The History of the United States
traditionally starts with the Declaration of Independence
in the year 1776, but its territory was occupied first by the Native Americans since
prehistoric times and then also by European colonists who
followed the voyages of Christopher Columbus
starting in 1492. The largest settlements were by the English on the East
Coast, starting in 1607. By the 1770s the Thirteen
Revolution. In 1789 the Constitution United States federal government,
with war hero George Washington as the first president. The
young nation continued to struggle with the scope of central government and
with European influence, creating the first political parties in the 1790s, and fighting a
second war for independence in 1812. contained two and half million people, were prosperous, and
had developed their own political and legal systems. The British government's
threat to American self-government led to war in 1775 and the Declaration of
Independence in 1776. With major military and financial support from France, the
patriots won the became the basis for the
U.S. territory expanded westward across the
continent, brushing aside Native Americans and Mexico, and overcoming
modernizers who wanted to deepen the economy rather than expand the geography. Slavery of Africans was abolished in the
North, but heavy world demand for cotton let it flourish in the Southern states. The 1860 election of Abraham
Lincoln calling for no more expansion of slavery triggered a crisis
as eleven slave states seceded to found the Confederate States of America in 1861. The
bloody American Civil WarReconstruction era, the U.S. ended
slavery, extended rights to African
Americans, and readmitted secessionist states with loyal
governments. The national government was much stronger, and it now had the
explicit duty to protect individuals. Reconstruction was rolled back by the
white South, leaving the blacks in a world of Jim Crow
political, social and economic inferiority. The entire South remained poor
while the North and West grew rapidly. (1861–65) redefined the
nation and remains the central iconic event. The South was defeated and, in the
Thanks to an outburst of entrepreneurship in the
North and the arrival of millions of immigrant workers from Europe, the U.S. became the
leading industrialized power by 1900. Disgust with corruption, waste, and
traditional politics stimulated the Progressive
movement, 1890s-1920s, which pushed for reform in industry and
politics and put into the Constitution women's suffrage and Prohibition of alcohol
(the latter repealed in 1933). Initially neutral in World War I, the U.S. declared war on Germany in 1917, and funded the
Allied victory. The nation refused to follow President Woodrow
Wilson's leadership and never joined the League of
Nations. After a prosperous decade in the 1920s the Wall Street Crash of 1929 marked the onset
of the decade-long world-wide Great Depression. A
political realignment expelled the Republicans from power and installed
Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt and his elaborate
and expensive New Deal
programs for relief, recovery, and reform. Roosevelt's
Democratic coalition, comprising ethnics in the
north, labor unions, big-city machines, intellectuals, and the white South, dominated
national politics into the 1960s. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941,
the U.S. entered World War II alongside the AlliesNazi Germany
in Europe and, with the detonation of newly-invented atomic bombs,
Japan and helped defeat
in Asia and the Pacific.
The Soviet Union
and the U.S. emerged as opposing superpowers
after the war and began the Cold Wararms race,
the Space Race,
and intervention in Europe and eastern Asia. Liberalism reflected in
the civil rights movement and opposition to
war in Vietnam peaked in the 1960s–70s before giving way to conservatism in the early
1980s. The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union dissolved in
1991, leaving the U.S.
to prosper in the booming Information Age economy that was boosted, at
least in part, by information technology. International
conflict and economic uncertainty heightened by 2001 with the September 11 attacks and subsequent War on Terror
and the late-2000s recession. confronting indirectly in an
Pre-Columbian Era
It is not definitively known how or when the Native Americans first settled the Americas and the present-day United States.
The prevailing theory proposes that people migrated from Eurasia
across Beringia,
a land bridge
that connected Siberia
to present-day Alaska,
and then spread southward throughout the Americas. This migration might have
begun as early as 30,000 years ago and continued through to about 10,000 years
ago, when the land bridge became submerged by the rising sea level caused by
the ending of the last glacial period.
These early inhabitants, called Paleoamericans,
soon diversified into many hundreds of culturally distinct nations and tribes.
