🦅 A History of the USA

Picture a country where tea was once brewed straight in the ocean, where presidents kept important state papers in their hat so as not to lose them, and where people simply decided one day that they were tired of obeying a king they had never laid eyes on, sitting thousands of miles away across a very large pond. Welcome to America!

Today we are going on a long, wild and occasionally unbelievable ride through the history of the United States. Forget the dull lists of dates that make your head spin. We are going to look at how it actually happened — with all the blunders, the brilliant ideas and the brutal turns that shaped this superpower. Buckle up: we start about five hundred years ago.

Chapter 1: A great geographical error, or how Columbus (didn't) discover America

The year is 1492. Pepper, cinnamon and silk from Asia are the hot commodities in Europe. The trouble is that the overland routes east are dangerous and expensive. An Italian navigator, Christopher Columbus, talks the Spanish queen into funding a mad plan: "If the Earth is round, I shall reach India by sailing steadily west!" It was a fine plan with one small defect. Columbus had no idea that an enormous, uncharted continent was standing in his way.

When his crew finally sighted land after weeks at sea (an island in the Caribbean), Columbus stepped ashore and solemnly announced: "We are in India!" That is why he began calling the local people Indians. And although he never found a single pepper plantation, he remained rock-solidly convinced until his death in 1506 that he had simply reached Asia. It took another navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, to work out that this was an entirely New World. And because Amerigo was rather better at writing letters about his voyages, the new continent was named after him — America. Christopher was left with Colombia and a handful of town names.

It is also true that Columbus was nowhere near the first European in America. Around the year 1000 the Vikings had already arrived in their wooden ships, led by Leif Erikson. They lived there a while, fought the locals and sailed away again without telling anyone in Europe. And of course we must not forget the Indigenous peoples themselves. They had been there for thousands of years, had built remarkable cities, and had no sense whatever of needing to be "discovered" by a confused Italian with a compass.

Chapter 2: Pilgrims, corn and the first Thanksgiving

Once word got round Europe that there was a great deal of empty land in America (nobody asked the people already living on it), the European powers began to gather — Spanish, French, Dutch and above all English. England founded thirteen colonies along the east coast.

One of the most famous groups of settlers were the Pilgrims. They were people who disliked the way religion was practised in England and wanted to live their own way. In 1620 they boarded a ship called the Mayflower and set out across a stormy Atlantic. The voyage was dreadful — everybody was sick, the ship leaked — but they eventually reached the coast of what is now Massachusetts, where they founded the settlement of Plymouth.

Their timing, though, was appalling. They arrived at the start of winter. They had no proper houses, their food was running out, and disease broke out. Half of all the Pilgrims died that first winter. Just as it looked as though the settlement would not survive, the Wampanoag arrived. One of them, Squanto, surprisingly spoke English (he had been kidnapped by English sailors years earlier, so the world really is small). Squanto and his people taught the Pilgrims the things that saved their necks: how to grow American corn, where to fish, and how to turn the fish into fertiliser for the crops.

When the Pilgrims brought in their first proper harvest in the autumn of 1621, they decided to throw an enormous three-day party to thank God and the Wampanoag for saving them. Wild turkeys were roasted; there was pumpkin, fish and venison. That is how Thanksgiving began, a holiday that is arguably more popular in the USA today than Christmas.

And one more story about that turkey. It is often said that Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to be the national bird instead of the eagle. In fact he never formally proposed it and nobody outvoted him — he wrote it in a private letter to his daughter, teasing that the eagle on the proposed national seal looked more like a turkey anyway. He did add, while he was at it, that the eagle is a lazy thief that steals fish from other birds, whereas the turkey is a little vain but brave. The eagle won in the end, and the turkey ends up in the oven every November.

Chapter 3: The Boston Tea Party, or when a king pushes his luck

Another hundred and fifty years passed. The settlers had become proud Americans. Life was reasonably good: they grew tobacco and cotton, they traded, and they had essentially no need for a British king sitting in London. But King George III had money troubles. He had fought a long and expensive war against the French (which, incidentally, was partly fought in America), and his treasury was empty.

The king had a "brilliant" idea: "Let the Americans pay for those wars! We shall introduce new taxes!" So London taxed almost everything in the colonies — official papers, newspapers, paint, glass, and above all tea. The Americans were furious. It was not really about the few extra pence; it was the principle. Not a single representative from America sat in the British parliament. Hence the famous slogan: "No taxation without representation!" (That is: if we have no say in how we are governed, we are not paying your taxes.)

