BHR-43
Brit-Am Historical Reports
6 July 2010 22 Tammuz 5770
Contents:
1. Archaeology: Brit-Am Version of Explorator 13.11
2. How America got its name by Toby Lester
3. Antisemitism at center of anti-Americanism?
|
Brit-Am Discussion Group 
|
Contents by Subject |
Research Recognition Reconciliation Contribute |
|
Site Map Contents in Alphabetical Order |
 This Site |
1. Archaeology: Brit-Am Version of Explorator 13.11
================================================================
ANCIENT NEAR EAST AND EGYPT
================================================================
More on that Hyskos city revealed by satellite imaging:
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx'id=132439§ionid=3510212
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2010/1004/fr2.htm
A 3200 years b.p. bronze tablet found at El-ahwat has been identified as a
battle chariot linchpin:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-07/uoh-3bt070110.php
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1887115/bronze_tablet_identified_as_battle_chariot_linchpin/index.html'source=r_science
Avoiding excavation on a Mount Gerezim site because it is 'too problematic':
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/ancient-site-near-nablus-too-problematic-to-open-1.299573
Plans for displaying artifacts in Tel Aviv:
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/tel-aviv-antiquities-authority-join-forces-to-display-archaeological-artifacts-across-city-1.299277
================================================================
CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA
================================================================
Video/feature connected to that Maya-were-aware-of-fossils story:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/06/100630-belize-maya-pools-vin-video/
More on mesoamerican rubber production:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/06/100628-science-ancient-maya-aztec-rubber-balls-beheaded/
================================================================
OTHER ITEMS OF INTEREST
================================================================
How America got its name (very interesting):
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/04/where_america_really_came_from/
What multispectral imaging reveals about the Declaration of
Independence:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/02/AR2010070205525.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/07/1776-in-a-new-light/59147/
Claim that humans have been affecting climate for thousands of
years:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100630162353.htm
http://www.newkerala.com/news/fullnews-137802.html
================================================================
TOURISTY THINGS
================================================================
Pompeii:
http://www.canoe.ca/Travel/Europe/Mediterranean/2010/06/11/14352666.html
2. How America got its name
By Toby Lester
July 4, 2010
http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/bookmarks/americas_name/
Extracts:
Each July 4, as we celebrate the origins of America, we look back ritually at what happened in 1776: the war, the politics, the principles that defined our nation.
But what about the other thing that defines America: the name itself' Its story is far older and far less often told, and still offers some revealing surprises.
If you're like most people, you'll dimly recall from your school days that the name America has something to do with Amerigo Vespucci, a merchant and explorer from Florence. You may also recall feeling that this is more than a little odd ' that if any European earned the 'right' to have his name attached to the New World, surely it should have been Christopher Columbus, who crossed the Atlantic years before Vespucci did.
But Vespucci, it turns out, had no direct role in the naming of America. He probably died without ever having seen or heard the name. A closer look at how the name was coined and first put on a map, in 1507, suggests that, in fact, the person responsible was a figure almost nobody's heard of: a young Alsatian proofreader named Matthias Ringmann.
How did a minor scholar working in the landlocked mountains of eastern France manage to beat all explorers to the punch and give the New World its name' The answer is more than just an obscure bit of history, because Ringmann deliberately invested the name America with ideas that still make up important parts of our national psyche: powerful notions of westward expansion, self-reinvention, and even manifest destiny.
And he did it, in part, as a high-minded joke.
Matthias Ringmann was born in an Alsatian village in 1482. After studying the classics at university he settled in the Strasbourg area, where he began to eke out a living by proofing texts for local printers and teaching school. It was a forgettable life, of a sort that countless others like him were leading. But sometime in early 1505, Ringmann came across a recently published pamphlet titled 'Mundus Novus,' and that changed everything.
The pamphlet contained a letter purportedly sent by Amerigo Vespucci a few years earlier to his patron in Florence. Vespucci wrote that he had just completed a voyage of western discovery and had big news to report. On the other side of the Atlantic, he announced, he had found 'a new world.'