The pre-Columbian
era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the AmericasEuropean
influences on the American continents, spanning the time of the original settlement in the Upper
Paleolithic period to European colonization
during the Early Modern period. While technically
referring to the era before Christopher Columbus' voyages of 1492 to
1504, in practice the term usually includes the history of American indigenous cultures
until they were conquered or significantly influenced by Europeans, even if
this happened decades or even centuries after Columbus' initial landing.
before the appearance of significant
Colonial Period
After a period of exploration by
people from various European countries, Spanish, Dutch,
English, French, Swedish, and Portuguese
settlements were established. In the 16th century, Europeans brought horses,
cattle, and hogs to the Americas
and, in turn, took back to Europe maize, potatoes, tobacco,
beans, and squash. The disease environment was very
unhealthy for explorers and early settlers. The Native Americans became exposed
to new diseases such as smallpox and measles and died in very large numbers,
usually before large-scale European settlement began.
Spanish, Dutch, and French colonization
Spanish explorers were the first Europeans to
arrive in what is now the United States with Christopher Columbus' second expedition, which
reached Puerto Rico on November 19, 1493; others reached Florida in 1513.
Quickly Spanish expeditions reached the Appalachian Mountains, the Mississippi
River, the Grand Canyon
and the Great Plains.
In 1540, Hernando de Soto undertook an extensive
exploration of Southeast. Also in 1540 Francisco Vázquez de Coronado explored
from Arizona to central Kansas. The Spanish sent some settlers,
creating the first permanent European settlement in the continental United
States at St. Augustine, Florida in 1565, but it
attracted few permanent settlers. Much larger and more important Spanish
settlements included Santa Fe, Albuquerque, San Antonio,
Tucson,
San Diego,
Los Angeles
and San Francisco.
New
Netherland was the 17th century Dutch colony centered on New York City and the Hudson
River Valley, where
they traded furs with the Native Americans to the north and were a barrier to Yankee New England. The Dutch were Calvinists who
built the Reformed Church in America, but they were
tolerant of other religions and cultures. The colony was taken over by Britain in
1664. It left an enduring legacy on American cultural and political life,
including a secular broadmindedness and mercantile pragmatism in the city, a
rural traditionalism in the countryside typified by the story of Rip Van
Winkle, and politicians such as Martin Van
Buren, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor
Roosevelt.
expansion from New France was the area colonized by France from
1534 to 1763. There were few permanent settlers outside Quebec, but
Indian tribes often became military allies in France's
wars with Britain.
After 1750 the Acadians—French
settlers who had been expelled by the British from Acadia (Nova Scotia)—resettled
in Louisiana, where they developed a distinctive rural Cajun culture that still
exists. They became American citizens in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. Other French villages along
the Mississippi and Illinois
rivers were absorbed when the Americans started arriving after 1770.
British Colonization
The strip of land along the eastern seacoast was
settled primarily by English colonists in the 17th century, along with much
smaller numbers of Dutch and Swedes. Colonial America was defined by a
severe labor shortage that employed forms of unfree labor
such as slavery and indentured servitude, and by a British
policy of benign neglect (salutary
neglect) that permitted the development of an American spirit
distinct from that of its European founders. Over half of all European
immigrants to Colonial America arrived as indentured servants.
The first successful English colony was
established in 1607, on the James River at Jamestown. It languished for decades until a
new wave of settlers arrived in the late 17th century and established
commercial agriculture based on tobacco. Between the late 1610s and the
Revolution, the British shipped an estimated 50,000 convicts to their American
colonies. One example of conflict between Native Americans and English settlers
was the 1622 Powhatan
uprising in Virginia,
in which Native Americans had killed hundreds of English settlers. The largest
conflict between Native Americans and English settlers in the 17th century was King Philip's War in New England,[13]
although the Yamasee War may have been bloodier.
New England was initially settled primarily by Puritans
who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, although
there was a small earlier settlement in 1620 by a similar group, the Pilgrims,
at Plymouth Colony. The Middle Colonies,
consisting of the present-day states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, were characterized by a large degree
of diversity. The first attempted English settlement south of Virginia
was the Province of Carolina, with Georgia
Colony the last of the Thirteen
Colonies established in 1733. The colonies were characterized by
religious diversity, with many Congregationalists in New England, German and
Dutch Reformed in the Middle Colonies, Catholics in Maryland, and Scotch Irish
Presbyterians on the frontier The First Great Awakening. Many royal
officials and merchants were Anglicans. Religion expanded greatly after the First Great Awakening, a religious revival
in the 1740s led by preachers such as Jonathan Edwards. American Evangelicals
affected by the Awakening added a new emphases on divine outpourings of the
Holy Spirit and conversions that implanted within new believers an intense love
for God. Revivals encapsulated those hallmarks and forwarded the newly created
evangelicalism into the early republic, setting the stage for the Second Great Awakening beginning in the
late 1790s.
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