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Thomas Willing, delegate to the Continental Congress from Pennsylvania, the first president of the Bank of North America, and the first president of the First Bank of the United States [79] Henry Wisner, New York Continental Congress delegate who voted for the Declaration of Independence but left Philadelphia before the signing.
His "Blue-Backed Speller" books taught generations of American children how to spell and read. Webster's name has become synonymous with "dictionary" in the United States, especially the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary that was first published in 1828 as An American Dictionary of the English Language.
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.
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 14 February 2025. "American history" redirects here. For the history of the continents, see History of the Americas. Further information: Economic history of the United States Current territories of the United States after the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands was given independence in 1994 This ...
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 ]
He founded many civic organizations, including the Library Company, Philadelphia's first fire department, [9] and the University of Pennsylvania. [10] Franklin earned the title of "The First American" for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity .
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 Manifesto of the Province of Flanders (1790) was the first foreign derivation of the Declaration; [6]: 113 others include the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence (1811), the Liberian Declaration of Independence (1847), the declarations of secession by the Confederate States of America (1860–61), and the Vietnamese Proclamation of ...