8. Some glimpses of the history of the U.S.A.
History of the United States
Where?
The United States of America is located in the middle of the North American continent, with Canada to the north and the United Mexican States to the south. The United States ranges from the Atlantic Ocean on the nation's east coast to the Pacific Ocean bordering the west, and also includes the state of Hawaii, a series of islands located in the Pacific Ocean, the state of Alaska located in the northwestern part of the continent above the Yukon, and numerous other holdings and territories.
First people
The
first known inhabitants of the area now known as the United States are believed
to have arrived over a period of several thousand years beginning approximately
20,000 years ago by crossing the Bering land bridge into Alaska. The first
solid evidence of these cultures settling in what would become the US begins as
early as 15,000 years ago with the Sandia and Clovis tribes. These people became the
indigenous people who inhabited the Americas prior to the arrival of European
explorers in the 1400s and who are now called Native Americans.
First cultures
Many
cultures thrived in the Americas before Europeans came, including the Puebloans
(Aztec) in the southwest and the Adena Culture in the east. Several such
societies and communities, over time, intensified this practice of established
settlements, and grew to support sizeable and concentrated populations.
Agriculture was independently developed in what is now the eastern United
States as early as 2500 BC, based on the domestication of indigenous sunflower,
squash and goosefoot. Eventually, Mexican maize and legumes were adapted to the
shorter summers of eastern North America and replaced the indigenous crops.
First Europeans
The
first European contact with the Americas was with the Vikings in the year 1000.
Leif Erikson established a short-lived settlement called Vinland in present day
Newfoundland. It would be another 500 years before European contact would be
made again.
Columbus, Ponce de Léon, Cabot
Relatively
little is known of these early settlers compared to the Europeans who colonized
the area after the first voyage of navigator Christopher Columbus in 1492 for
Spain. Columbus' men were also the first documented Old Worlders to land in the
territory of the United States when they arrived in Puerto Rico during their
second voyage in 1493. The first European known to set foot in the continental
U.S. was Juan Ponce de León, who arrived in Florida in 1513, though there is
some evidence suggesting that he may have been preceded by John Cabot in 1497.
First colonies
After a period of exploration by various European countries, Dutch, Spanish, English, French, Swedish, and Scottish settlements were established. In the 15th century, Europeans brought horses, cattle and hogs to the Americas.
Spanish explorers
Spanish
explorers reached the present-day United States. The first confirmed landing in
the continental US was by a Spaniard, Juan Ponce de León, who landed in 1513 at
a lush shore he christened La Florida.
Within three decades of Ponce de León's landing, the Spanish became the first Europeans to reach the Appalachian Mountains, the Mississippi River, the Grand Canyon and the Great Plains.
In 1540, De Soto undertook an extensive exploration of the present US and, in the same year, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led 2,000 Spaniards and Mexican Indians across today's Arizona-Mexico border and traveled as far as central Kansas. Other Spanish explorers include Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón, Pánfilo de Narváez, Sebastián Vizcaíno, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, Gaspar de Portolà, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Tristán de Luna y Arellano and Juan de Oñate.
Spanish settlements
The Spanish sent some settlers, creating the first permanent European settlement in the continental United States at St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565 and later Santa Fe, New Mexico, San Antonio, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Most Spanish settlements were along the California coast or the Santa Fe River in New Mexico.
French colonization (1652-1803)
New
France was the area colonized by France from the exploration of the Saint
Lawrence River, by Jacques Cartier in 1534, to the cession of New France to
Spain and Britain in 1763. At its peak in 1712, the territory of New France
extended from Newfoundland to Lake Superior and from the Hudson Bay to the
Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. The territory was then divided in
five colonies, each with its own administration: Canada, Acadia, Hudson Bay,
Newfoundland and Louisiana. About 16,000 French settlers came, and concentrated
in villages along the St. Lawrence River. The area around New Orleans and west
of the Mississippi passed to Spain, which ceded it to France in 1803, allowing
France to sell it as the Louisiana Purchase to the United States.
