The essay covers Columbus and Vespucci and cultural influences on the discovery of the new world.

The world in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was vastly different than it is today. The Crusades had given Europeans a taste for the riches of the East. Travel was dangerous. Communications were uncertain, at best. The nations of Europe were all monarchies undergoing the breakdown of the feudal system due to the commercial revolution. Gutenberg's advances in printing during the middle of the fifteenth century meant that ordinary people had begun to …

…Waldseemuller later changed his mind while making his map of 1513, giving the credit belatedly to Columbus, but by then the name "America" was firmly in use. The voyages of Columbus and Vespucci were responsible for opening up the Americas to later European exploration and colonization. Neither man would have been remembered without the travels of the other. Those travels and the men behind them form an interesting glimpse at the world from which they came.