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

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

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?

EDITOR’S NOTE: CNN’s “Word of the Week” brings you the meaning behind the words in the news.

Illustration by Alberto Mier/CNN

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.

Library of Congress/Handout/Reuters

“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.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

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.”

Is dumping a Cuban person in Africa ‘deportation’?

To Silicon Valley, anything could be a ‘psyop’

What does it mean to put a ‘watermark’ on AI text?

What does Trump mean when he says the US is ‘low-keying’ negotiations with Iran?

What were the Covid ‘lockdowns,’ really?

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

在劳动节当天，唐纳德·特朗普总统在他的 Truth Social 账户上发布了一系列地图，将新墨西哥州重新标记为“新美国”。

特朗普第二个任期的第一天，就签署了一项行政命令，将墨西哥湾更名为“美洲湾”。上个月，在加拿大拒绝在特朗普发起的贸易战中让步后，特朗普又下令将安大略湖更名为“美洲湖”。安大略湖并非以加拿大安大略省命名，“安大略”甚至都不是加拿大的词汇，但美国地名委员会还是照做了，谷歌地图和苹果地图也顺应潮流，为美国用户提供了更名服务。

尽管民调显示，安大略湖更名比之前墨西哥湾更名更不受欢迎，但有理由认为总统的计划可能还没结束。最近，他又提议将大西洋或太平洋也命名为“美国”。

特朗普当前这番地域沙文主义言论背后，隐藏着一段更为古老的语言沙文主义历史。虽然“美国”作为美利坚合众国的简称，其历史之久远，甚至超过了当今世上任何人的年龄，但两者并非一直都是同义词。在美国建国之前以及之后大约一个世纪，“美国”（或“美洲”）更常用来指代如今被称为北美洲和南美洲的大陆。美国约占这片大陆总面积的四分之一，人口约占三分之一。那么，美洲某一地区的领导人究竟何时、又是如何将“美国”据为己有的呢？

编者按：CNN的“每周一词”栏目为您解读新闻中出现的词语背后的含义。

插图：Alberto Mier/CNN

“美洲”一词最早出现于1507年，由德国制图师马丁·瓦尔德泽米勒绘制在一幅世界地图上，他将其用于描绘当今南美洲的地图。瓦尔德泽米勒的地图首次将美洲描绘成一个被海洋隔开的独立大陆，其依据是16世纪早期探险家亚美利哥·韦斯普奇的记录。

这张地图附带一本名为《宇宙学导论》（Cosmographiae Introductio）的书，现在普遍认为该书作者是德国学者马蒂亚斯·林格曼（Matthias Ringmann）。书中错误地将美洲大陆的发现归功于韦斯普奇，并以他的名字命名了这片大陆，如下：“我认为没有任何理由反对将这片土地命名为亚美利哥之地（Amerige），即亚美利哥的土地，或美洲，以纪念其发现者——一位才华横溢的人亚美利哥。”

瓦尔德泽米勒后来似乎对这个名称有所动摇。或许是意识到其他欧洲人在韦斯普奇之前就已到达该地区，他便在后来的地图上弃用了这个词，在1513年的地图上用“Terra Incognita”（未知之地）代替了“美洲”，在1516年的版本中又用“Terra Nova”（新世界）代替了“新世界”。

但这个名字已经开始流行起来，1538 年制图师杰拉杜斯·墨卡托描绘了南北两块大陆，并将它们都标记为“美洲”，这个名字就此流传开来。

美国国会图书馆/供稿/路透社

即使在当时，“美洲”也已在人们的想象中占据重要地位。英国作家在诗歌和文学作品中经常使用这个词，将其作为渴望前往之地的隐喻，例如诗人约翰·邓恩在《挽歌十九：致即将入睡的情人》中，将探索爱人的身体比作欧洲的殖民扩张：“允许我游走的双手，让它们自由地游走，在前，在后，在间，在上，在下。哦，我的美洲！我新发现的土地，我的王国，只有一人守护时才最安全。”

在美洲独立战争之前，英国人将后来成为美国的这片土地称为“英属北美”、“殖民地”，有时也简称为“美洲”。1775年，乔治三世国王在议会发表讲话时，谈到了“美洲的现状”和“我在美洲的人民”。革命领袖们在起草决议时使用了“联合殖民地”、“美洲联合殖民地”和“北美联合殖民地”等名称，最终在《独立宣言》中确定使用“美利坚合众国”。

