USA History

Water Under The Bridge. Archaeologists believe that the first inhabitants of the Americas crossed the Bering Sea from Siberia by a land bridge during the last Ice Age—approximately 12,000 years ago. Scientists have raised different theories to explain this migration: the pursuit of bison, a shift in the living conditions in Asia, or just wanderlust. Gradually, the Asiatic migrants came to inhabit all corners of their new continent. The earliest Native American cultures were nomadic, flourishing as they followed megafauna (giant mammals similar to today’s horses, armadillos, and lions). Around AD 200, the ancestors of today’s Pueblos fostered advanced civilizations; ruins are visible in the Anasazi Great Houses of Chaco Canyon .

A Brave New World. Though no one is certain, it is likely that the earliest Europeans to arrive in America did so accidentally, when storms blew their ships off course. Textbooks place the discovery of the Americas in 1492, when Christopher Columbus, an Italian explorer, found his voyage to the East blocked by Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea. Columbus thought he had reached the Spice Islands of the East Indies, and dubbed the inhabitants “Indians.” Columbus’s arrival marked the beginning of European conquest. In addition to establishing what would become a permanent European presence in the New World, conquests brought disease and death to the Native Americans.

In the centuries after Columbus’s voyage, Europeans rushed to the New World in search of gold and silver, prestige for themselves, colonies for their motherland, and in some cases, religious freedom. The Spanish expanded into the southern and southwestern regions what is now the US, while the French and Dutch created more modest empires to the north. The English settled the New World’s east coast, and after a few failed attempts, established a successful colony at Jamestown in 1607. Their prosperity and growth hinged on the indigenous tobacco plant, a product that gained instant popularity in England. In the years after 1620, the Puritans, religious separatists who had been persecuted by the Presbyterians in England, fled to present-day Massachusetts, settling at the famous Plymouth Rock . The Puritan founding of Plimoth spawned the popular myth of the first American Thanksgiving.

Revolution And Independence. In order to protect her holdings in the Americas from an impending French influence, Britain entered the French and Indian War in 1754, fighting battles against French and Native American joint forces. The British triumphed, but their victory was bittersweet: Britain’s power in the Americas seemed irrelevant once the colonists no longer needed protection from the French. Furthermore, the struggle more than doubled Britain’s government expenditures. British leaders decided to shift the economic burden onto American colonists: the new taxes angered colonists, who rallied against “taxation without representation.” Colonial committees created the First Continental Congress, which attempted to convince England of the colonists’ rights. Tensions peaked in 1773 when patriots in Boston staged the Boston Tea Party, dumping over 10,000 pounds of tea into Boston Harbor to protest unfair tea taxation. This marked the beginning of violence between Great Britain and the colonies and led to the Second Continental Congress. This Congress prepared the colonies for the war, which officially began in April 1775, at the battles of Lexington and Concord. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, and it was adopted on July 4th, which remains the USA’s most important non-religious national holiday. Fighting continued throughout the east coast until October 1781, when, outnumbered by colonial rebels and their French allies, the British surrendered, ending the Revolutionary War and finally granting the colonists their independence.

The Constitution, Protector Of Freedom. In 1787, the state legislatures of the original 13 states sent 55 delegates to draft what was to become the Constitution, which is still the governing code of law in America today. The Bill of Rights, a set of 10 constitutional amendments, was passed shortly after the Constitution, and remains a cornerstone of the American political system. This document includes protection of personal rights: freedom of speech, press, and religion, respectively. When the Constitution was ratified, George Washington, the former Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, was unanimously elected the first President of the United States.

Manifest Destiny. After Jefferson was elected third President of the US, he purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803—for less than $0.03 an acre. The purchase began an era known as “manifest destiny”: the belief that it was the will of God for America to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The sprawling landmass stretched south from Montana to Louisiana and west from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. The next year, Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the territory and find a river route to the Pacific Ocean. Lewis and Clark never found a waterway linking the oceans, but with the help of a Shoshone guide, Sacagawea, they charted the land west of the Mississippi. In the decades that followed, droves of people moved west along the grueling Oregon Trail in search of a new life. Over 40,000 prospectors traveled to California between 1848 and 1849 in a mass migration now known as the Gold Rush.

