History of America

From the time when, more than 40,000 years ago, Asians first crossed the land-bridge into the New-World to when in the 16th century European settlers arrived, and so right up to the armistice which ended the Great War in 1918 - Eye Witness History of America charts the rich and gripping story of the North American continent. Events are described as they unfold year by year with immediacy and are illustrated throughout.

The story starts in the 16th Century with the Europeans who came - at first sparsely then in a flood. In what is now called the United States a miracle of nation-building occurred. The established inhabitants were swept aside, their lands seized.

In the second half of the 18th century, the new settlers threw off the shackles of Europe (Great Britain) by revolution. They secured independence for the United States by ratifying a constitution that guaranteed a new kind of democratic government - of the people, by the people, for the people. Settlers came from everywhere and for every reason - some in chains as slaves. They came to search for gold, to find land, to flee famine, and to escape religious or political persecution The country became, as it remains today, a magnet for the oppressed, the dispossessed and the ambitious.

Eyewitness History of America, relates how this nation compounded of many peoples was created and how it survived a terrible civil war to emerge in the late 19th century as a world power. “History” brings this vast and remarkable country to life as never before.

European adventurers (and the Africans they forcibly imported to serve them) had been creating settlements and building new societies in America for nearly a century before there were serious efforts to colonise the lands that today constitute the United States. The Spanish and Portuguese, masters of the southern part of the New World, showed relatively little interest in the lands above Mexico. It was the British who looked at this North American wilderness and dreamed of a great empire.

Late in the 16th century, they began to create it, conceiving in the process new communities that they hoped would be free of the problems found in England and where they could live their lives in liberty.
The first English contact with the New World came only 5 years after Columbus reached America. In 1497, John Cabot (Like Columbus, a native of Genoa) crossed the Atlantic under the patronage of Henry VII and landed on the north-eastern coast of North America and other Englishmen followed. Although no serious efforts were made to establish colonies, this changed in the last decades of the 16th century due in a large measure to the defeat by the British of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and the British gaining mastery of the seas.

But colonisation was a result also of conditions within England itself, which was, in the age of Elizabeth I not only a venturesome society but a troubled one. In response to the world wide increasing demand for wool, English landowners were converting more and more of their fields into sheep pastures. This reduced the food supply and also pushed many of the serfs and tenants off the land creating a large floating population, which the domestic economy could not absorb, simultaneously British merchant capitalists were developing a thriving overseas trade. As European markets became saturated they began looking for new outlets.

By the late 16th century, therefore, interest in colonising North America was growing . These economic incentives coincided with powerful religious ones. The 16th century was the age of the Protestant Reformation in Europe creating in England a population of religious dissenters, influenced by the teachings of John Calvin and others. These ‘dissenters’ sought to ‘purify’ the church of corruption: and were therefore known as Puritans“ By the beginning of the 17th century , many began looking outside England for places of refuge.

Part of the attraction of America therefore, was its contrast to Britain itself. It was a place many British came to believe, where civilisation could start over, where great wealth could be found and where a perfect society could be created free of the flaws and inequities of the old world. People who felt superfluous in Britain, thought they could become essential, and successful, in America. The New World was appealing, in short, precisely because it was ‘new’.

From the beginning, the societies of the colonies were very different from one another. The differences were sharpest between the settlements in New England and those in Tidewater. In Virginia and Maryland, the character of settlement was shaped by the discovery of tobacco which became a valuable export crop. Because of their success, settlers avoided developing a substantial merchant class. Instead, they created large estates and imported a servile workforce - at first mainly white indentured servants from England, but later, from 1619, on, mostly African slaves. In New England, where the land was less fertile, farming remained mostly a family enterprise devoted to growing food rather than staple crops. At the same time the northern colonies developed a substantial merchant community and an important commercial life centred in its thriving port cities.
Despite the many differences, there were also similarities between the Southern and Northern regions. All the English colonies, unlike those of Spain and Portugal, were designed to be transplantation's of British society to the New World, hence the term ‘plantation’ (used to describe both Jamestown and Plymouth).

The colonists made no serious effort to blend British civilisation with that of the Indians. They tried instead, to isolate themselves from the natives and to create enclosed communities. When such efforts failed, as they almost always did, the settlers seldom tried to conciliate the Indians; they attempted instead, to defeat them, destroy them or drive them away. The Spanish and Portuguese had considered themselves colonial ‘rulers,‘ imposing new forms on an existing society. The British, by contrast, saw themselves as creators of communities that would be entirely on their own.

The Northern and Southern Colonies were alike, too, in their very loose relationship to the crown (which for a time took little interest in them). All were responsible not to the British government, but to private companies or individual proprietors. All became accustomed very quickly to thinking for themselves as relatively independent communities. All began from the start, sometimes without realising it, to develop political and social institutions that were quite different from those they had left behind in Britain. However much the settlers might try to recreate British habits and customs in America, life in the New World forced them to adjust constantly to conditions for which their experiences had not prepared them.

The pioneers of British colonisation - Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half brother Sir Walter Raleigh pre-eminent among them - had tried for nearly 30 years in the late 16th century to establish a permanent settlement in America. Their failure dampened enthusiasm for further efforts,; but the lure of the New World was to strong to be suppressed for long. By the early 17th century, other companies were ready to have a go

The second British settlement took root 13 years later, when a group of Puritan Separatists established a small colony at Plymouth, on the coast of what is now Massachusetts. Ten years later, in 1630, another large group of Puritans established the Massachusetts Bay Colony at Boston. Within a decade, British settlement was spreading throughout New England.

Other British settlements soon followed : through the expansion of the original colonies into neighbouring lands in Maryland, the Carolinas, and Pennsylvania. Also through the British conquest of the Dutch possessions in New York and New Jersey. In 1724 it stretched its realm farther by establishing the colony of Georgia.