U.S.

History For Dummies

Steve Wiegand

Native Americans and Explorers: 14,000 BC (?)–1607

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Anasazi.
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mean “ancient people” or “ancient enemies.”

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they flourished from about AD 1100 to 1300.

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population and were never numerous. But just why their culture died out so suddenly
around the beginning of the 14th century is a puzzle to archaeologists.
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Mound Builders,
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maybe 1 million to 1.5 million or so at the time of Christopher Columbus’s arrival

in 1492
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Historians estimate that at least 250 different tribal groups lived in America at
that time.
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around 1450, when five tribes — the Cayugas, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, and
Senecas — formed the Iroquois League.
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the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Creeks, and the Seminoles. These
tribes got by through a mix of hunting, gathering, and farming. Europeans would
later refer to them as the Five Civilized Tribes, in part because they developed
codes of law and judicial systems but also because they readily adopted the
European customs of running plantations,
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these Native Americans were still exploited, exterminated, or evacuated.

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The first sighting of the New World by a European probably occurred around 987,
when a Viking
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an expedition of three ships, some cattle, and about 160 people — including a few
women — created a settlement. The Karlsefni settlement lasted three years.
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By 1020,
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the Vikings had given up on North America.

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in 1453, the Turkish Empire conquered Constantinople (now Istanbul),

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In Spain, for example, 700 years of war between the Spaniards and the Moors (Arabs
from North Africa) were finally over in 1492. The marriage of Ferdinand of Castile
and Isabella of Aragon had united the country’s two major realms.
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In 1488, the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias reached the tip of Africa, named
it the Cape of Good Hope,
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in 1486, Columbus went to Spain.

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Isabella gave her approval in January 1492.

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on October 12, 1492. It was an island in the Bahamas, which he called San Salvador.
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Sailing on to an island he called Hispaniola (today’s Dominican Republic and

Haiti), the Santa Maria hit a reef on Christmas Eve, 1492. Columbus abandoned the
ship, set up a trading outpost he called Navidad,
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He
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enslaved the natives, thousands of whom died. And he hanged some of the “settlers”
for rebelling against his authority.
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In 1504, somewhat exaggerated letters by Vespucci about what he called Mundus Novus
— the New World — were printed throughout Europe. A German mapmaker read the
letters, was impressed, and decided in 1507 to call the massive new lands on his
maps America, in Vespucci’s honor
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John Cabot (England):

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in 1497, saw lots of fish, and claimed the area for England. In 1498,
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Cabot may have been the first non-Viking European to set foot on what’s now the
continental United States,
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Vasco Nunez de Balboa (Spain): Balboa is credited with being the first European to
see the South Seas from the New World.
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Ferdinand Magellan (Spain):

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Jacques Cartier (France):

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his trips helped France establish a claim for much of what is now Canada.
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Francisco Coronado
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Coronado’s group explored Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, and the Gulf of
California and discovered the Grand Canyon.
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Samuel de Champlain (France):

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He founded the colony of Quebec in 1608.

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Native American slavery It started with Columbus. By his second voyage to

Hispaniola, he set up a system, called the encomienda, which amounted to slavery.
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Columbus also imposed a gold tax on the Indians and sometimes cut the hands off of
those who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay it.
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the population of Hispaniola’s natives plummeted from an estimated 250,000 to

