U.S. leaders historically adopted the name "America" for the United States
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The term "America" originated on a 1507 map and was later applied to the United States as the nation expanded, while Latin American countries continue to use the word for the entire hemisphere.
President Donald Trump recently posted maps that rename New Mexico as "New America" and has previously renamed the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario with the "America" label. The moves have sparked debate over the historical use of the name.
The word "America" first appeared on a 1507 world map by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, who named the newly identified continent after explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Waldseemüller later removed the name from his maps, but the label persisted after Gerardus Mercator used it for both North and South America in 1538.
Before the American Revolution, British officials referred to the future United States as "British North America" or simply "the colonies." The 1776 Declaration of Independence adopted the phrase "United States of America," though other terms such as "United States of North America" were also used in diplomatic documents.
Historian Daniel Immerwahr noted that the United States only began to claim "America" as its exclusive identifier after it expanded into a colonial empire following the 1898 Spanish-American War. President Theodore Roosevelt frequently used the term in speeches, and it eventually replaced earlier poetic names like "Columbia" in national symbols.
In many Latin American languages, "Americano" still denotes any inhabitant of the Americas, while the United States is called "Estados Unidos" and its citizens are referred to as "estadounidense." Latin American intellectuals such as José Martí and Eduardo Galeano have criticized the U.S. appropriation of the term, arguing it marginalizes the broader hemisphere.
"From the start, ‘America’ is an option but it’s not the dominant way to refer to the country as a noun," said historian Daniel Immerwahr.
The ongoing renaming efforts by the Trump administration have revived discussions about the historical and cultural implications of using "America" to refer solely to the United States.