From Times Online:In 2003, the US Library of Congress spent $10m on a beautiful world map, created in 1507. The price was justified by a single, magical name, inscribed in capitals on a strange tract of blank space in the far west: “AMERICA”. As Toby Lester tells in this boundlessly engaging book, this map was not just the first to give America a name, it was the very first to show it as a continent, separated from Asia by a new ocean.
Advertising its purchase, Congress called the map “America’s birth certificate”; Lester rates its importance much less narrowly. It charts an astonishing shift in world-view, he argues, from the Europe-centred, God-driven world of the Middle Ages to the brave new imperial vision of the early modern age.
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