AMERICA.

America is one of the greatest political-philosophical symbols in world history. It is equal in importance to Athens representing philosophy, Jerusalem representing biblical religion, Rome representing both its pagan and Catholic manifestations, and Mecca representing the home of Islam. But what is meant by America? When people refer to it are they signifying the precise measurements of the landmass that incorporates the territory from Canada's Ellesmere Island above the magnetic pole in the north to Tierra del Fuego off the tip of Argentina in the south? Do they want to call attention to the area that in the year 2000 was home to forty-five countries and territories with 900 million people, where dozens of languages are spoken, and where can be found people of almost every ethnic origin, religion, and social and economic class? It is unlikely that they are referring to these basic facts. Facts and figures do not begin to touch what America represents symbolically. Throughout its history, America has stood for two different, almost opposite, things. First, it stands for natural man, the Indians, who are said to represent the world's beginning. Second, it stands for the United States, the great political experiment based on natural rights, which has evoked inspiration and fear and envy. It inspires such strong feelings because the United States is often perceived as the world's future. America thus represents both the world's origins and its endpoint. This essay attempts to shed light on the "idea" of America by tracing its genealogy from America's discovery by Western man until the twenty-first century.

The Indians

From 1492 until the American Revolution, and in some sense continuing into the twenty-first century, America evoked the image of Indians. Archaeologists believe that the American continent was first inhabited by human beings who walked from Siberia to Alaska over the Bering Strait on a frozen land bridge about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. However, what the Indians represent in the global imagination is a fairly static image informed by media portrayals that starkly depict the Indians either as barbaric savages or as noble stewards of the land living in harmony with nature. These images have a long genealogy.

First attempts to explain America.

Although the Americas were undoubtedly visited by the Vikings around the year 1000, the "discovery" of America is attributed to Christopher Columbus, whose voyage to America in 1492 captured the European imagination. Ironically, to Columbus's dying day, he insisted that what he had found was part of Asia. Thus, perceptions of America have been mistaken from the very beginning. (Sixteenth-century mapmakers, recognizing Columbus's mistake, named the New World not after him, but after Amerigo Vespucci—hence the name America —whom they credited as the first to realize that the New World was its own continent.)

The Indians of America were misrepresented from the very beginning and ever since their discovery. Not only did Columbus believe America was someplace else—hence the name Indians—but his description of its inhabitants was fanciful, too. He claimed to discover cannibals, Cyclopes, Amazons, Sirens, dog-faced peoples, people with no hair, and people with tails. These bizarre claims were suggested to him by centuries of fanciful tales passed on through medieval times by supposedly reliable authorities. In short, Columbus claimed to find what he was looking for. This began a pattern of preformed opinions dictating what is supposedly found in America. He saw the land as potential wealth and its people as possible converts or slaves. For him, as for most of the early conquistadores and missionaries, the Indians had no independent status, no integrity of their own. They were just to be used.

The Spanish Renaissance philosophers who first reflected on the discovery of the Indians did little better in appreciating them. Two positions dominated the Spanish debates. The first position, arguing that the Indians did not possess the faculty of reason, went so far as to argue that the Indians were the concrete embodiment of Aristotle's natural slave. According to this view, the Indians could be incorporated into Europe's traditional Christian-Aristotelian worldview but only in its lowest place. God created the Indians as naturally inferior, the argument went, so it was just and right that the Spanish subjugate them. The second view saw the Indians as rational—as evidenced by their languages, economics, and politics—but as underdeveloped and needing Spanish tutelage. Because they were human, the Indians had to be governed by consent—not their formal, explicit consent, but rather what they would consent to after they came to understand the natural law, which of course the Spanish thought they possessed. In short, because the Spanish were so confident in their worldview, it never occurred to them that they might be incorrect or possess only a partial truth. Their cultural confidence led them to reject the Americans as barbaric.

America as the home of natural man.

