Poster 1507 Martin Waldseemuller World Map

Universalis Cosmographia: Sometimes referred to as "The Birth Certificate of America" or "The Map that Named America", the Waldseemüller Map, Universalis Cosmographia, was the first to affix the name America to the New World, and Waldseemüller and his partner Matthias Ringmann are credited with naming the continents (or at that point, South America) in honor of the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci. Only a few hundred copies were made. Thought lost for hundreds of years, the sole known surviving copy was rediscovered in a castle library in the early 1900's, where it stayed for another century until the Library of Congress acquired it for 10 millions dollars.