America 500 years of a name

It is evident that Amerigo Vespucci, the famous Florentine navigator, had at his disposal knowledge that no one had previously been able to possess. Knowledge that allowed him to affirm that the new lands, discovered by the genius of Christopher Columbus, were not Asia, as he had believed, but an entirely unknown world. That was the great news that Vespucci delivered to the world, the basis of his glory and the reason why an entire new continent would be named, exactly five hundred years ago, in his honor: America. Intrigued by such a fascinating character, the great Colombian historian and Americanist Germán Arciniegas set out to study his life and times.

This book, a synthesis of its results, offers us a new human profile of Vespucci, which is far from the image transmitted by his detractors and from the one created by his panegyrists, while shedding light on the time in which he lived and the reasons for its real ignorance by many traditional historians. This volume complements the title by the same author When America Completed the Earth, published by Villegas Editores last year, within the "History" series, in small format.

This book has independent versions in Spanish and English.