A short history of the United States

People have lived in North America for at least 15,000 years, and archaeological evidence at several sites suggests considerably longer. By the time Europeans arrived, the continent held hundreds of distinct nations with their own languages, governments, agriculture and trade networks.

These were not small scattered bands. Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, was a city of perhaps 20,000 people around 1100 CE — larger than London at the time. The Ancestral Puebloans built multi-story stone complexes at Chaco Canyon. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy operated a sophisticated federal system of governance that several founders studied.

European contact was catastrophic in demographic terms. Epidemic disease, to which indigenous populations had no immunity, killed an estimated majority of the pre-contact population across the Americas within the first century and a half — the largest population collapse in recorded history — followed by displacement and war.

Spanish settlement in Florida and New Mexico predates English settlement by decades. St. Augustine, founded in 1565, is the oldest continuously occupied European-established city in the continental US.

The first permanent English settlement was Jamestown in 1607. Thirteen colonies developed along the Atlantic seaboard, with sharply different economies: commercial and shipping in New England, mixed farming in the middle colonies, and plantation agriculture in the South dependent on enslaved labor.

The first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619. Over the following two centuries roughly 388,000 people were transported directly to what became the United States as part of a transatlantic trade that carried over 12 million people from Africa in total.

Resistance to British taxation without representation escalated through the 1760s and 1770s into revolution. The Declaration of Independence was adopted on 4 July 1776, the war ended in 1783, and the first governing framework — the Articles of Confederation — proved too weak to function.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 produced the document still in force. It was a series of compromises, including several protecting slavery: the three-fifths clause counting enslaved people for representation but not rights, a twenty-year bar on ending the slave trade, and a fugitive slave clause. The Bill of Rights was added in 1791 to secure ratification.

The nineteenth century was defined by expansion west and by the question of whether slavery would expand with it. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 doubled the country's size; the Mexican-American War added the Southwest and California in 1848.

Expansion meant displacement. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced tens of thousands of people from southeastern nations west along what became known as the Trail of Tears, with thousands dying en route. Treaty-making, treaty-breaking and forced relocation continued through the century.

The slavery question could not be compromised indefinitely. Eleven southern states seceded following Lincoln's election in 1860, and the Civil War from 1861 to 1865 killed an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 people — more American deaths than every other US war combined.

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, the Fourteenth granted citizenship and equal protection in 1868, and the Fifteenth prohibited racial denial of voting rights in 1870. Reconstruction briefly enforced them.

Reconstruction ended in 1877, and southern states rebuilt racial hierarchy through Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, literacy tests and violence. The Supreme Court endorsed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. This system operated for roughly ninety years.

The Great Depression from 1929 produced unemployment above 20 percent and reshaped the relationship between citizens and the federal government. The New Deal created Social Security, unemployment insurance, federal deposit insurance, securities regulation and large public works — the foundation of the modern American state.

The Second World War ended the Depression and transformed the country's global position. The US emerged in 1945 as the dominant economic and military power, holding a nuclear monopoly and roughly half of world manufacturing output.

The postwar decades brought the GI Bill, the interstate highway system, suburbanization and the longest sustained rise in middle-class living standards in American history — benefits distributed unequally, with federal mortgage insurance and local practice systematically excluding Black families from suburban homeownership through redlining.

The Cold War structured foreign policy for four decades, through Korea, Vietnam, proxy conflicts and an arms race, ending with the Soviet collapse in 1991.

Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 held school segregation unconstitutional, overturning Plessy. The movement that followed — the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, Selma — combined mass nonviolent protest with litigation and produced the two most consequential statutes of the century.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in employment and public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 dismantled the mechanisms southern states used to prevent Black voting, and transformed southern politics within a decade. The Fair Housing Act followed in 1968.

The same decades brought Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, the reform of immigration law in 1965 that ended national-origin quotas and reshaped American demographics, the women's movement, environmental legislation, and the recognition of rights for people with disabilities and for LGBTQ Americans, the latter culminating in nationwide marriage equality in 2015.

Recent decades have been dominated by the end of the Cold War, the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the wars that followed, the 2008 financial crisis, deepening partisan polarization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and contested questions about voting, immigration and the reach of federal power that remain unresolved.