When the independent Republic of Texas (formerly part of Mexico) became a US state in 1845, President James Polk decided to expand into Mexican territory. The tension that resulted from the Texas War of Independence and Polk’s designs on Mexico’s territory led to the Mexican-American War. American soldiers offered protection for the Texans from Native Americans in exchange for surrender. Mexican troops were forced to capitulate when US troops invaded Mexico City. The treaty that ended the war in February 1848 granted the US nearly two-fifths of Mexico’s territory, including modern-day New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

The Homestead Act of 1862 prompted the cultivation of the Great Plains by distributing government land to those who would farm the land and settle it. This large-scale settlement led to bloody battles with the Sioux, Hunkpapas, and Cheyenne Native American tribes who had long inhabited the Plains and saw the settlement as an invasion of their lands. From 1866 to 1891 conflicts with Native Americans raged on, leading to the Allotment Act of 1891, which established Native American land reservations in order to end the fighting.

Slavery In The New World. The first Africans were brought to America in 1619 on a Dutch slave ship that landed in Jamestown, VA. The demand for cheap labor in America increased from the late 1500s into the 1600s, and white settlers began to invade Native American communities looking for slaves. Native Americans, however, suffered fatally from European diseases, leading colonial America to rely on African slaves to provide labor. Thousands of Africans were forced across the Atlantic to be auctioned off into US slavery, a harrowing journey known as the Middle Passage. This lasted until 1808, when the slave trade was abolished. Slave ownership, however, continued until the mid-19th century.

The existence of slavery exacerbated existing ideological differences between the North and the South. The South’s agricultural economy was driven by slave labor, while the industrialized North relied on manufacturing and trade. Because the federal government was designed to prevent the “tyranny” of pre-Revolution days, each state in the Union could decide to allow or prohibit slavery independently. As the Northern states became more insistent that territories and new states should be kept as “free states”, the Southern states dug in their heels, citing the Revolutionary ideal of states’ rights. Meanwhile, Northern abolitionists joined with free African-Americans to form the Underground Railroad, an escape route in which “conductors” secretly transported escaped slaves into the free Northern states. Southern slave-owners often chased slaves down in an attempt to reclaim their “property,” further fueling tensions between the North and South. In the end, only a fierce, bloody conflict could decide which region would prevail.

“A House Divided”: The Civil War. Tensions between the North and South came to a head when Abraham Lincoln, an anti-slavery Congressman from Illinois, was elected President in 1860. In response, South Carolina, a hotbed of pro-slavery sentiment, seceded from the Union and 10 other Southern states quickly followed suit. These rebellious states became the Confederate States of America under the Presidency of Jefferson Davis. Lincoln refused to accept the secession, setting the stage for war. On April 12, 1861, Southern troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, SC, and the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression as it is known in the South) began. For four years the country endured a bloody conflict. Lincoln led the Union to eventual victory, but the price was high; the war claimed more American lives than any other conflict in US history. Lincoln was assassinated at the Ford Theater on April 14, 1865, by Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth.

Reconstruction, Invention, And Industrialization. The period after the war brought with it a period of transition: Reconstruction in the South and the Industrial Revolution in the North. While the North’s rapid industrialization made it a contender in the world economy, the South’s agricultural economy entered a slow decline. Injured and embittered by the war and dependent on an outdated agricultural tradition, Southerners struggled to readjust to new socio-economic conditions. Meanwhile, newly-freed blacks faced a difficult transition from plantation life to free life. Jim Crow laws imposed by white politicians espoused a doctrine of segregation, impeding African-Americans’ civil rights—forcing them to be segregated from whites in public areas, such as schools and buses. Even drinking fountains were classified according to race. Freedom from slavery, however, also meant new opportunities for African-Americans. Black colleges were founded, and a few prominent African-Americans were able to gain some political power. For many blacks, though, segregation, Jim Crow laws, and racist sentiment led to share-crop farming for white landowners, which was not much different from slavery.

During the “Gilded Age” of the 1870s, captains of industry Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller built commercial empires and enormous personal fortunes amid an atmosphere of widespread corruption. However, massive wealth didn’t trickle down to farmers and industrial workers, who faced low wages, violent strike break-ups, and unsafe working conditions. But the Industrial Age wasn’t all bad. Major developments in transportation were a cornerstone of industrialization. Between 1850 and 1890, miles of railroad track in the nation increased from around 9000 to over 200,000. Aviation became popular after the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, NC in 1903. Thomas Edison started the nation’s first electricity generating station (in addition to inventing appliances like the lightbulb), and Rockefeller began turning oil into the energy powerhouse it is today. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, forever changing communication.