English/British colonisation
The strip of land along the seacoast was settled primarily by English colonists in the 17th century, along with much smaller numbers of Dutch and Swedes. The first English attempts—notably the Lost Colony of Roanoke—ended in failure, but successful colonies were soon established. In 1607, the Virginia Company of London established the Jamestown Settlement on the James River, both named after King James I. The colonists who came to the New World were not alike, they came from a variety of different social and religious groups who settled in different locations on the seaboard. The Dutch of New Netherland, the Swedes and Finns of New Sweden, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, the Puritans of New England, the English settlers of Jamestown, and the „worthy poor“ of Georgia, and others—each group came to the new continent for different reasons and created colonies with distinct social, religious, political and economic structures.
One nation?
Historians
typically recognize four distinct regions in the lands that later became the
Eastern United States. Listed from north to south, they are: New England, the
Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake Bay Colonies (Upper South) and the Lower South.
Some historians add a fifth region, the frontier, as frontier regions from New
England to Georgia resembled each other in certain respects. Other colonial
regions of today's United States include New France (Louisiana), New Spain
(including California, Florida and New Mexico) and Russian Alaska.
Slaves
Colonial America was defined by a severe labor shortage that gave birth to forms of unfree labor such as slavery and indentured servitude, and by a British policy of benign neglect (salutary neglect) that permitted the development of an American spirit distinct from that of its European founders.
Virginia
The first successful English colony was Jamestown, established in 1607, on a small river near Chesapeake Bay. The venture was financed and coordinated by the London Virginia Company, a joint stock company looking for gold. Its first years were extremely difficult, with very high death rates from disease and starvation, wars with local Indians, and little gold. One example of conflict between Native Americans and English settlers was the 1622 Powhatan uprising in Virginia, in which Indians had killed hundreds of English settlers. It languished for decades until a new wave of settlers arrived in the late 17th century and set up commercial agriculture based on large tobacco plantations. After Bacon's Rebellion, African slaves rapidly replaced English indentured servants as Virginia's main labor force.
Pilgrims
The
Pilgrims were a small Protestant sect based in England and the Netherlands. One
group sailed on the Mayflower and briefly landed in New York before
their eventual settling in Massachusetts in 1620.. They gave themselves broad
powers of self-governance and and later merged with the Massachusetts Bay
colony.
Puritans
The Puritans, a much larger group than the Pilgrims, established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629 with 400 settlers. This group was the Puritans who sought to reform the Church of England by creating a new, pure church in the New World. Within two years, an additional 2,000 arrived. The Puritans created a deeply religious, socially tight-knit and politically innovative culture that is still present in the modern United States. Seeking the true religion, they created the „City upon a Hill,“ an intensely religious, thoroughly righteous community designed to be an example for all of Europe. Unlike the cash-crop oriented plantations of the Chesapeake region, the Puritan economy was based on the efforts of individual farmers, who harvested enough crops to feed themselves and their families and to trade for goods they could not produce themselves. There was a generally higher economic standing and standard of living in New England than in the Chesapeake. Along with farming growth, New England became an important mercantile and shipbuilding center, often serving as the hub for trading between the South and Europe.
Middle Colonies
The
Middle Colonies, consisting of the present-day states of New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, and Delaware, were characterized by a large degree of
diversity—religious, political, economic, and ethnic. The Duke of York in 1664
sent an army which took possession of New Amsterdam and which was thenceforth
called Province of New York. Many Dutch and Irish immigrants settled in these areas, as well as in
Long Island and Connecticut. The Pennsylvania Dutch were included in this emigration.
Maryland
The Province began as a proprietary colony of the British
Lords Baltimore, who wished to create a haven for English Catholics in the new
world. Although Maryland was an early pioneer of religious toleration in the
British colonies, religious strife between Anglicans, Puritans, Catholics, and
Quakers was common in the early years, and Puritan rebels briefly seized
control of the Province.
Carolinas
The first attempted English settlement south of Virginia was the Province of Carolina. It was a private venture, financed by a group of English Lords Proprietors, who obtained a Royal Charter to the Carolinas in 1663, hoping that a new colony in the south would become profitable like that of Jamestown. They founded Charleston (originally Charles Town for Charles II of England). The original settlers in South Carolina established a lucrative trade in provisions, deerskins and Indian captives with the Caribbean islands. They came mainly from the English colony of Barbados and brought African slaves with them. Its ethnic makeup included the original settlers, a group of rich, slave-owning English settlers from the island of Barbados; and Huguenots a French-speaking community of Protestants. By 1729, the proprietary government had collapsed, and the Proprietors sold both colonies back to the British crown.
