almost credible etymology — the so-called Amerrique theory which was first advanced in 1875 — reappeared in the late 1970s in an essay by Guyanan novelist Jan Carew, titled "The Caribbean Writer and Exile." Here Carew focuses on the identity struggle of Caribbeans who are "subject to successive waves of cultural alienation from birth — a process that has its origins embedded in a mosaic of cultural fragments — Amerindian, African, European, Asian." He adds that "the European fragment is brought into sharper focus than the others, but it remains a fragment." It is in his discussion of this European fragment that he turns to the early historical accounts written by "European colonizers, about their apocalyptic intrusion into the Amerindian domains" — histories which, he argues, are largely fictions "characterized, with few exceptions, by romantic evasions of truth and voluminous omissions."

Carew moves from the "fictions" of Columbus to those of Vespucci with these striking words: "Alberigo Vespucci, and I deliberately use his authentic Christian name, a Florentine dilettante and rascal, corrected Columbus's error [thinking he had found the Orient] … Vespucci, having sailed to the American mainland declared that what Columbus had indeed stumbled on was a New World." Carew then alludes to Vespucci's famous letters about his voyages (more later about these controversial letters), which caused a great stir throughout Europe when they were published in the early 1500s. In them Vespucci "invented a colonizer's America, and the reality that is ours never recovered from this literary assault and the distortions he inflicted upon it" because "the fiction of a 'virgin land' inhabited by savages, at once a racist one and a contradiction, remains with us to this day." But Carew, in developing his own fiction which derives largely from a fanciful 19th-century treatise, goes on to say: "Amerigo [sic] was undoubtedly a Florentine dilettante … [and] an extraordinarily clever one. Why would he otherwise have changed his Christian name after his voyages to the Americas?"

Carew is 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. Carew cites Marcou to back his claim that "in the archives of Toledo, a letter from Vespucci to the Cardinal dated December 9, 1508, is signed Amerrigo with the double 'r' as in the Indian Amerrique … and between 1508 and 1512, the year in which Vespucci died, at least two other signatures with the Christian name Amerrigo were recorded."

Like Marcou, Carew wants us to believe that America was not named after Vespucci, but vice versa; that Vespucci had, so to speak, re-named himself after his discovery, gilding his given name by modifying it to reflect the significance of his discovery. For Carew, however, the "truth" he found in his reading of history becomes a source of rage: "Robbing peoples and countries of their indigenous names was one of the cruel games that colonizers played with the colonized…. To rob people or countries of their names is to set in motion a psychic disturbance which can in turn create a permanent crisis of identity. As if to underline this fact, the theft of an important place-name from the heartland of the Americas and the claim that it was a dilettante's Christian name robs the original name of its elemental meaning."

And what of this elemental meaning? To define it Carew echoes Marcou, who quotes from his correspondence with Augustus Le Plongeon. An imaginative anthropologist studying the Mayan culture in Yucatan, Le Plongeon had written to the French scholar: "The name AMERICA or AMERRIQUE in the Mayan language means, a country of perpetually strong wind, or the Land of the Wind, and sometimes the suffix '-ique' and '-ika' can mean not only wind or air but also a spirit that breathes, life itself."

All this leads Carew to conclude that "we must, therefore, reclaim the name of our America and give it once again its primordial meaning, land of the wind, the fountainhead of life and movement." His assertions concerning the name and its origin demand closer scrutiny, for in his passion to dispel myths he has created new ones.

Vespucci's Good Name

First of all, Vespucci's name must be cleared. He has been wrongfully portrayed as a crafty opportunist ever since the mid-16th century when Bartholomew de Las Casas accused him of being a liar and a thief who stole the glory that belonged to Columbus. "The new continent," insisted Las Casas, "should have been called Columba and not as it is unjustly called, America." In his epoch-making History of the Indies, Las Casas demeans Vespucci and his achievement, slandering his name by describing what he (a friend of Columbus and his family) considered "the long premeditated plan of Vespucci to have the world acknowledge him as the discoverer of the largest part of the Indies." Vespucci's unfounded bad reputation persisted here throughout the 19th century. One of the climaxes of vilification was attained by Emerson, who comments in English Traits (1856): "Strange … that broad America must wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickledealer at Seville, who went out, in 1499, a subaltern with Hojeda, and whose highest naval rank was boat-swain's mate in an expedition that never sailed, managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name." Vespucci was not the man described by Las Casas and Emerson, nor was he simply "an unimportant Florentine merchant," as he is described in the 1992 edition of Compton's Encyclopedia "published [by a Division of Encyclopedia Britannica] with the editorial advice of the faculties of the University of Chicago."