300,000 at the time of Columbus’s arrival in 1492 to perhaps 60,000 by 1510, to
near zero by 1550.
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When even the populations of the little islands waned, the Spanish looked for other
cheap labor sources.
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1513, King Carlos I of Spain had given his royal assent to the African slave trade.
He made his decision in part, he said, to improve the lot of the Indians.
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in 1493, Columbus stopped by the Canary Islands and picked up some sugar cane
cuttings.
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In 1516, the first sugar grown in the New World was presented to King Carlos I of
Spain. By 1531, it was as commercially important to the Spanish colonial economy as
gold.
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Sugar and rum became so popular that sugar plantations mushroomed all over the
Caribbean.
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In 1514, Pope Leo X declared that “not only the Christian religion but Nature cries
out against the slavery and the slave trade.” In 1537, Pope Paul III declared
Indians were not to be enslaved.
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the New World’s natives were then likely candidates to die from the Europeans’ most
formidable weapon: disease. Because they had never been exposed to them as a
culture, the Native Americans’ immune systems had no defense when faced with
diseases such as measles and smallpox.
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Spanish conquerors defeated mighty empires in Mexico and Peru — the Aztecs and
Incas.
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sophisticated cultures with built-in labor classes. All the Spanish had to do was
kill the old bosses and become the new bosses, so they didn’t have to import slaves
as they had done in the Caribbean.
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Pope Alexander VI divided the Americas between Spain and Portugal by drawing a line
on the map.
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In 1587, Walter Raleigh, who had the royal right to colonize in the Americas, sent
a group that consisted of 89 men, 7 women, and 11 children to what is now North
Carolina. They called their colony Roanoke.
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And no one knows exactly what happened to the first English colony in the New
World.
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Chapter 3
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Pilgrims’ Progress: The English Colonies, 1607–1700

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1604, however, when England and Spain signed a tenuous peace treaty,
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Protestantism, a rival Christian religion to the one led by the Pope in Rome, had
developed in the 16th century and become firmly rooted in England.
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England’s woolen industry was booming in the late 1500s and early 1600s. Farms were
turned into pastures for more and more sheep, and the tenant farmers on the former
farms were forced off, with no particular place to go — except the New World.
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In the winter of 1609, called “the starving time,” conditions got so bad colonists
resorted to eating anything they could get — including each other. One man was
executed after eating the body of his dead wife.
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The Portuguese were the first Europeans to raid the African coast for slaves, in
the mid-15th century. They were quickly followed by the Spanish, who used Africans
to supplant the New World Indians who had either been killed or died of diseases.
By the mid-16th century, the English sea dog John Hawkins was operating a thriving
slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean.
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While the Northern colonies had less use for slaves as agricultural workers, they
put Africans to work as domestic servants or as unpaid laborers
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Although the total population of slaves was relatively low through most of the
1600s, colonial governments took steps to institutionalize slavery. In 1662,
Virginia passed a law that automatically made slaves of slaves’ children. In 1664,
Maryland’s assembly declared that all black people in the colony were slaves for
life, whether they converted to Christianity or not. And in 1684, New York’s
legislators recognized slavery as a legitimate practice.
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In 1670, Virginia had a population of about 2,000 slaves. By 1708, the number was
12,000.
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a group of 102 men, women, and children left England on September 16, 1620, on a
ship called the Mayflower.
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half the Plymouth settlers died in the first six months.

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They had an extremely able leader in William Bradford, who was to be governor of
the colony for more than 30 years,
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The locals showed the newcomers some planting techniques and then traded the
colonists’ furs for corn, which gave the Pilgrims something to send back to
England. By the fall of 1622, the Plymouth colonists had much to be thankful for.
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It’s easy to confuse the Pilgrims and the Puritans. Both groups moved to journey to
America for religious reasons. Both were remarkably intolerant of other people’s
beliefs.
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Winthrop led about 500 Puritans to the Massachusetts Bay colony in New England in
1630, establishing the city of Boston later that year.
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by 1642, as many as 20,000 Puritans had left England for America.

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They set up a system of compulsory free education, institutions of higher learning,

and a model for what would eventually become a typical two-house state government
in America.
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Adultery was punishable by death until 1632, when the penalty was reduced to a
public whipping and the forced wearing of the letters “AD” sewed onto the clothing.
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In early 1692, three young girls in Salem, Massachusetts, threw fits and claimed
they had been bewitched by a West Indian slave and two other local women.
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When they admitted they had made it up, it was too late.
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none was burned at the stake, as witches were commonly dealt with in Europe.
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Puritans
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didn’t like Roman Catholics.
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Catholics established a colony north of Virginia in 1634. Called Maryland,

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The colony prospered as a tobacco exporter.

