Original subtitles

On the 4th of July, 2026, the United States will have celebrated its 250th

anniversary as an independent nation.

Although the year 1776 marks its official birth, the history of the land

that America was born from in fact dates back much further.

Over centuries and millennia, from the arrival of the first indigenous peoples

to the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, conflict, colonization, and struggle had

to first unfold before the idea that would define America to this day would

even be conceived.

That anyone, from anywhere, could arrive on its shores, cast off the tyranny or

poverty they left behind, and claim for themselves life, liberty, and the

pursuit of happiness as an American.

So how did this nation transform from a myriad of indigenous tribes scattered

across the continent, undergo colonization, settlement, revolution,

civil war, expansion and disaster to become the world's pre-eminent

superpower.

This is the history of the United States of America.

The first humans to set foot on the North American continent arrived between

15,000 and 20,000 years ago.

During the last Great Ice Age, a broad land bridge connected the far eastern

tip of Siberia to what is now Alaska.

and it was across this that small bands of hunter-gatherers made their way to

the Americas through a gradual generational process.

By the time the ice sheets retreated and the land bridge became submerged by the

rising seas around 10,000 years ago, these first Americans had spread across

and filled every ecological niche across the continent.

From the arid canyon lands of what is now Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico,

The ancestral Puebloans built multi-story stone and adobe dwellings

into the faces of sheer cliff walls.

On the Great Plains, stretching from present-day Texas northward to Montana

and Wyoming, nomadic peoples followed the immense bison herds across the vast

grasslands. In the Pacific Northwest of present-day Washington, Oregon and

Northern California, Abundant salmon runs and dense woodlands supported some

of the most populous societies in the pre-Columbian Americas.

Meanwhile, across the eastern woodlands, the natives of this region had built

thousands of settlements, with longhouses forming the central communal

nucleus of their communities, and had, by the 15th century, developed a

sophisticated tribal alliance network known as the Iroquois Confederacy.

Perhaps the most striking example of an advanced pre-Columbian civilization,

however, lay in the flood plains of the Mississippi River Valley, where a city

of mounds, known as Cahokia, grew to sustain a population of as much as 20

,000 people by around 1100 AD, making it larger at that time than many European

cities like London.

Life for the indigenous peoples of North America continued in much the same way

for thousands of years, until one of the most pivotal and seismic events in world

history occurred at the end of the 15th century.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus, who was sailing under the flag of Spain, made

landfall in the Caribbean after crossing the Atlantic in search of a new western

trade route to Asia.

Upon realizing that he had inadvertently come across an entirely unknown

continent, he claimed the lands in the name of Spain and set in motion a series

of events that would lead to the wider European discovery and colonization of

the Americas.

Within a decade, Waves of Spanish conquistadors had established themselves

across the Caribbean islands and had begun pushing outward in every

direction. The first European to set foot on what is now the United States

did so in 1513, when Juan Ponce de Leon sailed north from Puerto Rico to reach

the coast of Florida before wading ashore to claim the land for the Spanish

crown.

Further exploratory expeditions followed after the Spanish had conquered what is

now Mexico and Central America in 1539.

Hernando de Soto led an expedition to Florida, which then marched northward

and westward over the following four years across what is now Georgia, the

Carolinas, Tennessee, and Alabama.

He became the first European to cross the Mississippi River, pushing as far

west as present-day Arkansas, before he turned back and died on the banks of the

Mississippi in 1542.

At the same time, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado launched an overland expedition

from Mexico.

exploring much of what is now Arizona, New Mexico, and even as far as Kansas.

Spain would go on to establish the first permanent European settlement on the

continental United States at St. Augustine in Florida, which was founded

in 1565, and with it, planted the Spanish language deep into American

soil, making it the oldest European language ever spoken on the continent.

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The remaining years of the 16th century, however, saw Spain's colonization

efforts focus predominantly on the resource-rich areas of Mexico and Peru,

leaving much of the sprawling North American landmass open to being claimed

by other European powers.

French explorers had begun to explore parts of Florida and South Carolina in

the 1560s, resulting in two short-lived fortifications being constructed there.

But, as they had already reached and charted the St. Lawrence River in what

is now Canada during the mid-1530s, they focused on establishing themselves there

instead. It therefore fell to the English to lay the foundations of

colonial empire along the eastern seaboard, which over the course of

history would transform and evolve into what is now the United States.