Vespucci was born in 1454 in Florence, where he was baptized, according to the official record, "Amerigho [not, as Carew asserts, Alberigo] Vespucci"; the use of the form Amerigho for Amerigo is an instance of the orthographic anarchy that existed in the spelling of proper names. The name Amerigo derives from an old Gothic name, Amalrich. In all its forms found in Europe (Greek "Aimulos," Latin "Aemelius") the underlying meaning was that of work. Amalrich, which literally meant work ruler, or designator of tasks, might be freely translated as master workman. Old German forms of the name were Amalrich, Almerich, Emmerich; the Spanish form was Almerigo; in England it was Almerick, or Merica in old families in Yorkshire. It appeared in feminine forms in Amelia and Emily; its masculine forms were Amery, Emeric, and Emery. But as Charlotte Mary Yonge wrote in her History of Christian Names (1884), it was "the Italian form, Amerigo, which was destined to the most noted use … which should hold fast that most fortuitous title, whence thousands of miles, and millions of men, bear the appellation of the forgotten forefather of a tribe of Goths — Amalrich, the work ruler; a curiously appropriate title for the new world of labor and progress."

Some scholars believe Vespucci was named after Saint Emeric, son of the first king of Hungary. He was known in Latin as Sanctus Americus. He had died in his youth, and was canonized for his pious life and purity. Moreover, as a reflection of national pride, a theory native to Hungary argues that the European explorers of the New World (or their priests) named it after this popular saint, in the old tradition of bestowing place names in honor of saints. However, no proof of this etymology exists.

As was the custom of the Florentine nobility, Vespucci received an education that featured special instruction in the sciences connected with navigation — natural philosophy, astronomy, and cosmography — in which he excelled. Around 1490 he was sent to Spain by his employers, the famous Italian family of Medici, to join their business in fitting out ships. Vespucci was probably in Seville in 1492 when Columbus was preparing for his first historic voyage, as well as in 1493 when Columbus returned. Soon after, Vespucci was involved in fitting out the fleet for Columbus's second voyage. The two men eventually became friends; Columbus later wrote that he trusted Vespucci and held him in high esteem.

The period during which Vespucci made his own voyages falls between 1497(?) and 1504(?). At the beginning of 1505 he was summoned to the court of Spain for a private consultation, and, as a man of experience, was engaged to work for the famous Casa de Contratacion de las Indias (Commercial House for the West Indies), which had been founded two years before in Seville. In 1508 the house appointed him piloto mayor (pilot major, or chief navigator), a post of great responsibility, which included the examination of the pilots' and ships' masters' licenses for voyages. He also had to prepare the official map of newly discovered lands and of the routes to them (for the royal survey), interpreting and coordinating all data that the captains were obliged to furnish. Vespucci, who obtained Spanish citizenship, held this position until his death in Seville in 1512. In the face of the spurious charges that he was an ignorant usurper of the merits of others, the fact that Spain entrusted him, a foreigner, with the office of pilot major certainly bolsters his defense.

During the first half of the 20th century, scholars discovered further evidence that clears away the cloud of misunderstanding and ignorance by which Vespucci has long been obscured. Frederick J. Pohl's biography, Amerigo Vespucci, Pilot Major (1944), and Germán Arciniegas's Amerigo and the New World (1955; tr. Harriet de Onís) are among the best efforts that dispel the shadows to which he was relegated by those who maligned his fame. Nonetheless, both biographers disagree about the authenticity of his two published letters, key documents in a dramatic controversy: Arciniegas accepts them as genuine, whereas Pohl rejects them as forgeries. Their arguments both muster convincing evidence, suggesting an irreconcilable debate. But the question concerning the authenticity of these historic letters remains fundamental to the evaluation of Vespucci's achievement.

Two series of documents on his voyages are extant. The first or traditional series consists of the widely published letters, dated 1504, purportedly written by him. Addressed to his patron, Lorenzo de' Medici, the Mundus Novus (New World) — the title alone revolutionizing the European conception of the cosmos — was translated from the Italian into Latin, and originally printed in Vienna; the other letter, addressed to the gonfaloniere (chief magistrate) of Florence, Piero Soderini, was a more elaborate work. The second series consists of three private letters addressed to the Medici. In the first series of documents, four voyages by Vespucci are described; in the second, only two. Until the 1930s the documents of the first series were considered from the point of view of the order of the four voyages. According to the conflicting theory to which Pohl and other modern scholars subscribe, these documents should be regarded as the result of skillful, unauthorized manipulations by entrepreneurs, and the sole authentic papers would be the private letters, so that the verified voyages would be reduced to two. Most important, if the first series of documents are indeed forgeries, the "first" of the four voyages (dated 1497) never took place, and thus Vespucci could not be given priority of one year over Columbus on reaching the American mainland, nor could he be considered the first to explore the coastline of Central America, Mexico, and the southeastern coast of the United States.

