History of United StateAmerica
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.
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, 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 Mason–Dixon 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 (1863–1877), legal and voting rights
were extended to the freed
slave. The national
government emerged much stronger, and because of the Fourteenth
Amendment, 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 mostAfrican
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
world-wide 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 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.
VIKNESHWARAN A/L GNANASEGARAN
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