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Protestants
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Catholic
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they
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in 1649,
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recognized all Christian religions — and decreed the death penalty for Jews and
atheists.
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In 1681, a wealthy Quaker named William Penn got a charter to start a colony in
America.
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and founded Pennsylvania.

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By 1700, Pennsylvania’s leading city, Philadelphia, was, after Boston, the

colonies’ leading cultural center.
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the Dutch
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in 1626 established a colony in the New World at the mouth of the Hudson River,
calling it New Amsterdam.
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in 1664, when English ships and troops showed up to attack the settlement, it
surrendered without firing a shot. New Amsterdam became New York, named after its
new owner, James, the Duke of York.
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In 1642, Native Americans under Chief Opechencanough attacked settlers over a large
area of the Virginia colony and killed about 350 of them. The settlers
counterattacked a few months later and killed hundreds of Native Americans. In New
Netherland, the Dutch settlers murdered nearly 100 Native Americans in their sleep,
cut off their heads, and kicked them around the streets of New Amsterdam. That
launched a nasty war that ended when 150 Dutch soldiers killed about 700 Native
Americans at a battle near present-day Stamford, Connecticut.
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Chapter 4 You Say You Want a Revolution: 1700–1775

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Heading West in a Quest for Wealth

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After the Civil War, however, Americans moved west as much to make a buck as to
settle into a new life. The West was seen as a bottomless treasure chest of
resources to exploit.
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strike. In 1859, thousands descended on Pike’s Peak in Colorado, looking for gold.
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1861, it was Idaho; in 1863, Montana; in 1874, the Black Hills of Dakota; and in
1876, it was back to Colorado.
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large scale, and they reaped most of the profits.

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By 1871, 750,000 head of cattle were moving through Abilene alone. By 1875, the
advent of the refrigerated car allowed cattle to be slaughtered and butchered in
Midwest cities like Kansas City and Chicago before being shipped east.
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He was likely in his late teens or early 20s, and about one in five was African
American.
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By the early 1890s, the day of the cowboy and the cattle drive was coming to an
end.
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But in the 1880s, crop prices fell as new producers in Australia and India came on
the scene.
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There were plenty of dead Native Americans by 1876. When Columbus arrived, there
were probably 1 million to 1.5 million Native Americans living in what is now the
United States. By the time of the Civil War, that number had dropped to about
300,000,
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to ending tribal customs and forcing Native Americans to adopt white culture, a
process known as acculturation.
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Between 1859 and 1876, soldiers and Native Americans fought at least 200 pitched
battles and signed 370 treaties.
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“They made us promises more than I can remember,” noted one Sioux leader, “but they
never kept but one.
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offered to buy the land from the Native Americans but was refused. The last great
war against the Native Americans began, and for the first time, the Plains tribes
united into a formidable fighting force. On June 25, 1876, the U.S. 7th Cavalry
regiment, led by Custer, rashly attacked a Native American encampment at the Little
Bighorn River in Montana. It proved to be populated by 2,500 warriors.
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In 1887, Congress passed a law, called the Dawes Act, that divided land into
individual allotments for Native Americans, as part of an effort to turn them into
small farmers. It also provided for an education system and eventual U.S.
citizenship. However well intentioned the law was, it didn’t work.
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Many Native Americans eventually signed away their land for a few cents an acre to
speculators, who promptly resold it to settlers for a few dollars an acre.
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In 1890,
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a misunderstanding led to a cavalry attack on a group of Miniconjou and Hunkpapa

Lakota
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The soldiers killed more than 200 men, women, and children and then left their
bodies in the snow for three days before burying them in a mass grave. It was the
last major
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violence between the Native Americans and whites, and a tragic and horrifyingly
typical response to America’s “Indian Problem.”
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individuals. In 1896, in a case called Plessy v. Ferguson, it decided states had

the right to legally segregate public facilities, from schools to trains, as long
as the separate facilities were equal in quality — which rarely, if ever, occurred.
And in 1899, the Court went a step further by ruling that states could erect new
schools for white kids only, even if schools for black kids weren’t available.
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which not only tried to completely separate the races, but also take away most of
the rights they had been accorded by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.
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Blacks couldn’t serve on juries, represent themselves in court, or drink from the
same public drinking fountains as whites. If they quit a job, they could be
arrested for vagrancy.
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the best-known African American leader of the day was not ready to challenge the
injustices. Born into slavery, Booker T. Washington had become a schoolteacher, the
founder of a major vocational school in Alabama called the Tuskegee Institute,
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they were viewed as a competitive labor threat to American-born workers.

