Native Americans, or American Indians, arrived 13,500 to 16,000 years ago from northeast Asia, crossing the Bering Strait into Alaska, and created a wide variety of sophisticated societies before the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th century. The Mississippian cultures built huge settlements across the Southeast, and the Anasazi built elaborate cliff-side towns in the Southwest. After contact with European colonizers, these societies were decimated by Old-World diseases such as smallpox, and were pushed west by warfare and encroaching settlers. Their diminished numbers led to further marginalization, although today their cultures endure and continue to contribute to the American experience.
European colonization began in the 16th and 17th centuries. England, Spain, and France gained large holdings; the Netherlands, Sweden, and Russia also established outposts. The first English colonies, founded in Jamestown, Virginia (1607) and Plymouth, Massachusetts (1620), formed the kernel of what is now known as the United States.
In the Northeast, Massachusetts was settled by Puritans, who fled religious persecution in Europe and later spread and founded most of the other New England colonies, creating a highly ascetic region. Other religious groups also founded colonies, including the Quakers in Pennsylvania and Roman Catholics in Maryland. The Middle Colonies of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania became the North’s cosmopolitan center.
Longer growing seasons in the Southern colonies gave them richer agricultural prospects, especially for cotton and tobacco. As in Latin America and the Caribbean, indentured servants, convicts and later African slaves were imported and forced to cultivate large plantations. Slavery was practiced in both North and South, but its greater importance to the South’s economy eventually caused tremendous upheaval.
By the early 18th century, Great Britain had colonized the Atlantic coast from Georgia north into what is now Canada. The last major British migration to the territory took place in middle decades of that century when the Appalachia region was settled. In 1763, British dominance in North America was established after the global Seven Years’ War. In part to finance what was locally called the North American campaigns of the French and Indian War, Britain imposed unpopular taxes and regulations on its colonists. This precipitated revolution in 1775 and on 4 July 1776, colonists from 13 colonies declared independence. The Revolutionary War lasted until 1783, when the new United States of America gained sovereignty over all British land between the Atlantic and the Mississippi River. Those still loyal to the British mostly fled north to what is today Canada, which remained under British rule.
Wrangling over the formation of a national government lasted until 1787 when a constitution was agreed upon. Its Enlightenment-era ideas about individual liberty have since inspired the founding decrees of many states. George Washington, the general-in-chief of the revolutionary army, was elected the first president. By the turn of the 19th century, the newly-built Washington, D.C. was established as the national capital.
New states were created as white settlers moved west beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The Native American populations were displaced and further harrowed by war and disease. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase of French lands to the west of the Mississippi (charted by the Lewis and Clark expedition) effectively doubled the size of the nation, and provided “Indian Territory” in what is now Oklahoma for the many Native American tribes from the east that were forcibly relocated during the Trail of Tears of the 1830s.
Further disagreements with British commerce policies led to the War of 1812. The two years of fighting on land and sea included an invasion of Canada and the burning of the White House and public buildings in Washington, D.C. Virtually no changes of territory resulted from the war, but it galvanized separate American and Canadian identities. The national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner”, was conceived during this war. Western Native American tribes that had sided with the British suffered greatly as their territory was given to white settlers.
After the war, industry and infrastructure were expanded greatly, particularly in the Northeast (see American Industry Tour). Roads and canals came first and helped people spread inland. By the late 1860s, railroads and telegraph lines connected the east and west coasts via the industrial hub of Chicago in the Midwest. In the early 19th century, a series of religious revivals, the Second Great Awakening, led to various reform movements that strove for goals such as temperance, the abolition of slavery, and women’s suffrage.
U.S. expansion south and west chipped away at Spanish and Mexican territory. Spain sold Florida in 1813 after American military intervention, and an 1836 rebellion by American settlers in Mexican Texas founded an independent republic which was absorbed into the Union ten years later. This sparked the Mexican–American War in which Mexico lost what is now California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, and the contiguous United States essentially assumed its modern outline. Native Americans were relegated to reservations and continued to be purged by treaty, military force, and disease from settlers on the Oregon Trail and other westward routes. (See also: Old West.)