Georgia
At that time, tension between Spain and Great Britain was high, and the British feared that Spanish Florida was threatening the British Carolinas. Oglethorpe decided to establish a colony in the contested border region of Georgia and populate it with debtors who would otherwise have been imprisoned according to standard British practice. This plan would both rid Great Britain of its undesirable elements and provide her with a base from which to attack Florida. The first colonists arrived in 1733. Slavery was forbidden, as was alcohol and other forms of supposed immorality. Georgia initially failed to prosper, but eventually the restrictions were lifted, slavery was allowed, and it became as prosperous as the Carolinas.
Florida
In 1763, Great Britain received East and West Florida from the Spanish. The Floridas remained Loyal to Great Britain during the war of the American Revolution. The were returned to Spain in 1783 (in exchange for Havana), at which time most Englishmen left. The Spanish neglected the Floridas; few Spaniards lived there when the US bought the area in 1819.
William, Anne and George
The expanding French and British colonies were contending for control of the western, or interior, territories. Whenever the European countries went to war, there were actions within and by these colonies although the dates of the conflict did not necessarily exactly coincide with those of the larger conflicts. The first of the French and Indian Wars, King William's War (1689–1697) was name used in the English colonies in America to refer to the North American theater of the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–1697). Queen Anne's War (1702–1713) was the second in a series of four colonial wars fought between France and Great Britain in North America for control of the continent and was the counterpart of the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe. King George's War is the name given to the operations in North America that formed part of the 1740–1748 War of the Austrian Succession. The War of Jenkins’s Ear officially began when a Spanish commander chopped off the ear of the English captain Robert Jenkins and told him to take that to his king, George II.
French and Indians(1756-63)
The
French and Indian War was the North American chapter of the Seven Years' War,
spanning nine years. The name does not refer to the two battling sides, but
rather to the two main enemies of the British: the royal French forces and
various American Indian forces. The conflict, the fourth such colonial war
between the kingdoms of France and Great Britain, resulted in the British
conquest of all of New France east of the Mississippi River, as well as Spanish
Florida. To compensate its ally, Spain,
for its loss of Florida, France ceded its control of French Louisiana west of
the Mississippi.
Tea? 1773
The Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767 angered colonists regarding British decisions on taxing the colonies despite a lack of representation in the Westminster Parliament. The Boston Tea Party was an act of protest by the American colonists against Great Britain in which they destroyed many crates of tea bricks on ships in Boston Harbor.
Independence(1776-83)
The United States declared its independence in 1776 and defeated Great Britain with help from France and Spain in the American Revolutionary War. As Seymour Martin Lipset points out, „The United States was the first major colony successfully to revolt against colonial rule. On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress, still meeting in Philadelphia, declared the independence of a nation called „the United States of America“ in the Declaration of Independence, primarily authored by Thomas Jefferson. July 4 is celebrated as the nation's birthday. The new nation was dedicated to principles of republicanism, which emphasized civic duty and a fear of corruption and hereditary aristocracy.
Constitution(1787-89)
A series of attempts to organize a movement to outline and press reforms culminated in the Congress calling the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The
structure of the national government was profoundly changed on March 4, 1789,
when the people replaced the Articles of Confederation with the United States
Constitution. The new government reflected a radical break from the normative
governmental structures of the time, favoring representative, elective
government with a weak executive, rather than the existing monarchical
structures common within the western traditions of the time. The system of
republicanism borrowed heavily from Enlightenment Age ideas and classical
western philosophy in that a primacy was placed upon individual liberty and
upon constraining the power of government through division of powers and a
system of checks and balances.
Washington(1789-97)
George Washington—a renowned hero of the American Revolutionary War, commander and chief of the Continental Army, and president of the Constitutional Convention—became the first President of the United States under the new U.S. Constitution.
Expansion
The Louisiana Purchase, in 1803, gave Western farmers use of the important Mississippi River waterway, removed the French presence from the western border of the United States, and provided U.S. settlers with vast potential for expansion.
1812
In response to continued British impressment of American sailors into the British Navy, Madison had the Twelfth United States Congress— led by Southern and Western Jeffersonians — declare war on Britain in 1812. The United States and Britain came to a draw in the War of 1812 after bitter fighting that lasted until January 8, 1815. The Treaty of Ghent, officially ending the war, essentially resulted in the maintenance of the status quo ante bellum; however, crucially for the U.S., the British ended their alliance with the Native Americans.
