When America first appeared on the map.

• Position: What's New? - 1507 World Map in "A Land Beyond the Stars" website - Website overview

A multi-media interactive website that celebrates the life and times of 16th-century cartographer Martin Waldseemuller--who created the 1507 World Map, which is the first document to use the name 'America," represent the Pacific Ocean, and depict a separate and full Western Hemisphere--has been unveiled by the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and the Galileo Museum, Florence, Italy.

The website, "A Land Beyond the Stars," brings the map's wealth of historical, technical, scientific, and geographic data to a broader public. More than 11 hours of interactive videos explain the sciences of cartography and astronomy and the state of navigational and geographic knowledge during the time of Waldseemuller.

The 1507 map grew out of an ambitious project by cartographers in St. Die, near Strasbourg, France, to document and update new geographic knowledge derived from the discoveries of the late 15th and the first years of the 16th centuries. Waldseemulleris world map was the most exciting product of that effort, and included data gathered during Amerigo Vespucci's voyages of 1501-02 to the New World. Waldseemuller christened the new lands "America" in recognition of Vespucci's understanding that a new continent had been uncovered, as a result of the voyages of Christopher Columbus and other explorers in the late 15th century.

The 1507 map is the crown jewel of the unparalleled...