The tension came to a head on 16 December 1773 in Boston. Three British ships loaded with expensive tea arrived in the harbour. Local patriots calling themselves the Sons of Liberty decided on a radical piece of theatre. They dressed up (rather unconvincingly) as Native Americans, boarded the ships in the dark, smashed open 342 great chests of tea with axes and threw the lot into the sea. They drowned more than forty tons of tea, worth millions in today's money. The event is still known as the Boston Tea Party. The fish in Boston harbour probably had a caffeine shock — and King George III sent an army to America to pacify the rebels. War was one step away.

Chapter 4: The birth of a superpower

The War of Independence began in 1775. On one side stood the British army — professional soldiers in brilliant red coats (they were called Redcoats), the best-trained in the world. On the other stood the Americans: farmers, hunters and carpenters who often had no decent boots, let alone uniforms. At the head of this amateur American army stood George Washington.

A great many myths surround Washington. One is that he had wooden false teeth. In reality he suffered agonising toothache and by the end of his life had a single natural incisor left. His denture was not wooden but carved from hippopotamus ivory and cow bone — and it also contained human teeth, several of them bought from people he enslaved. It must have been extremely uncomfortable, which explains why George never smiles in a single portrait.

While Washington fought in mud and frost, the finest minds in America gathered in Philadelphia (Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin among them). They sat down at a table and in the summer of 1776 wrote and approved the Declaration of Independence. In it they announced to the world that the thirteen colonies no longer belonged to Great Britain but were founding a new country: the United States of America. Americans still celebrate the day they approved it as their greatest holiday, with tons of fireworks and barbecue — and you will find that date carved on the tablet a certain green lady is holding in New York harbour.

Winning the war took several more years. The Americans were greatly helped in the end by the French, who sincerely detested the British and were delighted to make trouble for them. In 1783 the British conceded defeat and America was free. George Washington was elected the first president and was so popular that he could have made himself king had he wanted to. He refused, because Americans had had quite enough of kings. After eight years in office he went back to farming of his own accord, founding the tradition that a president serves at most two terms.

Chapter 5: How a small country became a giant (and how the Indigenous peoples suffered for it)

At the start the USA was only a narrow strip of land along the Atlantic. But the Americans were hungry for new ground, and a huge migration westward began. How did they come by the land? Sometimes they simply bought it for a song. In 1803, for instance, they bought an enormous territory called Louisiana from the French emperor Napoleon. Napoleon urgently needed money for his wars in Europe, so he sold America a piece of land that doubled the size of the country for a mere fifteen million dollars. It was the best real-estate deal in history.

Later they bought Alaska from Russia. Everybody thought Secretary Seward had lost his mind, spending over seven million dollars on "a giant refrigerator full of bears". Then gold and oil were found in Alaska, and the critics went quiet.

The sad and dark side of this American growth was the fate of the Indigenous peoples. The American government signed treaties with the tribes and then broke them continually as white settlers pushed further west. In 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. Tens of thousands of people from nations such as the Cherokee had to leave their homes and walk thousands of kilometres to dry reservations in Oklahoma. That journey is called the Trail of Tears, because thousands died along it of hunger, cold and exhaustion.

Chapter 6: North against South, or Lincoln and his walking filing cabinet

Around 1860 America had an enormous internal problem that nearly destroyed it. The country was economically split in two. The North was modern, full of factories, railways and cities. Slavery was banned there. The South was agricultural: vast cotton and tobacco plantations worked in inhuman conditions by millions of enslaved Black people brought from Africa. Southerners claimed their economy would collapse without slaves.

In 1860 Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election. Lincoln was an extraordinary man. Born in a poor log cabin, he taught himself to read and became a lawyer. He stood almost two metres tall and wore an iconic tall stovepipe hat. That hat was not merely decorative — Lincoln kept important letters, notes and state papers inside it. Walking down the street and meeting someone important, he would simply take off his hat, rummage in it and produce the necessary paper. The first portable filing cabinet.

Lincoln made no secret of considering slavery a moral evil. The southern states, afraid he would take their slaves away, announced that they were leaving the USA and founding their own country, the Confederacy. Lincoln declared that the country must not break apart, and the American Civil War broke out — the bloodiest conflict ever fought on American soil.

The South won early on, having the better generals (the famous Robert E. Lee among them). But the North had more money, more people and, above all, weapons factories. In 1863 Lincoln issued a proclamation freeing all the slaves in the South. Thousands of Black soldiers then joined the war and fought for their own freedom. In July 1863 the enormous battle of Gettysburg turned the war decisively. In 1865 the South surrendered. Slavery was abolished and the USA held together — but only days later tragedy struck. Lincoln was shot in a Washington theatre by a fanatical southern actor, John Wilkes Booth.

