"America"

Creating the Map That Named America

In 1507, Waldseemüller created two maps that reflected information the scholars at St. Dié had received about the discovery of a new continent in the Atlantic. He produced one map, a globe gores, intended to be cut out and pasted on a sphere to form a globe, and another map, a plane chart or flat representation of the earth, designed on 12 panels.

To aid in the understanding of these maps, the scholars of St. Dié created a small textbook called Cosmographiae Introductio, which they bound with a new edition of The Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, which Sandacourt had translated into Latin from a French copy Lud had obtained from Portugal. It was on these maps and in this text that the name America was first used.