Good feelings(1817–1825)
omestically, the presidency of James Monroe was termed the
„Era of Good Feelings“ because of the decline of partisan politics.
The
Monroe Doctrine, expressed in 1823, proclaimed the United States' opinion that
European powers should no longer colonize or interfere in the Americas. This
was a defining moment in the foreign policy of the United States. The Monroe
Doctrine was adopted in response to American and British fears over Russian and
French expansion into areas of the Western Hemisphere. It was not until the
Presidential Administration of Teddy Roosevelt that the Monroe Doctrine became
a central tenet of American foreign policy. The Monroe Doctrine was then
invoked in the Spanish-American
Jacksonian democracy(1829-1837)
Jacksondrew his support from the small farmers of the West, and the workers, artisans and small merchants of the East, who sought to use their vote to resist the rising commercial and manufacturing interests associated with the Industrial Revolution. Jacksonian democracy generally was built on several principles: Expanded suffrage, Manifest Destiny, Patronage(the policy of placing political supporters into appointed offices), Strict construction of the Constitution and Laissez-faire economics.
American holocaust(1830-1838)
In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the president to negotiate treaties that exchanged Indian tribal lands in the eastern states for lands west of the Mississippi River. This established Andrew Jackson, a military hero and President, as a cunning tyrant in regards to native populations. The act resulted most notably in the forced migration of several native tribes to the West, with several thousand Indians dying en route, and the Creeks' violent opposition and eventual defeat. The Indian Removal Act also directly caused the ceding of Spanish Florida and subsequently led to the many Seminole Wars.
Gold
The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) began shortly after January 24, 1848 (when gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in Coloma). As news of the discovery spread, some 300,000 people came to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. These early gold-seekers, called „forty-niners,“ traveled to California by sailing ship and in covered wagons across the continent, often facing substantial hardships on the trip. While most of the newly-arrived were Americans, the Gold Rush also attracted tens of thousands from Latin America, Europe, Australia and Asia.
Mexico(1845-48)
Mexico refused to accept the annexation of Texas in 1845, and war broke out in 1846. Mexico did not recognize the secession of Texas in 1836; it considered Texas a rebel province. In the United States, the war was a partisan issue with most Whigs opposing it and most southern Democrats, animated by a popular belief in the Manifest Destiny, supporting it.The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded California, New Mexico, and adjacent areas to the United States.
Abolition
The
debate over slavery in antebellum America has several sides. Abolitionists grew
directly out of the Second Great Awakening and the European Enlightenment and
saw slavery as an affront to God and/or reason. Abolitionism had roots similar
to the temperance movement The publishing of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle
Tom's Cabin, in 1852, galvanized the abolitionist movement.
Confederate states of America(1861-65)
In
the middle of the 19th century, white Americans of the North and South were
unable to reconcile fundamental differences in their approach to government,
economics, society and African American slavery. In 1854, the proposed
Kansas-Nebraska Act abrogated the Missouri Compromise by providing that each
new state of the Union would decide its stance on slavery. After the election
of Lincoln, eleven Southern states seceded from the union between late 1860 and
1861, establishing a rebel government, the Confederate States of America on
February 9, 1861.
Civil War(1861-65)
The Civil War began when Confederate General Pierre Beauregard opened fire upon Fort Sumter. They fired because Fort Sumter was in a confederate state. Along with the northwestern portion of Virginia, four of the five northernmost „slave states“ did not secede and became known as the Border States. Emboldened by Second Bull Run, the Confederacy made its first invasion of the North when General Robert E. Lee led 55,000 men of the Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac River into Maryland. The Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, 1862, was the bloodiest single day in American history.
In a three-day battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Lee's forces were soundly defeated. Abraham Lincoln, was angered by George Meade's failure to pursue Lee after Gettysburg, and gave him a new commander, General Ulysses S. Grant. General William Tecumseh Sherman marched from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Atlanta, Georgia, defeating Confederate Generals Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood. Sherman's army laid waste to about 20% of the farms in Georgia in his „March to the Sea“, and reached the Atlantic Ocean at Savannah in December 1864. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox Court House.
