In 1607, the Kingdom of England established the Colony of Virginia, centered in Jamestown, in North America. Virginia was bordered by the indigenous Tsenacommacah, or the Powhatan Confederacy. To the north was the powerful Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy.
Many English settlers migrated to America for economic opportunity. In the South, a plantation economy sustained by cash crops like tobacco, sugar, and cotton developed. Much of the labor came from African slaves, who were first taken to Virginia in 1619. Indigenous peoples were also enslaved.
Religion also motivated colonists. While those who settled in Virginia followed the official Church of England, the New England colonies, such as Massachusetts, were populated by Protestant Puritans, who believed the Church was too similar to Catholicism. Maryland was a Catholic haven until 1689.
Colonization was initially driven by the Virginia Company, a joint-stock company chartered by the Crown. Its London branch colonized the South, while the Plymouth branch colonized the North. Most colonies eventually became royal property, but the colonies kept on trending towards self-government.
Virginia’s elected House of Burgesses ruled alongside the royally-appointed governor, while many town governments appeared throughout Massachusetts. The colonists successfully resisted an English attempt to establish a consolidated Dominion of New England in the late 17th century.
Still, England—or Great Britain after 1707—pursued mercantilism, a policy of maximizing exports and minimizing imports, by forcing the colonies to trade exclusively with Britain through the Navigation Acts. Raw materials from America were sold back to the colonies as manufactured goods.
This limited the growth of industry in the colonies, with the exception of Northern shipbuilding. Through British trade, the North developed a commercial economy with ports like Boston and New York, in contrast to the more agricultural South. Meanwhile, Georgia became the last of the Thirteen Colonies in 1732.
Relations between Britain and the colonies swiftly declined after the French and Indian War, during which British North America greatly expanded. Britain imposed new taxes on the colonies to pay off debts, despite their lack of representation in Parliament, and forbade settlement in the new western lands.
After more escalations like the Quartering Acts, which required colonists to house British soldiers; more taxes; the Boston Massacre; and the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the colonists convened at the Second Continental Congress to issue the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776.
With French aid, the colonies won the American Revolutionary War that followed. Britain recognized the independence of the United States of America in 1784. The United States Constitution, creating a federal presidential republic, was adopted in 1789, after the first, weaker central government failed.
After purchasing Louisiana from France in 1803 and staving off Britain in the War of 1812, the U.S. began to pursue its so-called Manifest Destiny: to conquer everything to the Pacific coast. This accelerated the ethnic cleansing and genocide of indigenous peoples. The nation also rapidly industrialized.
The admission of new states to the Union created tension between those states that still practiced slavery and those that did not. A delicate balance was preserved for a time by admitting slave and free states in pairs. Abolitionists voiced moral objections to slavery, supported by first-wave feminists.
Such developments culminated in the American Civil War, when slave-holding Southern states rebelled. Though the South was defeated and slavery was formally abolished in 1865, the process of Reconstruction failed to secure equal rights for Black Americans in the South, or indeed anywhere else.
Racial segregation persisted in the South, while Black voting rights, though now guaranteed by the Constitution, were severely restricted. Meanwhile, industrialization and capitalism brought about the Gilded Age, a time of unprecedented growth coupled with inequality. Millions of immigrants arrived.
The abuses of the Gilded Age brought about the Progressive Era, during which advancements like women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, antitrust laws, and public health policies were made. Externally, the U.S. delved into imperialism, seizing many colonies abroad, having largely dispossessed the native peoples.
After the Great Depression began in 1929, the liberal New Deal changed the role of the federal government forever with programs like Social Security and the Federal Housing Administration. In 1941, the United States entered World War II against Germany and Japan, for the latter attacked Hawaii.
The nation emerged victorious from the war as one of the world’s two superpowers, the other being the Soviet Union. The two countries entered a geopolitical and ideological conflict called the Cold War, fought through proxy wars, with the former promoting capitalism and the latter communism.
Domestically, liberalism remained dominant through the 1960s. New social programs like Medicare were enacted, while the Civil Rights Movement formally ended racial segregation. However, backlash to these reforms, as well as the economic stagnation of the 1970s, put the conservatives in power by 1980.
New Deal-style liberalism then fell out of favor. Meanwhile, the U.S. became the world’s sole superpower with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but the failures of its War on Terror, first waged in response to the September 11 attacks, and other factors have since threatened that position.
More recently, events like the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic have undermined public faith in the political and economic establishment. This has led to the rise of both left- and right-wing populist movements, locked in heavy contention over both social and economic issues.