the full history of America

1. The United States has been called the Land of Opportunity. Although the nation has
been a beacon of democracy, a symbol of freedom, and a model of individual
achievement, the United States is not free of its controversial history. From the horrors
of colonialism to the battle over slavery and the Jim Crow Laws to the Civil Rights.
Movement of the 1960s,
it is clear that the United States was not the mecca of liberty it was portrayed to be.
Still, the American spirit, American dream, and American innovation are as palatable as
the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, and the Lincoln Memorial. The United States
was born of revolution, and in its relatively short 244-year history, it has witnessed some
of the high points in human history and some of the most devastating lows. Here is the
captivating tale of one of the world’s greatest superpowers, a melting pot of people that
sometimes boils over into social unrest.
In the United States, schoolchildren were taught for many years that Christopher
Columbus discovered America in 1492. However, when Columbus set foot on
Hispaniola, there were already people there. Both North and South America was
populated with ancient, indigenous people. Anthropologists believe that humans
crossed a land bridge at the Bering Strait during the last Ice Age, and, from there, their
numbers spread throughout the Western Hemisphere. The native groups of South
America, the incredible cultures of ancient Mesoamerica,
Native America, and First Nation tribes of North America thrived for thousands of years
before Columbus’s arrival. Columbus wasn’t even the first European in the New World.
Norse and Viking explorers had already arrived in Greenland and parts of present-day
Canada.
Word spread of the riches of the New World. Although many tales about the wealth of
the newly discovered continent were obvious exaggerations – like stories of cities made
of gold – there were enough natural resources to attract explorers from several
European countries. People from Spain, England, Italy, France, and Portugal sailed to
the Americas to stake their claim to the vast expanse of land. The English attempted to
establish the first permanent colony in the United States, in what is now Virginia. In
1587, more than one hundred men, women, and children sailed to Roanoke Island and
built a settlement. The colony’s leader, John White, sailed back to England for supplies,
but when he returned almost three years later, the entire colony had disappeared. The
reasons remain a mystery to this day. Undeterred, the English sent John Smith to
establish the Jamestown colony in 1604. This opened the door to more colonization
efforts. A new and vast land beckoned people looking for adventure, people escaping
economic turmoil, or people fleeing religious persecution, as was the case with the
Pilgrims–who landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts in 1620.
Others were looking for opportunities. In England, land was scarce, and primogeniture
was practiced; only firstborn sons inherited land and estate, making land ownership an
impossibility for second and third born sons. Their only hope to build their own estates
was to make a new start in America. By the mid-1700s, European colonies were
prevalent up and down the east coast of the North American continent.
A bold young Virginia landowner named George Washington made a name for himself
as a military leader in the French and Indian War, which raged from 1754 to 1763. The
English colonists were victorious over the outnumbered French, even with several