John Wilkes Booth(1865)
The
Abraham Lincoln assassination, one of the last major events in the American
Civil War, took place on Friday, April 14, 1865. President Abraham Lincoln was
shot while attending a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's
Theatre with his wife and two guests. Lincoln’s assassin was an actor and
Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth.
Reconstruction(1863-1877)
Reconstruction
was the attempt to resolve the issues of the American Civil War, when both the
Confederacy and slavery were destroyed. Reconstruction addressed the return to
the Union of the secessionist Southern states, the status of the leaders of the
Confederacy, and the Constitutional and legal status of the Negro Freedmen.
Violent controversy erupted over how to tackle those issues, and by the late
1870s Reconstruction had failed to equally integrate the Freedmen into the
legal, political, economic and social system.
A Little Bighorn
U.S. Federal government policy, since the James Monroe Administration, had been to move the indigenous population beyond the reach of the white frontier into a series of Indian reservations. Tribes were generally forced onto small reservations as Caucasian farmers and ranchers took over their lands. In 1876, the last major Sioux war erupted when the Black Hills Gold Rush penetrated their territory.
The
battle was the most famous action of the Indian Wars and was a remarkable
victory for the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne. A U.S. cavalry detachment
commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was annihilated. It
was, however, not the greatest Indian military victory over U.S. forces; that
was the Battle of the Wabash in 1791, when Little Turtle and an alliance of
Ohio tribesmen killed and wounded nearly a thousand U.S. soldiers.
Gilded age(1877-1893)
After the Civil War, America experienced an accelerated rate of industrialization, mainly in the northern states. From 1865 to about 1913, the U.S. grew to become the world's leading industrial nation. Powerful industrialists, such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould, known collectively as „robber barons“, held great wealth and power. In a context of cutthroat competition for wealth accumulation, the skilled labor of the old-fashioned artisan and craftsman gave way to well-paid skilled workers and engineers, as the nation deepened its technological base. Meanwhile, a steady stream of immigrants encouraged the availability of cheap labor, especially in the mining and manufacturing sector. Monopolies plagued the United States and corruption within the oil, steel, and railroad businesses was vast. Also important in the Gilded Age were drastic educational changes, immigrant assimilation, religion movements, and huge empires built in a newly national press, notably by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.
Inventors
In the United States of America the Second Industrial Revolution is commonly associated with electrification as pioneered by Nikola Tesla, Thomas Alva Edison, George Westinghouse and by scientific management as applied by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Other important inventors were for example Alexander Graham Bell and Henry Ford.
Railroads(1869)
Railroads opened up the West, creating markets where none had existed. The First Transcontinental Railroad, finished 1869 by Irish and Chinese immigrants, provided access to previously remote expanses of land. Railway construction boosted demand for capital, credit, and land.
Immigrants
From 1840 to 1920, an unprecedented and diverse stream of immigrants arrived in the United States, approximately 37 million in total. They came from a variety of locations: 6 million from Germany 4.5 million from Ireland; 4.75 million from Italy; 4.2 million people from England, Scotland and Wales; 4.2 million from the Austro-Hungarian Empire; 2.3 million from Scandinavia; and 3.3 million people from Russia (mostly Jews, and Poles and Lithuanian Catholics). New York and other large cities of the East Coast became home to large Jewish, Irish, and Italian populations, while many Germans and Central Europeans moved to the Midwest, obtaining jobs in industry and mining. Ellis island was the main immigration port for immigrants entering the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This desire for freedom and prosperity led to the famous term; the American Dream.
Immigrants came for a variety of reasons, such as to find economic
opportunity (in the forms of steady factory employment or arable land to farm)
or to escape from the Irish Potato Famine. Some Irish were recruited right off
the boats into the Union Army during the Civil War. Many immigrants fled from
religious or political persecution, especially conservative Lutherans from
Saxony and Jews from Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 19th
century.
North(1890s)
The area that became Alaska was purchased from Russia on October 18, 1867, for $7,200,000 in gold bullion. The Klondike Gold Rush was a frenzy of gold rush immigration to and for gold prospecting, along the Klondike River near Dawson City, after gold was discovered there in the late 19th century. Dawson City is located in the Yukon Territory of northwest Canada.
