The great landmass of the Western Hemisphere was first documented in letters from Amerigo Vespucci, an employee of the Medici family. It appears that Vespucci navigated the coastline of this New World from what we now call Central America to about the 25th parallel in what is now Brazil.
The introduction of the name "America," a feminization of Vespucci’s first name, was made by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in his 12-panel map of the globe done in 1507. The first image I could find that differentiates North and South America is by Abraham Goos, a Dutch engraver and publisher, in 1626.
Why am I dragging us all through this little history lesson? It has to do with something that most of us here know but few others want to admit: there are LOTS of "Americans" who don’t live in the United States. Before there was a U.S., before there were North and South (or Central) Americas, there was plain, old America. It’s a fact that’s easy to forget. No one in the world refers to people in this country as "United Statians" or "United Statites." We’re Americans, right? Every one knows that that appellation refers to citizens of this country.
Just like Vespucci never called the continent(s) whose coastlines he had explored "America," perhaps we were not the first ones to call our country America or its citizens American, but the name has stuck. With the name comes a jingoistic pride that we are somehow the real Americans. The good nuns who taught me many years ago were humble enough and smart enough to know - and tell us - that thinking of ourselves, to the exclusion of all others in this hemisphere, as Americans was disrespectful of the rest of the inhabitants with whom we share the "New World." Sure, we say "Latin Americans" meaning those of the southern latitudes who speak the Latin-derived romance languages of Spanish, Portuguese, and French, but we don’t consider them American Americans. And what about poor Canada? Are they, too, not American?
American exceptionalism likely originated in the Puritan ideology as expressed by John Winthrop as the "City Upon a Hill":
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken... we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God... We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us til we be consumed out of the good land whither we are a-going.
Exceptionalism was further promulgated in the Revolutionary era by men like Thomas Paine in "Common Sense":
• "O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her--Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind."
• ". . . have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the event of a few months."
I could go on to trace it through to the present day, but I am hoping that that is unnecessary. It is often brought out in diaries here that those of us fortunate enough to live in this country sometimes view ourselves as better-than, smarter-than, whiter-than, etc. I am as guilty as the next one for being lazy and using the word "American" when what I really mean is people of the U.S. It’s a lot easier to type and I don’t have think as much when constructing a sentence. It also ignores or denies that there are a whole lot more "Americans" living outside our borders than within them.