Memphis innovators still drawing map of the city
Our country is named after Amerigo Vespucci. I think that is important for everyone to remember as the Fourth of July approaches. Our nation was not named after Christopher Columbus or George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, but an Italian explorer working for the king of Spain. But why him?
In 1502, 10 years after Columbus believed he had found a short route to India, Vespucci sailed down the coast of South America and realized this was, in fact, a separate land mass entirely. He wrote a letter in which he pronounced, “We might rightly call this a new world.”
His letter was widely circulated, and in 1507, a mapmaker named Martin Waldseemüller drew the first map of the Earth using Vespucci’s findings, where the New World was there for all to see. Since Vespucci was the first to write about this discovery, Waldseemüller believed it was only right to name the New World after him.
Using the feminine Latin form of Amerigo, which was the convention, Waldseemüller called the New World “America.” Eventually, the word was used to refer to the northern and southern continents of the New World and more specifically the country we celebrate on the Fourth of July.
So to be clear, a mapmaker we have never heard of named our country after an explorer who did not discover America, but who saw a reality that no one else recognized. That gives me encouragement for the future of Memphis. Here’s why.
Vespucci did not just take for granted that Columbus had discovered a new trade route to India, even though that is what everyone in Europe wanted to believe. Instead, Vespucci let the facts speak, and he left his mind open to an understanding not limited by what he was told was true or what would be economically convenient if it were true. He saw both possibility and the adventure of the future. It was — to Europeans — a New World.
And then a mapmaker, working completely under the radar, used Vespucci’s writings and analysis to name the New World after him rather than someone who stumbled into the discovery without understanding its meaning. Vespucci’s New World expanded the way the Old World understood itself. It had to — now they knew the New World was there, and there was no going back to old understandings.
In Memphis, we do not need to let others define us based on popular belief, what they have been told or what they might wish were true. We will be known by those who live into the truth of who we are and what we are capable of, rather than what others choose to say of us.
We are our own New World. And it will be our mapmakers — today’s Memphis innovators, visionaries, advocates and entrepreneurs — who work behind the scenes, who will one day name our identity and give the nation new language to describe us. That map of Memphis is just now being drawn.
The Rev. Dr. G. Scott Morris is founder and chief executive officer of Church Health.