Empire
The United States began its rise to international power in this period with substantial population and industrial growth domestically and numerous military ventures abroad, including the opening of Japan by the arrival of the Black Ships of Commodore Matthew Perry and the Spanish-American War, which began when the United States blamed the sinking of the USS Maine (ACR-1) on Spain without any real evidence. As spoils from the Spanish-American War, the U.S. acquired the Philippines and Puerto Rico.
During this period, the United States helped liberate Cuba from Spanish rule and annexed Hawaii and Puerto Rico. At the end of the Spanish-American War, it acquired the Philippines, and after suppressing an independence movement in a war which killed hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians, it began modernizing the islands, especially in terms of public health measures to stop epidemics that killed hundreds of thousands. Deciding not to permanently keep the Philippines, it promised independence in 1946.
In 1901, the U.S. Congress passed the Platt Amendment, putting severe restrictions on the Cuban government's financial freedom, granting the U.S. a naval base at Guantanamo Bay, and reserving the right of the U.S. to intervene in Cuban affairs. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt supported the independence of Panama from Colombia in order to construct the Panama Canal. In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt announced his „Corollary“ to the Monroe Doctrine, stating that the United States would intervene to protect U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere should Latin American governments prove incapable or unstable. Interventions in Nicaragua, Mexico and occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic followed. This period was capped by the 1917 entry of the United States into World War I.
Progressive era(1890s-1920s)
The Progressives strongly opposed waste and corruption and pushed for social justice, general equality and public safety, but there were contradictions within the movement, especially regarding race. Significant changes achieved at the national levels included Prohibition with the 18th Amendment and women's suffrage through to the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as well as the income tax with the Sixteenth Amendment and direct election of Senators with the Seventeenth Amendment.
Theodore
Roosevelt(1901-09)
By the early 20th century, most of the larger cities and more than half the states had established an eight-hour day on public works. Equally important were the Workers' Compensation Laws, which made employers legally responsible for injuries sustained by employees at work. New revenue laws were also enacted, which, by taxing inheritances, laid the groundwork for the contemporary Federal income tax.
War to End All Wars(1914-18)
Firmly
maintaining neutrality when World War I began in 1914, the United States
entered the war against Germany only after Germany's U-boats sank the ocean
liner Lusitania. Germany announced that its U-boats would conduct unrestricted
submarine warfare against neutral shipping, and the U.S. discovered, through an
intercepted telegram known as the Zimmerman Telegram, that the Germans had
attempted to ask Mexico to go to war against the United States in case the
United States went to war with Germany. Sizable number of citizens(Irish and
Germans) were staunchly opposed to U.S. involvement in the European conflict
(at least on the British side). Many German-Americans may have anglicized their
names so as not to became subject to harassment or arrest.
Fear
of German occupation of Denmark and hence control of the Danish Virgin Islands
prompted the United States to purchase the islands for $25,000,000 before
entering the war.
On
the battlefields of France, the arriving fresh American armed forces proved
crucial in bolstering the war-weary Allied armies in the summer of 1918 as they
turned back the powerful final German offensive (Spring Offensive) and advanced
in the Allied final offensive (Hundred Days Offensive).
Victory (1918)
With
victory over Germany achieved a few months later on November 11, 1918, Britain,
France and Italy imposed severe economic penalties on Germany in the Treaty of
Versailles. The United States Senate did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles;
instead, the United States signed separate peace treaties with Germany and her
allies. The Senate also refused to enter the newly-created League of Nations on
Wilson's terms, and Wilson rejected the Senate's compromise proposal.
Isolated power
Following World War I, the U.S. grew steadily in stature as an economic and military world power. The aftershock of Russia's October Revolution resulted in real fears of communism in the United States, leading to a three-year Red Scare.The United States Senate did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles imposed by its Allies on the defeated Central Powers; instead, the United States chose to pursue unilateralism, if not isolationism.
Prohibition(1920-33)
In 1920, the manufacture, sale, import and export of alcohol was prohibited by the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Prohibition encouraged illegal breweries and dealers to make substantial amounts of money selling alcohol illegally. Prohibition brought about mobsters and a crime wave and violent street battles over turf, and ended in 1933, a failure.
Great depression(1929-40)
During most of the 1920s, the United States enjoyed a period of unbalanced prosperity. The boom was fueled by a rise in debt and an inflated stock market. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 caused a world-wide depression, which led to deflation and a great increase in unemployment. In the United States between 1929 and 1933, unemployment soared from 3% of the workforce to 25%, while manufacturing output collapsed by one-third.
