History of the USA

American history begins — from a European perspective — with the founding of Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, the first permanent English settlement in North America. In 1620, the Pilgrims, Puritan separatists, followed, arriving on the Mayflower in Plymouth (Massachusetts) to escape religious persecution in England. They nearly starved in the first winter, had it not been for the Wampanoag natives who taught them survival — a help that the colonists later "thanked" with displacement and violence.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, 13 British colonies emerged along the Atlantic coast. Each had its own character: Puritan Massachusetts with its educational tradition (Harvard was founded in 1636, just 16 years after the Pilgrims' arrival), the tolerant Quaker Pennsylvania, the aristocratic Virginia of tobacco planters, and cosmopolitan New York (originally the Dutch Nieuw Amsterdam).

Two dark chapters marked the colonial era: The systematic displacement and murder of the indigenous population (whose total number before the Europeans' arrival is estimated at 5–15 million) and slavery — the first African slaves were brought to Virginia in 1619, just 12 years after the founding of Jamestown. By the time of independence, slaves made up over 40% of the population in some southern states.

The break with the British motherland had a prosaic trigger: taxes. After the costly Seven Years' War (French and Indian War, 1754–63), the British Parliament decided to tax the colonies more heavily — without giving them a say. "No taxation without representation" became the rallying cry.

The escalation followed quickly: The Boston Tea Party (1773) — patriots disguised as Indians threw 342 chests of tea into the harbor to protest the tea tax. The battles of Lexington and Concord (April 19, 1775) — the "shots heard 'round the world," the beginning of the War of Independence. And on July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia adopted the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson — one of the most influential documents in human history.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." — a sentence of revolutionary power, written by a man who owned over 600 slaves. This contradiction between ideal and reality runs like a red thread through all of American history.

The War of Independence (1775–1783) was won with the help of France. In 1787, the US Constitution was adopted in Philadelphia — the oldest constitution still in force in the world. George Washington became the first president in 1789.

The central tragedy of American history. The conflict between the industrialized North and the agrarian South — at its core a dispute over slavery — escalated into the Civil War after the election of Abraham Lincoln (1860). Eleven southern states seceded from the Union and founded the Confederacy (Confederate States of America) under President Jefferson Davis.

The Civil War (1861–1865) was the bloodiest conflict in US history — over 620,000 dead (more than in all other American wars combined). Battles like Gettysburg (July 1863, over 50,000 casualties in three days), Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history), and the Siege of Vicksburg shaped the memory.

In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation — freeing all slaves in the rebellious states. After the North's victory, the constitutional amendments 13 (abolition of slavery), 14 (citizenship for all), and 15 (voting rights regardless of race) followed. Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, five days after the war ended, at Ford's Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth.

The Reconstruction (1865–1877) brought temporary progress — black senators, schools, land ownership — before the Jim Crow laws from the 1880s cemented segregation in the South for nearly a century.

Starting with the Spanish-American War (1898), the USA began its rise to global power. The First World War (entry in 1917) made the USA the creditor of Europe. The Roaring Twenties brought jazz, Hollywood, skyscrapers, and the boom — followed by the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, which plunged 25% of Americans into unemployment.

The Second World War — triggered for the USA by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) — transformed the country into the greatest military power in history. D-Day (June 6, 1944), Iwo Jima, and finally the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 1945) ended the war and defined the new world order.

The Cold War (1947–1991) between the USA and the Soviet Union shaped half a century: McCarthyism, Korean War, Cuban Missile Crisis (1962, the world on the brink of nuclear war), Vietnam War (1964–1975, 58,000 American dead, deep societal division), arms race, moon landing (1969), and finally the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the end of the Soviet Union (1991).

In parallel: The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s — Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. ("I Have a Dream", 1963), the Freedom Riders, the Selma marches — fought for the abolition of segregation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. King's assassination in 1968 (like that of JFK in 1963 and Robert Kennedy in 1968) deeply traumatized the nation.

After the end of the Cold War, the USA seemed invulnerable as the only superpower — until September 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (2,977 dead) fundamentally changed the country: The "War on Terror" led to the wars in Afghanistan (2001–2021) and Iraq (2003–2011), tightened security laws (Patriot Act, TSA at airports), and altered the nation's self-perception.

In 2008, Barack Obama became the first African American president — a historic moment that seemed to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence for many. The 2008 financial crisis (triggered by the collapse of the mortgage market) plunged the world economy into the worst recession since 1929.

The 2010s and 2020s brought a deep political polarization: The presidency of Donald Trump (2017–2021), the Black Lives Matter movement, the COVID-19 pandemic (over 1 million deaths in the USA), and the storming of the Capitol (January 6, 2021) showed a country wrestling with itself. The cultural divides between urban and rural America, between Democrats and Republicans, are deeper than since the Civil War.

Despite all conflicts, the USA remains the largest economy in the world, the center of global pop culture, tech innovation, and military power. The question of whether the country can live up to its founding promise remains as relevant as in 1776.