Free Republic

Drawn half a millennium ago and then swiftly forgotten, one map made us see the world as we know it today... and helped name America. But, as Toby Lester has discovered, the most powerful nation on earth also owes its name to a pun. Almost exactly 500 years ago, in 1507, Martin Waldseemuller and Matthias Ringmann, two obscure Germanic scholars based in the mountains of eastern France, made one of the boldest leaps in the history of geographical thought - and indeed in the larger history of ideas. Near the end of an otherwise plodding treatise titled Introduction to Cosmography,...

Researcher whose father found old maps posits 2000 BC voyage to west coast History books tell us that the first Chinese settlers to Canada arrived in Victoria about 150 years ago, but a U.S. researcher says she has solid evidence that they came earlier. Some 4,000 years earlier. That would be 3,500 years before 1492, when European explorer Christopher "Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Or 10,000 years after nomadic hunters from Eastern Siberia crossed the frozen Bering Strait during the Ice Age, a migration taken by modern scholars to account for North America's native population. Charlotte Harris Rees, a retired...

Ptolemy's Geography, America and Columbus: Ancient Greeks and why maybe America was discovered Michael Lahanas Aristotle: “there is a continuity between the parts about the pillars of Hercules and the parts about India, and that in this way the ocean is one.” [As] for the rest of the distance around the inhabited earth which has not been visited by us up to the present time (because of the fact that the navigators who sailed in opposite directions never met), it is not of very great extent, if we reckon from the parallel distances that have been traversed by us... For...

The first Briton sailed to the New World only seven years after Columbus, a long-lost royal letter reveals.Written by Henry VII 510 years ago, it suggests Bristol merchant William Weston headed for America in 1499.In his letter the king, right, instructs his Chancellor to suspend an injunction against Weston because "he will shortly with God's grace, pass and sail for to search and find if he can the new found land".Bristol University's Dr Evan Jones believes it was probably the earliest attempt to find the North-West Passage - the searoute around North America to the Pacific. He said: "Henry's...

The Chinese yuan is preparing to overtake the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, economist Nouriel Roubini has warned. Professor Roubini, of New York University's Stern business school, believes that while such a major change is some way off, the Chinese government is laying the ground for the yuan's ascendance. Known as "Dr Doom" for his negative stance, Prof Roubini argues that China is better placed than the US to provide a reserve currency for the 21st century because it has a large current account surplus, focused government and few of the economic worries the US faces. In a...

LONDON (Reuters) - The international financial crisis has given world leaders a unique opportunity to create a truly global society, Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown will say in a keynote foreign policy speech on Monday. In his annual speech at the Lord Mayor's Banquet, Brown -- who has spearheaded calls for the reform of international financial institutions -- will say Britain, the United States and Europe are key to forging a new world order. "The alliance between Britain and the U.S. -- and more broadly between Europe and the U.S. -- can and must provide leadership, not in order to...

MILWAUKEE - A big investigation at the Milwaukee Police Department. It appears someone drew a bullet on a picture of president-elect Barack Obama. A source tells TODAY'S TMJ4 the picture was discovered at the District 5 station during roll call. Police officers apparently pulled Wednesday's Journal Sentinel out of the garbage can. On the front page -- a picture of Barack Obama...with a bullet drawn near the president-elect's head. An internal investigation is now underway. Police also notified the U.S. Secret Service. However, there is no information this was actual a threat on Obama's life. Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn...

BRUSSELS: The head of the European Union (EU)'s executive body, the European Commission, on Wednesday congratulated Barack Obama on his victory in th e US presidential election and called on him to work with the EU to shape a "new deal for a new world". "This is a time for a renewed commitment between Europe and the US. I want to assure Senator Obama of the support of the European Commission and of my personal support in forging this renewed commitment to face together the many challenges ahead of us," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said. "We need a...

Columbus Day was originally celebrated Oct. 12, the day Christopher Columbus landed in the New World, but it is currently celebrated the second Monday in October. However, in some quarters, "celebrate" is not the appropriate term. Since about 1992, Columbus Day has been not only a celebration by Italian-Americans, but a day of protests by some - not all - Native Americans and by those who describe themselves as "multiculturalists." It is important to note who these "multiculturalists" are: people who think Western civilization is an evil culture. They want to portray the European/American culture as uniquely causing death and...

Land-ice Bridge, New Research Suggests -- Research by a Valparaiso University geography professor and his students on the creation of Kankakee Sand Islands of Northwest Indiana is lending support to evidence that the first humans to settle the Americas came from Europe, a discovery that overturns decades of classroom lessons that nomadic tribes from Asia crossed a Bering Strait land-ice bridge. Valparaiso is a member of the Council on Undergraduate Research. Dr. Ron Janke began studying the origins of the Kankakee Sand Islands – a series of hundreds of small, moon-shaped dunes that stretch from the southern tips of Lake...

