United States

• 1. Introduction

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  The United States of America first received its name in a letter dated the 2nd of January, 1776. Stephen Moylan, an aide to General George Washington, wrote it while requesting permission to seek Spanish assistance for the Revolutionary War. The republic it named did not yet exist. It would take years of war, compromise, and catastrophe to build.

  Three hundred forty-one million people now live in this country. Its economy has been the world's largest since roughly 1890. It is home to 735 billionaires and 37.9 million people living in poverty. It holds 42% of the world's nuclear weapons and spends more on its military than the next several countries combined. How a scattering of British colonies became that kind of country is a story involving mass migration, enslavement, dispossession, technological ambition, and persistent internal contradiction.

• 2. Deep Roots

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  Paleo-Indians arrived in North America at least 15,000 years ago from Siberia. They came across the Bering land bridge or along a now-submerged coastal route. The Clovis culture, appearing around 11,000 BCE, is considered the first widespread culture in the Americas. Over centuries, Indigenous peoples built increasingly complex societies. The Mississippian cultures developed agriculture and architecture in the midwestern and eastern regions. The Ancestral Puebloans inhabited the Southwest.

  Spain chartered the first European colony in what is now the continental United States in 1513. Saint Augustine, Spain's first permanent settlement on the continent, was founded in 1565. Britain arrived at Virginia Colony in 1607 and Plymouth Colony in 1620. Estimates of the pre-contact Native population range from around 500,000 to nearly 10 million. Enslaved Africans were trafficked to all Thirteen Colonies by 1770. They provided the main labor force for Southern plantation economies from Maryland to Georgia.

• 3. Revolution and Republic

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  The Battles of Lexington and Concord on the 19th of April, 1775 ignited the Revolutionary War. Britain had attempted to disarm colonial militias. The Second Continental Congress appointed George Washington commander-in-chief and assigned Thomas Jefferson to draft a declaration. The Declaration of Independence was adopted on the 4th of July, 1776.

  The Constitution drafted at the 1787 Constitutional Convention created a federal republic of three separate branches. It went into effect in 1789. The Bill of Rights followed in 1791. Washington's refusal to seek a third presidential term set a precedent for the peaceful transfer of power. After the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781, the Treaty of Paris gave the new nation territory stretching west to the Mississippi River. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 established that new territory would grow through admitting new states rather than expanding existing ones.

• 4. Expansion and Its Costs

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  The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 nearly doubled U.S. territory in a single transaction with France. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 attempted to balance slavery's expansion by admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state. It prohibited slavery in Louisiana Purchase lands north of the 36°30′ parallel.

  President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced the removal of Native peoples from east of the Mississippi. The Trail of Tears lasted from 1830 to 1850. An estimated 60,000 Native Americans were displaced westward. Between 13,200 and 16,700 people died on the forced march. The cotton gin of 1793 had made slavery enormously profitable for Southern elites. The Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857 declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. That ruling removed the last legal buffer between the two systems.

  Eleven slave states seceded in 1861, forming the Confederacy. War broke out in April when the Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumter. The Emancipation Proclamation of the 1st of January, 1863 freed enslaved people in Confederate states. The Confederates surrendered after the Battle of Appomattox Court House in 1865.

• 5. Industrial Giant

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  Between 1865 and 1917-24.4 million people arrived from Europe. They poured through New York and spread into industrial cities and Midwestern farmland. Factory electrification, the assembly line, and interchangeable parts manufacturing transformed the American economy. By around 1890, the U.S. had the world's largest economy. It has held that position ever since.

  Industrialization concentrated wealth in the hands of tycoons who built monopolies in railroads, petroleum, and steel. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 ended the boom. President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal's program of reform, recovery, and relief. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought the United States fully into World War II. In August 1945, the U.S. used nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war. The Philippines, acquired from Spain in 1898, received full independence on the 4th of July, 1946.

• 6. Superpower and Its Limits

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  Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on the 20th of July, 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the lunar surface. The mission capped a Space Race against the Soviet Union that had begun when NASA was founded in 1958. The Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991 left the U.S. as the world's sole superpower.

  The civil rights movement had reshaped domestic life in the same decades. Martin Luther King Jr. became a prominent leader in the early 1960s. Conscription ended in 1973 after years of opposition to the Vietnam War. By 1985, the majority of American women aged 16 and older were in paid employment. The 11th of September 2001 attacks led to military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The housing collapse of 2007 triggered the Great Recession.

  In 2024, U.S. military spending reached $997 billion, representing 37% of global military spending. The country held the world's sixth-highest per capita incarceration rate in January 2023 at 531 people per 100,000 inhabitants. In 2011, the richest 10% of adults held 72% of household wealth while the bottom 50% held 2%. The January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by insurrectionists attempting to block a presidential transfer of power tested a precedent Washington himself had established 232 years earlier.