但即便如此，这个名称也远未确定。在1782年与法国签订的一项条约中，本杰明·富兰克林使用了“北美合众国”这个名称。

“从一开始，‘美国’就是一种选择，但它并不是指代这个国家的常用名词，”历史学家兼《如何隐藏一个帝国：大美利坚合众国的历史》一书的作者丹尼尔·伊默瓦尔说。

这个新国家的名字很拗口——九个音节，加上定冠词“the”则是十个——从一开始，那些关心国家未来的人们就考虑过其他替代方案。历史学家凯特琳·菲茨在一封电子邮件中写道，虽然“America”偶尔也被用来指代新生的美国，但当时的人们普遍认为这个词指的是整个西半球。缩写“USA”在1776年被用来标记通过检验的火药，但直到后来才开始广泛使用。

一些作家和知识分子给这座城市起了富有诗意和文学色彩的别名，例如以克里斯托弗·哥伦布的名字命名的“哥伦比亚”，尽管哥伦布从未踏足北美大陆。这个名字后来被赋予了美国的首都哥伦比亚特区，也出现在诸如《哥伦比亚》、《哥伦比亚万岁》和《哥伦比亚，海洋之珠》等爱国歌曲中。

但菲茨指出，就像“美国”一样，“哥伦比亚”一词理论上也可以指整个西半球。“在十八世纪末十九世纪初，无论身处波士顿还是波哥大，提到哥伦比亚就意味着庆祝摆脱欧洲的独立，”她写道。

意识到这些局限性，医生塞缪尔·米切尔于1803年提议将美国命名为弗雷顿（Fredon）。按照这种命名方式，弗雷多尼亚（Fredonia）将作为诗意和文学术语，而该国居民则被称为弗雷顿人（Fredonians），或更通俗地称为弗雷德人（Fredes）。但这个想法一经提出便被否决。其他一些拟定的国名，例如尤尼斯人（Unisian）、美国人（United Statesian）和美国（United Statian），也同样遭到了嘲笑。

直到美国从殖民地集合体转型为殖民帝国，其领导人才开始明确地将“美国”作为其国家的象征。伊默瓦尔指出，随着美国吞并波多黎各、关岛和菲律宾，并在1898年美西战争后控制古巴，美国领导人和民众意识到国家的性质发生了根本性的改变。他补充说，此前使用的“共和国”或“联邦”等词汇已不再适用。伊默瓦尔还提到，战后首任总统西奥多·罗斯福在演讲中经常使用“美国”一词，而且该词也取代了国歌中的“哥伦比亚”。

吉姆·沃森/法新社/盖蒂图片社

尽管美国领导人已经挪用了“美洲”一词，但许多拉丁美洲人仍然认为它指的是整个西半球。在西班牙语和葡萄牙语中，美国是“Estados Unidos”，其居民分别是“estadounidense”和“estadunidense”。在这两种语言中，“Americano”都可以指北美洲和南美洲的任何居民，尽管有时也随意地用来指美国人。

当美国领导人宣称对“美洲”拥有主权时，拉丁美洲的领导人和革命者则试图重新定义这个词，使其代表整个西半球。古巴作家何塞·马蒂在其1891年发表的散文《我们的美洲》（Nuestra America）中就使用了“美洲”一词，该文敦促拉丁美洲各国团结起来，共同对抗美国的扩张。而乌拉圭记者爱德华多·加莱亚诺在其1971年出版的《拉丁美洲被切开的血管》（Open Veins of Latin America）一书中，则直接批判了现代以美国为中心的“美洲”概念。

“一路走来，我们甚至失去了自称为美国人的权利，尽管海地人和古巴人作为新民族出现在历史上的时间，比‘五月花号’清教徒在普利茅斯海岸定居早了一个世纪，”加莱亚诺写道。“对当今世界而言，美国仅仅是美利坚合众国；我们居住的地区是一个次美洲，一个身份模糊的二等美国。”

因此，特朗普将墨西哥湾更名为美洲湾的举动，在一些拉丁美洲人中引发了更具颠覆性的解读，正如杰拉尔多·卡达瓦去年在《纽约客》杂志上所写的那样。“美洲湖”或“新美洲”这些名称是否暗示着整个美洲大陆都可以对它们提出主权要求？

前提是特朗普别先宣布整个北美大陆归他所有。本周，他在Truth Social网站上建议将新墨西哥州命名为“新美国”，随后又分享了一张虚构的北美地图，地图上涂满了星条旗。地图上所有可见的陆地——包括格陵兰岛、加拿大、墨西哥、中美洲、加勒比海地区以及欧洲岛国冰岛——都被标注为“美利坚合众国”。

将古巴人丢弃在非洲算是“驱逐出境”吗？

在硅谷看来，任何事情都可能是“心理战”。

给人工智能生成的文本添加“水印”意味着什么？

特朗普所说的美国正在“低调”与伊朗的谈判，是什么意思？

新冠疫情期间的“封锁”究竟是什么？