Honk if you love Hispanics. A license plate that touts "Hispanics Discovered Florida" may soon join the 109 specialty tags drivers can choose from. The idea to celebrate the contributions of Hispanics came from National Hispanic Corporate Achievers, a Longwood group that sponsors minority job fairs. The plate would become a fundraising tool to support job and mentorship programs. Danny Ramos, the group's president, said the tag's message is about cultural pride for Florida's 3.6 million Hispanics -- even if not all of Latin American or Spanish descent identify with the term.

Possible discovered of America by Marco Polo before Colomb: account in VSD 'America - its West coast - would have been discovered by Marco Polo some 200 years before Christophe Colomb, according to a chart of the Library of the Congress in Washington examined since 1943 by the FBI and whose history is told in published review VSD Wednesday. This document, brought to the Library in 1933 by Marcian Rossi, an American naturalized citizen originating in Italy, “represents a boat beside a chart showing part of India, China, Japan, the Eastern Indies and North America”, indicates the report/ratio of...

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Archeologists have discovered the remains of two dozen children in Mexico apparently sacrificed by priests who slashed their throats and offered their blood to the rain god Tlaloc, researchers said Tuesday. The discovery at a former Toltec settlement indicates child sacrifice predated the Aztecs, an advanced civilization conquered by the Spain in the 16th century and was fairly commonplace. Dating to about AD 950 to 1150, the bones of the children were found on the outskirts of the Toltec archeological zone Tula, said Luis Gamboa, an archeologist for the National Institute of Anthropology and History. The...

Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center Washington, D.C. Thank you all. (Applause.) Please be seated -- si ntese. Buenas tardes. Gracias por la bienevenida. For those of you not from Texas, that means, good afternoon. (Laughter.) And thank you for the welcome. I'm honored to be back again with the men and women of the Hispanic Chamber. I appreciate your hospitality. I'm pleased to report the economy of the United States is strong, and one of the reasons why is because the entrepreneurial spirit of America is strong. And the entrepreneurial spirit of America is represented in this room....

Mummy’s amazing American maize The far-reaching influence of Spanish and Portuguese colonisers appears not to have extended to South American agriculture, scientists studying Andean mummies up to 1,400 years old have found. The University of Manchester researchers working with colleagues in Buenos Aires compared the DNA of ancient maize found in the funerary offerings of the mummy and at other sites in northwest Argentina with that grown in the same region today. Surprisingly, they found both ancient and modern samples of the crop were genetically almost identical indicating that modern European influence has not been as great as previously...

First Americans Arrived Recently, Settled Pacific Coast, DNA Study Says Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic News February 2, 2007 A study of the oldest known sample of human DNA in the Americas suggests that humans arrived in the New World relatively recently, around 15,000 years ago. The DNA was extracted from a 10,300-year-old tooth found in a cave on Prince of Wales Island off southern Alaska in 1996. The sample represents a previously unknown lineage for the people who first arrived in the Americas. The findings, published last week in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, shed light on how...

It's said that a picture is worth a thousand words. I only have room for about 700 here so let me be more concise. Just the other day, an editorial cartoon, set in the 1600s, depicted a rowboat full of Pilgrims coming ashore in the New World and encountering a group of Indians constructing a log wall to keep them out. Standing next to a boulder marked "Plymouth Rock" (in case you didn't get it) on the shoreline, one of the Indians, with his arms folded in an unwelcoming position and a disapproving frown on his face, blocked their way....

Ancient civilisations in Mexico developed a writing system as early as 2,000 years ago, new evidence suggests. The discovery in the state of Veracruz of a block inscribed with symbolic shapes has astounded anthropologists. Researchers tell Science magazine that they consider it to be the oldest example of writing in the New World. The inscriptions are thought to have been made by the Olmecs, an ancient pre-Columbian people known for creating large statues of heads. The finding suggests that New World people developed writing some 400 years before their contemporaries in the Western hemisphere. ...... "I think it could...

WILLIAMSBURG—If one becomes a British knight by rendering extraordinary service to the crown, it's hard to imagine anyone more deserving of a knighthood than Capt. John Smith. Yet Smith, a soldier, explorer and diplomat of the first order, a man some consider largely responsible for the success of the first permanent English settlement in the New World, was never knighted. That's because the importance of Smith's accomplishments was not recognized until after his death. But a group of local residents doesn't think little things like death or 400 years should keep Britain from recognizing the man who opened the New...

Critics also seem to have discounted the devastation of Europe in the previous century brought on by the Plague. Estimates are that one third of Europeans died as a result of this epidemic that scholars believe originated in the Gobi Desert in the early 1300s. The Black Death, as bubonic plague was known, had been brought to Europe from Asia. Much less fashionable than the moral indictment against Western nations for carrying disease to the New World is the counterclaim against Asia—and equally absurd. No small part of the denunciation of Columbus and his successors in our times is an...