Chapter 7: The Wild West, gold fever and saloon stories

After the Civil War came the era you know from films — the Wild West. Cowboys, sheriffs and bandits such as Billy the Kid and Jesse James roamed everywhere, and a transcontinental line was built that finally joined the two coasts.

Why did people rush to that dangerous west in the first place? Very often it was gold. In 1848 a carpenter found glittering yellow pebbles in a Californian creek. Word spread, and in 1849 the first great Gold Rush broke out. Thousands of people — named the Forty-Niners after the year — quit their jobs, sold their houses and ran to California hoping to get rich. Most of them of course found nothing and ended in poverty; the people who really made money were the ones selling them shovels, food and expensive liquor in the saloons. Incidentally, this is exactly when a certain Levi Strauss began sewing prospectors extremely tough trousers out of canvas with metal rivets — and so the first jeans came into the world, quite possibly the ones you are wearing while you read this.

Cowboys were not in fact romantic heroes forever firing their revolvers. It was brutally hard, filthy work. Their main job was driving huge herds of cattle hundreds of kilometres across the prairie to the nearest loading yard. It took months, they slept on the ground under the open sky, they ate beans over and over, and the greatest danger to them was not gunfights but a stampeding herd that could trample them.

Chapter 8: The age of inventions and skyscrapers

At the turn of the twentieth century America turned into an industrial rocket. People moved from the countryside into the cities, and millions of immigrants poured in from Europe (a great many Czechs among them) in search of the "American dream". When the immigrant ships came into New York harbour, the first thing to greet them was an enormous green statue, a gift to the USA from France.

It was an age of brilliant minds. Thomas Alva Edison, in his laboratories in New Jersey, perfected the light bulb, invented the phonograph and a great deal else. The story goes that before he worked out what material to put in a bulb so that it would not burn straight out, he tried thousands of dead ends (including his assistant's charred beard). Asked whether those thousands of failures had not discouraged him, he replied: "They were not failures. I have merely successfully discovered ten thousand ways that do not work."

Another man who changed the world was Henry Ford. He invented neither the car nor the moving assembly line — moving lines were already in use in the Chicago stockyards, where he borrowed the idea. What he did invent was using them to build cars. Until then cars were built by hand and so expensive that only millionaires could afford them. Ford put workers along a line where each one made a single motion all day (tightening one bolt, say). Production of his famous Model T became so fast and so cheap that any ordinary American could buy one. Ford had an idiosyncratic sense of marketing and said: "You can have a car in any colour, so long as it is black." (Black dried fastest and therefore did not hold up the line.)

Because there was little room in the centres of the great cities and land cost the earth, architects had an idea: "If we cannot build outwards, we shall build into the sky!" Thanks to the safety lift and cheap steel, the first skyscrapers began to rise. America started to look like something out of the future.

Chapter 9: World wars and the gangster era with Al Capone

When the First World War broke out in Europe in 1914, America's first response was: "That is your problem, we are staying out of it." But German submarines began sinking American merchant ships, so in 1917 the USA entered the war and helped bring it to a quick end.

After the war came the roaring twenties. People wanted to dance to jazz and enjoy themselves. The government, however, made a mistake and passed Prohibition — a total ban on the sale and production of alcohol. They thought it would cure crime. The result was precisely the opposite. People did not stop drinking; the drink was simply made in secret in illegal stills and smuggled. Gangsters got fabulously rich on that black market. The most famous of them was Al Capone in Chicago. He had a private army with machine guns, bribed the police and the politicians, and disposed of his competition. The police could not touch him, because nobody would testify. In the end they got him not for murder but for not paying tax on his illegal profits. He finished up in the famous prison on Alcatraz.

In 1929 the party ended. An enormous bubble on the stock exchange burst, shares lost their value and the Great Depression began. People lost their savings, factories closed, and millions queued endlessly for free soup. America was pulled out of it by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, under which the state employed millions of people building dams, roads and bridges.

Roosevelt was, incidentally, the only president to govern four times in a row. People loved him, even though he spent most of his time in office in a wheelchair, paralysed by polio — the press helped keep that from the public so that America would not look weak. It was he who led the USA through the Second World War. America entered it after Japanese aircraft attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii without warning on 7 December 1941. America mobilised its entire industry and, together with the British prime minister Winston Churchill and the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, defeated Adolf Hitler. The USA ended the war in the Pacific in August 1945 by dropping two newly developed atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Chapter 10: The Cold War and the race for the Moon

After the Second World War the world split into two camps. On one side stood the democratic USA, on the other the communist Soviet Union. The Cold War began. It was called cold because the two superpowers never fought each other directly (with atomic weapons that would have meant the end of the world), but competed constantly over who had more rockets, better spies and — above all — who would conquer space first.

