North America

• 1. Introduction

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  North America covers roughly 24,709,000 square kilometers, about 16.5% of Earth's land area, yet it carries the name of a man who never set foot on its northern reaches. The Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci explored South America between 1497 and 1502. He was the first European to argue that these lands were a continent unknown to Europeans. German cartographers borrowed his name, and it eventually stretched across an entire hemisphere. This is a continent of more than 592 million people in 23 independent states and territories. It holds the world's largest Christian population and its lowest population density. It was reached by humans at least 20,000 years ago, then by the Norse around the year 1000, and then by everyone who followed Columbus. How did a landmass split between English, Spanish, and French come to wear an Italian explorer's first name? Why is its southern edge a matter of dispute among geologists? And what carved its Great Lakes only 10,000 years ago?

• 2. Naming The Continent

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  In 1507, Martin Waldseemüller published a world map and placed the word "America" on the landmass of present-day South America. He worked alongside Matthias Ringmann, and the two settled on a Latinized feminine form of Vespucci's name, following the model of Europa, Asia, and Africa. Americus itself traced back through Medieval Latin Emericus to the Old High German name Emmerich, linked to Saint Emeric of Hungary. The land north of present-day Mexico went by a different label entirely. Waldseemüller called it Parias. A 1553 world map by Petrus Apianus named North America "Baccalearum", meaning "realm of the Cod fish", a nod to the cod off the East Coast. Gerardus Mercator extended the name across the whole Western Hemisphere on his 1538 map. On his 1569 map he labeled the north "America or New India". The Spanish Empire preferred "Las Indias" for its holdings, governed by a body called the Council of the Indies. The continent has answered to many names since: New Spain, New France, British North America, and América Septentrional, the first official name given to Mexico.

• 3. First Peoples

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  Many indigenous creation myths hold that their peoples have lived on the land since its creation, though there is no evidence humans evolved there. The traditional theory holds that hunters crossed the Bering Land Bridge between eastern Siberia and present-day Alaska between 27,000 and 14,000 years ago. A growing view is that the first inhabitants sailed from Beringia some 13,000 years ago. The oldest petroglyphs in North America date from 15,000 to 10,000 years before present. One of the oldest known cultures, the Clovis culture, flourished from roughly 9550 to 9050 BCE in modern New Mexico. Later peoples built remarkable societies. The Mississippian culture spread along the Mississippi River valley with platform-mound urban centers, while the Ancestral Puebloans settled the Four Corners region. Southern cultures domesticated tomatoes, squash, and maize, crops now grown worldwide. The Mayans developed a writing system, built pyramids and temples, kept a complex calendar, and arrived at the concept of zero around 400 CE. Anthropologists believe the Inuit reached the high Arctic later than other groups, marked by Dorset culture artifacts vanishing and the Thule people replacing them.

• 4. Norse And Conquest

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  Norse sagas hold the first recorded European references to North America, where the land is called Vinland. The earliest verifiable trans-oceanic contact by any European culture with the mainland dates to around 1000 CE, at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland. Leif Erikson, who lived from roughly 970 to 1020 CE, is thought to have visited and is considered the first European to make landfall on the continent, Greenland excepted. Norse settlements appeared in Greenland and at least one in Newfoundland. Centuries later the balance of power had shifted. When Spanish conquistadors arrived, the Mayan culture survived in southern Mexico and Guatemala, but political dominance had passed to the Aztec Empire and its capital Tenochtitlan in the Valley of Mexico. Hernán Cortés sailed westward in 1519 to the Mexican mainland. With local indigenous allies, the Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire in 1521. The arrival of Europeans brought Eurasian diseases such as smallpox, to which indigenous peoples lacked immunity, and the indigenous population declined substantially through disease and violent conflict.

• 5. Empires And Settlements

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  Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León, who had sailed on Columbus's second voyage, reached the southeastern coast in 1513 and named it La Florida. Spain had already planted permanent settlements on Hispaniola and Cuba in the 1490s, building cities and forcing indigenous populations to work raising crops and panning gold. As the Spanish empire grew, other powers pressed in. France took the western half of Hispaniola and developed Saint-Domingue as a cane sugar colony worked by enslaved Africans. Britain took Barbados and Jamaica, while the Dutch and Danes seized islands Spain had claimed. Britain came late to the mainland, focused first on controlling nearby Ireland. The first permanent English settlement rose at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, followed by colonies forming the Thirteen Colonies of British America. The first permanent French settlement was Quebec City in 1608. Britain's early Canadian footholds included St. John's, Newfoundland in 1630 and Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1749. After the Seven Years' War, France ceded its territories east of the Mississippi River to Britain in 1763, and Spain gained the lands to the west.

• 6. Revolution And Expansion

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  On the 4th of July 1776, delegates of the Thirteen Colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, written primarily by Thomas Jefferson of the Committee of Five. The colonies declared independence from King George III, escalating a war that had begun the year before at the Battles of Lexington and Concord on the 19th of April 1775. The Second Continental Congress formed the Continental Army and appointed George Washington its commander. France and Spain, enemies of Britain, came to support the American cause, while Hessian units from present-day Germany fought for the British. In 1783, after eight years of war, George III acknowledged defeat, and the Treaty of Paris was signed on the 3rd of September 1783. Expansion followed swiftly. In 1803, during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte sold France's remaining claims west of the Mississippi to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. Spain and the United States settled their western boundary in 1819 with the Adams-Onís Treaty. Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821. Russia sold its claims, including present-day Alaska, to the United States in 1867, the same year colonial settlers north of the United States unified as the dominion of Canada.

• 7. Land And Time

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  Laurentia is the ancient craton at North America's geologic core, formed between 1.5 and 1.0 billion years ago during the Proterozoic eon, with the Canadian Shield its largest exposure. The Appalachian Mountains formed some 480 million years ago, among the oldest ranges in the world. When Pangaea began to rift around 200 million years ago, North America became part of Laurasia before separating during the mid-Cretaceous. The Rockies rose during the Laramide orogeny, between 80 and 55 million years ago, and receding glaciers carved the Great Lakes about 10,000 years ago. The continent's southern limit is debated. Its only land connection to South America lies at the Darien Gap on the Colombia-Panama border, though some geologists place the limit at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico. The highest peak is Denali in Alaska. The geographic center sits about 6 miles west of Balta, Pierce County, North Dakota, though a 15-foot field stone obelisk in nearby Rugby claims the spot. Central America remains geologically restless. A 1976 earthquake in Guatemala killed 23,000 people, and the Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica killed 87 when it erupted in 1968.

• 8. People And Power

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  The United States is the most populous country on the continent, with 342.9 million people, followed by Mexico with 126 million and Canada with 41.5 million. Greenland, at 2.166 million square kilometers, holds only 55,984 people, giving it the world's lowest population density at 0.026 per square kilometer. Mexico City and New York City are the largest cities, the only two on the continent to exceed eight million. International metropolitan areas have grown along the borders, with Detroit-Windsor and San Diego-Tijuana drawing heavy commercial activity. Christianity is the largest religion, claiming 77% of the population by a 2012 survey, and the United States holds nearly 247 million Christians, the world's largest such population. North America's GDP per capita was assessed by the IMF in October 2016 at $41,830, making it the richest continent. NAFTA, implemented in 1994, formed one of the world's four largest trade blocs before being replaced by the USMCA in 2018. Canada, Mexico, and the United States will host the 2026 FIFA World Cup, a fitting marker for a continent still drawing its peoples together across the same borders that once divided three competing empires.