In 1580 the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) began a path-breaking new way of thinking about the Indians. A skeptic and a keen observer of human diversity, Montaigne argued that "each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in." Unlike the Spanish, Montaigne doubts the standards of his own place and time. In his famous essay "Of Cannibals" (Essays ) he describes Indian society as the best society that ever was, real or imagined, because they are "still very close to their original naturalness" and thus live in a "state of purity" according to "les loix naturelles. " He claims their society, held together with "little artifice and human solder," is as pure and natural as a society can be. His account claims that these Indians do fight and eat their captives, but he says they do so not for economic gain but as a kind of aristocratic struggle for mastery. He describes their warfare as "wholly noble" and "as excusable and beautiful as this human disease can be." This is the origin of the image of the noble savage.

Montaigne knows, however, that his account of the Indians' tranquility and bliss is fictitious. He concedes the barbarous horror of some of their actions, writing, "I am not sorry that we notice the barbarous horror of [their] acts, but I am heartily sorry that, judging their faults rightly, we should be so blind to our own." Here Montaigne reveals his true intentions in describing the Indians: he uses them as an image with which to expose the horrors and cruelty of his own world. This usage of the Indians as a countercultural marker was to become the norm. While Montaigne's account of the Indians is in the end neither anthropologically accurate nor fully desirable, he is the first to misrepresent the Indians in a positive fashion.

After Montaigne, no major philosopher in Europe doubted the Indians' naturalness. To the contrary, the Indians came to represent natural man par excellence. From Montaigne until the end of the Enlightenment, every major philosopher agreed with John Locke's (1632–1704) famous statement that "in the beginning all the world was America" (Second Treatise of Government ). America represented Europe's past. In ending one debate, however, Montaigne began a new one. While every major thinker agreed that the Indians represented mankind's natural state, debate arose over the interpretation of the natural state: was it a brutishness to overcome or an innocence to recapture?

Among these philosophers the debate evolved in a single direction. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) first argued that mankind's natural state is a horrible state of war to be avoided at all costs. Locke and Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), countered that the state of nature is pacific but undesirable. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), François Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–1778), and Denis Diderot (1713–1784) later praised the Indians as naturally good and happy, in contrast to European artificiality and corruption. These varied representations, it should be noted, do not correspond to any changes in Indian societies, nor do they respond to new information about the Indians. In truth, the available evidence was barely consulted at all by any of the great thinkers. Rather, these philosophers clearly used their descriptions of the Indians as support for their own ends. As dissatisfaction with Europe increased, so did praise of the Indians grow as an alternative, more desirable and more natural, way of living.

In sum, contemporaneous representations of the American Indians really reflect Europe's own debates, not the reality of America. They have left the legacies of brutishness and of the noble savage, which remain in the twenty-first century. But there is another legacy of these debates. In using the Indians of America to promote their own visions of freedom and legitimate institutions, the philosophers set in motion a train of thought and actions that would lead to revolution. The first of these revolutions took place in America and led to the founding of the United States.

The United States

When people speak about America, they usually are referring not to the Indians, nor to the hemisphere as a whole, but to the United States of America (USA), the world's most powerful nation since World War II. The global obsession with American power revolves around four axes: cultural, economic, political, and military. American popular culture (e.g., blue jeans, rock and roll and jazz music, cinema and television programming, McDonald's restaurants, and Disneyland) is both highly prized for its energy, ease, accessibility, and speed and condemned as an unwanted cultural intrusion that threatens to swamp indigenous ways. Economically, America has for centuries represented the possibility of riches beyond belief ("streets paved with gold"), and as such has been the goal of tens and tens of millions of immigrants. But since the United States became the world's dominant economic power, its material wealth has become both envied and resented. Politically, America has been lauded as a uniquely favorable place (what the American colonist John Winthrop called a "city on a hill") for the promise of freedom that it offers, and it has been condemned, as in the eyes of the Iranian revolutionary, the Ayatollah Khomeini, as "the great Satan" for what are perceived to be its heathen and materialistic ways. Militarily, the United States has since World War II been the strongest country on earth, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is universally cited as the world's only superpower. This power is sometimes feared and envied by those without it. Moreover, people throughout the globe paradoxically call for the United States to use its power when they want it to do something and condemn the United States as arrogant when it uses it for a cause of which they disapprove.

