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A New Theory on Mapping the New World By Guy Gugliotta Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 7, 2002; Page A07 In 1507, a group of scholars working in France produced an extraordinary map of the world, the first to put the still-recent discoveries of Columbus and others into a new continent separate from Asia, and to call that continent "America." With the Waldseemuller map, the New World was born. But there was something else. What would later come to be called South America and Central America were surprisingly well-shaped, not only on the east coast, where explorers had already...

Australians have started a campaign calling for Britain to hand over the first map ever to refer to the nation by the word "Australia", claiming that the document is country's "birth certificate". Captain Matthew Flinders Matthew Flinders, a British explorer and cartographer, drew the map in 1804 after becoming the first European to circumnavigate Australia. It was the first time a navigator used the name "Australia" to describe the continent, which had previously been referred to as New Holland or Terra Australis. Flinders, who hailed from Lincolnshire and spent several years charting the coast of Australia, wrote a book about...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has reoriented Germany away from Russia and toward the United States. Expanded economic ties are just one area of renewed cooperation. But could Germany get burned like the British did? The gift brought by a guest says a lot about his or her intentions. The love-sick romantic shows up with a dozen red roses. A box of Cohiba cigars is the classic gift between men in the West. Purebred horses and trained falcons, on the other hand, are the gift of choice among men in the Arab world. When German chancellors travel, their hosts usually receive...

Article Published July 24, 2003 America put on the map First document to name country makes its debut Story by Associated Press WASHINGTON — The earliest map using "America" to label part of the New World is going on display in America for the first time. The 496-year-old Martin Waldseemueller map, sometimes called America's birth certificate, will be on public view at the Library of Congress starting today. The library recently completed the $10 million purchase of the 12-panel map covering 36 square feet, the most expensive single item it has ever acquired. It was owned by Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg,...

The Oldest Map With The Word 'America' On It Was Just Found Between Two Geometry Books The Daily Telegraph Jul. 3, 2012, 7:44 PM A version of a 500-year-old world map that was the first to mention the name "America" has been discovered in a German university library. Experts did not even know about the existence of a fifth copy of the map by German cartographer Martin Waldseemueller until it showed up a few days ago, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich said. The discovery is much smaller and thought to have been made after the 1507 original version, which Germany...

There are two key characters in this story, John Cabot, a sailor, and Richard Amerike, a Bristol business man. Unfortunately, neither left much of themselves for us to see or read: no portrait, nothing in their own writing, no detailed contemporary record of themselves or their work. There is, however, enough recorded to know that they both achieved things of lasting importance; one very directly, the other less obviously but in its way even more portentous: Cabot awakened the world to the existence of the North American continent, and Amerike gave his name and badge to what, in time, was...

There isn't a Man in the Moon, pigeons won't stand still if you put a pinch of salt on their tails and Christopher Columbus didn't discover America. How many childhood certainties have proved false over the years?. Now Peter Macdonald, writing for the BBC, has claimed that America was named not after a Florentine navigator called Amerigo Vespucci but after an Anglicised Welshman called Richard Amerike. Although North America was visited by Leif Ericsson, or "Leif the Lucky", nearly 1 000 years before the birth of Christ, Europeans were generally unaware of its existence until the Genoese Giovanni Caboto, who...

America was named after a British Customs officer and not, as historians have long believed, the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who participated in Christopher Columbus's voyages to the New World. Martin Waldseemuller, whose 1507 map of the world was the first to show the so-called Unknown Territory as a separate continent, has long been credited with naming the new land after the Florentine nobleman. But according to a new book by Rodney Broome - Amerike, The Briton Who Gave America its Name - the country was named in 1496, years before Vespucci's voyage, by John Cabot - the Bristol-based explorer...

Analysis of ancient cadavers recovered at a famous archaeological site confirm the existence of a sophisticated culture of butchering and carving human remains, according to a team of scientists from the Natural History Museum, University College London, and a number of Spanish universities.

A replica of the French navy frigate Hermione that brought General Lafayette to America to rally rebels fighting Britain in the US war of independence, will set sail for the United States again on Saturday, 235 years after the original crossing.

/ Mount Baekdu is set to explode according to experts and if that isn't shocking enough, keep in mind that Baekdu is responsible for one of the worst eruptions in the last 2,000 years. Professor Yoon Seong-hyo from Pusan National University urged officials to keep a close eye on the highest peak of the Korean peninsula. Baekdu is an active volcano located on the border between North Korea and China. The caldera or cauldron of the Baekdu volcano, which is sometimes called Paektu or Changbai, has risen a centimetre since July, according to new research. "The mountains's height has risen...