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Anti-Chinese riots broke out in San Francisco in 1877. In 1882, Congress passed a
law prohibiting all Chinese immigration for ten years. The ban, called the Chinese
Exclusion Act, was later extended to last indefinitely and wasn’t repealed until
1943.
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Between 1866 and 1915, 25 million immigrants came to the United States. Most of
them came from Italy and Southeastern Europe, but they also came from Scandinavia,
Russia, Poland, Germany, Ireland,
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England, and France.

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country. The presence of so many immigrants in so short a time caused alarm in some
“natives,” who feared the newcomers would weaken their chances in the job market
and pollute American culture.
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from 1830 to 1870, about 40,000 miles of track were laid in the country. But in the
20 years from 1871 to 1890, more than 110,000 miles were laid. In 1869, the first
transcontinental line
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linking the East and West coasts was opened, and by 1900, there were four more.
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locate. They employed more than one million people by 1900.

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they helped speed development of America’s telegraph system, because where the
rails went, the wires went.
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awarded themselves exorbitant contracts —

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AND DRIBBLE BEFORE YOU SHOOT …

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The Canadian-born YMCA teacher was training would-be YMCA instructors in

Springfield, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1891.
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Manufacturing steel more efficiently

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Carnegie. Born in Scotland, Carnegie came to America at the age of 13 and got a job
working in a Pennsylvania factory for $1.50 a week.
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Carnegie eventually focused on steel. He hired chemists to perfect the production

process, developed markets for steel, reinvested his profits, and expanded.
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In 1901, Carnegie sold out to financier J. P. Morgan for the staggering sum of $447
million. In his later years, he gave away more than $300 million of his fortune
through philanthropies that included building 2,811 public libraries and donating
8,000 organs to churches.
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In the 1850s, whale oil — the primary fuel for providing light
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Alexander Graham Bell, invented the telephone.

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miles. Then a man named George Westinghouse began using alternating current (AC),
which allowed high voltage
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In 1877, America faced its first national labor strike when railroad
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workers walked off the job after wages were cut. State and federal troops were
called in, hundreds of strikers were killed or wounded,
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In 1894, a strike against the Pullman railroad car company spread over 27 states
and paralyzed the country’s railroads.
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many mediocre presidents in a row as it did between 1876 and 1900.

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Garfield was assassinated

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The Rise of Populism

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These hard times triggered a political movement called Populism. Populists sought
higher crop prices and lower interest rates.
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They also wanted more money put into circulation and more silver coins made. The
idea was that more money in circulation would raise crop prices,
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“A Splendid Little War”

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Some Americans wanted to free Cuba from Spanish oppression. Some wanted to protect
U.S. economic interests, and others just saw it as a chance to pick off some of
Spain’s colonies for America.
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HOW ABOUT HAWAII?

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The islands of Hawaii have always been a great place to visit for Americans. Yankee
traders visited there in the 1790s. In the 1840s, the islands were home to American
whaling ships. And by 1860, many U.S. citizens owned land there.
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in 1898, Hawaii became a U.S. territory. In 1959, it became the 50th state.
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Chapter 13 Growing into the 20th Century: 1899–1918 IN THIS CHAPTER Winning
colonies from Spain
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Bringing in Teddy Roosevelt Improving conditions across America Getting America in

the air and on the road Fighting for women’s right to vote Hunting for jobs in the
North, African-American style Joining World War I with Woodrow Wilson
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