The voyage completed by Vespucci between May 1499 and June 1500 as navigator of an expedition of four ships sent from Spain under the command of Alonso de Hojeda is certainly authentic. This is the second expedition of the traditional series. Since Vespucci took part as navigator, he certainly cannot have been inexperienced; however, it seems unlikely that he had made a previous voyage, though this matter remains unresolved. In the voyage of 1499–1500, Vespucci would seem to have left Hojeda after reaching the coast of what is now Guyana (Carew's homeland). Turning south, he is believed to have discovered the mouth of the Amazon River and explored the coast of present-day Brazil. On the way back, he reached Trinidad, sighting en route the mouth of the Orinoco River, and then made for Haiti. Vespucci thought he had sailed along the coast of the extreme easterly peninsula of Asia, where Ptolemy, the 2nd-century Greek geographer, believed the market of Cattigara to be; so he looked for the tip of this peninsula, calling it Cape Cattigara. He supposed that the ships, once past this point, emerged into the seas of southern Asia. As soon as he was back in Spain, he equipped a fresh expedition with the aim of reaching Asia. But the Spanish government did not welcome his proposals, and at the end of 1500 Vespucci went into the service of Portugal.

Under Portuguese auspices he completed a second expedition, which set sail from Lisbon on May 31, 1501. After a halt at the Cape Verde Islands, the expedition traveled southwestward, reached the coast of Brazil, and certainly sailed as far south as the Río de la Plata, which Vespucci was the first European to discover. In all likelihood the ships took a quick run still farther south, along the coast of Patagonia to the Golfo de San Juli n or beyond. His ships returned by an unknown route, anchoring at Lisbon on July 12, 1502. This voyage is of fundamental importance in the history of geography in that Vespucci himself became convinced that the lands he had explored were not part of Asia but a New World. Unlike Columbus, who, to his death, clung to the idea that he had found the shores of Asia, Vespucci defined what had indeed been found — and for this he has been rightfully honored.

Naming the New World

Vespucci not only explored unknown regions but also invented a system of computing exact longitude and arrived at a figure computing the earth's equational circumference only fifty miles short of the correct measurement. It was, however, not his many solid accomplishments but an apparent error made by a group of scholars living in St. Dié, near Strasbourg, France, in the mountains of Lorraine, then part of Germany, that led America to be named (ostensibly) after him; and this is largely why his reputation has suffered. His published letters had fallen into the hands of these German scholars, among whom was the young cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. Inspired to publish a new geography that would embrace the New World, the group collectively authored a revision of Ptolemy, which included a Latin translation of Vespucci's purported letter to Soderini, as well as a new map of the world drawn by Waldseemüller. In their resulting Cosmographiae Introductio, printed on April 25, 1507, appear these famous words (as translated from the original Latin; see below) written most likely by one of the two poet-scholars involved in the project: "But now these parts [Europe, Asia and Africa, the three continents of the Ptolemaic geography] have been extensively explored and a fourth part has been discovered by Americus Vespuccius [a Latin form of Vespucci's name], as will be seen in the appendix: I do not see what right any one would have to object to calling this part after Americus, who discovered it and who is a man of intelligence, [and so to name it] Amerige, that is, the Land of Americus, or America: since both Europa and Asia got their names from women."


The new geography included in its appendix Waldseemüller's large, stunning map of the world, on which the New World is boldly labeled AMERICA — in the middle of present-day Brazil. This map is the first known map, printed or manuscript, to use the name America, and also the first to depict clearly a separate western hemisphere, with the Pacific as a separate ocean. The entire New World portion of the map roughly represents South America, and when later mapmakers added North America, they retained the original name; in 1538, the great geographer Gerard Mercator gave the name America to all of the Western Hemisphere on his Mapamundi. Waldseemüller's 1507 map, lost to scholars until 1901 when it was found in a German castle, is now reckoned to be the first to show the name, and the earliest record of its use. Moreover, the discoverer of the map went so far as to dub it the "Baptismal Certificate of the New World." Historians today agree that Vespucci, who was completely unaware of the project in Lorraine, had nothing to do with the so-called baptism. He clearly never tried to have the New World named after him or to belittle his friend Columbus. Nonetheless, the name America spread throughout Europe and quickly established itself through sheer force of usage.

