Controversy in the Discovery of America and the Subsequent Founding of the United States of America.

This US History is an incredibly large undertaking, but I will start with an Introduction about the earliest beginnings of the USA; namely, the discovery of the American Continents, on which our country's European and African ancestors settled and met the Native Americans. My detailing of the Native Americans and First Nations before and after European First Contact are contained in the following pages, to which I will add each new installment (as I do them) about the Indigenous Peoples and their inteaction with those who became the citizens of the USA. Did you know that a portion the Cherokee Nation at one time owned Black slaves? There is much diversity in US History, and of course not actions resulting fomr it have been good.

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Other American Pages in the US History Series:

• Native American Nations (25-Part Series)

• National Pow Wow of the United States
• Native Americans in Western Novels

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• What is the History of USA?

• US History - The 13 Colonies

• US History - The American Revolution

• US History - Foundation Documents and Flags

• US HIstory - The New Nation: 1799 to 1850.

• US History: 1851 - 1900

• US History in The 20th Century: 1901 - 1920

• US History: COLD WAR INTRIGUE 1950 - 1960

• US History: John F. Kennedy and the Marilyn Monroe Murder

• US History: The Great Society 1963 - 1968

In April, 2007, German Chancellor Angela Merkel officially presented the United States of America with a copy of a 500-year-old global map form 1507 AD that was the first to show the world the New World called America.

Library of Congress historians stated that the world map, completed by a German-born cleric and cartographer, Martin Waldseemueller, is the first known document to employ the name America. It seems the first to depict the Western Hemisphere as such and the first to show separate oceans in the Pacific and Atlantic. The New World territories were named for Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. We've heard before, in grammar school, that an Americus Vespucious discovered America, not Christopher Columbus. This old map seems to clinch the deal.

The old map, printed the year after the death of Christopher Columbus, invoked the written accounts by Italian merchant Amerigo Vespucci, who deduced that land to the west of Europe may be separate and not truly the eastern coast of Asia, as Columbus believed. Waldseemueller seemed to pay homage to Vespucci by adapting his first name to label the new land.

The Waldseemueller global gore map is black print on paper that is 15 inches wide and less than 10 inches high, so it is small.

The controversy is that the word "America," placed over a small sliver of land marked a major paradigm shift in the European world view. The map maker changed his mind and crossed out, or left off of new copies, the name America.

The map sectioned into a series of shapes called gores, which allow it to be formed into a sphere the size of a softball. This showed that the world is not flat! For the first time, the map projects the Earth in a full 360 degrees of latitude.

James Ford Bell, of the University of Minnesota's James Ford Bell Library, purchased the map in 1954. He did not disclose what he paid, but based on a similar document auctioned in 2005, the Waldseemueller map is valued at over $1 million. Other sources states that map is worth over $10,000,000.

In December, 2007 the ancient map went on permanent display at the Library of Congress. Now the world can see the beginnings of America, which is also the beginnings of the United States, Canada, and the other nations of the Western Hemisphere. It also marks the European First Contact with Native Americans and First Nations, as well as Indigenous Peoples in the southern half of the Western Hemisphere.

• Is this really why he changed mind?
• Moreover, how did he draw South America so accurately? The shape of South America is correct and the width at key points is within 70 miles of spot on.
• Why did he put a huge ocean west of America long before it was discovered? Vasco Nunez de Balboa did not reach the Pacific until 1513, and Ferdinand Magellan did not round the southern tip of South America until 1520. Where did the mapmaker get his information?

The old map is built in 12 sheets, purchased from German Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg for $10 million in 2003. They are mounted in a 6-foot by 9.5-foot (1.85 meter by 2.95 meter) display case machined from a single block of aluminum. This is an impressive beginning and an impressive record of the discovery a New World.

Another copy of this ancient map was previously stolen along with several other valuable old maps from Spain, from Madrid's national library. The theft of the maps caused a national outrage that cost the head of the national library, Rosa Regàs, her job amid accusations that the government was not doing enough to protect its national heritage. César Goméz Rivero, a Uruguayan-born Spanish citizen in South America, sent his lawyer to negotiate immunity in exchange for returning eight of the 19 maps he still had in his possession. Truly, a controversy surrounding the Waldseemueller map and its copies, if still extant, is the center of intrigue surrounding the country of America and her beginnings in the New World.