When did the United States claim the name ‘America’?

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — On Labor Day, President Donald Trump posted a series of maps to his Truth Social account with the state of New Mexico relabeled as “New America.”

On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Last month, after Canada refused to capitulate in a trade war he initiated, Trump ordered that Lake Ontario be renamed “Lake America.” That body of water wasn’t named for the Canadian province of Ontario and “Ontario” isn’t even a Canadian term, but the US Board on Geographic Names complied, and Google Maps and Apple Maps obligingly followed along for their US users.

Even as polls show that the renaming of Lake Ontario is even more unpopular than the previously unpopular renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, there’s reason to think the president might not be finished. Recently, he suggested that the Atlantic or Pacific oceans should also bear the name “America.”

Behind Trump’s current spree of geographic jingoism, there’s an older history of linguistic jingoism. Though “America” has been a shorthand for the United States of America longer than anyone around today has been alive, the two weren’t always synonymous. Before the US was established and about a century after, “America” — or “the Americas” — more commonly described the continental landmasses now known as North America and South America. The US takes up about a quarter of this collective landmass by area and accounts for about a third of its population. So when and how did the leaders of one part of the Americas claim “America” for themselves?

The word “America” was apparently first used in 1507 on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, who applied it to a rendering of present-day South America. Waldseemüller’s map was the first to depict the Americas as a distinct continent separated by an ocean, drawing on records from the early 16th century explorer Amerigo Vespucci.

The map was accompanied by a book called “Cosmographiae Introductio,” or “Introduction to Cosmography,” now believed to be written by the German scholar Matthias Ringmann. The text erroneously credited Vespucci with discovering the continent and named it for him as follows: “I see no reason why any one should justly object to calling this part Amerige, i.e., the land of Amerigo, or America, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability.”

Waldseemüller later seemed to have second thoughts about the name. Perhaps upon realizing that other Europeans had reached the area before Vespucci, he dropped the term from subsequent maps, replacing “America” with “Terra Incognita,” or “unknown land,” on a 1513 map, and with “Terra Nova,” or “new world,” on a 1516 version.

But the name had already started to take hold, and after the cartographer Gerardus Mercator depicted the northern and southern landmasses in 1538 and labeled both as “America,” it stuck.

“America” loomed large in the imagination even then. English writers used the term in poetry and literature as a metaphor for a place one longs to go, as the poet John Donne did in “Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed” when he compared the exploration of a lover’s body to European colonization: “Licence my roving hands, and let them go, Before, behind, between, above, below. O my America! my new-found-land, My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d.”

Before the American Revolution, the British referred to the land that would become the US as “British North America,” “the colonies” and sometimes simply “America.” King George III, in a 1775 speech before Parliament, spoke of “the present situation of America” and “my people in America.” Leaders of the revolution used names such as “the United Colonies,” “the United Colonies of America” and “the United Colonies of North America” in drafting resolutions, eventually settling on “united States of America” in the Declaration of Independence.

But even then, the name was far from fixed. In a 1782 treaty with France, Benjamin Franklin used the moniker “United States of North America.”

“From the start, ‘America’ is an option but it’s not the dominant way to refer to the country as a noun,” said Daniel Immerwahr, historian and author of “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.”

The new country’s name was clunky — nine syllables, or 10 including “the” — and from the beginning, those invested in the nation’s future considered other alternatives. Though “America” was occasionally used to describe the nascent US, people of the period largely understood the word to refer to the entire hemisphere, the historian Caitlin Fitz wrote in an email. The abbreviated “USA” was used in 1776 to label gunpowder that had passed inspections, but didn’t appear to come into wider use until later.

Some writers and intellectuals offered poetic and literary nicknames, including “Columbia,” after Christopher Columbus, even though he never set foot in North America. This was the name bestowed on the nation’s capital, the District of Columbia, and the name used in patriotic songs such as “Columbia,” “Hail Columbia,” and “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.”

But as with “America,” Fitz noted that “Columbia” could conceivably apply to the entire hemisphere. “To reference Columbia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was to celebrate independence from Europe, whether you were in Boston or Bogotá,” she wrote.

Recognizing these limitations, the doctor Samuel Mitchill proposed in 1803 that the US be called Fredon. Under this nomenclature, Fredonia would be the poetic and literary term, and denizens of the nation would be called Fredonians, or more colloquially, Fredes. But the idea was dead on arrival. Other would-be demonyms, such as Unisian, United Statesian and United Statian, were similarly ridiculed.

It wasn’t until the US transitioned from a collection of colonies into a colonial empire that its leaders assertively claimed “America” for their own nation. As the US annexed Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, and asserted control over Cuba as a result of the 1898 war with Spain, Immerwahr said US leaders and citizens understood the nature of the country to be fundamentally changed. Terms that had previously been in use, such as “the Republic” or “the Union,” no longer seemed sufficient, he added. Teddy Roosevelt, the first president after the war, used “America” often in speeches, Immerwahr said, and the word replaced “Columbia” in national anthems.

Even as US leaders have co-opted the term “America,” many Latin Americans continue to understand the term to mean the entire hemisphere. In Spanish and Portuguese, the US is “Estados Unidos” and its denizens are “estadounidense” and “estadunidense,” respectively. “Americano” in both languages can refer to any inhabitant of North and South America, though it is sometimes used casually to mean people from the US.

As US leaders laid claim to “America,” Latin American leaders and revolutionaries sought to reclaim the term for the hemisphere. The Cuban writer José Martí used it in the title of his 1891 essay “Nuestra America,” or “Our America,” which urged Latin American republics to unite in the face of US expansion. And in his 1971 book “Open Veins of Latin America,” the Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano directly critiqued the modern, US-centric understanding of the word.

“Along the way we have even lost the right to call ourselves Americans, although the Haitians and the Cubans appeared in history as new people a century before the Mayflower pilgrims settled on the Plymouth coast,” Galeano wrote. “For the world today, America is just the United States; the region we inhabit is a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity.”

As a result, Trump’s move to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America inspired more subversive readings among some Latin Americans, as Geraldo Cadava wrote last year in the New Yorker. Might the names “Lake America” or “New America” signal that the entire continent can stake a claim to them?

Only if Trump doesn’t claim the entire continent first. After suggesting on Truth Social this week that New Mexico should be called New America, he shared a separate, fictional map of North America colored in with the stars and stripes. All the visible land — encompassing Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, as well as the European island nation of Iceland — was labeled “United States of America.”

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