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Germany Gives US 500 Year-Old Map That First Named America

Germany Gives US 500 Year-Old Map That First Named America
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Writer, layabout and all-around nogoodnik; web publisher; former Associate News Editor, The Huffington Post

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel officially handed over to the United States on Monday a 500-year-old map that was the first to tell the world of a new land that it called America.

Library of Congress historians say the world map, completed by German-born cleric and cartographer Martin Waldseemueller in 1507, is the first known document to use the name America, the first to depict the Western Hemisphere and the first to show separate Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The New World territories were named for Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.

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