These perceptions of the United States are neither new nor unmediated reactions to perceived facts. Each of these praises and complaints can be traced back almost to the founding of the United States itself. Thus, they cannot be explained merely as a reaction to a particular political administration or to the rise of American power. Deeper phenomena are at play.

First reactions to the United States.

The United States was formed in a rebellion from England in 1776. Its revolution was the first successful modern revolution in that it was inspired and justified (at least in part) by philosophical doctrine. The United States' Declaration of Independence invokes philosophy when it argues that "all men are created equal" and endowed with "inalienable rights" such as the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Government exists only to secure these rights, and any government that does not secure them is deemed illegitimate. The founders of the United States wrote a Constitution to secure these rights based on limited government and the separation of public and private spheres. At a time when no country on earth was based on the consent of the governed, the success of American democracy proved to the modern world that democratic and representative government could exist.

The relationship between the Old and New Worlds (and the two images of America) is intertwined and reciprocal. The American Revolution marked the first major step in the collapse of the European empires founded after Columbus discovered the New World. This revolution was inspired in part by the European philosophical doctrines based on natural rights, which had themselves been partly inspired by the original inhabitants of America. Ironically, the political experiment in the name of natural rights then helped destroy the "natural" people who helped inspire the United States' philosophical forefathers. The American Revolution then helped inspire the French Revolutionaries and other lovers of liberty throughout the world. The complex nature of this relationship is seen in the following quotation from the essay "On the Influence of the American Revolution on Europe" by the French philosopher Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794):

"The human race had lost its rights. Montesquieu found them and restored them to us" (Voltaire). It is not enough, however, that these rights be written in the philosophers' works and engraved in the heart of virtuous men. It is also necessary that the ignorant or feeble man be able to read them in the example of a great people.

America has given us this example. Its Declaration of Independence is a simple and sublime exposition of these rights, so sacred and so long forgotten. Among no nation have they been so well known, or preserved in such perfect integrity.

The reciprocal relationship is evident: it moves from Montesquieu and Voltaire, who had been partially inspired by America's original inhabitants, to the Declaration of Independence then back to Condorcet, who authored France's Constitution of 1793.

Condorcet's praise of America was typical of the Enlightenment philosophes. Immediate reaction to the American Revolution by Enlightenment thinkers was one of enthusiastic praise. In his popular pamphlet entitled "Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution and the Means of Making it a Benefit of the World," Richard Price (1723–1791) writes, "I see the revolution in favor of universal liberty which has taken place in America; a revolution which opens a new prospect in human affairs, and begins a new era in the history of mankind." Given the unprecedented liberties guaranteed in America, Price is hopeful, nay certain, that liberty will soon spread throughout the world, if unchecked by tyrannical governments. He says the revolution will "raise the species higher" and compares its effect to "opening a new sense." Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that "next to the introduction of Christianity among mankind, the American revolution may prove the most important step in the progressive course of human improvement." So many hopes has he pinned on America that "perhaps there never existed a people on whose wisdom and virtue more depended; or to whom a station of more importance in the plan of Providence has been assigned." Similarly, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781), whose brief stint as finance minister in France marked the last serious attempt at reform before the French Revolution, says in a "Letter to Price" that America is "the hope of the world" and should "become a model to it."

The Enlightenment thinkers did not think America was perfect. Slavery was America's greatest flaw. They understood the difficulties in eradicating this execrable institution and argued that America would be judged by the manner of eliminating it as circumstances allowed.

