The Beginnings of America (1400s - 1700s)
For many years it was firmly believed that the world was flat and that if anyone sailed too far west they would fall off the end of the earth. This was disproved in 1492 when Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus, under contract to the Spanish crown, reached several Caribbean islands, making first contact with the indigenous peoples of those islands. While academics dispute the exact method, it is believed that these indigenous peoples first made their way to America at least 12,000 years and as many as 40,000 years ago.
21 years after Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, Juan Ponce de León became the first European to land on what would become the U.S. mainland although he was not immediately aware of this thinking “La Florida” was another island in the Caribbean. Many Spanish settlers would travel to the “new world” and settle in areas in present-day southwestern United States. Thousands travelled here through Mexico.
The Spanish would not be the only Europeans to settle in America. French fur traders established outposts of New France (which stretched from New Foundland to the Canadian Rocky Mountains, between the Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.) France claimed much of the North American interior including the present day states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Indiana.) The first successful English settlements were the Virginia Colony in Jamestown in 1607 and the Pilgrims Plymouth Colony in 1620. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, which resulted in a wave of migration, was founded in 1628 and by 1634 some 10,000 Puritans had settled in New England. The British Empire, between the late 1610s and the American Revolution used America as a penal colony for some 50,000 convicts.
1614 saw the Dutch settle along the lower Hudson River. One of their first settlements included New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. The Dutch however would only hold land in America until 1674 when they would cede their territory to the British Empire. The province of New Netherland would be renamed New York (as it is today).
Many new immigrants, especially to the South, were indentured servants—including almost two-thirds of all Virginia immigrants between 1630 and 1680. By the turn of the century, African slaves were becoming the primary source of bonded labor. With the 1729 division of the Carolinas and the 1732 colonization of Georgia, the thirteen British colonies that would become the United States of America were established. All had local governments with elections open to most free men, with a growing devotion to the ancient rights of Englishmen and a sense of self-government stimulating support for republicanism. All legalized the African slave trade. With high birth rates, low death rates, and steady immigration, the colonial population grew rapidly. The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest in both religion and religious liberty. In the French and Indian War, British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans (popularly known as "American Indians"), who were being displaced, those thirteen colonies had a population of 2.6 million in 1770, about one-third that of Britain; nearly one in five Americans were black slaves. Though subject to British taxation, the American colonials had no representation in the Parliament of Great Britain.