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Columbus is traditionally (and indeed still) credited with the discovery of the Americas for a number of reasons, some dubious but others quite legitimate. First of all, we must qualify this discovery as discovery by Old World people. Clearly, the original "discovery" by the human species was some 40,000 years ago by the ancestors of the indigenous ...

This is highly speculative and subjective. After all, you put forth very valid contenders to hold the title, particularly the natives and the Vikings. But what I find most likely is that Columbus was the first to do it for profit. He (and those who paid him) were the first to capitalize on it. The Viking settlement didn't last all that long, and didn't ...

There is a mounting body of evidence that the continent (originally the area of Newfoundland) is actually named after Richard Amerike, of Bristol. Amerike was very involved in arranging and aiding the voyages of John Cabot (Giovanni Cabotto) to the new world. In fact, he bore a great deal of the cost of these expeditions, hoping to gain new trade business ...

Columbus is credited with discovering "America" (the "Indies," actually), because he SET OUT to do so. He had been trying to find a trade route west, to India, and thought that he had done so; i.e., that what later became the "Americas" was "India" to him, which is why he called the locals "Indians." Other peoples, the Vikings, the Chinese, and others ...

Eratosthene's calculations did turn out to be quite accurate. This was mostly a matter of luck though. He in fact had two major errors, that just happened to cancel each other out. It is also a fact that nobody is sure how big his unit of distance was, and it is only now after the fact that we can take one of the possibilities and say he was only 2% off. It ...

1. lit. A deck covering half the length of a ship or boat, fore or aft: in this sense still used in some small partly open craft. a. In old ships of war: A deck extending from the mainmast aftward, situated between the then smaller quarter-deck and the upper or main deck. After the two decks above the main deck were reduced to one, for which the name ...

According to I Am America. (And So?), a New York Times article by Wyatt Mason (published in 2007), the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller was "misled by a document known as the Soderini Letter, a narrative account said to have been by Vespucci but believed by modern scholars to have been forged by unscrupulous publishers." The Soderini Letter ...

Politics. An English fleet under John Cabot (actually Giovanni Caboto from Genoa) was the first (after the vikings) to land on mainland North America. After the American Revolution an Englishman wasn't favorite for "founder of our nation" national hero status and so Columbus legend appears in the early 1780s. He then really took off in chicago 100 years ...