Leif Erikson
Research done in the early 1960s by Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his wife, archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, identified a Norse site located at the northern tip of Newfoundland. It has been suggested that this site, known as L'Anse aux Meadows, is "Leifsbúðir". The Ingstads demonstrated that Norsemen had reached America about 500 years before Christopher Columbus. Later archaeological evidence suggests that "Vinland" may have been the areas around the Gulf of St. Lawrence and that the L'Anse aux Meadows site was a ship repair station and waypoint for voyages there. That does not necessarily contradict the identification of L'Anse aux Meadows with "Leifsbúðir" since the two sagas appear to describe "Vinland" as a wider region which included several settlements. The "Saga of Erik the Red" mentions two other settlements in "Vinland": a settlement called "Straumfjǫrðr", which lay beyond "Kjalarnes" promontory and the Wonderstrands, and one called "Hóp", which was located even farther south.
Leif was described as a wise, considerate, and strong man of striking appearance. During his stay in the Hebrides, he fell in love with a noblewoman, Thorgunna, who gave birth to their son Thorgils. Thorgils was later sent to Leif in Greenland, but he did not become popular.
Alfred Hudd
The traditional theory of the naming of America is that it was named in honour of Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian navigator. At the turn of the sixteenth century, Vespucci undertook a series of voyages (the number of which remains unresolved) in search of a western passage to the Indies. After the voyage of 1501–1502, he proposed that the areas that he and, separately, Christopher Columbus had explored were not part of Asia, but rather a New World. America first received its name in the "Cosmographiae Introductio", published by cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in 1507. Vespucci's published letters (the authenticity of which is contested) were the inspiration for that work, which was authored by a group of scholars in Saint-Dié, Lorraine, France. They revised Ptolemy's "Geography" to include the New World and reasoned that, as the three previously known continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa, had feminine names, so should the New World. Accordingly, the feminised version of the Latin form of the baptismal name of the "discoverer" of the New World, Vespucci, was utilised. The appendix of the book included Waldseemüller's map of the world in which the New World was labelled "America." The map, rediscovered in a German castle in 1901, was the first to use the name America and the first to depict a Western Hemisphere. The Library of Congress purchased the 1507 Waldseemüller map in 2003. On 30 April 2007, German Chancellor Angela Merkel transferred the map, also known as America's "birth certificate," to the people of the United States in a ceremony at the Library of Congress.