Few Americans are aware of the fact that their continent is named after the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Even fewer probably know that it was the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller (1470-1520) and Matthias Ringmann who are credited with the first recorded usage of the word America. In honor of Amerigo Vespucci they noted the name “America” for the newly discovered continent on the map “Universalis Cosmographia” in 1507.
In 2007, celebrating the 500-year-anniversary of the Waldseemüller Map, German Chancellor Angela Merkel passed the map on to the Library of Congress.
Now, however, a new map that was probably accidentally bound into another book, was found in an archive of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.
See a PDF of the map on the “Open Access Site” of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Listen to the complete story in German on BR