The great strengths of America, however, more than outweighed its imperfections. Enlightenment leaders praised the numerous liberties in the United States, including freedom of the press, speech, conscience, and religion. Moreover, America was seen as an inspiration for the world. As Condorcet writes, it is an example "so useful to all the nations who can contemplate it"; "it teaches them that these rights are everywhere the same"; "the example of a free people submitting peacefully to military, as to civil, laws will doubtless have the power to cure us." Europe developed these Enlightenment ideas, but due to its powerfully entrenched institutions, it could not act on them. The Enlightenment philosophes, however, thought that the example of America would inspire the deeds that their words could not. In fact, they were right. The American Revolution inspired the French Revolutionaries in 1789, and it has continued to inspire revolutionaries throughout the world.

Nineteenth-century views of the United States.

Nineteenth-century views of the United States are seen through the lens of the French Revolution. After the French Revolution devolved into terror, anarchy, and despotism, no major thinker ever again unqualifiedly praised the American Revolution. This is peculiar. Thinkers might have said that the French got it wrong, the Americans right, so let us praise the Americans and further intensify the study of it. Instead, they let the horrors of the French Revolution color their understanding of the American. This shows once again how the perceptions of America were based more on European dynamics than on the reality of America itself.

Despite the failure of the French Revolution, the existence of the United States, coupled with the Enlightenment belief in progress, led to a general feeling that the United States was the future. If the French proved that the path to the future was not simple and smooth, the perception of what the future was to be like, as embodied in the United States, was also ambivalent. Interest in the United States was heightened because everyone had a stake in the future, which the United States seemed to represent.

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, criticism arose about the United States. The substance of this criticism was similar across the ideological spectrum of the nineteenth century and is familiar to anyone aware of contemporary critiques of the United States. What America had become and what critics thought Europe would become—democratic—was regarded as a mixed blessing. The greatest representative of this ambivalence is Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), the great French thinker and statesman. According to Tocqueville, democratic government is inefficient, meandering, and petty. But it has its advantages. It gets more done by energizing the people to do things themselves: "it does that which the most skillful government often cannot do: it spreads throughout the body social a restless activity, superabundant force, and energy never found elsewhere, which, however little favored by circumstance, can do wonders. Those are its true advantages" (Democracy in America ). Democracy is not conducive, however, to refinement, elevated manners, poetry, glory, or heroic virtues. All of the main political theorists of the nineteenth century agreed with this ambivalent assessment of America—and of the budding liberalism of Europe.

America was seen as epitomizing the self-interested individualism of the new commercial society and as representing the centralization of power by the new middle-class regime. As such, four criticisms were repeatedly leveled at it. First, America was said to embody the disorder caused by collapsing institutions. The authority of all previous standards—experience, age, birth, genius, talent, and virtue—was undercut in America. Second, America represented a growing obsession with money. It was because of this that all other standards of human value were ignored. Third, America represented unchecked equality. The new type of man preferred equality to liberty, as Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) warned. Finally, the new form of government represented the power of the majority, the "tyranny of the majority" in Tocqueville's famous phrase. This stifled creativity and individuality. It guaranteed that society would be geared to the mediocre middle at the expense of individual refinement, the cultivation of culture, and the emergence of spiritual sublimity and greatness. These are essentially the same charges leveled against the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by traditional authorities in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, by the educated elites in Europe and elsewhere, and by the antimodern radicals, such as the Ayatollah Khomeini, Hizbollah, and Al Qaeda.

Twentieth-century views of the United States.

The main twentieth-century critiques of America, such as those by Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) on the right and by the Frankfurt School on the left, argue that America is overly technological and materialistic. Thus, America, once described as the home of nature, became the place where nature is most obscured. Twentieth-century thinkers did not agree on the origins of America's technological morass. For example, the Frankfurt School saw technology as the result of capitalism, whereas Heidegger attributed it to a particular metaphysical way of being. The characteristics that they lamented in America's overtechnicalization, however, are similar. They lament the mechanization of society and the way it alienates human beings from their deeper essences. They deplored the monotonization and leveling of the world and the resulting loss of individuality. They decried the way technology kills the spirit and prevents the attainment of the highest human developments. In short, their substantive list of complaints is very similar to those made during the nineteenth century; but whereas the nineteenth-century thinkers attributed the problems to an array of social, political, and economic factors, twentieth-century thinkers blamed them on technology.

