History of North America

• 1. Introduction

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  The History of North America may run far longer than anyone once believed. For years the accepted story held that humans first crossed into the continent over the Bering Sea sometime between 40,000 and 17,000 years ago. Then more recent discoveries arrived, and they may push that arrival back at least another 90,000 years. That single revision reframes everything that follows. Who were these first migrants, and how did they spread from the Inuit of the far north to the Mayans and Aztecs of the south? How did a continent of diverse, self-contained communities become a staging ground for European rivalries between England, France, and Spain? And how did colonies that fought wars over resources turn into independent states that learned, mostly, to trade and keep the peace? The answers move across glaciers, fur-trading posts, battlefields, and a vote count that mysteriously crashed. They begin with stone.

• 2. Crossing The Land Bridge

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  Beringia is the name archaeologists give to the land bridge that once joined eastern Siberia to present-day Alaska. During the Quaternary glaciation, sea levels dropped sharply, and that exposed ground became a corridor. The traditional theory holds that early migrants followed herds of now-extinct Pleistocene megafauna along ice-free passages between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets. A second proposed route ran down the Pacific coast, on foot or in primitive boats, toward South America. Evidence for that coastal path would now lie hidden. A sea level rise of hundreds of meters after the last ice age would have drowned it. The few points of agreement are narrow. Researchers concur on an origin in Central Asia and on widespread habitation of the Americas around the late glacial maximum, roughly 16,000 to 13,000 years before present. Beyond that, the debate stays hot, and even older alternative theories survive, including a proposed migration from Europe. The hard proof is small and sharp. Stone tools, especially projectile points and scrapers, are the primary record of early human activity, and the flaked lithics let archaeologists sort one cultural period from the next.

• 3. From Maize To Empires

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  Agriculture was invented independently in two regions of this continent: the Eastern Woodlands and Mesoamerica. The more southern cultural groups domesticated crops now used worldwide, among them tomatoes and squash. Above all they domesticated maize, or corn, one of the world's major staples. With farming came a cascade of advances. The Maya civilization built a writing system, raised huge pyramids, ran a complex calendar, and arrived at the concept of zero some 500 years before anyone in the Old World. By the time the Spanish reached Central America, the Mayan culture endured, but political dominance had shifted north to the Aztec Empire. The Archaic period set the stage for all of it. A warmer, more arid climate took hold and the last megafauna vanished, and mobile hunter-gatherers began focusing on the resources nearest them. That regional adaptation became the norm, leaning less on big-game hunting and more on small game, fish, seasonal vegetables, and harvested plants. Status mattered too. In some groups, the placement of artifacts within an Archaic burial site marked social differentiation. Numbers give the human scale. The Maddison Project at the University of Groningen estimates pre-Hispanic Mexico at 7.5 million people for the year 1500, with Maddison's total for all of pre-contact North America at 9.75 million.

• 4. The Norse And The Crossing

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  Erik the Red founded a colony on Greenland in 985 CE, and the earliest physical evidence of outside contact with the continent traces to him and the Vikings. His son Leif Eriksson is believed to have reached the Island of Newfoundland around the year 1000, naming his discovery Vinland. Only one Norse site outside Greenland has yet been found in North America, at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland and Labrador. Every Norse colony was eventually abandoned. The Greenland settlement persisted until the early 1400s, yet it drew little attention, and the voyages never became common knowledge in the Old World. Europeans stayed largely ignorant of the Americas until 1492. That year the Italian sailor Christopher Columbus, who had proposed sailing west to find a shorter route to Asia, reached land in the Bahamas. He had won the backing of Isabella I and Ferdinand II, Queen and King of a newly united Spain. Others soon followed his wake. John Cabot explored the east coast of what would become Canada in 1497, Giovanni da Verrazzano traced the coast from Florida toward Newfoundland in 1524, and Jacques Cartier sailed for the French crown in 1534, exploring the St. Lawrence River.