The baptismal passage in the Cosmographiae Introductio has commonly been read as argument, in which the author said that he was naming the newly discovered continent in honor of Vespucci and saw no reason for objections. But, as etymologist Joy Rea has suggested, it could also be read as explanation, in which he indicates that he has heard the New World was called America, and the only explanation lay in Vespucci's name. In ignoring the possible intention of these words as explanation, most scholars have ignored the simple fact that place names usually originate informally in the spoken word and first circulate that way, not in the printed word. Moreover, to read the passage in the Cosmographiae Introductio as explanation lends credence to the theory, argued by Carew, Marcou, and others, that the early European explorers called the new continent Amerrique or, perhaps, another name with a similar pronunciation.

Even though the Latinization of Americus fits a pattern, why did the cosmographers not employ Albericus (hence the assumption that "Alberigo" was Vespucci's authentic Christian name), the Latinization that had already been used for Amerigo's name as the author of the Mundus Novus? Their substitution of Americus for the well-known Latinization Albericus might mean that they wanted a Latinization that would fit and explain the name America which they had already heard applied to the New World. Why did they ignore the common law in the naming of new lands: the use of the last names of explorers and the first names of royalty? Their ignoring it, Rea claims, further supports the idea that they were trying to force an explanation and that the only one they could think of was a Latinization of Vespucci's first name.

Another Amerindian Root

Did America get its name through oral tradition when those who had sailed with Columbus or Vespucci circulated stories that gold was to be found in the Amerrique Mountains of Nicaragua? According to Ricardo Palma's Tradiciones Peruanas (Peruvian Traditions, 1949), the ending of the word America indicates this origin: "The ending ic (ica, ique, ico made Spanish) is found frequently in the names of places, in the languages and native dialects of Central America and even of the Antilles. It seems to mean 'great, high, prominent' and is applied to mountains and peaks in which there are no volcanos." The Spanish Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada (1907) gives Americ or América as a mountainous region in Nicaragua, adding that Columbus had landed on the coast of Nicaragua directly east of these mountains. Columbus, who met the Indians of this coast, presumably heard the name Amerrique from them: he was looking for gold and the Indians gave him some, telling him he could get more to the west in the mountains there.

The coast at the foot of the Amerrique Mountains that faces the Caribbean Sea is called the Mosquito Coast, named for the Mosquito Indians, who live there still. The Mosquitos are Caribs. It is almost certain that Columbus first heard the name of the mountains pronounced by a Carib. Amerrique, therefore, must derive from a Carib word, possibly one of the Carib culture words — not a word in the Mayan language, which was not spoken in Nicaragua, though it almost resembles in sound the Quiche Mayan iq' amaq'el meaning perpetual wind. Further dispelling the idea of a Maya connection to America, Robert M. Laughlin, curator of Mesoamerican Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution, and an eminent anthropologist with expertise in Mayan culture, points out that "r" is rarely in the alphabets of Mayan languages.

The Caribs, traveling far from their Carib or Cariay coast, could see the Amerriques in the distance, and these mountains for them could have signified the mainland. The Indians in the Caribbean did have a word for the mainland, given in the Lexicografía Antillana (Antillean Dictionary, 1931) as babeque and defined as the name that Columbus understood the Indians to say when they were pointing to a land beyond Haiti and Cuba. Las Casas believed for a while that this must be Jamaica, but later decided it was the name for the mainland. Other historians have considered it the name the Caribs used for the mainland. Babeque, different as it sounds from Amerrique, could possibly be a variant of Amerrique. Very different spellings for the same Carib word reflect variants that sound little like each other; thus, the variants of the name Carib are Canibe, Galibi, Caniba, Canibal and Caliban.

The English Connection

Equally as amazing as the Amerrique theory, the little-known theory that "America" derives from the name of a Bristol-based Welshman, Richard Ameryk, emerged early in the 20th century. It constitutes an incredible Anglicization of the New World — and would, for obvious reasons, infuriate Carew. The theory was developed by Alfred E. Hudd, a member of the Clifton Antiquarian Club, which in 1910 published his work in its proceedings; the paper, "Richard Ameryk and the Name America," had been read to the group two years before. Hudd opens with a reference to Bristol's 1897 celebration of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of North America by John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), the Italian navigator and explorer who had sailed for England, laying the groundwork for the later British claim to Canada. For his achievement Cabot received a handsome pension conferred upon him by the King, from the hands of the Collectors of Customs of the Port of Bristol. One of these officials, the senior of the two, who was probably the person who handed over the money to the explorer, was named Richard Ameryk (also written Ap Meryke [Welsh] on one deed, and elsewhere written Amerycke) who seems to have been a leading citizen of Bristol at the time. Hudd claims that the name given to the newly found land by the discoverer was "Amerika," in honor of the official from whom he received his pension.