Beyond the technological blame, there is another important divergence between nineteenth-and twentieth-century thinkers' assessments of America. Whereas nineteenth-century thinkers like Tocqueville saw Russia, as well as the United States, as an emerging power, they almost all greatly preferred the American model to the Russian. This was not true in the twentieth century. Many figures on the left, such as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), ideologically committed to communism, lauded Soviet approaches and condemned American ones. Even among the anticommunist right, many considered the United States and the Soviet Union to be equally bad. Heidegger, for example, says that America and Russia "are metaphysically the same." An abstraction from politics that allows such comparisons is regrettable, but in Heidegger's case it is even worse. While formally arguing that the United States and Russia are the same, when he needs a shorthand label for the phenomena that he describes as a "Katastrophe, " he calls it "Americanization," not Russianization, implying that the former is closer to the core of the problem.

Critical Reflections

According to its representations, America has moved from representing Europe's past to representing Europe's future and from the epitome of nature to the epitome of technology, polar opposite views. Four points might be noted, however, that raise questions about the validity of these representations. First, descriptions of America have been fantastical from the beginning. They are inaccurate and often intentionally so. Second, although twentieth-century thinkers blame the United States for the technologization of the world, it is apparent that the technological attitude long predates the founding of the United States. Columbus and the conquistadores neither saw the New World for what it was nor had any desire to do so. Rather, they sought to exploit resources and people, and this is the essence of the technological attitude, the attitude that some claim began only with the United States. Third, twentieth-century thinkers miss the mark in blaming America for problems that have to do with modernity itself. Because the United States was created from scratch by colonists with minimal feudal baggage, the United States emerged as perhaps the purest embodiment of modern values. But there are multinational corporations in Europe and other countries around the world, and most people wherever they live in the world desire the standard of living and freedom that the United States—and many modern countries—have. So while there is a certain justification for seeing the United States as embodying modernity, it is not modernity's sole embodiment.

Fourth, there is a fundamental continuity in the views about America. The Indians have been described as on the one hand, naïve, innocent, childlike, and simple, and on the other as brutish, vulgar, shallow, stupid, and lacking spirituality. These are essentially the same charges that Europe and the world leveled at the United States throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The United States might be all of these things, although probably not more than most countries and possibly less so than many. But the fact that ways of life as opposite as those of the Indians and the United States are described in fundamentally the same terms indicates a problem in the substantive nature of the representations.

As an epilogue, it is worth noting briefly a postmodern view of America. Postmodern thinkers reject the idea of there being any humanly knowable truth and choose to play with images, which they claim is all we are left with. The French postmodern thinker Jean Baudrillard has done this with the United States. In a book entitled America (1986; English translation published in 1988), Baudrillard writes contradictorally, "For me there is no truth of America" and, "I knew all about this nuclear form, this future catastrophe when I was still in Paris, of course." He also mixes all of the main images of America, describing the United States both as "the original version of Modernity" and as "the only remaining primitive society." For him, America is the "Primitive society of the future." He combines five hundred years of images of America in a clever fashion.

See also Enlightenment ; Europe, Idea of ; Individualism ; Natural Law .

