Amerigo The Naming Of America

Author : Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 030751255X
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Amerigo written by Felipe Fernández-Armesto and published by Random House. This book was released on 2008-12-18 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1507, European cartographers were struggling to redraw their maps of the world and to name the newly found lands of the Western Hemisphere. The name they settled on: America, after Amerigo Vespucci, an obscure Florentine explorer. In Amerigo, the award-winning scholar Felipe Fernández-Armesto answers the question “What’s in a name?” by delivering a rousing flesh-and-blood narrative of the life and times of Amerigo Vespucci. Here we meet Amerigo as he really was: a sometime slaver and small-time jewel trader; a contemporary, confidant, and rival of Columbus; an amateur sorcerer who attained fame and honor by dint of a series of disastrous failures and equally grand self-reinventions. Filled with well-informed insights and amazing anecdotes, this magisterial and compulsively readable account sweeps readers from Medicean Florence to the Sevillian court of Ferdinand and Isabella, then across the Atlantic of Columbus to the brave New World where fortune favored the bold. Amerigo Vespucci emerges from these pages as an irresistible avatar for the age of exploration–and as a man of genuine achievement as a voyager and chronicler of discovery. A product of the Florentine Renaissance, Amerigo in many ways was like his native Florence at the turn of the sixteenth century: fast-paced, flashy, competitive, acquisitive, and violent. His ability to sell himself–evident now, 500 years later, as an entire hemisphere that he did not “discover” bears his name–was legendary. But as Fernández-Armesto ably demonstrates, there was indeed some fire to go with all the smoke: In addition to being a relentless salesman and possibly a ruthless appropriator of other people’s efforts, Amerigo was foremost a person of unique abilities, courage, and cunning. And now, in Amerigo, this mercurial and elusive figure finally has a biography to do full justice to both the man and his remarkable era. “A dazzling new biography . . . an elegant tale.” –Publishers Weekly (starred review) “An outstanding historian of Atlantic exploration, Fernández-Armesto delves into the oddities of cultural transmission that attached the name America to the continents discovered in the 1490s. Most know that it honors Amerigo Vespucci, whom the author introduces as an amazing Renaissance character independent of his name’s fame–and does Fernández-Armesto ever deliver.” –Booklist (starred review)

Author : Martin Waldseemüller
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 146 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Naming of America written by Martin Waldseemüller and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new book features a facsimile of the 1507 World Map by Martin Waldseemuller - the first map ever to display the name America - and tells the fascinating story behind its creation in 16th-century France and rediscovery 300 years later in the library of Wolfegg Castle, Germany, in 1901. It also includes a completely new translation and commentary to Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann's seminal cartographic text, the Cosmographiae Introductio, which originally accompanied the World Map. John Hessler considers answers to some of the key questions raised by the map's representation of the New World, including "How was it possible for a small group of cartographers to have produced a view of the world so radical for its time and so close to the one we recognize today?"; and "What evidence did they possess to show the existence of the Pacific Ocean when neither Vasco Nunez de Balboa nor Ferdinand Magellan had yet reached it'." There are no easy answers, and yet, as this fascinating book reveals, this group of unknowns created some of the most important maps in the history of cartography, and afford us a glimpse into an age when accepted scientific and geographic principles fell away, spawning the birth of modernity.

Author : Roscoe R. Miller
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Amerigo & the Naming of America written by Roscoe R. Miller and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Frederick A. Ober
Publisher : Blurb
ISBN 13 : 9781714130054
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Amerigo Vespucci and the Naming of America written by Frederick A. Ober and published by Blurb. This book was released on 2019-10-23 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The continent of "America" is named not after Christopher Columbus, but rather his contemporary navigator and explorer, Amerigo Vespucci-and this book tells his story, and how his name came to be given to the New World. Drawing heavily upon Vespucci's own writings, this work provides a little-known insight into the background, voyages, discoveries and life of the Florence-born explorer, who ended his life as the "pilot navigator" of Spain. In that position-the most senior post in charge of mapping out the new world-Vespucci's genius was acknowledged across Europe, and the accuracy of his maps superseded all others. Vespucci not only mapped out vast areas of the New World, but also personally undertook at least four major voyages of discovery himself, working alternatively for the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. Never taking any personal credit or wealth, Vespucci's low-key approach meant that he was overshadowed by the more outgoing explorers of his age-men such as Columbus-yet, as his papers show, he knew them all and provided much valuable knowledge to all those who asked him. Finally, in a move which would have been as much a surprise to himself as anyone else, the continents of both North and South America were named after him-because of a strange quirk of history, described in full in this book.