The World Moves: Imperialism, Immigration, And Wwi. The United States’ victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898 seemed to validate its internationalist policies. Believing that the US should be a leader in world affairs, and continuing its tradition of Manifest Destiny, the nation acquired colonies in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

While the US displayed its proud face all over the globe, the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought a flood of new foreign faces to the nation. The flood of European immigration began in 1880, when nearly four million Italian immigrants fled Italy’s dismal economic climate for American shores. Between 1880 and 1900, the US population grew by 50 percent. New York’s Ellis Island became the center for processing immigrants. Near Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty , a gift to the US from the people of France, greeted the shiploads of “tired, poor, huddled masses” yearning for the freedom promised by the Constitution.

In 1901, Teddy Roosevelt took over the presidency following the assassination of William McKinley, and brought a youthful, progressive approach to the government. In response to the corrupt, monopolistic practices of big business, Roosevelt and his progressive Bull Moose Party promoted anti-trust reforms to regulate large companies. In foreign affairs, Roosevelt established the US as an international police power; recommending that the nation “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Meanwhile, a new breed of journalists, known as the “muckrakers,” began writing articles to unveil the Industrial Age’s rampant corruption. One of the most famous of these works, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, was a graphic exposé of the meatpacking industry.

After vowing to keep the US out of “Europe’s War,” President Woodrow Wilson entered World War I. US troops landed in Europe in 1917 and fought until Germany’s defeat the next year. The expansion of the US Armed Forces that was necessary to carry out the war meant that 6% of the labor force aged 15-44 was deployed, and at least a fifth of the nation’s resources were devoted to the war. The war, and the US’s sudden involvement, called for extensive production of military products. In fact, from an economic point of view, the money spent by the US on the war was completely offset by the increases in production that were necessary to fight it. Though the metal-consuming war jump-started America’s industrial economy and established the US as a major international power, the war killed 10 million people, including 130,174 Americans. Ultimately, this human loss left Americans wary of future combat in Europe.

Roaring 20s, Great Depression, And Wwii. After the war, Americans returned their attention to the home front, and the United States entered a new age of affluence. Labor unrest and racial tension were blamed on communist influences, and during 1919 the US experienced a “Red Scare” as unease over the spread of communism increased. The same year, the perceived moral decline of America was addressed by the immensely unpopular Prohibition laws, which outlawed alcohol. In spite of these restrictions, America’s fun-loving spirit thrived as Mafia-run “speakeasies” replaced neighborhood saloons and created a huge black market for bootleg liquor. The jazz scene raged, giving this era of music, leisure, and decadence the apt name “The Jazz Age.”

During this period, women suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony mobilized for the right to vote, putting intense pressure on politicians at every level of the government. These efforts eventually met with success in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which extended suffrage to women.

The economic boom of the “Roaring 20s” was driven largely by overextended credit. The facade of economic stability crumbled on “Black Thursday,” October 24, 1929, when the New York Stock Exchange crashed. This downfall initiated a period of world-wide financial collapse known as the Great Depression. In an urban, mechanized age, millions of workers (25-50% of the work force) were left unemployed and struggled to provide for their families. The United States, like the rest of the developed world, rebounded slowly, and poor economic conditions continued for almost a decade despite New Deal policies like the Social Security Act initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In the aftermath of the Depression, Nazi Germany plowed through Europe. American civilians were largely unaware of the extent of the horrors in Europe because of Nazi cover-ups. The US entered World War II only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941. Joining the Allied Powers, the US waged a war on two fronts, fighting both the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific. The European front was resolved with the German surrender on May 8, 1945, less than a year after the immense D-Day invasion of continental Europe in June 1944. The war in the Pacific continued until August of 1945, when the US dropped two newly developed nuclear bombs on Japan, killing 80,000 civilians and demonstrating to the world the power of nuclear warfare. Defeating Germany and her allies in Europe and Asia established the US military as a permanent global force.

The Cold War. Spared the wartime devastation faced by Europe and East Asia and empowered by nationalistic pride, the US economy boomed after the war and secured the nation’s status as the world’s dominant economic and military power. The US population increased during this period, as jubilation over victory and a throng of men returning from war created the Baby Boomer generation. While the 1950s are often nostalgically recalled as a golden age of prosperity and traditional values, the decade did experience international tumult and angst.

