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The meaning of the word American in the English language varies according to the historical, geographical, and political context in which it is used.American is derived from America, a term originally denoting all of the Americas (also called the Western Hemisphere), ultimately derived from the name of the Florentine explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512).
The Americas, sometimes collectively called America, [3] [4] [5] known initially as India Nova, [6] are a landmass comprising the totality of North America and South America. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ 8 ] When viewed as a single continent, the Americas or America is the 2nd largest continent right after Asia, and is the 3rd largest continent by population.
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.
When did America begin? Well, the United States became a country in 1776 and drafted a constitution in 1787. Seems simple enough, right?Yet many Americans remain unsatisfied with such an obvious ...
Federal Republic of Central America—formerly the United Provinces of Central America, a federal republic in Central America from 1823 to 1840 comprising the newly independent Spanish territories: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and (later) Los Altos. In 1838, the federation succumbed to civil war and dissolved.
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 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.
A while back, I went on a quest to figure out and—and live by—the original meaning of America’s Founding document: the Constitution. I bore a musket on the streets of New York. I renounced ...