PHOTO: THE ART ARCHIVE/CORBIS
l Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez (shown here in a contemporary painting) applied the name “California” to lands discovered by an expedition he sent north from Mexico in 1533.
The author of a novel imagined an earthly
paradise “in the Indies,” somewhere
to the east of Asia, called California.
now Baja California. The two men who led the expedition, Diego de Becerra and Fortun Ximenez, decided that they had found the mythic island of California, and they applied that name to the land that they discovered. In other parts of the United States, large colonies of migrants from one
The earliest European settlement on the island of Manhattan (Algonquin for “island”) was founded by the Dutch in 1614, who named it Nieuw Amsterdam.
European country would settle in one area and import names wholesale from their country of origin. Hence the prevalence of Dutch names in New York, which was once the colony of New Amsterdam. The names of areas of New York City—Bowery, Brooklyn, Coney Island, Harlem, Flushing—all
are modified versions of Dutch names. Even the quintessential American word Yankee is said to be a corruption of the Dutch name Jan Kees. The counties around Baltimore reflect the influx of Scottish settlers, with place-names such as Aberdeen, Braeburn, Dumbarton, and Inverness.
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PHOTO: BLUE LANTERN STUDIO/CORBIS
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