Federal governance was light and the states were highly autonomous. By the 1850s, there was irreconcilable disparity between the industrialized and more urban Northern states, which had all outlawed slavery within three decades of the revolution, and the plantation-dependent rural South. Many in the North wanted to impose a national ban on the expansion of slavery, while the Southern states sought to expand slavery into new territories. Abolitionists operated an Underground Railroad leading fugitive slaves in the northern states to freedom in Canada. In 1861, eleven Southern states, fearful of marginalization and the avowedly anti-slavery President Abraham Lincoln, broke from the Union and formed an independent Confederate States of America. The ensuing American Civil War remains the bloodiest conflict on American soil and killed hundreds of thousands of people. In 1865, Union forces prevailed, firmly cementing the federal government’s authority over the states. Slavery was abolished nationwide and the Confederate states were re-admitted into the Union during a period of Reconstruction. The former slaves and their descendants were to remain an economic and social underclass, particularly in the South.
Russia sold its tenuously held Alaskan territory in 1867, and independent Hawaii was annexed in 1898. The United States’ decisive victory over Spain in the 1898 Spanish–American War gained it overseas colonies, of which Puerto Rico and Guam remain American dependencies. Alaska and Hawaii were the last U.S. territories to be granted statehood to date, in 1959.
In the late 19th and into the 20th century, Southern and Eastern Europeans, Ashkenazi Jews and Irish bolstered the continuing industrialization of the eastern cities by providing cheap labor. Many Southern African-Americans fled rural poverty and racism for industrial jobs in the North. Other immigrants, including many Scandinavians and Germans, moved to newly opened territories in the West and Midwest, where land was given to anyone who would develop it.
The United States’ entrance into World War I in 1917 marked the start of an era in which it would become a world power. Real wealth grew rapidly and in the Roaring 20s stock speculation created an immense financial “bubble”. It burst in 1929, leading to the global economic havoc of the Great Depression. The resulting privation fostered a culture of sacrifice and hard work that would serve the country well in the coming conflict. It also ushered in President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His “New Deal” was a series of government programs that constructed thousands of buildings and bridges across the country while creating the basis of the American welfare state.
In 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, an American naval base in Hawaii, plunging the United States into World War II on the side of the Allied Powers. (See World War II in Europe and the Pacific War.) The U.S. developed atomic bombs and dropped them twice on Japan in 1945, abruptly ending the war. By the end of the war, the U.S. had firmly established itself as the world’s dominant economic power, responsible for nearly half of global industrial production. During the ensuing Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union jostled for power. Although war between the two superpowers never occurred, both sides were indirectly involved in covert operations and military endeavors through various proxy states that continue to (often negatively) affect the view people have of the U.S. and its role in global politics.
For the century after the Civil War, black people, though ostensibly equal citizens under the post-Civil War amendments to the U.S. Constitution, suffered through strong social, economic, and political discrimination and state-sanctioned segregation, especially in the South. A movement fighting for full civil rights for black Americans gained strength following World War II, when returning black veterans who fought against racism abroad came home to find they were still heavily discriminated against. The civil rights movement vehemently, but largely peacefully, vied for equal rights, with Martin Luther King, Jr., a charismatic preacher, as its most visible leader. The landmark Civil Rights Act that was passed in 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, although such discrimination still exists, mostly in less blatant forms. In 2008, the country elected its first African-American president. A revived women’s movement in the 1960s also led to wide-ranging changes in American society.
Postwar America was characterized by affluence and industrialization. People left agriculture and moved to the cities to become part of an increasingly technology-based economy. American car culture emerged in the 1950s and was supported by the construction of a comprehensive Interstate Highway System. These trends also led to the rise of suburbia and a decline in public transportation and rail travel, making touring the United States without a car difficult to this day. White flight to the suburbs in many American cities left many black people behind in blighted inner city neighborhoods. The American consumer culture, Hollywood movies, and many forms of popular music established the U.S. as the cultural superpower of the world. The U.S. grew into one of the world’s major centers of higher education, and is now home to many of the world’s most prestigious universities, attracting more international students than any other country.
In 2001, terrorist attacks claimed the lives of nearly 3000 people across three states, thrusting national security into the forefront of public attention. The 2020s dawned amidst a wave of social unrest brought on by the global COVID-19 pandemic and an intensifying public discourse on issues of social injustice.
Source: wikivoyage.org