On his return to England the flamboyant Cabot, who dressed in silk, was celebrated as "the Great Admiral." He had a reputation for his extravagance. He purportedly gave one of the islands he explored to a friend, another to his barber, and also promised some Italian friars that they could be bishops. Hudd reasons that if Cabot were so free with his gifts to his poorer friends, it is easy to understand his wish to show gratitude to the King's official, and that he may well have done so by conferring his name on "the new Isle" which, it was thought, lay off the coast of China — Cabot never realized that he had found a continent.

To back his claim that the name America was known in Bristol in the years just before 1500, and well before Waldseemüller's map, Hudd presents the often quoted words of a lost manuscript, one of the "Calendars" in which local events were recorded: "This year [1497], on St. John the Baptist's day [June 24th], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe called the 'Mathew,' the which said ship departed from the port Bristowe the 2nd of May and came home again the 6th August following." If Hudd's suggestion is correct, the original manuscript documents the fact that the newly discovered land was already called America in Bristol before that name became known in Europe.

"Amerika," Hudd says, "seems much more like the name of the Bristol Customs official, than that of the Italian [Amerigo] … and having been invented in Bristol, by Cabot, and having been the only name for 'the new island' for more than ten years after its discovery, the resemblance of the name to that of Vespucci struck [the authors of the Cosmosgraphiae Introductio] … (to whom the English 'Richard Ameryk' was quite unknown), and thus through an error of his editor[s], to Vespucci was transferred the honour that the discoverer of North America, John Cabot, had intended to confer on the Bristolian 'Ameryk.'" Hudd fears that his main evidence, the original manuscript of Bristol's calendar, was lost in a fire and acknowledges that this important piece of the puzzle is missing. However, even if the name America were known in Bristol in 1497, Hudd has taken a majestic leap to suggest Ameryk's name as its origin. No proof exists to substantiate his claim that Cabot actually honored the Welshman by naming America after him. But if the name were indeed known in Bristol then, how was that possible?

Rodney Broome’s recent book, Terra Incognita: The True Story of How America Got Its Name (2001), in which he argues for the Amerike theory, is a very good read, but ultimately lacks the hard evidence to support the author’s claim. He presents a compelling inference at best. A longtime U.S. resident, Broome is originally from Bristol. He summarizes his argument this way in the Bristol Times: "Bristol merchants bought salt cod in Iceland until the King of Denmark stopped the trade in 1475. In 1479, four Bristol merchants received a royal charter to find another source of fish and trade. Not until 1960 did someone find bills of trading records indicating that Richard Amerike was involved in this business. Records show that in 1481, Amerike shipped a load of salt (for salting fish) to these men in Newfoundland and I believe the Bristol sailors named the area after the Bristol merchant they worked for."

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The current edition of Webster's New World College Dictionary (2004) admits the mystery that surrounds the origin of the name America, saying it derives (<) from "Americus Vespucius … but < ? Sp. Amerrique … used by early explorers for the newly discovered lands < ? AmInd." No definitive conclusions can be reached. Too many claims are, for lack of hard evidence, based on speculation. Theories about the true origin of the name are ultimately historical fictions. Yet behind these fictions lie compelling views of the New World. Taken together, they form a multicultural vision of its distinctive character. To hear Americus in the name; to hear the perpetual wind of the Amerrique Mountains; to hear the African in the Mayan iq' amaq'el; to hear the Scandinavian Ommerike, as well as Amteric, and the Algonquin Em-erika; to hear Saint Emeric of Hungary; to hear Amalrich, the Gothic lord of the work ethic, and the English official, Amerike — to hear such echoes in the name of our hemisphere is to hear the wishful projections of their proponents, as well as ourselves.

oh!!! Miguel!!!

Someone has a LOT of time on their hands.

My eyes are sore. Good read though.

Bravo Miguel, you really do a good research

Next search: How did a turd come to be called a turd? Gotta get to work here. Important things to do.

n 1596, a flush toilet was invented and built for Queen Elizabeth I by her Godson, Sir John Harrington.


So thats why we call it a John...simple essay, took 3 seconds to read and we come out better for it ^.^

i'm sorry. I know it is too long.
but i could not edited all the information in it is really important.