The phrase would stick, of course. But it didn't mean to Vespucci what it means to us today: a new continent. Europeans of the time often used the phrase simply to describe regions of the world they had not known about before. Another Italian merchant had used the very same phrase, for example, to describe parts of southern Africa recently explored by the Portuguese.Continued...
The expanding horizons began with Vespucci. In his letter, he reported sailing west across the Atlantic, like Columbus. After making landfall, however, he had turned south, in an attempt to sail under China and into the Indian Ocean ' and had ended up following a coastline that took him thousands of miles almost due south, well below the equator, into a region of the globe where most European geographers assumed there could only be ocean.
When Ringmann read this news, he was thrilled. As a good classicist, he knew that the poet Virgil had prophesied the existence of a vast southern land across the ocean to the west, destined to be ruled by Rome. And he drew what he felt was the obvious conclusion: Vespucci had reached this legendary place. He had discovered the fourth part of the world. At last, Europe's Christians, the heirs of ancient Rome, could begin their long-prophesied imperial expansion to the west.
Ringmann may well have been the first European to entertain this idea, and he acted on it quickly. Soon he had teamed up with a local German mapmaker named Martin Waldseemuller, and the two men printed 1,000 copies of a giant world map designed to broadcast the news: the famous Waldseemuller map of 1507. One copy of the map still survives, and it's recognized as one of the most important geographical documents of all time. That's because it's the first to depict the New World as surrounded by water; the first to suggest the existence of the Pacific Ocean; the first to portray the world's continents and oceans roughly as we know them today; and, of course, the first to use a strange new name: America, which Ringmann and Waldseemuller printed in block letters across what today we would call Brazil.
Why America? Ringmann and Waldseemuller explained their choice... '...I do not see why anyone should rightly prevent this from being called Amerigen, ' the land of Amerigo, as it were ' or America, after its discoverer, Americus.'
The naming-of-America passage in 'Introduction to Cosmography' is rich in precisely the sort of word play Ringmann loved. The key to the passage is the curious name Amerigen, which combines the name Amerigo with the Greek word gen, or 'earth,' to create the meaning 'land of Amerigo.' But the name yields other meanings. Gen can also mean 'born,' and the word ameros can mean 'new,' suggesting, as many Renaissance observers had begun to hope, that the land of Amerigo was a place where European civilization could go to be reborn ' an idea, of course, that still resonates today. The name may also contain a play on meros, a Greek word sometimes translated as 'place,' in which case Amerigen would become A-meri-gen, or 'No-place-land': not a bad way to describe a previously unnamed continent whose full extent was still uncertain.
Whatever its meanings, the name America filled a need. By the middle of the 16th century it had caught on, and mapmakers were using it to define not only South but North America. But Ringmann himself didn't live to see the day. By 1511 he was complaining of weakness and shortness of breath, and before the year's end he was dead, probably of tuberculosis. He hadn't yet reached 30.
3. Antisemitism at center of anti-Americanism?
http://clarespark.com/2010/07/01/the-new-anti-americanism/
Extract:
To conclude: the nativists reacting to mass immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mentioned above were politically defeated and marginalized. The New Left, however, though they were supposedly anti-Stalinist, taught and still teach a view of the U.S. that is identical with Stalinist and Nazi anti-American propaganda, for example that 'Zionists' control America, and that 'institutional racism' still exists under its maleficent aegis, as if a jewified, trigger-happy John Calhoun had just been elected as the President of a slavocracy.
Pleased with what you read"
Click Here to make an offering. |
'It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God or the Bible.'
George Washington
Brit-Am is the "still small voice" that contains the truth.
[1-Kings 19:12] AND AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE A FIRE; BUT THE LORD WAS NOT IN THE FIRE: AND AFTER THE FIRE A STILL SMALL VOICE.
 |
 |