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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.
By 1807, he began work on a more extensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language, which took twenty-six years to complete. To evaluate the etymology of words, Webster learned twenty-eight languages, including Old English , Gothic, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, Welsh, Russian, Hebrew, Aramaic ...
Richard Allen, African-American bishop, founder of the Free African Society and the African Methodist Episcopal Church [90] Crispus Attucks, believed to be of Native American and African descent, was the first of five persons killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770, and thus the first to die in the American Revolution. [91]
A portrait of Franklin c. 1746–1750, [Note 3] by Robert Feke widely believed to be the earliest known painting of Franklin [69] [70] Join, or Die, a 1754 political cartoon by Franklin, urged the colonies to join the Seven Years' War in the French and Indian War; the cartoon was later resurrected, serving as an iconic symbol in support of the ...
Before Paine's arrival in America, sixteen magazines had been founded in the colonies and ultimately failed, each featuring substantial content and reprints from England. In late 1774, Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken announced his plan to create what he called an "American Magazine" with content derived from the colonies. [ 32 ]
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.
In 1801, he authorized a U.S. Navy fleet under Commodore Richard Dale to make a show of force in the Mediterranean, the first American naval squadron to cross the Atlantic. [179] Following the fleet's first engagement, he successfully asked Congress for a declaration of war. [179] The "First Barbary War" was the first foreign war fought by the ...
It is the oldest dictionary publisher in the United States. [1] In 1831, George and Charles Merriam founded the company as G & C Merriam Co. in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1843, after Noah Webster died, the company bought the rights to An American Dictionary of the English Language from Webster's estate. All Merriam-Webster dictionaries ...