The following teaser is from an article posted in the May 18, 2012 edition of the DailyMail.co.uk:
The phrase ‘United States of America’ may have been coined by an anonymous Virginia ‘planter’, rather than President and founding father Thomas Jefferson, according to a new discovery.
The National Archives cite the first known use of the ‘formal term United States of America’ as being the Declaration of Independence in June 1776, which would recognise Jefferson as the originator.
But historians have uncovered an example of the phrase published in The Virginia Gazette three months earlier.
Beginning in March 1776, a series of anonymously written articles began appearing in the newspaper, published in Williamsburg, with the author signing off simply ‘A Planter.’
Addressed to the ‘Inhabitants of Virginia,’ the essays argue in favour of independence over reconciliation with Great Britain and voice for the first time what an independent America would be called, according to The Christian Science Monitor.