Miguel, is always good to be reminded of our true ancestry... and I bet there are a few that are surprised that "America" does not start and end within the confines of the United States borders.

Good research...very basic, and very much to the point...

I'm sorry, but I have to say this, one of my fav lines from the movie Canadian Bacon

"It's time we put the "America" back in North America!"

You know it Ayirah.
You are my homegirl
Take care.

a friednly reminder
from your lonely friend
love ya guys

What did that say, anybody have a summary? No way I have time.

It said that for the proud and historic name, "AMERICA" their is only one country on two continents that saw fit to incorporate and honor it as part of its title, The United States of America!!

history is very clear, unless disguised

This is America as far as I'm concerned !!

High school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history always comes in last. They consider it the most irrelevant of twenty-one school subjects; bo-o-o-oring is the adjective most often applied.

James Loewen spent two years at the Smithsonian Institute surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American History. What he found was an embarrassing amalgam of bland optimism, blind patriotism, and misinformation pure and simple, weighing in at an average of four-and-a-half pounds and 888 pages.

In response, he has written Lies My Teacher Told Me, in part a telling critique of existing books but, more importantly, a wonderful retelling of American history as it should - and could - be taught to American students. Beginning with pre-Columbian American history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, and the My Lai massacre, Loewen supplies the conflict, suspense, unresolved drama, and connection with current-day issues so appallingly missing from textbook accounts.

A treat to read and a serious critique of American education, Lies My Teacher Told Me is for anyone who has ever fallen asleep in history class.

Introduction to Lies My Teacher Told Me





"It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so." -- Felix Okoye


"Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade." -- James Loewen


"American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it." -- James Baldwin


"Concealment of the historical truth is a crime against the people." -- General Petro G.Grigorenko, samizdat letter to history journal, c. 1975, U.S.S.R.



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High school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history always comes in last. They consider it "the most irrelevant" of 21 school subjects, not applicable to life today. "Borr-r-ring" is the adjective they apply to it. When they can, they avoid it, even though most students get higher grades in history than in math, science, or English. Even when they are forced to take history, they repress it, so every year or two another study decries what our 17-year-olds don't know.

African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn it especially poorly. Students of color do only slightly worse than white students in mathematics. Pardoning my grammar, they do more worse in English and most worse in history. Something intriguing is going on here: surely history is not more difficult than trigonometry or Faulkner. I will argue later that high school history so alienates people of color that doing badly may be a sign of mental health! Students don't know they're alienated, only that they "don't like social studies" or "aren't any good at history." In college, most students of color give history departments a wide berth.

Many history teachers perceive the low morale in their classrooms. If they have lots of time, light family responsibilities, some resources, and a flexible principal, some teachers respond by abandoning the overstuffed textbooks and reinventing their American history courses. All too many teachers grow disheartened and settle for less. At least dimly aware that their students are not requiting their own love of history, they withdraw some of their energy from their courses. Gradually they settle for just staying ahead of their students in the books, teaching what will be on the test, and going through the motions.

College teachers in most disciplines are happy when their students have had more rather than less exposure to the subject before they reach college. Not in history. History professors in college routinely put down high school history courses. A colleague of mine calls his survey of American history "Iconoclasm I and II," because he sees his job as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school. In no other field does this happen. Mathematics professors, for instance, know that non-Euclidean geometry is rarely taught in high school, but they don't assume that Euclidean geometry was mistaught. English literature courses don't presume that "Romeo and Juliet" was misunderstood in high school. Indeed, a later chapter will show that history is the only field in which the more courses students take, the stupider they become.

Perhaps I do not need to convince you that American history is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we got to this point. Understanding our past is central to our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. We need to know our history, and according to C. Wright Mills, we know we do. Outside of school, Americans do show great interest in history. Historical novels often become bestsellers, whether by Gore Vidal (Lincoln, Burr) or Dana Fuller Ross (Idaho! Utah! Nebraska! Oregon! Missouri! and on! and on!). The National Museum of American History is one of the three big draws of the Smithsonian Institution. The Civil War series attracted new audiences to public television. Movies tied to history have fascinated us from Birth of a Nation through Gone With the Wind to Dances With Wolves and JFK.

Our situation is this: American history is full of fantastic and important stories. These stories have the power to spellbind audiences, even audiences of difficult seventh graders. These same stories show what America has been about and have direct relevance to our present society. American audiences, even young ones, need and want to know about their national past. Yet they sleep through the classes that present it.

What has gone wrong?

