"Call it Columbia." "Alleghania." "The United States of the Earth."
This was not a pub argument. This was the Continental Congress, September 1776, deciding what to actually call the country they'd just declared into existence two months earlier.
On September 9, 1776, the Second Continental Congress formally retired the label 'United Colonies', the working title that had done perfectly adequate administrative duty up to that point, and settled on the United States of America. A name so familiar now it sounds inevitable. It wasn't.
Columbia was a serious contender, a Latinate nod to Christopher Columbus that carried the same sweep as 'America' without the awkward debt to Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine cartographer who, by most accounts, simply wrote a letter at the right moment. Columbia stuck around anyway, it became a district, a river, a record label, a country in South America, and roughly four hundred universities.
Alleghania had its backers too. Named for the Allegheny mountain range running through Pennsylvania and Maryland, it had a geographic logic the founders liked, they were, at that moment, largely a seaboard-and-ridge operation. The Appalachians were their western frontier. Branding the nation after them wasn't ridiculous.
Then there was the congressman, identity debated by historians, who reportedly floated the United States of the Earth. No known records survive of how the room reacted, but 'polite silence' seems a reasonable guess.
What's striking is that 'America' itself nearly didn't make the cut. The full name, United States of America, won largely because it was already in informal circulation, it sounded suitably republican, and because committees, when exhausted, tend to ratify whatever phrase people have already been using in the hallway.
Two hundred and forty-eight years later, the runner-ups get to live in the footnotes.
Which name do you think they should have gone with, and does it even matter?