2. Native American tribes on their side. The French and Indian War served as a dress
rehearsal for the war for independence, the Revolutionary War.
As the American colonies grew, expanded, and became more organized, the colonists
became disgruntled about how they were treated by the British crown. The colonies
were expected to pay their share of taxes but had no voice in the British government. As
the Revolutionary War broke out, George Washington was tasked with commanding the
Continental Army. The colonists issued their Declaration of Independence from the
British in 1776, but setting up the framework for a new, democratic nation took much
debate and discussion. The United States Constitution was finally ratified on September
17, 1787. Washington was elected to serve as the new country’s first president.
The new United States settled into an uneasy peace until they faced another threat from
the British. The War of 1812 was fought because the British wanted to restrict the U.S.
expansion across the North American continent and control U.S. trade. Years after the
war, the United States, and Britain buried the hatchet and became tight allies.
In the 1800s, the United States was marked with the mistreatment of minorities.
President Andrew Jackson advocated for the relocation of Native Americans from rich,
fertile farmlands because he believed that white Americans had more of a right to the
land than the indigenous people. Jackson’s attitude toward the Native Americans
culminated in the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the horrific Trail of Tears, a forced
march of over 60,000 Native Americans from their traditional homes in the southeastern
part of the U.S. to designated reservation lands west of the Mississippi River.
Approximately 4,000 people – many children – died during the treacherous journey.
While the Native Americans were forcibly ripped from their homelands, another
population of people in the United States endured the horrors of slavery. The African
slave trade was a thriving business until Congress passed an Act in 1808 that put a stop
to the importation of slaves from Africa; however, it did not put an end to the institution
of slavery in America. The large cotton and tobacco plantations of the South relied on
slave labor to stay profitable. As the moral dilemma of slavery weighed on the minds of
the industrial North, the issue became a wedge that drove apart the two halves of the
country and sparked a war between the states.
For four years, beginning in 1861, Americans fought Americans. Many of the southern
states seceded from the U.S. to form their own country, the Confederate States of
America. The fighting started at Fort Sumter just a few weeks after Abraham Lincoln
was sworn in as President.
The toll on the soldiers was tremendous. Seven-hundred and fifty thousand people died
in combat or from disease during the Civil War, more than all military deaths of U.S.
soldiers from all other wars combined until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. The
Civil War ended when Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, surrendered to Ulysses
S. Grant, the Union general, on April 9, 1865, at the Appomattox Courthouse. With the
fall of the southern Confederacy, over four million slaves were freed. Free, however, did
not mean equal. In the decades following the Civil War, American inventors created
such life-changing things as the electric light bulb, the telephone, the automobile, the
internal combustion engine, the assembly line, the teddy bear, the airplane, and the
supermarket. As the United States progressed into a modern society and a world
superpower, African Americans, Native Americans, and women were treated as
second-class citizens. Jim Crow Laws across the South were intended

3. to prevent Black people from achieving equality by openly discriminating against them.
Blacks were granted the right to vote in U.S. elections in 1870 but were often prevented
from voting by various discriminatory laws. Women earned the right to vote in 1920 and
Native Americans, in 1924. The United States was progressive and repressed
simultaneously.
A financial disaster and a man-made natural disaster knocked many Americans off the
ladder of success they had been steadily climbing. On October 24, 1929, the years of
lavish living on borrowed money caused the economy to collapse and the Stock Market
to crash. Businesses went bankrupt, thousands of people lost their jobs, and the United
States sank into the Great Depression. Adding to the woes was the Dust Bowl, the
U.S.’s largest man-made environmental disaster, which occurred in the early 1930s.
Irresponsible farming practices in the Great Plains set up a doomsday scenario in which
the fertile topsoil, exposed to high winds and drought conditions, blew away. Farmers
went bankrupt, and families lost their homes.
This, coupled with the Great Depression, forced the United States government to enact
programs, such as Social Security, the Civilian Conservation Corps, farm relief, and
banking reform to help get the country back on solid footing again. Just as the United
States was recapturing its former glory, it was attacked on its soil.
Political turmoil in Europe put most of that continent’s countries at war with each other.
Additionally, Japan and China were engaged in territorial conflict. Although it seemed
as though much of the world was at war, the United States had avoided involvement
until one fateful Sunday morning. Just before 8 a.m. on December 7, 1941, the Imperial
Japanese Navy Air Service commenced a surprise attack on the American naval base
at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Over two thousand people were killed, a dozen ships were
destroyed, and a few hundred planes were damaged. In response to the unprovoked
attack, President Franklin Roosevelt declared war on Japan the next day and
announced that the United States was joining the Allied forces in Europe. The
Americans were going to World War II.
On the home front, American factories and businesses switched gears to manufacture
the supplies needed to support the war effort, recruiting women in large numbers to
keep the assembly lines humming along. On the war front, the death toll was high. The
Nazis were killing millions of Jews in systematic extermination. The end of the fighting in
Europe came after the Allied troops seized Berlin and Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler,
committed suicide. The official German surrender came on May 8, 1945. The fighting in
the Pacific Theater raged on. With no end in sight, the Americans unleashed the
destructive power of Robert Oppenheimer’s newly developed atomic bomb on two
Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6, 1945, and again three days
later. More than a quarter of a million people died because of the two atomic bombs,
most were civilians. The Japanese emperor had no recourse but to surrender to the
United States.
In the decades following the end of World War II, the United States enjoyed
unprecedented growth and progress. Most families owned at least one automobile and
one television.