Their first attempt at establishing a colony in the Americas came with the

settlement on Roanoke Island, off the coast of present-day North Carolina, in

the year 1585.

It would, however, prove to be a disaster, as the settlement failed

repeatedly despite being resupplied, and the colonists themselves mysteriously

vanished without explanation by 1590, leaving behind only the word Cloatoan

carved onto the settlement's wooden palisade.

Efforts only resumed in the 17th century, when two more English colonies

were founded in 1607.

The Popham Colony, in what is now Maine, quickly failed within a year, and the

other, established at Jamestown in Virginia, very nearly repeated the same

disastrous fate.

Disease and starvation killed many of the early colonists of Jamestown, and

the settlement only survived in part due to the leadership of men like Captain

John Smith, who negotiated and traded with the local Powhatan Confederacy for

food. Their relations were often tense and sometimes violent.

What ultimately saved Jamestown, however, was the tobacco plant.

In 1612, the colonist John Rolfe planted a milder strain of tobacco sourced from

the Caribbean, which proved enormously popular with English consumers.

Within a decade, the Virginia colonists were shipping tens of thousands of

pounds of it back to England every year, generating profits that attracted new

investment, new settlers, and the overall expansion of the colony.

The resulting demand for labour to work the tobacco crops produced what would

become the defining original sin of the American nation.

For in August 1619, a vessel named the White Lion sailed into the Virginia

colony and sold the first documented enslaved Africans into servitude in

English North America, laying the foundations for an institution which

would shape the future nation and persist for more than 200 years.

Meanwhile, over 1,000 miles to the north, a very different kind of English

colony was taking root.

In November 1620, a group of religious separatists, known as the Pilgrims, made

landfall on the Massachusetts coast aboard their ship, the Mayflower.

They too quickly faced the threat of starvation, but were saved by the chance

encounter with a native named Samoset, who as it happened spoke some English.

He returned a few days later with another native man named Tisquantum,

otherwise known as Squanto.

who spoke even better English as a result of previously being kidnapped and

taken to Europe.

He taught the colonists how to cultivate corn, catch fish, and navigate the

unfamiliar landscape, before negotiating a formal alliance between them and the

local Wampanoag confederation, which would endure for 50 years.

In the autumn of 1621, the Plymouth colonists celebrated their first

successful harvest alongside the local Wampanoag people which thereafter formed

the basis of the Thanksgiving Day celebration.

Over the following decades of the 17th century, the English colonial presence

along the Atlantic seaboard expanded with remarkable speed.

In 1630, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established, and the settlement of

Boston was founded, which would grow into the most populous and prosperous

town in English North America within a generation.

English settlements in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maryland soon

followed, and formed around an altogether different European nation's

colony taking hold in the region.

The Dutch had already established a settlement at Albany on the Hudson River

in 1614, and their territorial claim quickly expanded over the following

years, especially with the founding of New Amsterdam in 1624, which served

as the capital of the wider colony of New Netherland.

Sweden had also joined in on these colonial endeavors in the New World,

briefly establishing settlements along the lower reaches of the Delaware River

in 1638, before being conquered by the Dutch in 1655.

New Netherland was in turn conquered by the English in 1664, who added it to

their list of possessions along the eastern seaboard, which, by the latter

decades of the 17th century, had grown to include the Carolinas, New Hampshire,

and Pennsylvania.

the latter of which was chartered in sixteen eighty one by the quaker william

penn by the dawn of the eighteenth century the land that would become the

united states was effectively divided between three competing european powers

the english or by now british colonies following the acts of union in seventeen

o seven clung to the shores of the atlantic ocean in the east to the south

the spanish exerted control from florida and as far as texas and new mexico and

to the north and west the French had expanded their original territorial

claims in Canada to cover a vast area extending into the Great Lakes and down

the Mississippi River Basin towards the Gulf of Mexico.

However, within a few decades, the number of British colonies had grown to

13 after the province of Carolina was divided into North and South in 1712,

and Georgia was founded in 1733.

With a combined population of over 1 million people by the year 1750, the

American colonies had continued to attract a growing number of settlers

from across Europe, constituting not only English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh,

but also Germans, Poles, Dutch and Swedes, as well as an ever-increasing

number of African slaves.

So much so that many areas within the 13 colonies were soon becoming overcrowded

and, as a result, some settlers began to push further westwards in search of new

lands to settle and farm.

particularly in the fertile Ohio River Valley.