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Alan Mitchell Levine

17. America

1. apple pie typical, wholesome American dessert. [Am. Culture: Flexner, 68]
2. bald eagle national bird of the U.S.; native only to North America. [Am. Culture: EB, I: 753]
3. baseball traditional American sport and pastime. [Am. Sports: EB, I: 850]
4. Brother Jonathan the original Uncle Sam. [Am. Hist.: Hart, 110]
5. Crossing of the Delaware Washington’s beleaguered army attacks Trenton; famous event in American history (1776). [Am. Hist.: Jameson, 138]
6. e pluribus unum motto of the U.S.: Latin ’one out of many.’ [Am. Culture: RHD, 481]
7. Fourth of July Independence Day; traditional U.S. holiday; anniversary of adoption of Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776). [Am. Culture: EB, V: 326]
8. Liberty Bell symbol of American freedom; at Independence Hall, Philadelphia. [Am. Hist.: Jameson, 284]
9. Mayflower ship that brought the founding Puritans. [Am. Hist.: Jameson, 313]
10. melting pot America as the home of many races and cultures. [Am. Pop. Culture: Misc.]
11. Old Ironsides the frigate Constitution, symbol of U.S. success in War of 1812, now preserved as a museum. [Am. Hist.: Benét, 733]
12. Peoria typical mid-American town. [Am. Culture: Misc.]
13. Pledge of Allegiance statement of loyalty to the U. S., inaugurated in 1892 upon 400th anniversary of the discovery of America. [Am. Hist.: WB, P: 508]
14. Plymouth Rock site of Pilgrim landing in Massachusetts (1620). [Am. Hist.: Jameson, 395–396]
15. pumpkin pie traditional dish, especially at Thanksgiving. [Am. Culture: Flexner, 68]
16. Red, White and Blue, the colors of the U. S. flag, used in reference to the flag itself and ideals of patriotism. [Am. Hist.: Misc.]
17. Silent Majority average Americans of middle class. [Am. Culture: Flexner, 375]
18. Star-Spangled Banner, The U.S. national anthem. [Am. Hist.: EB, IX: 532]
19. Stars and Stripes nickname for the U.S. flag. [Am. Hist.: Brewer Dictionary, 8567]
20. Statue of Liberty great symbolic structure in New York harbor. [Am. Hist.: Jameson, 284]
21. Thanksgiving annual U.S. holiday celebrating harvest and yearly blessings; originated with Pilgrims (1621). [Am. Culture: EB, IX: 922]
22. Uncle Sam personifies people or government of the United States. [Am. Hist.: Hart, 870–871]
23. Vespucci, Amerigo (1454–1512) Italian navigator-explorer from whose name America is derived. [Am. Hist.: EB, X: 410]
24. Washington, D.C. focus of U.S. government, policies, etc. [Am. Hist.: Hart, 899]
25. Washington, George (1732–1799) “the Father of our country”; first U.S. President (1789–1797). [Am. Hist.: Jameson, 535–536]
26. White House official residence of the president of the U.S. in Washington, D.C. [Am. Culture: EB, X: 656]
27. Yankee to an American, a New Englander; to a Southern American, any Northerner; to a foreigner, any American. [Am. Hist.: Hart, 953]

America. In Latin America Buddhism has made little headway. In north America and Canada, however, its impact has been great, particularly in recent decades, and all the major Asian schools and traditions of Buddhism are now represented. The first Buddhist institution in north America was a temple built in San Francisco in 1853 in order to serve the needs of immigrant Chinese labourers. The spread of Buddhism over the next hundred years was largely due to the arrival of immigrant groups from various parts of Asia, culminating in a wave of refugees from Indo-China in the wake of the Vietnam War. Many Tibetan lamas fled to north America following the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959, and Tibetan Buddhism currently enjoys a high profile. Apart from immigrants, many Westerners have converted to Buddhism and influenced the pattern of its development. This group, typically white and middle-class, favours democratic as opposed to hierarchical structures for Buddhist groups and a greater role for women. It is also more concerned with social and political issues. The number of Buddhists in the United States is currently estimated at around 3–5 million. The situation overall in north America remains fluid as Buddhism continues to adapt itself to Western customs.

