Atta boy! The Atlantic Review shows up as the Nr.1 blog in Spiegel's Technorati trackback list for this story. Let's see if the Der Spiegel international edition staff begins to really pay attention to the lively dialogues and scoops on transatlantic news and issues that take place regularly at your blog or if they just continue to ignore your work and that of other top German bloggers as they have done for the past year or more.

P.S. I still say that the Waldseemüller 1507 map of the world is a fake. Check the spelling on Amerika with a loupé... is that a "c" or a "k"?

You know Zyme, I think that you may be right about that. Martin Waldseemüller probably denoted all geographical features of the map in Latin. Just to make sure, I dropped a line to the folks over at the new Library of Congress blog about our (my confusion)... let's see if they stop by the Atlantic Review to clear this matter up once and for all. Here is the question I posed to the LoC:

"We’ve picked up on the story over here in Germany at the Atlantic Review blog. The 1507 Waldseemüller map of the world is a great gift to the LoC and the American people, but we are having a bit of debate over its authenticity. Did Martin Waldseemüller denote the continents and other geographical features on his map in Alt Deutsch (Old German) or in Latin?

See the Atlantic Review posts on April 28th and May 1st for our comments about this acquisition.

Atlantic Review
http://atlanticreview.org/

P.S. I think that it is great the the U.S. Library of Congress has started a blog. Good luck!"

Wait a minute. If the new continent was denoted in Latin then wouldn't it be called Amerikus? Americi? I didn't do so well in Latin studies at school...:-)

Thanks for the update on the original post Jörg. Actually I was just having fun with you and the Atlantic Reviews's regular readers re: the Library of Congress acquisition of the Waldseemüller 1507 map of the world. Der Spiegel did get the story wrong but perhaps it was just carelessness on the part of the article's authors (yeah, right).

As an American citizen and as an American with a longstanding relationship with the German people (not always pleasant and friendly, mind you) I am very proud to have this magnificent and rare 36 square foot antique map as a permanent addition to the collections of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. I'm very interested in history and antique maps and documents as you well know.

What your readers and you may be really interested in seeing and hearing is the speech that German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave at the Library of Congress (auf Deutsch and in English) before members of the U.S. Congress and guests of the LoC. This is where she expressed her personal feelings about the transatlantic relationship between the German people and the American people and she made no bones about her foreign policy goals toward the United States under her leadership of both Germany and the EU Presidency. It's THE story that Der Spiegel and other news media missed or chose to ignore during Merkel's recent visit to Washington D.C.

Checkout the 37 minute streaming video webcast available at the new Library of Congress blog. It is well worth the time (and bandwidth) to watch and listen to Angela Merkel and others speak about the Waldseemüller map and the transatlantic relationship:

Library in the News 04/30/07 by Matt Raymond
http://www.loc.gov/blog/?p=49

P.S. This map of course should provoke lots of questions and debate and provide food for thought about the "Dawn of the Modern Era" and European expansionism into the New World. Just think about it: if a copy of Waldseemüller's map had fallen into the hands of the Aztecs and the various indigenous tribes of South, Central, and North America they could have planned a helluva counter-attack to stem the European invasion of their lands. The world as we know it today would be a very different place.