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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.
Amerigo Vespucci. The naming of the Americas, or America, occurred shortly after Christopher Columbus 's death in 1506. The earliest known use of the name America dates to April 25, 1507, when it was applied to what is now known as South America. [ 1 ] It is generally accepted that the name derives from Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer ...
Contents. List of state and territory name etymologies of the United States. The fifty U.S. states, the District of Columbia, the five inhabited U.S. territories, and the U.S. Minor Outlying Islands have taken their names from a wide variety of languages. The names of 24 states derive from indigenous languages of the Americas and one from Hawaiian.
The history of the lands that became the United States began with the arrival of the first people in the Americas around 15,000 BC. Numerous indigenous cultures formed. After European colonization of North America began in the late 15th century, wars and epidemics decimated indigenous societies. Starting in 1585, the British Empire colonized ...
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.
The United States tests the first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site in New Mexico, July 16, 1945. The United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. The United States drops an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. Japanese Instrument of Surrender signed September 2, 1945.
History of the Americas. A true-color image of the Americas. Via Much of the information in the image comes from a single remote-sensing device— NASA 's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, flying over 700 km above the Earth on board the Terra satellite in 2001. The human history of the Americas is thought to begin with ...
This came to a head in 1860 and 1861, when the governments of the southern states proclaimed their secession from the country and formed the Confederate States of America. The American Civil War led to the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865 and the eventual readmission of the states to the United States Congress.