__1454: __ Amerigo Vespucci is born in Florence, Italy. He'll give his name to two continents. Vespucci, the son of a notary, went to work for the Medici banking house. They dispatched him as an agent ...

“Amerigo Vespucci, who gave his name to America, was a pimp in his youth and a magus in his maturity,” writes Felipe Fernández-Armesto in his new biography (Random House, 231 pages, $24.95). His ...

Perhaps its most remarkable feature was a new continent. On the left of the map were two land masses across the Atlantic; the northern one marked “Parias” while the southern one was named “America”.

Despite bequeathing his name to two continents, the explorer Amerigo Vespucci has languished in the shadow of his precursor, friend and fellow Italian, Christopher Columbus. In recent times, that has ...