Kiera Meboe, age 11, of Lake Zurich, I11., for her question:
WHERE DID THE WORD AMERICA. COME FROM?
The land mass longer from north to south than any other land area on earth is called America. Stretching from 72 degrees North to 56 degrees South, America covers 128 degrees of latitude and is about 9,500 miles long. There are two great divisions: North America and South America with the narrow southern part of North America sometimes called Central America.
America is a vast area of land. Widest part of North `America is the 3,000 miles between British Columbia and Labrador while the widest part of South America is the 3,300¬mile stretch between Peru and Brazil. The slim Isthmus of Panama is the link between the two giant continents.
America gets its name from an Italian merchant¬explorer named Amerigo Vespucci.
In 1492 Christopher Columbus didn't realize that he had reached the Western Hemisphere. He was sure that the islands he explored were part of the Indies. He first set foot on the mainland of America on his third voyage in 1498.
Amerigo Vespucci made four voyages to the New World in 1497, 1499, 1501 and 9503. The first two were for Spain and the last two for Portugal. Vespucci's letters describing his so called discovery of the New World were not disputed by Columbus.
In 1507, as mapmakers started carefully charting the New World which was obviously not part of the Indies, someone suggested that the new continent, which was actually South America, be named America because Amerigo had discovered it. His name was accepted for South America and gradually came into use for North America as well.
Actually, Amerigo Vespucci did not take a leading part in the four voyages to the New World. He was only a pilot, or astronomer, as pilots were then called.
In 1505 Vespucci became a Spanish subject and from 1508 until his death in 1512 he was the chief pilot of Spain.
Vespucci was born in Florence, Italy, and became interested in astronomy when he was a young man. He was a merchant in Florence for a time and later in Seville and Cadiz, Spain. In 1495 he became connected with a firm which fitted out ships for long voyages.
The word America, by the way, is often used now to mean the United States of America.
Amerigo Vespucci, on his four voyages to the New World, explored the coasts of present day Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.
Actual credit for putting Amerigo's name on the vast new territory goes to a German geographer named Martin Waldseemuller. He and most of the mapmakers of his time thought that Vespucci had actually discovered the New World.