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The earliest known use of the name "America" dates to 1505, when German poet Matthias Ringmann used it in a poem about the New World. [2] The word is a Latinized form of the first name of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who first proposed that the West Indies discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492 were part of a previously unknown landmass, rather than the eastern limit of Asia.
However, without a clarifying context, singular America in English commonly refers to the United States of America. [2] Historically, in the English-speaking world, the term America could refer to a single continent until the 1950s (as in Van Loon's Geography of 1937): According to historians Kären Wigen and Martin W. Lewis, [3]
The first documented use of the phrase "United States of America" is a letter from January 2, 1776. Stephen Moylan, a Continental Army aide to General George Washington, wrote to Joseph Reed, Washington's aide-de-camp, seeking to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the Revolutionary War effort.
United States of America—a federal republic in North America founded in 1776 and comprising 50 states (one of which, Hawaii, is not considered to be located in North America) and one federal district (the District of Columbia), with several outlying territories of varying affiliation; commonly referred to as the U.S. or simply America.
The Americas, sometimes collectively called America, [3] [4] [5] ... Citizens of the United States of America are normally referred to by the term estadounidense ...
Just 13% of eighth-graders were deemed “proficient” in history, based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an exam sometimes called “America’s report card.” Only 22% were ...
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Depending on what story you believe, America's most famous shopping day is either named after a financial crisis, a concerned police force or, according to some theories, 19th-century slave owners ...