German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday officially handed over to the United States the 500-year-old map that was the first to tell the world of a new land it called America. Library of Congress historians say the world map, completed by German-born cleric and cartographer Martin Waldseemueller in 1507, is the first known document to use the name America — named after Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci — the first to depict the Western Hemisphere and the first to show separate Pacific and Atlantic oceans. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/nation/4763661.html
