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Printing Press Dbq Essay

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As André Gide once said, “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” During the mid-1400s in Europe, German inventor Johannes Gutenberg created the printing press, a machine that revolutionized the way ideas spread. The printing press quickened the production of books, speeding up the spread of information from one place to another; it also educated people in the areas of reading and writing. However, the two main consequences of the printing press were the Exploration and the Protestant Reformation. Although the Reformation was substantially impacted by the printing press, exploration was a greater consequence of the printing press because it sparked interest in exploration in the European citizens, …show more content…

Although some think that the printing press had a bigger impact on the Reformation, for it was influential in spreading religion, the mass distribution of Columbus’s letter verifies the influence of the printing press on exploration. When looking at Martin Waldseemuller’s World Map of 1507 and comparing it to a map published earlier, Henricus Martellus’s World Map of 1489, one can see that America has been added. This addition was made from the information in Columbus’s letter. Without the printing press, Columbus’s letter wouldn’t have been mass produced and the information couldn’t have reached the mapmaker, who would not have been able to include the Americas in his improved map. Europeans wouldn’t even have known that America, the place where millions of people live today, actually existed. Without the printing press, the existence of the Americas wouldn’t have been confirmed. Explorers might have found the Americas at a later date than they actually did, which would’ve altered the course of America’s history. This proves that exploration was the more important consequence of the printing

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