How Amerigo Became America

Matthias Ringmann, a minor scholar and cartographer working in landlocked Eastern France, was responsible for putting America on the map, literally. History, however, has since forgotten him. “Vespucci, it turns out, had no direct role in the naming of America. He probably died without ever having seen or heard the name. A closer look at how the name was coined and first put on a map, in 1507, suggests that, in fact, the person responsible was a figure almost nobody’s heard of: a young Alsatian proofreader named Matthias Ringmann.”