We begin to get a handle on that question by noting that textbooks dominate history teaching more than any other field. Students are right: the books are boring. The stories they tell are predictable because every problem is getting solved, if it has not been already. Textbooks exclude conflict or real suspense. They leave out anything that might reflect badly upon our national character. When they try for drama, they achieve only melodrama, because readers know that everything will turn out wonderful in the end. "Despite setbacks, the United States overcame these challenges," in the words of one of them. Most authors don't even try for melodrama. Instead, they write in a tone that if heard aloud might be described as "mumbling lecturer." No wonder students lose interest.

Textbooks almost never use the present to illuminate the past. They might ask students to learn about gender roles in the present, to prompt thinking about what women did and did not achieve in the suffrage movement or the more recent women's movement. They might ask students to do family budgets for a janitor and a stock broker, to prompt thinking about labor unions and social class in the past or present. They might, but they don't. The present is not a source of information for them. No wonder students find history "irrelevant" to their present lives.

Conversely, textbooks make no real use of the past to illuminate the present. The present seems not to be problematic to them. They portray history as a simple-minded morality play. "Be a good citizen" is the message they extract from the past for the present. "You have a proud heritage. Be all that you can be. After all, look at what the United States has done." While there is nothing wrong with optimism, it does become something of a burden for students of color, children of working class parents, girls who notice an absence of women who made history, or any group that has not already been outstandingly successful. The optimistic textbook approach denies any understanding of failure other than blaming the victim. No wonder children of color are alienated. Even for male children of affluent white families, bland optimism gets pretty boring after eight hundred pages.

These textbooks in American history stand in sharp contrast to the rest of our schooling. Why are they so bad? Nationalism is one of the culprits. Their contents are muddled by the conflicting desires to promote inquiry and indoctrinate blind patriotism. "Take a look in your history book, and you'll see why we should be proud," goes an anthem often sung by high school glee clubs, but we need not even take a look inside. The difference begins with their titles: The Great Republic, The American Way, Land of Promise, Rise of the American Nation. Such titles differ from all other textbooks students read in high school or college. Chemistry books are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not Rise of the Molecule. Even literature collections are likely to be titled Readings in American Literature. Not most history books. And you can tell these books from their covers, graced with American flags, eagles, and the Statue of Liberty.

Inside their glossy covers, American history books are full of information - overly full. These books are huge. My collection of a dozen of the most popular averages four and a half pounds in weight and 888 pages in length. No publisher wants to be shut out from an adoption because their book left out a detail of concern to an area or a group. Authors seem compelled to include a paragraph about every president, even Chester A. Arthur and Millard Fillmore. Then there are the review pages at the end of each chapter. Land of Promise, to take one example, enumerates 444 "Main Ideas" at the ends of its chapters. In addition, it lists literally thousands of "Skill Activities," "Key Terms," "Matching" items, "Fill in the Blanks," "Thinking Critically" questions, and "Review Identifications" as well as still more "Main Ideas" at the ends of each section within its chapters. At year's end, no student can remember 444 main ideas, not to mention 624 key terms and countless other "factoids," so students and teachers fall back on one main idea: to memorize the terms for the test following each chapter, then forget them to clear the synapses for the next chapter. No wonder high school graduates are notorious for forgetting in which century the Civil War was fought!

None of the facts is memorable, because they are presented as one damn thing after another. While they include most of the trees and all too many twigs, authors forget to give readers even a glimpse of what they might find memorable: the forests. Textbooks stifle meaning as they suppress causation. Therefore students exit them without developing the ability to think coherently about social life.

Even though the books are fat with detail, even though the courses are so busy they rarely reach 1960, our teachers and our textbooks still leave out what we need to know about the American past. Often the factoids are flatly wrong or unknowable. In sum, startling errors of omission and distortion mar American histories. This book is about how we are mistaught.

Errors in history textbooks do not often get corrected, partly because the history profession does not bother to review them. Occasionally outsiders do: Frances FitzGerald's 1979 study, America Revised, was a bestseller, but she made no impact on the industry. In a sarcastic passage her book pointed out how textbooks ignored or distorted the Spanish impact on Latin America and the colonial United States. "Text publishers may now be on the verge of rewriting history," she predicted, but she was wrong - the books have not changed.

History can be imagined as a pyramid. At its base are the millions of primary sources - the plantation records, city directories, speeches, songs, photographs, newspaper articles, diaries, and letters from the time. Based on these primary materials, historians write secondary works - books and articles on subjects ranging from deafness on Martha's Vineyard to Grant's tactics at Vicksburg. Historians produce hundreds of these works every year, many of them splendid. In theory, a few historians working individually or in teams then synthesize the secondary literature into tertiary works - textbooks covering all phases of United States history.

