History of the United States

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"American history" redirects here. For the history of the continents, see History of the Americas.
See also: Economic history of the United States
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The date of the start of the history of the United States is a subject of debate among historians.
Older textbooks start with the arrival of Christopher Columbus on October 12, 1492 and
emphasize the European background, or they start around 1600 and emphasize the American
frontier. In recent decades American schools and universities typically have shifted back in time

to include more on the colonial period and much more on the prehistory of the Native peoples.[1]
[2]

Indigenous people lived in what is now the United States for thousands of years before European
colonists began to arrive, mostly from England, after 1600. The Spanish had small settlements in
Florida and the Southwest, and the French along the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast. By
the 1770s, thirteen British colonies contained two and a half million people along the Atlantic
coast east of the Appalachian Mountains. In the 1760s, the British government imposed a series
of new taxes while rejecting the American argument that any new taxes had to be approved by
the people (see Stamp Act 1765). Tax resistance, especially the Boston Tea Party (1774), led to
punitive laws (the Intolerable Acts) by Parliament designed to end self-government in
Massachusetts. American Patriots (as they called themselves) adhered to a political ideology
called republicanism that emphasized civic duty, virtue, and opposition to corruption, fancy
luxuries and aristocracy.
Armed conflict began in 1775 as Patriots drove the royal officials out of every colony and
assembled in mass meetings and conventions. In 1776, the Second Continental Congress
declared that there was a new, independent nation, the United States of America, not just a
collection of disparate colonies. With large-scale military and financial support from France and
military leadership by General George Washington, the American Patriots won the Revolutionary
War.
The peace treaty of 1783 gave the new nation the land east of the Mississippi River (except
Florida and Canada). The central government established by the Articles of Confederation
proved ineffectual at providing stability, as it had no authority to collect taxes and had no
executive officer. Congress called a convention to meet secretly in Philadelphia in 1787. It wrote
a new Constitution, which was adopted in 1789. In 1791, a Bill of Rights was added to guarantee
inalienable rights. With Washington as the first president and Alexander Hamilton his chief
political and financial adviser, a strong central government was created. When Thomas Jefferson
became president he purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, doubling the size of the
United States. A second and final war with Britain was fought in 1812.
Encouraged by the notion of Manifest Destiny, federal territory expanded all the way to the
Pacific. The U.S. always was large in terms of area, but its population was small, only 4 million
in 1790. Population growth was rapid, reaching 7.2 million in 1810, 32 million in 1860, 76
million in 1900, 132 million in 1940, and 321 million in 2015. Economic growth in terms of
overall GDP was even faster. However the nation's military strength was quite limited in
peacetime before 1940. The expansion was driven by a quest for inexpensive land for yeoman
farmers and slave owners. The expansion of slavery was increasingly controversial and fueled
political and constitutional battles, which were resolved by compromises. Slavery was abolished
in all states north of the MasonDixon line by 1804, but the South continued to profit off the
institution, producing high-value cotton exports to feed increasing high demand in Europe. The
1860 presidential election of Republican Abraham Lincoln was on a platform of ending the
expansion of slavery and putting it on a path to extinction.

Seven cotton-based deep South slave states seceded and later founded the Confederacy months
before Lincoln's inauguration. No nation ever recognized the Confederacy, but it opened the war
by attacking Fort Sumter in 1861. A surge of nationalist outrage in the North fueled a long,
intense American Civil War (1861-1865). It was fought largely in the South as the overwhelming
material and manpower advantages of the North proved decisive in a long war. The war's result
was restoration of the Union, the impoverishment of the South, and the abolition of slavery. In
the Reconstruction era (18631877), legal and voting rights were extended to the freed slave.
The national government emerged much stronger, and because of the Fourteenth Amendment in
1868, it gained the explicit duty to protect individual rights. However, when white Democrats
regained their power in the South during the 1870s, often by paramilitary suppression of voting,
they passed Jim Crow laws to maintain white supremacy, and new disfranchising constitutions
that prevented most African Americans and many poor whites from voting, a situation that
continued for decades until gains of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and passage of
federal legislation to enforce constitutional rights.
The United States became the world's leading industrial power at the turn of the 20th century due
to an outburst of entrepreneurship in the Northeast and Midwest and the arrival of millions of
immigrant workers and farmers from Europe. The national railroad network was completed with
the work of Chinese immigrants and large-scale mining and factories industrialized the Northeast
and Midwest. Mass dissatisfaction with corruption, inefficiency and traditional politics
stimulated the Progressive movement, from the 1890s to 1920s, which led to many social and
political reforms. In 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed women's suffrage
(right to vote). This followed the 16th and 17th amendments in 1913, which established the first
national income tax and direct election of US senators to Congress. Initially neutral during World
War I, the US declared war on Germany in 1917 and later funded the Allied victory the following
year.
After a prosperous decade in the 1920s, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 marked the onset of the
decade-long worldwide Great Depression. Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the
Republican dominance of the White House and implemented his New Deal programs for relief,
recovery, and reform. The New Deal, which defined modern American liberalism, included relief
for the unemployed, support for farmers, Social Security and a minimum wage. After the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States later entered World War
II along with Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and the smaller number of Allied nations. The
U.S. financed the Allied war effort and helped defeat Nazi Germany in the European theater and
culminated in using the newly invented nuclear weapons on Japanese strategic cities that helped
defeat Imperial Japan in the Pacific theater at the cost of 407,000 Americans throughout both
theaters of World War II.
The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as rival superpowers after World War II. During
the Cold War, the US and the USSR confronted each other indirectly in the arms race, the Space
Race, proxy wars, and propaganda campaigns. US foreign policy during the Cold War was built
around the support of Western Europe and Japan along with the policy of "containment" or
stopping the spread of communism. The US joined the wars in Korea and Vietnam to try to stop
its spread. In the 1960s, in large part due to the strength of the civil rights movement, another
wave of social reforms were enacted by enforcing the constitutional rights of voting and freedom

of movement to African-Americans and other racial minorities. Native American activism also
rose. The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union officially dissolved in 1991, leaving the United
States as the world's only superpower. As the 21st century began, international conflict centered
around the Middle East following the September 11 attacks by Al-Qaeda on the United States in
2001. In 2008, the United States had its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, which
has been followed by slower than usual rates of economic growth during the 2010s.