HISTORY.

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see History of the Americas.

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HISTORY.

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The history of the United States as covered in American schools and universities typically begins with
either Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage to the Americas or with the prehistory of the Native peoples,
with the latter approach having become increasingly common in recent decades. [1]

Indigenous populations lived in what is now the United States before European colonists began to arrive,
mostly from England, after 1600. By the 1770s, thirteen British colonies contained two and a half million
people. They were prosperous and growing rapidly, and had developed their own autonomous political
and legal systems. The British Parliament asserted its authority over these colonies by imposing new
taxes, which the Americans insisted were unconstitutional because they were not represented in
Parliament. Growing conflicts turned into full-fledged war beginning in April 1775. On July 4, 1776, the
colonies declared independence from the Kingdom of Great Britainand became the United States of
America.

With large-scale military and financial support from France and military leadership by GeneralGeorge
Washington, the Patriots won the Revolutionary War and peace came in 1783. During and after the war,
the 13 states were united under a weak federal government established by theArticles of Confederation.
When these proved unworkable, a new Constitution was adopted in 1789; it remains the basis of
the United States federal government, and later included a Bill of Rights. With Washington as the nation's
first president and Alexander Hamilton his chief financial advisor, a strong national government was
created. In the First Party System two national political parties grew up to support or oppose Hamiltonian
policies. When Thomas Jefferson became president he purchased the Louisiana Territory from France,
doubling the size of American territorial holdings. A second and last war with Britain was fought in 1812.
The main result of that war was the end of European support for Native American (Indian) attacks on
western settlers.

Under the sponsorship of the Jeffersonian Democrats, and the Jacksonian Democrats, the nation
expanded to the Louisiana purchase and all the way to California and Oregon, and a quest for
inexpensive land for Yeoman farmers and slave owners who promoted democracy and expansion, at the
cost of violence and a disdain for European culture. The expansion, under the rubric of Manifest
Destiny was a rejection of the advice of Whigs who wanted to deepen and modernize the economy and
society rather than merely expand the geography. Slavery was abolished in all the Northern states (north
HISTORY.

of the Mason-Dixon line which separated Pennsylvania and Maryland) by 1804, but it flourished in
the Southern states because of heavy European demand for cotton.

After 1820, a series of compromises postponed a showdown on the issue of slavery. In in the mid 1850s,
the new Republican power took political control of the North and promised to stop the expansion of
slavery, which implied its eventual death. The 1860 presidential election of Republican Abraham
Lincoln triggered the secession of eleven slave states to found the Confederacy in 1861. The American
Civil War (1861-1865) was the centerpiece of American history. After four years of bloody warfare, the
Union, under President Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant as the commanding general defeated the South
with Robert E. Lee as its foremost general The Union was saved, slavery was abolished, and the South
was impoverished. In the Reconstruction era (186377), the United States ended slavery and extended
legal and voting rights to the Freedmen (African Americans who had been slaves). The national
government was much stronger, and because of the Fourteenth Amendment it now had the explicit duty
to protect individual rights. Reconstruction ended in 1877 and from the 1890s to the 1960s the system
of Jim Crow (segregation) kept blacks in political, social and economic inferiority. The entire South
remained poor until the 2nd half of the 20th century, while the North and West grew rapidly and
prospered.

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 North and the arrival of millions of immigrant workers and farmers from
Europe. The national railroad network was completed, and large scale mining and factories industrialized
the Northeast and Midwest. Middle class dissatisfaction with corruption, inefficiency and traditional politics
stimulated the Progressive movement from the 1890s to 1920s, which pushed for reforms and allowed
for women's suffrage and the prohibition of alcohol (the latter repealed in 1933). Initially neutral in World
War I, the U.S. declared war on Germany in 1917, and 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
world-wide Great Depression. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt became president and implemented
hisNew Deal programs for relief, recovery, and reform, defining modern American liberalism. After the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States entered World War II alongside
the Allies and helped defeat Nazi Germany in Europe and, with the detonation of newly-invented atomic
bombs, Japan in the Far East.

The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as opposing superpowers after World War II and began
the Cold War, confronting one another indirectly in the arms race and Space Race. U.S. foreign policy
during the Cold War was built around the containment of Communism, and the country participated in the
wars in Korea and Vietnam to achieve this goal. Liberalism won numerous victories in the days of the
New Deal and again in the mid-1960s, especially in the success of the civil rights movement,
but conservatism made its comeback in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. The Cold War ended when
HISTORY.

the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, leaving the United States the only superpower. As the 21st century
began, international conflict centered around the Middle East and heightened significantly following
the September 11 attacks and the War on Terrorism that was subsequently declared. The United States
experienced its worst economic recession since World War II in the late 2000s, which has been followed
by slower than usual rates of economic growth during the 2010s.