The ideological gulf between the world’s two nuclear powers—the democratic, capitalist US and the totalitarian, communist Soviet Union—initiated the half-century Cold War between the two nations. Tension with the Soviet Union heightened as President Harry Truman installed the foreign policy of communist containment to prevent the spread of communism beyond the Soviet Union’s borders. Fear of communism led to American military involvement in Asia, where the Maoist revolution in China had emboldened imitators in surrounding countries. From 1950 to 1953, the United States fought the Korean War on behalf of the South Koreans, who had been attacked by the communist North Korean government. The Soviet launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in 1957 rekindled fears that communist regimes were surpassing America in many ways. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, during which President John F. Kennedy negotiated the removal of Soviet missiles from a Cuban base, narrowly avoiding nuclear war, reinforced the perception that the United States had to protect the world from Soviet invasion.

Exploiting rising anti-communist feeling at home, the House Un-American Activities Committee, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, conducted so-called witch-hunts delving into every aspect of American public life to root out communist sympathizers, with a special focus on Hollywood and the media as a whole. The power of McCarthy and the HUAC waned as the vast majority of accusations were proven to be unfounded.

In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy during a parade in Dallas, TX. The assassination of the young, charismatic President mirrored America’s larger loss of innocence and optimism. Throughout the rest of the decade, cultural strife, stemming from the long-fought civil rights movement and the bloody, controversial Vietnam War, altered the nation’s social fabric.

All You Need Is Love..And Protest. Driven by the dictates of the containment policy instituted after WWII, the US became embroiled in Vietnamese politics, culminating in a large-scale deployment of combat troops in 1965 to protect the South Vietnamese state from the aggression of Ho Chi Minh’s communist government to the north. The Vietnam War was seen as a test of America’s foreign policy, making retreat difficult even when it became apparent that military officials had underestimated the situation in Vietnam and that a U.S. victory was unlikely. Though most Americans supported the war at first, opposition grew as it dragged on and citizens began to question its moral premises. Vietnam was the first war “fought on television,” where graphic images of war never before seen by Americans, contributed to the perception of the war as a hopeless endeavor. Members of the new hippie generation responded with shouts of “Make Love, Not War” at the 1969 Woodstock music festival. The youth protests catalyzed wrenching generational clashes that eventually climaxed in riots and violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the National Guard shooting of anti-war protestors at Kent State in 1970.

The Vietnam War was not the only cause that captured the hearts and minds of idealistic young Americans. Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up a bus seat in Montgomery, AL in 1955 sparked a period of feverish activity culminating in the civil rights movement, in which African-Americans strove for recognition of equality. The struggle was characterized by countless demonstrations, marches, and sit-ins in the heart of a defiant and often violent South. Activists were drenched with fire hoses, arrested, and even killed by local mobs and policemen. The movement crested with a march on Washington, D.C. in 1963, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have A Dream” speech, calling for non-violent racial integration. The tone of the civil rights movement changed as some blacks became fed up with peaceful demonstrations and turned to the more militant rhetoric of Malcolm X, who espoused separatist “Black Power,” and the Black Panthers, who used more aggressive tactics to assert African-Americans’ rights.

The second wave of the women’s movement arose at this time as well. Sparked by Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, American women sought to erase the line between men’s and women’s roles in society, demanding equal pay and access to male-dominated professions. Outside the Miss America Pageant in 1968, women crowned a sheep “Miss America” and exuberantly threw away their bras and high heels. The sexual revolution, fueled by the introduction and commercial use of the birth control pill, focused the debate on abortion and reproductive rights. The 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, but the battle between its opponents and advocates still divides the nation.

Despite civil rights legislation and anti-poverty measures passed under President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society agenda, the specter of the Vietnam War overshadowed his presidency. By the end of these tumultuous years, the nation had dropped seven million tons of bombs on former Indochina—twice the amount used against America’s WWII enemies—and victory was still out of reach. Under President Richard Nixon, America extracted the last of its troops from Vietnam.

In 1972, five burglars were caught breaking into the Democratic National Convention Headquarters in the Watergate apartments. Their attempt to bug the offices led to a broader scandal involving Nixon himself. Aided by the information of top FBI official Mark Felt (an anonymous source known until 2005 as “Deep Throat”), Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward published a series of articles that exposed Nixon’s links to the scandal and ultimately led to his resignation.