Archaeologists working at the Rising Whale site at Cape Espenberg, Alaska, have discovered several artifacts that were imported from East Asia. Bronze artifacts discovered in a 1,000-year-old house in Alaska suggest trade was occurring between East Asia and the New World centuries before the voyages of Columbus.

Earth has seen its share of catastrophes, the worst being the “big five” mass extinctions scientists traditionally talk about. Now, paleontologists are arguing that a sixth extinction, 260 million years ago, at the end of a geological age called the Capitanian, deserves to be a member of the exclusive club. In a new study, they offer evidence for a massive die-off in shallow, cool waters in what is now Norway. That finding, combined with previous evidence of extinctions in tropical waters, means that the Capitanian was a global catastrophe. “It’s the first time we can say this is a true...

Researchers working in Kenya's archaeologically prolific Lake Turkana region claim to have uncovered a set of 3.3-million-year-old stone tools. That's 700,000 years older than the previous record, and predates evidence for the evolutionary origins of the genus Homo by half a million years. Above: A satellite image of Lake Turkana, where the stone tools – and many other artifacts and fossils of human ancestors – have been recovered NPR's Chris Joyce reports on the findings of Stony Brook University archaeologist Sonia Harmand and her colleagues, which were announced Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in San Francisco:...

Since October 2014, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has regularly referred to the concept of a "Mastermind" (ust akil, "supra-intellect," in Turkish) that, he says, is plotting against Turkey. This concept has been applauded by the Islamist pro-AKP media. Erdogan's December 12, 2014 speech, which focused on this "mastermind" concept, inspired the production of a two-hour "documentary" by one of the leading Turkish television channels, the pro-AKP A Haber. The film, titled "The Mastermind," first aired on March 15, 2015 and has been broadcast repeatedly since then; in addition, the Turkish Islamist pro-AKP media are circulating the film on their...

The SS City of Cairo was torpedoed 772km south of St Helena by a German U-boat and sank to 5,150m. The 100 tonnes of coins, recovered in the deepest salvage operation in history, belonged to HM Treasury. The silver rupees had been called in by London to help fund the war effort. But they never made it. The steamship's tall plume of smoke was spotted by a U-boat on 6 November 1942 and it was torpedoed. Ten minutes later, amid efforts to abandon ship, the City of Cairo was hit with a second torpedo which sealed its fate. The ship...

LECCE, Italy — All Luciano Faggiano wanted when he purchased the seemingly unremarkable building at 56 Via Ascanio Grandi was to open a trattoria. He could run the trattoria on the ground floor and live upstairs with his wife and youngest son. The only problem was the toilet. Sewage kept backing up. So Mr. Faggiano enlisted his two older sons to help him dig a trench and investigate the underground sewage pipe. He predicted the job would take about a week, and soon after he would open his trattoria. If only. “We found underground corridors and other rooms, so we...

A photograph that has posed a Civil War mystery, puzzling historians for three decades, appears to be a long-surviving hoax. The mysterious photograph of what appeared to be a far older photo — showing a figure in a coat and hat and the blurred image of a warship — surfaced in 1986. Some historians believed it might be a photo of the CSS Georgia, a Confederate ironclad that sank 150 years ago in Georgia as Union troops captured Savannah.

Winston Churchill Day Share By Hillsdale College Apr 8, 2015 5:57:00 PM As the publisher of the Official Biography of Winston Churchill, Hillsdale College plans to host a celebration on April 9 in honor of national Winston Churchill Day!To mark the anniversary of Churchill's honorary US citizenship, Hillsdale College and RosettaBooks are offering free Kindle downloads of all 8 volumes of the official biography on April 9-11 – An $80 value, absolutely free!Download your free copies here:  Youth, 1874–1900 (Volume I)Young Statesman, 1901–1914 (Volume II)The Challenge of War, 1914–1916 (Volume III)World in Torment, 1916–1922 (Volume IV)The Prophet of Truth, 1922–1939...

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has released a video showing jihadists smashing, bulldozing and blowing up 3,000-year-old artefacts in the ancient Assyrian capital of Nimrud. The video depicting the destruction at the Iraqi site shows jihadists using sledgehammers and drills to smash huge alabaster reliefs and a bulldozer to bring down walls. The jihadists are then shown placing barrels apparently filled with explosives before blowing up three separate areas of the site, one of Iraq's greatest archaeological treasures.