AMERICAN

ORIGINS
 The First Nations in America

Before the arrival of European settlers, the territory that is nowadays the United States of America
was inhabited by the native American tribes: Alaska Athabascan, Aleut, Apache, Blackfeet,
Cherokee, Cheyenne , Chickasaw, Chippewa, Choctaw, Colville, Comanche, Cree, Creek, Crow,
Delaware, Eskimo, Houma, Iroquois, Kiowa, Lumbee, Menominee, Navajo, Osage, Ottawa,
Paiute, Pima, Potawatomi, Pueblo, Puget Sound Salish, Seminole, Soshone, Sioux, Tohono
O’odham, Ute, Yakama, Yaqui, Yuman, and other not specified tribes.
 Spanish incursion

The beginings of the European colonization in the present territoy of the U.S.A.
Traces back in the foundation of San Agustín, a Spanish colony in the present state of
Florida.
 English Settlement
The First permanent English settlement was the Jamestown colony ( in the
state ofVirgina in the present day), founded in 1607 by the London Virgina
Company. Eventually, the company lost control of the land, which passed to
the British crown.

Ten years after the foundation of

the Jamestown colony, French
and Dutch settlers established
their own colonies (Quebec and
Mississippi, the French;
Manhattan and New Amsterdam,
the Dutch).
 New England
New England is a colective name
given to six states: Connecticut,
Maine, Massachusetts, New
Hampshire, Rhode Island and
Vermont.
In 1616, Captain John Smith
described the area in a pamphlet
"New England." The name was
officially sanctioned, on
November 3, 1620, when the
charter of the Virginia Company
of Plymouth was replaced by a
charter for the Plymouth Council
for New England.

The Plymouth Colony was an English colonial venture in North America from 1620
until 1691. The colony was founded by a separatist Puritan sect, who obtained a land
patent from the London Virginia Company in 1620 before that company was
dissolved.
 The Pilgrims

The Pilgrims were a group of English religious separatists who sailed

from Europe to North America in the early 17th century, in search of a
home where they could freely practice their religion.
 Puritans
The Puritans were members of a group of radical English Protestants that arose in
the sixteenth century and became a major force in England during the seventeenth
century. Puritans wanted to purify the Church of England by eliminationg traces of its
origins in the Roman Catholic Church.

The central tenet of Puritanism

was God's supreme authority
over human affairs, particularly
in the church, and especially as
expressed in the Bible. This
view led them to seek both
individual and corporate
conformance to the teaching of
the Bible, and it led them to
pursue both moral purity down
to the smallest detail as well as
ecclesiastical purity to the
highest level.

John Calvin Oliver Cromwell

(1509-1564). (1599-1658)
Many purtians were persecuted in their
homeland and fled to America in the 1620’s The Mayflower
and 1630’s, settling colonies that eventually
became Massachusetts

Thanksgiving Day is an American and

Canadian festivity. It is celebrated the fourth
Thursday of November.
The Thirteen Colonies
 The Birth of a Nation

From 1775 to 1783 the the Thirteen British colonies, with the aid of France and Spain,
battled the British rule. The colonies eventually obtained their independence recognized by
the British in Treaty of Paris (1783).
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
One of England's greatest literary figures: a poet,
essayist, biographer, lexicographer and often
considered the finest critic of English literature.
Between 1747 and 1755, Johnson wrote perhaps
his best-known work, A Dictionary of the English
Language. Although widely praised and
enormously influential, Johnson did not make
much money from it as he had to bear the expense
of its long composition. During this time, Johnson
also wrote a series of semi-weekly essays under
the title The Rambler.
 Noah Webster (1758 –1843 )
An American lexicographer, textbook author,
Bible translator, spelling reformer, writer, and
editor. He has been called the "Father of
American Scholarship and Education." His
Blue-backed Speller books taught five
generations of children in the United States
how to spell and read, and in the U.S. his name
became synonymous with "dictionary,"
especially the modern Merriam-Webster
dictionary which was first published in 1828 as
An American Dictionary of the English
Language.

“The Isolation of America from England will produce, in a course of time, a

language in North america as different from the future language of England
as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from
one another.”
-Noah Webster-
Predictions were based on the idea that America, as an independent country, should be
independent in language as well. Moreover, since the arrival of the pilgrims, English
needed new words for the exotic elements of their new land’s wilderness, thus they
adopted words from the native languages. With the subsequent arrival of other
Europeans once the United States was born as a country (migrations that took place
especially in the XIX century). It was predictable for the language to change.