Author : Germán Arciniegas
Publisher : Villegas Asociados
ISBN 13 : 9789588160184
Total Pages : 520 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Why America? written by Germán Arciniegas and published by Villegas Asociados. This book was released on 2002 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the fact that the Americas were named after Florentine Amérigo Vespucci, he has been one of the least researched characters in American history. In this profile, Vespucci is revealed as a smart, trustworthy businessman and explorer, worthy of this new world's honor.

Author : Amerigo Vespucci
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and Other Documents Illustrating His Career written by Amerigo Vespucci and published by . This book was released on 1894 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Jules Marcou
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 8 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Origin of the Name America written by Jules Marcou and published by . This book was released on 1875 with total page 8 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Amerigo Vespucci
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 136 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Letter to Piero Soderini, Gonfaloniere written by Amerigo Vespucci and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Toby Lester
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1439160422
Total Pages : 726 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Fourth Part of the World written by Toby Lester and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-11-03 with total page 726 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Old maps lead you to strange and unexpected places, and none does so more ineluctably than the subject of this book: the giant, beguiling Waldseemüller world map of 1507.” So begins this remarkable story of the map that gave America its name. For millennia Europeans believed that the world consisted of three parts: Europe, Africa, and Asia. They drew the three continents in countless shapes and sizes on their maps, but occasionally they hinted at the existence of a "fourth part of the world," a mysterious, inaccessible place, separated from the rest by a vast expanse of ocean. It was a land of myth—until 1507, that is, when Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure scholars working in the mountains of eastern France, made it real. Columbus had died the year before convinced that he had sailed to Asia, but Waldseemüller and Ringmann, after reading about the Atlantic discoveries of Columbus’s contemporary Amerigo Vespucci, came to a startling conclusion: Vespucci had reached the fourth part of the world. To celebrate his achievement, Waldseemüller and Ringmann printed a huge map, for the first time showing the New World surrounded by water and distinct from Asia, and in Vespucci’s honor they gave this New World a name: America. The Fourth Part of the World is the story behind that map, a thrilling saga of geographical and intellectual exploration, full of outsize thinkers and voyages. Taking a kaleidoscopic approach, Toby Lester traces the origins of our modern worldview. His narrative sweeps across continents and centuries, zeroing in on different portions of the map to reveal strands of ancient legend, Biblical prophecy, classical learning, medieval exploration, imperial ambitions, and more. In Lester’s telling the map comes alive: Marco Polo and the early Christian missionaries trek across Central Asia and China; Europe’s early humanists travel to monastic libraries to recover ancient texts; Portuguese merchants round up the first West African slaves; Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci make their epic voyages of discovery; and finally, vitally, Nicholas Copernicus makes an appearance, deducing from the new geography shown on the Waldseemüller map that the earth could not lie at the center of the cosmos. The map literally altered humanity’s worldview. One thousand copies of the map were printed, yet only one remains. Discovered accidentally in 1901 in the library of a German castle it was bought in 2003 for the unprecedented sum of $10 million by the Library of Congress, where it is now on permanent public display. Lavishly illustrated with rare maps and diagrams, The Fourth Part of the World is the story of that map: the dazzling story of the geographical and intellectual journeys that have helped us decipher our world.

Author : Pierpont Morgan Library
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 92 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book America from Amerigo Vespucci to the Louisiana Purchase written by Pierpont Morgan Library and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: