Americas

The Americas (also collectively called America; Amérique, Amerika, Spanish and Portuguese: América) comprise the totality of the continents of North and South America.

Spanish, or Castilian, is a Romance language that originated in the Iberian Peninsula and today has over 450 million native speakers, mainly in Spain and the Americas.

The Americas (also collectively called America; Amérique, Amerika, Spanish and Portuguese: América) comprise the totality of the continents of North and South America. This shift did not seem to happen in most other cultural spheres on Earth, such as Romance-speaking (including France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Romania, Switzerland, and the Romance-speaking countries of Latin America and Africa), Germanic (but excluding English) speaking (including Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Icelands, Faroe Islands), Baltic-Slavic languages (including Czech Rep., Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithunia, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria) and in many other spheres, where America is still considered a continent encompassing the North America and South America subcontinents, as well as Central America.

It is also considered by some to be a northern subcontinent of the Americas.

The Americas (also collectively called America; Amérique, Amerika, Spanish and Portuguese: América) comprise the totality of the continents of North and South America. This shift did not seem to happen in most other cultural spheres on Earth, such as Romance-speaking (including France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Romania, Switzerland, and the Romance-speaking countries of Latin America and Africa), Germanic (but excluding English) speaking (including Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Icelands, Faroe Islands), Baltic-Slavic languages (including Czech Rep., Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithunia, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria) and in many other spheres, where America is still considered a continent encompassing the North America and South America subcontinents, as well as Central America.

It may also be considered a subcontinent of the Americas, which is how it is viewed in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions of the Americas.

Together, they make up most of the land in Earth's western hemisphere and comprise the New World.

The New World is one of the names used for the majority of Earth's Western Hemisphere, specifically the Americas (including nearby islands), and Oceania.

Along with their associated islands, they cover 8% of Earth's total surface area and 28.4% of its land area.

Following are links to lists of islands of the Americas which relates to all islands associated with South America and North America, including those of the Caribbean.

Since the Americas extend from north to south, the climate and ecology vary widely, from the arctic tundra of Northern Canada, Greenland, and Alaska, to the tropical rain forests in Central America and South America. This shift did not seem to happen in most other cultural spheres on Earth, such as Romance-speaking (including France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Romania, Switzerland, and the Romance-speaking countries of Latin America and Africa), Germanic (but excluding English) speaking (including Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Icelands, Faroe Islands), Baltic-Slavic languages (including Czech Rep., Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithunia, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria) and in many other spheres, where America is still considered a continent encompassing the North America and South America subcontinents, as well as Central America.

Central America (América Central, Centroamérica ) is a region found in the southern tip of North America and is sometimes defined as a subcontinent of the Americas.

The Spanish voyages of Christopher Columbus from 1492 to 1502 resulted in permanent contact with European (and subsequently, other Old World) powers, which led to the Columbian exchange and inaugurated a period of exploration, conquest, and colonization whose effects and consequences persist to the present.

The Columbian exchange, also known as the Columbian interchange, named for Christopher Columbus, was the widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, diseases, and ideas between the Americas, West Africa, and the Old World in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Mass emigration from Europe, including large numbers of indentured servants, and importation of African slaves largely replaced the indigenous peoples.

The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas.

Diseases introduced from Europe and West Africa devastated the indigenous peoples, and the European powers colonized the Americas.

Between the 16th and 20th centuries, European powers controlled at various times the Americas, almost all of Africa and Oceania and the majority of Asia.

Currently, almost all of the population of the Americas resides in independent countries; however, the legacy of the colonization and settlement by Europeans is that the Americas share many common cultural traits, most notably Christianity and the use of Indo-European languages: primarily Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and, to a lesser extent, Dutch.

The different varieties of the Spanish language spoken in the Americas are distinct from Peninsular Spanish and Spanish spoken elsewhere, such as in Africa and Asia.

The Americas are home to over a billion inhabitants, two-thirds of whom reside in the United States, Brazil, and Mexico.

It is the largest country to have Portuguese as an official language and the only one in the Americas; it is also one of the most multicultural and ethnically diverse nations, due to over a century of mass immigration from around the world.

The Spanish presence involved the enslavement of large numbers of the indigenous population of America.

Spanish slavery in the Americas diverged drastically from other European colonies in that it took on an early abolitionist stance towards Native American slavery.

The Americas (also collectively called America; Amérique, Amerika, Spanish and Portuguese: América) comprise the totality of the continents of North and South America.