New Deal(1933, 1936)
The Great Depression led to government efforts to restart the economy and help its victims with Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. New Deal were programs he initiated between 1933 and 1938 with the goal of providing relief, recovery, and reform (3 Rs) to the people and economy of the United States. The recovery was rapid in all areas except unemployment, which remained fairly high until 1940.
World War II(1940-45)
The United States did not enter World War II until Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Until then, the United States's isolationism had bound the country to neutrality. The following day, Franklin D. Roosevelt successfully urged a joint session of Congress to declare war on Japan, calling 7 December 1941 „a date which will live in infamy.“ Four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 11, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, drawing the country into a two-theater war.
The United States realized they could not fight both Japan and Germany at once. Thus it was decided to concentrate the bulk of their efforts on fighting Hitler in Europe, while maintaining a defensive position in the Pacific until Hitler was defeated.
Britain had ceased its daylight bombing raids, due to heavy casualties inflicted by the Luftwaffe. The United States's first step was to set up a large airforce in Britain to concentrate on bombing raids into Germany itself. Germany was thus bombed 24 hours a day from August 1942 to the end of the war in Europe.
D-Day
The American army's first ground action was fighting alongside the British and Australian armies in North Africa. By early 1944, a planned invasion of Western Europe was underway. Germany fully expected this attack to occur, but a complete lack of intelligence following the efficient elimination of virtually all German spies by British Intelligence allowed this attack to occur largely as a surprise. What followed on 6 June 1944, was Operation Overlord, or D-Day. In all, almost 5,000 ships, 10,000 aircraft and 176,000 troops took part in the 6 week battle that ended in a decisive victory for the allies.
On 30 April 1945, with Berlin completely overrun with Russian forces and his country in tatters, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. On 8 May 1945 the war with Germany was over, following its unconditional surrender to the Allied forces.
From
a modest contribution in troops at the beginning of the campaign in Europe, by
the end of the war approximately 66% of all allied divisions in Western Europe
were American.
Japan
The first years of the war against Japan was largely a defensive battle attempting to prevent the Japanese Navy from asserting dominance of the Pacific region. Japan quickly defeated and created military bases in Guam, Thailand, Malaya, Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and Burma. This was important for Japan, as it had only 10% of the homeland industrial production capacity of the United States.
The turning point of the war was the Battle of Midway in June 1942. The United States Navy had broken the Japanese communication codes which allowed it to strategically position its ships in order to deliver a comprehensive defeat to the Japanese Navy.
The
decision to use nuclear weapons to end the conflict has been one of the most
controversial decisions of the war. The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on
August 6, 1945, unexpected by the Japanese. The second bomb was dropped on
Nagasaki on August 9. On August 15, 1945, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally and the
war was over, avoiding a bloody invasion.
Cold War
Following
World War II, the United States emerged as one of the two dominant superpowers.
The U.S. Senate, on December 4, 1945, approved U.S. participation in the United
Nations (UN), which marked a turn away from the traditional isolationism of the
U.S. and toward more international involvement. The post-war era in the United
States was defined internationally by the beginning of the Cold War, in which
the United States and the Soviet Union attempted to expand their influence at
the expense of the other, checked by each side's massive nuclear arsenal and
the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. The result was a series of
conflicts during this period including the Korean War and the tense nuclear
showdown of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Within the United States, the Cold War
prompted concerns about Communist influence, and also resulted in government
efforts to encourage math and science toward efforts like the space race.
In the decades after
World War II, the United States became a global influence in economic,
political, military, cultural and technological affairs. The Cold War continued
through the 1960s and 1970s, and the United States entered the Vietnam War,
whose growing unpopularity fed growin counterculture.
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960. Known for his charisma, he was the only Catholic to ever be President. The Kennedy's brought a new life and vigor to the atmosphere of the White House. During his time in office, the Cold War reached its height with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. He was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.
Civil Rights Movement (1963)
At the center of middle-class culture since the 1950s has been a growing obsession with consumer goods. American people completed their great migration from the farms into the cities and experienced a period of sustained economic expansion. At the same time, institutionalized racism across the United States, but especially in the American South, was increasingly challenged by the growing Civil Rights movement and African American leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Martin Luther King delivered the I Have a Dream speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. During the 1960s, the Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation between Whites and Blacks came to an end.
