United States of America - History
Before the European colonization of the Americas, a process that began at the end of the 15th century, the present-day continental U.S. was inhabited exclusively by various indigenous tribes, including Alaskan Natives, who arrived on the continent over a period that may have begun 35,000 years ago and may have ended as recently as 11,000 years ago. The first confirmed European landing in the present-day United States was by a Spaniard, Juan Ponce de Leon, who landed in 1513 in Florida, and as part of his claim, the first European settlement was established by Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles on the site of a Timucuan Indian village in 1565 at St. Augustine, Florida. The first successful English settlement was at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, followed in 1620 by the Pilgrims' landing at Plymouth, Massachusetts. In 1609 and 1617, respectively, the Dutch settled in part of what became New York and New Jersey. In 1638, the Swedes founded New Sweden, in part of what became Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania after passing through Dutch hands. Throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries, England (and later Great Britain) established new colonies, took over Dutch colonies, and split others. With the division of the Carolinas, in 1729, and the colonization of Georgia, in 1732, the British colonies in North America, excluding present-day Canada, numbered thirteen. These thirteen colonies would be drawn closer together over the coming decades.
Tensions between American colonials and the British during the revolutionary period of the 1760s and 1770s led to open military conflict in 1775. George Washington commanded the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) as the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776. The Second Continental Congress had been formed to confront British actions, and did create the Continental Army, but did not have the authority to levy taxes or make federal laws. In 1777, the Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, uniting the states under a weak federal government, which operated from 1781 until 1788, when enough states had ratified the United States Constitution. The Constitution, which strengthened the union and the federal government, has since remained the supreme law of the land.
From 1803 to 1848, the size of the new nation nearly tripled as settlers (many embracing the concept of Manifest Destiny as an inevitable consequence of American exceptionalism) pushed beyond national boundaries even before the Louisiana Purchase. The expansion was tempered somewhat by the stalemate in the War of 1812, but was subsequently reinvigorated by victory in the Mexican-American War in 1848.
As new territories were being incorporated, the nation was divided over the issue of states' rights, the role of the federal government, and, by the 1820s, the expansion of slavery. The Northern states were opposed to the expansion of slavery whereas the Southern states saw the opposition as an attack on their way of life, since their economy was dependent on slave labor. The failure to permanently resolve these issues led to the Civil War, following the secession of many slave states in the South to form the Confederate States of America after the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln. The 1865 Union victory in the Civil War effectively ended slavery and settled the question of whether a state had the right to secede. The event was a major turning point in American history, with an increase in federal power.
After the Civil War, an unprecedented influx of immigrants, who helped to provide labor for American industry and create diverse communities in undeveloped areas, together with high tariff protections, national infrastructure building, and national banking regulations, hastened the country's rise to international power. The growing power of the United States enabled it to acquire new territories, including the annexation of Puerto Rico after victory in the Spanish-American War, which marked the debut of the United States as a major world power.
At the start of the First World War, in 1914, the United States remained neutral. In 1917, however, the United States joined the Allied Powers, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. For historical reasons, American sympathies were very much in favor of the British and French, even though a sizable number of citizens, mostly Irish and German, were opposed to intervention. After the war, the Senate did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles, because of a fear that it would pull the United States into European affairs. Instead, the country pursued a policy of unilateralism that bordered at times on isolationism.
During most of the 1920s, the United States enjoyed a period of unbalanced prosperity as farm prices fell and industrial profits grew. A rise in debt and an inflated stock market culminated in a crash in 1929, triggering the Great Depression. After his election as President in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted his plan for a New Deal, which increased government intervention in the economy in response to the Great Depression.
The nation did not fully recover until 1941, when the United States was driven to join the Allies against the Axis Powers after a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. World War II was the costliest war in American history, but helped to pull the economy out of depression as the required production of military materiel provided much-needed jobs and women entered the workforce in large numbers for the first time.
After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union became superpowers in an era of ideological rivalry dubbed the Cold War. The United States promoted liberal democracy and capitalism, while the Soviet Union communism and a centrally planned economy. The result was a series of proxy wars, including the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the tense nuclear showdown of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
The perception that the United States was losing the space race spurred government efforts to raise proficiency in mathematics and science in schools and led to President Kennedy's call for the United States to land "a man on the moon" by the end of the 1960s, which was realized in 1969.
Meanwhile, American society experienced a period of sustained economic expansion. At the same time, discrimination across the United States, especially in the South, was increasingly challenged by a growing civil-rights movement headed by prominent African Americans such as Martin Luther King, Jr., which led to the abolition of the Jim Crow laws in the South.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States continued to intervene militarily overseas, for example in the Gulf War.
Following the September 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. foreign policy focused on the threat of terrorist attacks. In response, the government under George W. Bush began a series of military and legal operations termed the War on Terror, beginning with the overthrow of Afghanistan's Taliban government in October 2001. Soon after, the United States launched the controversial 2003 invasion of Iraq, with support from 30 governments, which George W. Bush referred to as the 'Coalition of the Willing'. Although the Bush administration justified its invasion with a charge that Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, no such stockpile was found, and the Bush administration later admitted having acted on flawed intelligence.
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