In the second period of Old Portuguese, in the 15th and 16th centuries, with the Portuguese discoveries, the language was taken to many regions of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

It is home to eight megacities (metropolitan areas with ten million inhabitants or more): New York City (23.9 million), Mexico City (21.2 million), São Paulo (21.2 million), Los Angeles (18.8 million), Buenos Aires (15.6 million), Rio de Janeiro (13.0 million), Bogotá (10.4 million), and Lima (10.1 million).

It is the largest urban agglomeration in the Americas and the tenth largest in the world.

Currently, almost all of the population of the Americas resides in independent countries; however, the legacy of the colonization and settlement by Europeans is that the Americas share many common cultural traits, most notably Christianity and the use of Indo-European languages: primarily Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and, to a lesser extent, Dutch.

Outside Eurasia, Indo-European languages are dominant in the Americas and much of Oceania and Africa, having reached there through colonialism during the Age of Discovery and later periods.

Currently, almost all of the population of the Americas resides in independent countries; however, the legacy of the colonization and settlement by Europeans is that the Americas share many common cultural traits, most notably Christianity and the use of Indo-European languages: primarily Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and, to a lesser extent, Dutch.

Following the Age of Discovery (15th–17th century), Christianity was spread into the Americas, Oceania, sub-Saharan Africa, and the rest of the world via missionary work.

The Spanish voyages of Christopher Columbus from 1492 to 1502 resulted in permanent contact with European (and subsequently, other Old World) powers, which led to the Columbian exchange and inaugurated a period of exploration, conquest, and colonization whose effects and consequences persist to the present.

The term 'Old World' is used commonly in the West to refer to Africa, Asia and Europe (Afro-Eurasia or the World Island), regarded collectively as the part of the world known to its population before contact with the 'New World' (the Americas and Oceania).

The first inhabitants migrated into the Americas from Asia.

Paleo-Indians, Paleoindians or Paleoamericans were the first peoples who entered, and subsequently inhabited, the Americas during the final glacial episodes of the late Pleistocene period.

This shift did not seem to happen in most other cultural spheres on Earth, such as Romance-speaking (including France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Romania, Switzerland, and the Romance-speaking countries of Latin America and Africa), Germanic (but excluding English) speaking (including Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Icelands, Faroe Islands), Baltic-Slavic languages (including Czech Rep., Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithunia, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria) and in many other spheres, where America is still considered a continent encompassing the North America and South America subcontinents, as well as Central America.

The idea that a part of the Americas has a linguistic affinity with the Romance cultures as a whole can be traced back to the 1830s, in the writing of the French Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier, who postulated that this part of the Americas was inhabited by people of a "Latin race", and that it could, therefore, ally itself with "Latin Europe", ultimately overlapping the Latin Church, in a struggle with "Teutonic Europe", "Anglo-Saxon America" and "Slavic Europe".

America derives from Americus, the Latin version of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci's first name.

Sailing for Portugal around 1501–1502, Vespucci demonstrated that Brazil and the West Indies were not Asia's eastern outskirts (as initially conjectured from Columbus' voyages) but a separate, unexplored land mass colloquially known as the New World.

Decolonization of the Americas began with the American Revolution in the 1770s and largely ended with the Spanish–American War in the late 1890s.

In 1823, the fifth American President James Monroe (1758–1831, served 1817–1825) enunciated the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that the United States would not tolerate further efforts by European governments to retake or expand their colonial holdings in the Americas or to interfere with the newly independent states in the hemisphere; at the same time, the doctrine stated that the U.S. would respect the status of the existing European colonies.

Linguists and biologists have reached a similar conclusion based on analysis of Amerindian language groups and ABO blood group system distributions.

Indigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from Alaska, Nunavut, and Greenland to the southern tip of South America, encompassing the land masses that constitute the Americas.

Christie's auction house says a two-dimensional globe created by Martin Waldseemüller was the earliest recorded use of the term.

He and Matthias Ringmann are credited with the first recorded usage of the word America, on the 1507 map Universalis Cosmographia in honour of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.

The term Pre-Columbian is used especially often in the context of the great indigenous civilizations of the Americas, such as those of Mesoamerica (the Olmec, the Toltec, the Teotihuacano, the Zapotec, the Mixtec, the Aztec, and the Maya) and the Andes (Inca, Moche, Muisca, Cañaris).

This list of pre-Columbian cultures includes those civilizations and cultures of the Americas which flourished prior to the European colonization of the Americas.

The pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appearance of significant European influences on the American continents, spanning the time of the original settlement in the Upper Paleolithic to European colonization during the Early Modern period.

The most popular theory asserts that migrants came to the Americas via Beringia, the land mass now covered by the ocean waters of the Bering Strait.