However, parts of this region had already been claimed by the neighboring

colony of New France, but as there was no clearly defined boundary of where one

territory ended and another began, tensions and disputes over land were

sure to follow.

In May 1754, a young Virginia militia officer named George Washington led a

small British colonial force into the Ohio Valley to assert their claims over

the disputed area and chase off any interloping French presence.

The resulting Battle of Jumonville Glen saw Washington's men ambush and kill a

number of French-Canadian troops, but this quickly triggered a colonial

conflict being fought across British and French North America.

Known to history as the French and Indian War, this rapidly escalated into

a wider global conflict amongst the great European powers of the age and

their respective overseas colonies.

Most of the fighting in North America initially focused on the disputed border

region between the 13 colonies and New France. But as the war progressed, the

British mounted a successful military campaign into French Canada and

effectively seized the entire territory.

extinguishing France's colonial presence on the continent by the war's end in

1763.

However, the defense of the 13 colonies had left the British crown with an

enormous war debt, and so devised a solution for the American colonies to

financially contribute to their own defense through taxation, a seemingly

plausible and reasonable idea to those in London, but one which was received

with constitutional outrage by those in Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and Boston.

Over the following decade, a series of deeply unpopular taxes were levied on

the 13 colonies, which they were unable to democratically resist, owing to no

American colonists being represented in the British Parliament.

The resulting calls of no taxation without representation were accompanied

by riots, boycotts, and political violence, particularly in the colony of

Massachusetts, which prompted the British to send troops to Boston in 1768

to maintain law and order.

Their presence, however, only heightened tensions further.

In March 1770, an incident occurred in which a group of soldiers fired their

muskets into a crowd, killing five men in what became known as the Boston

Massacre. Then, in December 1773, three ships loaded with British tea inside

Boston Harbor had their cargoes dumped into the water by a group of colonists

dressed as Native Americans.

In the following year of 1774, The British closed Boston's port and

drastically curtailed Massachusetts' right to self-government. But rather

than isolating the colony as intended, the other American colonies rallied to

its support.

That September, delegates from 12 of the 13 colonies gathered at Carpenter's Hall

in Philadelphia for the first Continental Congress, where they agreed

to a comprehensive boycott of British goods.

and sent a petition to King George III demanding the repeal of the so-called

Intolerable Acts.

When the King dismissed the petition and declared Massachusetts to be in a state

of rebellion, many American colonists realized that an armed revolution in the

name of independence was now the only way forward.

On the morning of 19th April 1775, 700 British regulars left Boston to

seize a cache of weapons that revolutionary forces had purportedly

stockpiled in the town of Concord, Massachusetts.

However, whilst marching through the village of Lexington, their path was

blocked by a line of armed colonial militia.

The resulting standoff was only broken when somebody fired first.

The proverbial shot heard round the world marked the opening of the American

War of Independence.

Within weeks, American Revolutionary Forces known as Patriots, had converged

on Boston and began besieging the British garrison within the city.

At the same time, the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and in June

appointed George Washington, the same who had commanded the colonial forces in

the preceding French and Indian War, as commander-in-chief of the newly

constituted Continental Army.

The first year of the war and into 1776 saw the British ultimately evacuate

Boston and re-established their base of operations in New York City, whilst the

American Revolutionary Forces gained hard-fought experience as they

transitioned from a poorly trained and ill-equipped militia into a professional

fighting force.

The Continental Congress met again in the summer of that year, with notable

figures such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin drafting

out the foundational document which would birth an entirely new nation.

On the 4th of July 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed by the

delegates of the 13 colonies, marking the official beginning of the United

States of America.

As the Revolutionary War continued to gain pace, a series of brilliantly

executed military maneuvers resulted in the Continental Army gaining the upper

hand over the British, most notably the victory at Saratoga in upstate New York

in 1777.

This prompted the French, who had secretly been channeling money and

supplies to the Americans for over a year, to formally enter the war as an

ally in February 1778, transforming what had been a colonial rebellion into a

global conflict, which Britain was far less equipped to win.

By late 1781, the British forces were concentrated in Yorktown, Virginia, and

so Washington and the French General Rochambeau secretly marched their

combined force south to meet them.

while the French fleet, under Admiral de Grasse, won a decisive naval battle at

the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, cutting the British off by sea.

Being effectively surrounded on all sides and made to endure a three-week

siege, the British were compelled to surrender on the 19th of October, 1781,

and although the war would officially drag on diplomatically for two more

years, the fighting was now effectively over.