In practice, however, it doesn't work that way. Instead, history textbooks are clones of each other. The first thing editors do when recruiting new authors is to send them half a dozen examples of the competition. Often a textbook is not written by the authors whose names grace its cover, but by minions deep in the bowels of the publisher's offices. When historians do write them, they face snickers from their colleagues and deans - tinged with envy, but snickers nonetheless: "Why are you writing pedagogy instead of doing scholarship?"

The result is not happy for textbook scholarship. Many history textbooks do list up-to-the-minute secondary sources in bibliographies at the ends of chapters, but the contents of the chapters remain totally traditional - unaffected by the new research.

What would we think of a course in poetry in which students never read a poem? The editors' voice in literature textbooks may be no more interesting than in history, but at least that voice stills when the textbook presents original materials of literature. The universal processed voice of history textbook authors insulates students from the raw materials of history. Rarely do authors quote the speeches, songs, diaries, and letters that make the past come alive. Students do not need to be protected from this material. They can just as well read one paragraph from William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech as read two paragraphs about it, which is what American Adventures substitutes. No wonder students find the textbooks dull.

Textbooks also keep students in the dark about the nature of history. History is furious debate informed by evidence and reason, not just answers to be learned. Textbooks encourage students to believe that history is learning facts. "We have not avoided controversial issues" announces one set of textbook authors; "instead, we have tried to offer reasoned judgments" on them - thus removing the controversy! No wonder their text turns students off! Because textbooks employ this god-like voice, it never occurs to most students to question them. "In retrospect I ask myself, why didn't I think to ask for example who were the original inhabitants of the Americas, what was their life like, and how did it change when Columbus arrived," wrote a student of mine. "However, back then everything was presented as if it were the full picture," she continued, "so I never thought to doubt that it was." Tests supplied by the textbook publishers then tickle students' throats with multiple choice items to get them to regurgitate the factoids they "learned." No wonder students don't learn to think critically.

As a result of all this, high school graduates are hamstrung in their efforts to apply logic and information to controversial issues in our society. (I know because I encounter them the next year as college freshmen.) We've got to do better. Five sixths of all Americans never take a course in American history beyond high school. What our citizens "learn" there forms most of what they know of our past.

America's history merits remembering and understanding. This book includes ten chapters of amazing stories - some wonderful, some ghastly - in American history. Arranged in roughly chronological order, these chapters do not relate mere details but events and processes that had and have important consequences. Yet most textbooks leave out or distort them. I know because for several years I have been lugging around twelve textbooks, taking them seriously as works of history and ideology, studying what they say and don't say, and trying to figure out why. I chose the twelve to represent the range of books available for American history courses. Two, Discovering American History and The American Adventure, are "inquiry" textbooks, composed of maps, illustrations, and extracts from primary sources like diaries and laws, linked by narrative passages. These books are supposed to invite students to "do" history themselves. The American Way, Land of Promise, The United States -- A History of the Republic, American History, The American Tradition, are traditional high school narrative history textbooks. Three textbooks, American Adventures, Life and Liberty, and Challenge of Freedom, are intended for junior high students but are often used by "slow" senior high classes. Triumph of the American Nation and The American Pageant are also used on college campuses. These twelve have been my window into the world of what high school students carry home, read, memorize, and forget. In addition, I have spent many hours observing high school history classrooms in Mississippi, Vermont, and the Washington metropolitan area.

The eleventh chapter analyzes the process of textbook creation and adoption to explain what causes textbooks to be as bad as they are. I must confess an interest here: I once wrote a history textbook. Written with co-authors, Mississippi: Conflict and Change was the first revisionist state history textbook in America. Although Conflict and Change won the Lillian Smith Award for "best nonfiction about the South" in 1975, Mississippi rejected it for public school use, so the authors and three school systems sued the textbook board. In April, 1980, Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed et al. resulted in a sweeping victory based on the first and fourteenth amendments. The experience taught me first-hand more than most authors or publishers ever want to know about the textbook adoption process. I have also learned that not all the blame can be laid at the doorstep of the adoption agencies. Chapter twelve looks at the effects of using these textbooks. It shows that they actually make students stupid. An epilogue, "The Future Lies Ahead," suggests distortions and omissions that went undiscussed in earlier chapters and recommends ways that teachers can teach and students can learn American history more honestly - sort of an inoculation program against the next lies we are otherwise sure to encounter.