America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer who set forth the then revolutionary concept that the lands that Christopher Columbus sailed to in 1492 were part of a separate continent.
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Meanwhile, on the eastern shores of the Americas, the most certain, best-documented evidence for European contact with America before Columbus is the Vikings. Icelandic sagas record that Lief Eriksson took a ship west from Greenland in the year 1001 and set up a settlement in an area they called Vinland.