HISTORY: FROM THE ORIGINS TO THE END OF THE CENTURY. XVI

The historical formation of the USA began with the settlement of English colonists, at the beginning of the century. XVII, on the Atlantic coast of North America. This original nucleus, which developed over almost two centuries in the thirteen colonies that proclaimed independence in 1776, becoming the United States, has given the Anglo-Saxon character to the vast portion of North America – between the Atlantic and the Pacific, Mexico and Canada – which is included within the borders of the USA It is therefore on this basis that both the residents of those parts of Spanish or French America that were later annexed to the United States and the tens of millions of immigrants, before and especially after independence, from the most diverse countries of Europe. Giovanni da Verrazzano, on behalf of Francesco I of France, had explored the Atlantic coast in 1524 between 34º and 50º latitude N; later, in 1562 and 1565, groups of French Huguenots founded colonies in present-day South Carolina and Florida; but the colonists were ferociously massacred, as heretics, by the Spanish governor of Florida. This peninsula, in fact, already touched in 1513 by Juan Ponce de León, was under the dominion of the Spaniards, who in 1565 founded the city of Saint Augustine, the oldest city in the current USA. From Florida and Mexico, Spain then went inland, again in the course of the sixteenth century, throughout the vast region north-west of Mexico, up to California. In turn, the French, moving from New France (Canada), descended, in the seventeenth century, along the Great Lakes, Ohio and Mississippi, taking possession of the region they called Louisiana; in 1718, Nouvelle Orléans (later New Orleans) was founded at the mouth of the Mississippi. At that date, however, English America had already been developing for a century, indeed ready to react to the threat of encirclement that was represented for it by the advance of French colonization. The first English expeditions, Elizabeth then reigning, was called Virginia. Visit ask4beauty for North America history.

HISTORY: FROM THE FIRST SETTLEMENT IN 1607 TO THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY. XVIII

But it was only in 1607 that a group of settlers, led by Captain John Smith and sent by the London Company, founded the first permanent settlement, also on the Virginia coast, at Jamestown. Thirteen years later, in 1620, about a hundred dissenters from the Anglican church, the “pilgrim fathers”, landed on the coast of Massachusetts from the ship Mayflower, who had moved across the Atlantic to escape the absolutism of James I Stuart and to be able to freely practice their own faith. Still during the voyage they had drawn up a covenant (solemn and voluntary pact which they called the Mayflower Compact), in which the rules of their future coexistence were established: the first expression of principles that will become characteristic of the American institutional system: the written Constitution and the source of sovereignty placed in those who joined. Founded New Plymouth, thus arose the first nucleus of New England (New England), the matrix of the most typically Anglo-Saxon America and therefore of the United States. Between 1628 and 1630 there was a much more conspicuous migration of Puritans in the same area, who first founded Salem and then other cities, including Boston. While Massachusetts was organized according to the theocratic mentality of the Calvinists, in 1636 a pastor, Roger Williams moved from Salem to Rhode Island, founding Providence, a center of religious tolerance, another fundamental principle of the American way of life. In a few decades, New England (New England) already included four colonies (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Connecticut); further south, in the central area of ​​the Atlantic coast, the colony of Maryland had arisen, founded by Catholics; further south, in addition to Virginia, the colonies of North Carolina (North Carolina) and South Carolina (South Carolina) had formed. Between New England (New England) and Maryland, however, New Sweden, born in 1638, and New Holland were interposed., built in 1624, with the main center of New Amsterdam. Both these colonies had a short life: New Holland absorbed New Sweden in 1655, only to be conquered by the British in 1664, who renamed New Amsterdam New York. On the territories thus annexed four new colonies arose: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. A thirteenth and final colony was added in 1732, Georgia, located between South Carolina and the Spanish possession of Florida. In their expansion from the coast to the interior, the English colonists, in addition to the natural difficulties, painstakingly dominated by the pioneering spirit (also this past to the American character), had to face the original residents of the region, the so-called Indians: a very long story, which ended only a century after independence of the United States, through alternatives of encounters and clashes (the “Indian wars”), at the end of which the Indians, who also had their own civilization, were exterminated, partly overwhelmed, culturally degraded, pushed further and further back and finally locked up in specific “reserves”. If the British had found the Indians on the spot, it was instead they who imported that other ethnic component that must have had a very significant weight in American history, that of the blacks, employed as slaves especially in the peculiar agricultural crops of the South. thirteen colonies two very different societies: that of the northern colonies, a democratic society of small landowners, artisans, merchants; and that of the southern colonies (including Maryland), an aristocratic society of large landowners who exploited the work of black slaves. Yet, despite so much economic and social diversity, politically and even ethnically all the settlers shared the fundamental principles already mentioned, from the jealous sense of autonomy to the vigilant awareness of their rights. And they were principles so basic and felt as such that they made even the considerable constitutional differences between the different types of colonies secondary.Moreover, since the colonial period, the English language, customs and common law started the process of assimilation and fusion of the different nuclei of European peoples that were settling across the Atlantic.