The Treaty of Paris, signed in September 1783, formally recognized the

independence of the United States of America and granted the new nation

sovereignty over all territory east of the Mississippi River, south of the

Great Lakes, and north of Spanish Florida.

The remaining years of the 18th century saw some of the nascent republic's most

influential documents, institutions, and events occur, with the Constitution

being ratified in 1788 and George Washington being unanimously elected as

president in the following year.

with the new federal government assembling first in New York City,

before moving to Philadelphia and then, in 1800, to the new purpose-built

capital of Washington.

With the dawn of the 19th century, the United States stood as a fragile,

contested, and rapidly expanding entity.

It had largely inherited the territorial domains of the original 13 colonies,

stretching as far as the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, but settler

demand to push even further westwards had already begun to manifest.

When Thomas Jefferson became president, he successfully orchestrated the

purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, thereby expanding the

borders of the country westward to the Rocky Mountains.

To gain an understanding of what lay beyond this vast and mostly unexplored

territory, Jefferson dispatched an expedition headed by Meriwether Lewis

and William Clark to explore and map the region.

In May 1804, they set off from St. Louis and travelled overland, crossing the

Rockies, before descending the Columbia River to reach the Pacific Ocean in

November 1805.

Their journey mapped the outlines of a continent and fuelled the aspirations of

a nation that dreamed of one day stretching from coast to coast.

Much of the continent, nevertheless, remained in the hands of either Spain,

who had expanded its imperial domain throughout the 18th century as far as

California, and parts of Colorado in the west, and retained control of Florida

before ceding it to the US in 1821.

But it was the British to the north, who still held control over Canada, who

would prove to be a thorn in the side of expanding American interests.

Although relations between the two countries had been repaired following

the Revolutionary War, old tensions still remained, and new grievances

emerged when the United States began supporting Napoleonic France.

whom Britain was at war with throughout the early 1800s. By 1812, accumulated

grievances over British interference with American shipping and the

impressment of American sailors into the Royal Navy sparked a new conflict

between the United States and its old colonial master.

The War of 1812 lasted for the better part of two years and proved largely

inconclusive. as both sides launched unsuccessful invasions into each other's

territories across the Canadian border.

Although the British were successful in attacking Washington and burning the

White House to the ground, the Americans, under the leadership of

future President Andrew Jackson, decisively defeated the British at the

Battle of New Orleans in early 1815, even though a peace treaty had been

signed, but news of it had not yet reached them.

With the war over, the united states found itself further emboldened in its

right to exist as a nation and began a process of westward expansion to

manifest its destiny of spanning the entire continent new states were quickly

formed and admitted into the union over the course of the early 19th century

with ohio indiana illinois missouri alabama and mississippi witnessing

pioneers pour westward across the appalachian mountains to settle the new

land for themselves however These lands were already occupied by countless

Native American tribes, whose homeland this had been for tens of thousands of

years.

Under President Andrew Jackson, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was

introduced, which authorized the federal government to negotiate treaties with

the Native tribes, most of which were done coercively and fraudulently, which

traded their tribal homelands east of the Mississippi for equivalent territory

to the west.

Within a decade, the Cherokee Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole had been

forcibly expelled from their ancestral lands and force-marched to designated

Indian territory in present-day Oklahoma, with thousands dying from

disease, exposure, and starvation along the way.

The land which they left behind became the center of the cotton-growing region

of the Deep South, which by the 1830s and 1840s had become the engine of the

entire American economy.

The workforce which underpinned all of this was almost exclusively provided by

slave labor, sourced from imported Africans and their descendants, which

amounted to over 2 million people by the year 1830.

Although slavery had been abolished in virtually all of the northern states by

this point, the institution of slavery remained integral amongst the cotton

-producing southern states and expanded into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana,

Missouri, as well as Texas, which had declared its independence from Mexico in

1836.

Although it was not yet part of the United States, American settlers had

begun emigrating there back in the early 1820s, but within a decade had found

that the Mexican government had placed numerous restrictions on their personal

liberties and outlawed slavery.

What followed was the Texan Revolution, with famous battles being fought like

that at the Alamo and San Jacinto.

With independence secured, the small Texan Republic began negotiations with

the United States to be annexed as the 28th State of the Union, which it

finally did over a decade later in 1845, but the resulting border disputes in

turn triggered the outbreak of the Mexican-American War.

Over the following years of 1846 and 1847, the U.S. Army invaded Mexico on

several occasions and ultimately captured the capital of Mexico City.

to win the war decisively.