• 5. Three Crowns, One Continent

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  Veracruz, founded by Hernán Cortés in 1519, was the first successful Spanish settlement in continental North America. Spain had already conquered the Aztec empire and seized most of the largest Caribbean islands, the beginning of the Spanish Empire in the New World. Many more settlements followed across colonial New Spain, reaching Florida, Central America, New Mexico, and later California. Spain claimed all of North and South America except Brazil, and for over a century no rival planted colonies to challenge that claim. France arrived later and chose trade. Its first settlements were Port Royal in 1604 and Quebec City in 1608, and the fur trade soon became the primary business on the continent, transforming indigenous ways of life. England came to the south. Its first permanent settlements were Jamestown in 1607, with Bermuda as a satellite in 1609, and Plymouth in 1620. Further south, plantation slavery became the main industry of the West Indies, giving rise to the Atlantic slave trade. By 1663 the patterns hardened. The French crown took New France from the fur-trading companies, and English charter colonies gave way to more metropolitan control.

• 6. Wars And Revolutions

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  The Battle of the Plains of Abraham at Quebec City ended the French presence on the continent, as France ceded most of her claims outside the Caribbean. For Native nations in Eastern North America, that defeat was a disaster, stripping them of their major ally against expanding Anglo-American settlement. From 1763 to 1766, a confederation of Great Lakes-area tribes waged Pontiac's Rebellion to defend lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, reserved for them under the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Independence movements reshaped what the wars had left. The American Revolution created the United States of America, and the flight of the United Empire Loyalists produced English Canada as a separate community. To the south, Miguel Hidalgo declared independence in 1810, beginning the Mexican War of Independence. In 1813, Jose Maria Morelos and the Congress of Anahuac signed the Solemn Act of the Declaration of Independence of Northern America, the first legal document proclaiming separation from Spain. Spain finally recognized Mexico's independence in 1821. The young United States pushed west, acquiring the Louisiana territory in 1803. Tecumseh's confederacy fought to hold the Great Lakes between 1810 and 1811, then went north and helped the British block an American attempt to seize Canada in the War of 1812.

• 7. Forging Modern Nations

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  The Republic of Texas declared itself in 1836, and that English-speaking rebellion against Mexico set a chain in motion. Texas joined the United States in 1845, which led to the Mexican-American War in 1846, and from that conflict the United States gained California and the Southwest. Inside the United States, the divide between free and slave states had already forced the Missouri Compromise in 1820, and the secession of the Confederate States brought civil war. That war ended slavery, destroyed and later rebuilt most of the South, and left the United States a powerful industrialized nation. Canada answered American power with union. Four colonies federated in 1867 to create the Dominion of Canada, which reached the Pacific with British Columbia by 1871 and completed the Canadian Pacific transcontinental railway by 1885. The late 19th century filled the West with immigration, though the land was not empty. The United States fought numerous Indian Wars, while Canada relied on the Numbered Treaties yet saw rebellions in 1870 and 1885 on the prairies. Mexico spent the era under the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.

• 8. The Long Twentieth Century

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  On the 1st of July 1916, the dominion of Newfoundland suffered a devastating loss on the First day on the Somme. As part of the British Empire, Canada had been at war since 1914, bearing the brunt of poison gas attacks at Ypres, and the Conscription Crisis of 1917 brought riots to the streets of Montreal against the wishes of most French Canadians. The United States stayed out until 1917, then helped shape interwar Europe at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Mexico, caught in its own revolution, never joined. The next war pulled the continent closer to the center of world affairs. On the 19th of August 1942, a force of some 6,000 largely Canadian infantry landed near the French port of Dieppe, where German defenders under General von Rundstedt destroyed them, killing 907 Canadians and capturing nearly 2,500. Two years later those lessons fed the successful Normandy invasion. That same year, Germans sank two Mexican oil tankers in the Gulf of Mexico, pushing neutral Mexico to declare war on the Axis. Postwar Mexico entered an era of growth its own history calls El Milagro Mexicano, the Mexican miracle. One election later exposed the cracks. On the 6th of July 1988, the IBM AS/400 counting the votes shut down, the government said only that se cayo el sistema, and when service returned the PRI's Carlos Salinas was declared the winner over Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. On the 1st of January 1994, Canada, Mexico, and the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, creating the world's largest free trade area, and in 2000 Vicente Fox became the first non-PRI candidate to win the Mexican presidency in over 70 years.