By the mid-1970s, America was disillusioned with both the government and the idealistic counterculture of the previous decade. Frivolous activities, like dancing in platform shoes and powder blue suits under flashing lights—a phenomenon known as disco—became the mark of a generation that just wanted to have fun. Unfortunately, the international situation remained tense. The oil-rich Arab nations boycotted the US, causing an energy crisis in 1973 that drove up gas prices, frustrated autophile Americans, and precipitated an economic recession.

The 1980s. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, a politically conservative former California governor and actor, was elected to the White House. Reagan knew how to give the people what they needed: money. He cut spending on public programs and lowered taxes. Though the decade’s conservatives embraced social goals, the Reagan revolution was economic. Reaganomics cut taxes for big corporations, reduced government spending, and attempted to limit inflation, initiating a “trickle-down” effect and spurring consumption. On the foreign policy front, the straight-talking cowboy president negotiated the end of the Cold War.

The 1990s: Bills, Bills, Bills. The US remained an active force in the world through the early 1990s. President George H.W. Bush directed “Operation Desert Storm” in 1990 as a response to Iraq’s invasion of neighboring Kuwait. The war freed Kuwait, but its popularity in the US was compromised by the economic recession that followed. In 1992, Americans elected young Democrat Bill Clinton, who promised a new era of government activism after years of laissez-faire rule.

Clinton found himself plagued with his own problems: a suspicious Arkansas real estate development project called Whitewater, an alleged extramarital affair with Gennifer Flowers, and accusations of sexual harassment from Paula Jones. Yet Clinton’s public approval remained high, especially after the nation supported him in a struggle against Congressional Republicans whose attempts to balance the budget led to two government shutdowns between 1995 and 1996. Clinton was re-elected in 1996, but new scandal erupted in 1998 as reports of an inappropriate relationship between Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky were plastered across the American media. Clinton initially denied the allegations, but later admitted that he lied, resulting in impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice. The trial in the Senate ended with a vote for informal censure over conviction, and Clinton remained in office. Despite the scandal, 90s America saw its lowest unemployment and inflation rates in modern history, as well as increased homeownership, decreased crime and welfare rolls, and the first balanced budget in years.

The United States also saw the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1991, plus a vast increase in the use of personal computers (PCs). As the decade progressed, PCs became more prevalent and email jumped in popularity; by the turn of the century, 100 million Americans were using the Internet. The sudden demand for the Internet set the stage for the so-called dot-com boom of the 1990s. California’s Silicon Valley played host to many of the startup Internet companies that enjoyed unbelievable success in the stock market. The dot-com bubble, however, was short-lived, and burst early on in the 21st century.

A New Enemy: Terror. On September 11th, 2001, the most severe terrorist attack in the history of the United States occurred when four planes were hijacked by Al-Qaeda terrorists. The site of the most violent crash was the World Trade Center in New York City, where approximately 3000 lives were taken. Since September 11th, President George W. Bush has initiated a War on Terrorism designed to identify and capture terrorists, particularly those of Al-Qaeda. Immediately following the attacks on the US, patriotism was high, and Bush received sweeping support for the US invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of the ruling Taliban, who had supported Al-Qaeda terrorists. The War on Terrorism became more controversial at home when Attorney General John Ashcroft proposed (and Congress passed) measures like the PATRIOT Act, which were designed to protect the country from terrorists, but which many believe to endanger key civil liberties.

Recent News. President Bush declared war on Iraq in March 2003 to “disarm Iraq and free its people.” Major fighting ended only three weeks after the American army entered Iraq, but US forces remain years later, trying to stabilize the nation in the face of bloody insurgent violence and heated domestic unrest.

It appears that the war in Iraq—which has grown to be an increasingly contentious issue at home and abroad—will be a

focal point for presidential hopefuls in 2008, who in 2007 have begun to clamor for nominations from their respective parties. Democrats are eager to capture the presidency in the wake of the highly controversial Bush administration, with candidates Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama leading an aggressive charge. Early polls show Republican favorites Fred Thompson and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as likely candidates for the GOP nomination.

Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Deep South in late August of 2005, tearing through the region and leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. By any standard one of the costliest and deadliest hurricanes in the history of the United States, Katrina left a permanent impact on many beloved American cities, including New Orleans, which suffered as many as 53 levee breaches and causing severe flooding in approximately 80% of the city. New Orleans is currently on its way to recovery.

Global warming has also proven to be a troubling dilemma, jumping to the forefront of political discourse. In 2006, former vice-president Al Gore unveiled his groundbreaking, Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which explores contemporary data and predictions for climate change.