The Soviets made the better start in this Space Race. In 1957 they launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik (it only beeped, but the Americans panicked), and in 1961 they sent up the first human being, Yuri Gagarin. President John F. Kennedy then announced an ambitious goal: "Before this decade is out, we shall land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth!" Everyone thought he had lost his mind, because at that point the USA did not even have a decent rocket.

But NASA got to work. On 20 July 1969 millions of people watched on black-and-white televisions all over the world as the lunar module of Apollo 11 settled onto the surface of the Moon in the Sea of Tranquillity. Neil Armstrong climbed out, came down the ladder and became the first human being in history to press a boot into moon dust. As he did so he said the sentence the whole world remembers: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." He and Buzz Aldrin planted an American flag (stiffened with wire so that it would hang properly in vacuum) and collected a bag of moon rock. With that the Americans won the space race outright.

Chapter 11: I have a dream, or the fight for civil rights

While America shone in space, at home it still had a deep and unjust stain. Although slavery had ended back in 1865, Black people in many American states (particularly in the South) still did not have the same rights as white people. Laws of segregation applied. That meant Black people could not go to the same schools, restaurants, hotels or public lavatories, and on buses had to sit only at the back. If the front seats for white passengers were full, a Black passenger had to stand up and give up their place.

Everything began to change in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. A seamstress named Rosa Parks sat down on a bus after a long day at work. When the driver told her to stand and let a white passenger sit, she calmly said: "No." The police arrested her for it. That apparently small act set off enormous protests. Black residents of Montgomery began boycotting the buses — for a year they preferred to walk rather than pay a company that treated them like rubbish. The transit operator was driven to the brink of ruin and the rules had to change.

At the head of this civil rights movement stood a young preacher, Martin Luther King Jr. King admired the Indian leader Gandhi and held to the principle that injustice must be fought without violence — through demonstrations, boycotts and speeches. In 1963 he led an enormous march on Washington, where he gave his most famous speech before 250,000 people, beginning with the words "I have a dream…". He dreamed that his four small children would one day live in a country where they would be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. King received the Nobel Peace Prize for his struggle but, like Lincoln, came to a tragic end — he was shot by an assassin in Memphis in 1968. His dream came true nonetheless: the laws changed, segregation was abolished, and in 2008 Americans elected Barack Obama as their first Black president.

Chapter 12: Welcome to the digital age

In the last decades of the twentieth century America became the centre of a technological revolution. In a Californian valley now known as Silicon Valley, young men in garages began assembling things that completely changed the way you live, learn and entertain yourself today.

Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak built the first Apple computer in Jobs's parents' garage. A little further away Bill Gates was building Microsoft. And at the end of the nineties two students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, came up with the search engine without which you could not find a pancake recipe today — Google. America, in short, gave the world personal computers, the internet, smartphones, social networks and streaming.

Today the United States is a country full of contradictions. It has an enormous Hollywood, the source of your favourite films and superheroes, it has astronauts planning a flight to Mars, and it is simultaneously wrestling with a great many modern problems. From thirteen small, poor colonies afraid of an angry king in London, the USA has travelled an incredible, sometimes bloody and sometimes quite mad road. And that is all of our history of the USA — now you know how today's world was born!

A quick quiz to finish

Do you think you were paying attention? Test your historical brain cells on this quick quiz. The correct answers are right underneath, but no peeking!

1. Which bird did Benjamin Franklin talk up at the eagle's expense?

a) The wild goose — b) The turkey — c) The pigeon

2. Where did President Abraham Lincoln keep important documents and letters?

a) In a secret drawer in his boot — b) In his tall hat — c) Under his pillow

3. What happened during the famous Boston Tea Party?

a) The Americans invited the British king to afternoon tea. — b) Bostonians dressed as Native Americans threw chests of tea into the sea. — c) Iced tea was invented in Boston.

4. Which famous inventor tried using his assistant's beard in his light bulb?

a) Henry Ford — b) Albert Einstein — c) Thomas Alva Edison

5. What was the name of the ship the Pilgrims sailed to America on in 1620?

a) Titanic — b) Mayflower — c) Santa Maria

Answers: 1b (yes, the turkey), 2b (his hat really was a walking filing cabinet), 3b (the fish had a caffeinated day), 4c (Edison genuinely tried everything), 5b (Mayflower).