What is an American? Not in some social-historical sense. Just practically: Are there around 350 million Americans or more than a billion? People in Maine and Idaho call themselves Americans. But so do people all across what you might call “the Americas,” way down through Chile and Argentina, some of whom consider it pretty typical that a certain nation would arrogate that description all to itself. Arguments about this have gone on for centuries and show no signs of stopping; a fresh ripple passed through TikTok this year.
Some people say this is all about the arbitrary nature of continents. No matter how much you might appeal to isthmus widths or plate tectonics to pretend that continents make objective sense, the truth is that they are made up, incoherent and subjective. Children in Cleveland are taught about North America and South America, but a good share of the world recognizes just one contiguous American continent — as on the 1507 map that established the name, labeling it somewhere around Bolivia. The population of this America would be “American,” causing some linguistic tension with those kids in Cleveland.
But continents can’t really explain why we keep arguing about this. For one thing, U.S.-Americans didn’t reach consensus on that North-South separation until the 1950s. For another, we ourselves spent much of our history making the exact same complaint as our Latin American neighbors! This nation collected a bunch of already-named states under a painfully generic label, conveying only a sense of union and a vague location; as a collective national identity emerged, people were genuinely irritated by the lack of a real-deal name. Even “American” was a fudge, a word for New World things in general that slid into describing a New World nation-state. In 1903, the writer James Duff Law argued that our people, “in justice to Canadians and Mexicans, have no right to use the title ‘Americans,’” and thus “every day is keenly felt the want of a correct name.” His preference, “Usonian,” was shared by Frank Lloyd Wright, who traced its invention to the novelist Samuel Butler: “‘The United States’ did not appear to him a good title for us as a nation, and the word ‘American’ belonged to us only in common with a dozen or more countries.”
“Usonian” is not bad. But is this stuff really fixable? English-language country naming seems no easier to rationalize than continents. Names generally come in two parts: a political designation (like “Republic of”) and a national or geographic one (like “Armenia”). We mostly just use the second, unless circumstances demand otherwise — say, differentiating between the two Congos or discussing conglomerations like the United Kingdom or the United Arab Emirates. That’s one solid argument for people in the United States calling ourselves “American”: This is the sole country with “America” as its national title. (“It was a bit of an oversight that the country and the continents have the same name,” someone jokes on Reddit, “but it’s probably too late for either of them to change.”) Some call us by the political-structure part instead — estadounidense in Spanish, statunitense in Italian — but our rights to that aren’t exclusive either: We border, formally, los Estados Unidos Mexicanos. Not one part of U.S.A. is a unique identifier.
There are naming tangles all over the globe, especially if you’re pedantic. The islands of Micronesia are home to five sovereign nations, but only one took the name Federated States of Micronesia. The area Europeans called Guinea has a Republic of Guinea but also Guinea-Bissau and Equatorial Guinea (where people are Equatoguinean); the Niger River gives us both Nigerians and Nigeriens. I will spare you a whole thing about Grenada (the country), Grenada (the island) and the Grenadines and spare myself the politics of “China.” Head north from Lesotho and you’ll meet South Africans — things are not straightforward!
More to the point, consider “Columbia.” That was another contender for the name of the New World, after Christopher Columbus instead of Amerigo Vespucci. Latin American revolutionaries used it to refer to the whole region — which is why, after liberating the Viceroyalty of New Granada and Captaincy General of Venezuela in the early 1800s, they did the same thing the United States did and christened an umbrella Republica de Colombia. (Even, briefly, a “United States of Colombia.”) Millions now identify as “Colombian” for roughly the same reason estadounidenses say “American.”
It’s not as though the name was unused. U.S.-Americans used it for our capital district, for cities, for a river and a university and a broadcast system; people in search of a better demonym proposed “Columbian” and “Columbard”; up until Lady Liberty arrived, the white-robed “Lady Columbia” was in fact a chief national symbol. (The Department of Homeland Security tweeted a provocative painting of her just last year.) To our north, a patch of Canada was named by Queen Victoria: “The only name which is given to the whole territory in every map the Queen has consulted is ‘Columbia,’” she wrote, “but as there exists also a Columbia in South America, and the citizens of the United States call their country also Columbia, at least in poetry, ‘British Columbia’ might be, in the Queen’s opinion, the best name.”
It’s hard to untangle history. We call ourselves American in a national sense. Chileans call themselves American in a continental one. Nothing so terrible stems from this, apart from a sense that it’s unflatteringly in character on our part. And the main issue there is not exactly about the name, is it? You could make a list of unpleasant things the United States has done to the rest of the hemisphere, somebody jokes in one argument: “Calling ourselves American wouldn’t crack the top 200.”
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.