Already
existing social movements,including those among women, minorities and young
people were fed by the unpopular Vietnam war. President Lyndon Johnson's Great
Society social programs added to the wide range of social reform during the
1960s and 1970s. Feminism and the environmental movement became political
forces, and progress continued toward civil rights for all Americans. The
Counterculture Revolution swept through the nation and much of the western
world in the late sixties, bringing forth more liberated social views as a reaction against the
conservative social norms of the 1950s, the political conservatism (and
perceived social repression) of the Cold War period, and the US government's
extensive military intervention in Vietnam.
Nixon(1969-1974)
In
the early 1970s, Johnson's successor, President Richard Nixon was forced by
Congress to bring the Vietnam War to a close, and the American-backed South
Vietnamese government subsequently collapsed. The war had cost the lives of
58,000 American troops and millions of Vietnamese. The OPEC oil embargo and
slowing economic growth led to a period of stagflation. Nixon's own
administration was brought to an ignominious close with the political scandal
of Watergate.
Jimmy Carter(1977-81)
His
administration is perhaps best known for failing to deal with a hostage
situation in Tehran, an economic and energy crisis, and for helping to
establish a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.
Ronald Reagan (1981–1989)
In
the 1984 election, Ronald Reagan won 49 states in one of the largest ever
election victories. He took a hard line against the Soviet Union, succeeded in
growing the military budget and launching a costly and complicatd missile
defense system (dubbed „Star Wars“) hoping to intimidate the Soviets.
When
Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow, many conservative Republicans were
dubious of the friendship between him and Reagan. Gorbachev tried to save
Communism in Russia first by ending the expensive arms race with America, then
in 1989 by shedding the East European empire. Communism finally collapsed in
Russia in 1991, ending the US-Soviet Cold War.
Sole power
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States emerged as the world's sole remaining superpower and continued to involve itself in military action overseas, including the 1991 Gulf War. Following his election in 1992, President Bill Clinton oversaw the longest economic expansion in American history, a side effect of the digital revolution and new business opportunities created by the Internet (see Internet bubble).
9/11
The
presidential election in 2000 between George W. Bush (R) and Al Gore (D) was
one of the closest in American history, and helped lay the seeds for political
polarization to come.
At the beginning of the new millennium, the United States found itself attacked by Islamic terrorism, with the September 11, 2001 attacks in which Islamic extremists hijacked four transcontinental airliners and intentionally crashed two of them into the twin towers at the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. The passengers on the fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, revolted causing the plane to crash into a field in Somerset County, PA. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, that plane was intended to hit the US Capitol Building in Washington. As a result of the attacks, the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, destroying the entire complex. The United States soon found large amounts of evidence that suggested that a terrorist group, al-Qaeda, spearheaded by Osama bin Laden, was responsible for the attacks.
War on Terrorism(2001-
The attacks of that day sparked patriotism throughout the country. In response to the attacks, under the administration of President George W. Bush, the United States (with the military support of NATO and the political support of most of the international community) invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban regime, which had supported and harbored bin Laden. More controversially, President Bush continued what he dubbed the War on Terrorism with the invasion of Iraq by overthrowing and capturing Saddam Hussein in 2003.
This second invasion proved to be unpopular in many parts of the world and helped fuel a global wave of anti-American sentiment.
Katrina (2005)
In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded parts of the city of New Orleans and heavily damaged other areas of the gulf coast, including major damage to the Mississippi coast. The preparation and the response of the government were criticized as ineffective and slow.
Future
As of 2006, the political climate remains polarized as debates continue over partial birth abortion, federal funding of stem cell research, same-sex marriage, immigration reform and the ongoing war in Iraq. By 2006, rising prices saw Americans become increasinglydependent on steady supplies of inexpensive petroleum for energy, with President Bush admitting a U.S. „addiction to oil.“
More:
1492: The conquest of paradise(1992)
The new world(2005)
The Last of the Mohicans(1992)
The Patriot(2000)
Amistad(1997)
Dances with Wolves(1990)
Cold Mountain(2003)
The Godfather: Part II(1987)
The Godfather
Forrest Gump(1994)
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