History of united states

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History of the United States
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"American history" redirects here. For the history of the continents, see History of the Americas.
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The history of the United States as covered in schools and universities typically begins with either 1492 and Columbus, or—especially in recent years—with the prehistory of the Native peoples.[1]
The United States began as an independent nation with the Declaration of Independence on July 4,1776. European colonists reached the Gulf andPacific coasts, but the largest settlements were by the English on the Atlantic coast, starting in 1607. By the 1770s, the Thirteen Colonies contained two and a half million people. They were prospering, and had developed their own political and legal systems. As a result of the French and Indian Wars, Britain began to try to recoup the costs of thosewars by instituting a series of additional taxes on the Colonists, and had left parts of their army in the colonies to help provide for their defense. The additional efforts at taxation, and the continuous presence of British troops posed a threat to American self-government. Political action in the early 1770s culminated in the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, and led to all-out war in 1775.After fierce debate among the colonies, it was finally agreed to declare their independence from Britain, and in 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed, formally and officially breaking all ties with the former mother country. With major military and financial support from France, the Patriotswon the American Revolutionary War. During and after the war, the United States were united undera weak federal government established by theArticles of Confederation. When these became unworkable, a new Constitution was written in 1789, and it became the basis for the United States federal government, with war hero George Washington as the country's first president. The young nation continued to struggle with the scope of central government and with European influence, creating thefirst political parties in the 1790s, and fighting a second war with Britain in 1812.
U.S. territory expanded westward across the continent, brushing aside Native Americans and Mexico, and rejecting the advice of Whigs who wanted to deepen the economy rather than expand the geography. Slavery of Africans was abolished in all the Northern states at the turn of the 19th century, but it flourished inthe Southern states because of heavy European demand for cotton. After 1820, a series of compromises postponed a showdown on the issue of slavery, but in the late 1850s, the new Republican power took political control of the North and promised to stop the expansion of slavery, which implied its eventual death. The 1860 presidential election of Republican Abraham Lincoln triggered a crisis as eleven slavestates seceded to found the Confederacy in 1861. The bloody American Civil War (1861–65) redefined the nation and remains the central iconic event. The South was eventually defeated and, in the Reconstruction era, the United States ended slavery, extended rights to African Americans, and readmitted secessionist states with loyal governments. The national government was much stronger, and it now...