What about Saint Pierre and Miquelon then? Located a short distance west of Newfoundland. Regarded as the last French possession in North America.
I can’t see any reasonable way to declare this a part of the European continent (or Eurasia).
Plates are problematic as well. The North American Plate is interesting: It excludes a bit of the coast west of the San Andreas fault. So LA is not in NA? It does include some (but not all) of Cuba. But not Hispaniola (except maybe a little bit). That makes no sense, map-wise. It also includes half of Iceland and part of far eastern Asia! It also cuts off well north of Panama.
So forget plates. So water boundaries only? Then what about Asia-Europe and Asia-Africa (ignoring man made waterways)? And on and on.
I always have taken the Caribbean islands as to be non-continental. Like good old Hawaii. But Trinidad and Tobago which are just islands off the coast of South America are part of the Caribbean Community. Okay. OTOOH, so are Suriname and Guyana.
Personally, I’m inclined to say that North and South America are different continents, as are Africa and Eurasia, on the grounds that, if you tried to cut the shapes out of paper, it’d fall apart.
But then again, if you cut North America out of paper, Manhattan would definitely fall apart, being an island and all. But I don’t have any problem considering Manhattan part of North America.
That still doesn’t cut it for me because he didn’t realize what he found.
I prefer to think that no one discovered it. Even he had made his voyage before or instead of the Vikings, and had realized what he had found, there is still the issue of Alaskan and Siberian natives, who never forgot that there was a huge mass of land 20 or so miles away. So the Americas were never really lost from the knowledge of the “Old World” to begin with.
Wow, some very interesting takes that I didn’t expect. I have, in the meantime, brought some of the more salient points from this thread to the cow-orkers I was having this debate with and the consensus among them is that I’m wired way too tight and who cares if the Grand Cayman is part of North America or not.
So, of course, I immediately declared victory and bathed in glory.
One data point: Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti (along with Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.) were signatories to the North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement, implemented in 1941.
Most islands are really underwater mountains with the top part sticking out above sea level. Often volcanic, with lava coming out from weak points in the crust where the plates meet. (Or upthrust, where the plates collided and one side got pushed up.)
But it wasn’t called ‘America’ until years later. Columbus thought he had reached India or the eastern part of Asia. I seem to recall that he held that belief through several voyages, and died still believing it.
Right. In fact it was Columbus’s own insistence that he hadn’t discovered a new continent, but instead part of Asia, that resulted in it not being named after him but rather after Amerigo Vespucci, who was the first to popularize the idea.
The Olympic Flag has five rings representing all the continents: Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia (or Oceania) and the Americas (as one).
Some cultures/nations still call the Americas one continent.
You can go by continental plates, but then you run into problems with part of Iceland and Siberia being in North America and part not. Not to mention part of California is on the Juan de Fuca plate or Pacific plate, and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks California isn’t in North American
Geographically all Caribbean islands, not part of a South American nation are considered, North America.
I recall until the 90s most encyclopedias listed all nations south of Mexico as Latin America, even Guyana and Suriname which do not use a Latin tongue. Now most omit those two and none Latin (languages) speaking islands
Geographically part of North America. Otherwise it would be South America which it’s seldom considered even islands closer to South America, or not among the islands not included in any continent, which the Caribbean islands are also rarely considered AFAIK, as opposed to islands far out in the open ocean.
Socio-politically there are more ways to subdivide ‘the Americas’. One is North America (as in just the US and Canada) v Latin America, with the non-Latin Caribbean islands and the Guianas as a miscellaneous category. Another semi-geographic subdivision is North America (including Mexico in some contexts), Central America (including Mexico in some contexts), the Caribbean, and South America.
What it boils down to is that “continent” is not a precisely defined term. “Generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria” is how wiki puts it. There isn’t really a definite “right” and “wrong”. Personally, I’ll stick with Greenland being in North America, Iceland in Europe, and the Carribean Islands in North America. Matches where generations of cartographers have placed them. In the case of the Carribean Islands, probably because making a map of North America on a rectangular page with most map projections pretty much forces them onto the page because of the way Florida and Mexico wrap around the Carribean.
Before somebody calls me on it, yes, I know they actually wrap the Gulf of Mexico. But the general shape of the North American continent including Central America still pretty much forces the Caribbean onto a rectangular page.
That depends on North American what, precisely. If you’re talking about the North American continent, then no. If you’re talking about the North American region, then yes.
An “atlas oriented” definition works almost perfectly. An atlas page of NA and the Caribbean looks nice. Ditto SA, Africa, Antarctica and Australia*. Europe/Asia is a problem. Too wide to fit a page similar to the others and have a nice scale. Splitting into Europe and Asia at the Urals sort of works.
An Australian map could nicely fit Indonesia and such. But including NZ would downgrade the scale. It’s further away than most people think.
I just remembered one point of data. There is a program at the local college called On The Latin Side, whose promo includes the phrase “On the Latin Side features a great selection of music reflecting the cultures of Central and South America, the Caribbean and Spain.” So the DJ at least considers them different musically.
I once shared a house with a Guyanan fellow (of Indian sub-continental stock) who certainly insisted in the strongest terms that he and his country were West Indian. A sure way to make him extremely angry, was to refer to him as (a) South American.
For what this may be worth – the British quarterly Continental Railway Journal – dedicated to reporting news and findings re railways in all parts of the world except for the British Isles; ceased publication 2013: classed as “North America”, everywhere on the whole continental land-mass going as far south and east as Panama inclusive; plus all Caribbean islands without exception, and islands such as (mentioned elsewhere in thus thread) the Bahamas and Bermuda, not in the Caribbean but culturally akin. Only continental-land-mass countries from Colombia onward, ranked as South America.
The guy who edited CRJ, fairly autocratically, for many decades, was a highly conservative gentleman as regards general approach to life. I’d hazard a guess that at school in the 1930s / 40s, he had been told that correct North / South America categorisation was as above; and took that as gospel truth, for the rest of his life.
(To the best of my knowledge, Guyana never featured in CRJ. With the criterion applied being basically of a geographical rather than a cultural nature, I’d imagine that had it done so, it would have been put in the “South America” slot.)
That doesn’t follow. Otherwise that would be evidence that the DJ considers Central America and South America to be different musically. In fact, the music of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean Islands (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Cuba) has more in common with the Spanish-speaking countries of the mainland than it does with that of Jamaica and the English-speaking Caribbean (calypso, ska, reggae). It’s a little odd that they didn’t include Mexico, which is generally considered to be part of North America.
