Among his initial flurry of Executive Actions on January 20th — the day he was inaugurated — President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness.” It, in part, directed the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
A week later, Google announced it would change what users of Google Maps and Google Earth in the U.S. saw to Gulf of America. But the Associated Press (AP) announced that its wire reports would continue to refer to Gulf of Mexico while acknowledging "Gulf of America." Conservative leaning news outlets made the switch without clarification. The Trump Administration has since indefinitely barred AP reporters from attending press events in the Oval Office or aboard Air Force One until the agency agrees to use "Gulf of America" in its style guide.
The name Gulf of Mexico first appeared on a world map in the 1500s and by the mid 1600s the name had become commonly used. There are roughly 3,700 miles of coastline around the Gulf – including in US, Mexico, and Cuba. The U.S. Gulf Coast, which includes the states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, accounts for approximately 1,630 miles of that total.
And the Gulf is intimately tied to the history of how the United States developed over the centuries. So, in order to get some context I spoke last week with a man who both grew up on the Gulf, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for his comprehensive book about it. Jack E. Davis is author or editor of ten books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea.”
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