America The name technically includes North and South America. They can be divided into ‘Anglo‐America’ (Canada and the United States) and ‘Latin America’ (Central and South America, and the Hispanic Islands of the West Indies). The name America was first applied to South America in 1507 by Martin Waldseemüller (c.1470–c.1521), a German geographer and cartographer at the court of the Duke of Lorraine, in honour of an Italian (Florentine) explorer, Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512) (Latinized in Waldseemüller's Cosmographiae Introductio to Americus Vesputius). Vespucci made a landfall in modern Guyana in 1499 and then went south. This first voyage was with Spanish support, but his subsequent voyage in 1501–2 along the coast of Brazil had the backing of the Portuguese. Vespucci came to the conclusion that during the voyages he had undertaken in 1499–1502 a ‘New World’ had been discovered rather than the east coast of Asia. In due course the name was extended to North America. ‘America’ now usually refers only to the United States of America.

America the name was apparently coined in M. Waldseemüller Cosmographiae Introductio (1507) and coming from Americus, modern Latin form of the name of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512), who navigated the coast of South America in 1501.
America's Cup an international yachting race held every three to four years, named after the yacht America, which won it in 1851. The America's owners gave the trophy to the New York Yacht Club as a perpetual international challenge trophy, and it remained in the club's possession for 132 years. An Australian crew won it in 1983, but the Americans won it back in 1987, and held it until 1995, when New Zealand were successful.

America Western hemisphere, consisting of the continents of North America and South America, joined by the isthmus of Central America. It extends from n of the Arctic Circle to 56°s, separating the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific. Native Americans settled the entire continent by 8000 bc. Norsemen were probably the first Europeans to explore America in the 8th century, but Christopher Columbus is popularly credited with the first European discovery in 1492. The name ‘America’ was first applied to the lands in 1507, and derives from Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine navigator (falsely) believed to be the first European to set foot on the mainland.

America, name first applied to the present continent of South America (1507) in a map by the German geographer Martin Waldseemüller (fl.1470–1513), who coined the title in honor of the navigator Amerigo Vespucci. He applied it to the whole New World in his Cosmographiae Introductio (1507), a work intended to be an introduction to a new edition of Ptolemy. Mercator used “America” to indicate both North and South America (1538), but for more than two centuries the lands in the western hemisphere were known in Spain and Portugal as the “Indies,” “West Indies,” or “New World.”

America [for Amerigo Vespucci ], the lands of the Western Hemisphere—North America, Central (or Middle) America, and South America. The world map published in 1507 by Martin Waldseemüller is the first known cartographic use of the name. In English, America and American are frequently used to refer only to the United States.

13. America

Americamania

an obsession with America and things American.

un-Americanism

the state or condition of being out of sympathy with or against an ideal of American behavior, attitudes, beliefs, etc. —un-American , n., adj.

America (‘My Country, ‘tis of thee’). Patriotic hymn with words of Rev. Samuel Francis Smith (1832) sung to tune of ‘God save the King’. Also title of symphonic rhapsody (1928) by E.Bloch.

America, see USA and Latin America at war.

America •bicker, clicker, dicker, flicker, kicker, liquor, nicker, picker, pricker, shicker, slicker, snicker, sticker, ticker, tricker, vicar, whicker, Wicca, wicker •bilker, milker, Rilke •blinker, clinker, drinker, finca, freethinker, Glinka, Inca, inker, jinker, shrinker, sinker, Soyinka, stinker, stotinka, thinker, tinker, Treblinka, winker •frisker, whisker •kibitka, Sitka •Cyrenaica • Bandaranaike •perestroika • Baedeker • melodica •Boudicca • trafficker • angelica •replica •basilica, silica •frolicker, maiolica, majolica •bootlicker • res publica • mimicker •Anneka • arnica • Seneca • Lineker •picnicker •electronica, harmonica, Honecker, japonica, Monica, moniker, Salonica, santonica, veronica •Guernica • Africa • paprika •America, erica •headshrinker • Armorica • brassica •Jessica • lip-syncer • fossicker •Corsica •Attica, hepatica, sciatica, viatica •Antarctica • billsticker •erotica, exotica •swastika