The resulting Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in February 1848,

transferred over half a million square miles of Mexican territory to the United

States, which thereafter extended the American frontier all the way to the

Pacific Ocean.

This was in addition to the earlier peaceful acquisition of the Oregon

Territory from Britain back in 1846.

However, just as the Mexican-American War was drawing to a close in January

1848, gold was discovered in the foothills of the sierra nevada mountains

the resulting california gold rush saw the opening up of the west over the

subsequent years as more than three hundred thousand settlers flocked to the

territory traveling along the wagon trails that stretched across the

continent san francisco was transformed from a village of a few hundred people

into a boom town of thirty thousand within just a few years and by eighteen

fifty california was eligible for statehood

By the mid-19th century, the number of states within the Union had grown to 31,

and although they were united under a federal government, there was one issue

alone that was causing division amongst them.

Slavery. Every new territory acquired and state admitted since the Louisiana

Purchase had chosen either to be for or against the permission of slavery within

its own borders.

This had largely been determined along a north-south divide, with the more

affluent and industrial northern states choosing to be free, whereas the poorer

southern states at the center of the slave-produced plantation economy argued

in favor of it.

There were some states, however, that were effectively caught in the middle

between these competing views, with the territory of Kansas in particular

witnessing a wave of politically motivated violence between pro- and anti

-slavery mobs throughout the latter half of the 1850s.

which became a tragic prelude of the nationwide events to come.

In 1854, the Republican Party was founded, principally upon a mandate for

preventing the expansion of slavery into the new territories in the West.

It was this position that carried Abraham Lincoln to win the presidential

election in 1860, a result which was so alarming to the slaveholding South that

it triggered the unravelling of the Union.

South Carolina was the first state to secede on the 20th of December 1860, and

within a few months had been joined by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia,

Louisiana, and Texas to form the Confederate States of America, with

Jefferson Davis serving as its president.

The Confederates quickly seized federal forts and arsenals across the South,

including Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

But the resulting battle between Union and Confederate troops on the 12th of

April 1861 marked the outbreak of the American Civil War.

Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina followed their southern

neighbors in seceding to join the Confederacy, and over the following four

years fought the Union in some of the most brutal and costly battles ever seen

in American history.

Generals such as Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union

faced off against Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson of the Confederacy,

are the likes of Antietam and Gettysburg, which saw old 18th century

tactics combine with newly industrialized forms of warfare to

produce casualties of unimaginable scale.

On the 1st of January 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation

Proclamation, which declared all enslaved people in the Confederate

States to be free, making the ending of slavery as an institution an explicit

war aim.

By April 1865, most of the Confederate States had either been occupied or

surrounded by Union forces.

With no prospect of escape or relief, Robert E. Lee met with Ulysses S. Grant

at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia on the 9th of April and formally

surrendered, thereby marking the end of the Civil War that had claimed over 600

,000 Americans' lives.

The victory celebrations, however, were short-lived.

For just five days later, on the evening of the 14th of April, Abraham Lincoln

was shot by the Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth while watching a

theater performance and died the following morning, becoming the first

American president to be assassinated.

Despite the loss of Lincoln, the country began a process of reconstructing and

reintegrating the war-ravaged southern states, notably by passing the 13th

Amendment in December 1865.

which formally abolished slavery throughout the United States.

Further amendments followed, which enfranchised African Americans with the

right to vote and hold public office, with Hiram R. Revels becoming the first

black senator to sit in the U.S. Congress.

But there nevertheless remained a deep racial bias in the southern states in

the post-war years.

The Ku Klux Klan emerged in 1865, headed by former Confederate General Nathan

Bedford Forrest.

to orchestrate a campaign of terror against African Americans and their

white allies across the South, and, after the withdrawal of federal troops

from former confederate areas in 1876,

the southern states moved rapidly to construct a system of racial segregation

through new laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright violence that became

known as the Jim Crow laws, which would remain enforced in the South for the

better part of a century.

Meanwhile, Far to the northwest of the continent, the United States was in the

process of acquiring what would become its largest state.

During the previous century, the territory of Alaska had not been

colonized by Britain, France, or Spain, but Russia.

However, its harsh environment and remote location had attracted few

settlers, and by the 1860s, it was viewed as more of a liability than an

asset to the Russian Empire.

Knowing this, the US Secretary of State, William Seward entered into negotiations

with the Russians and purchased the entirety of Alaska in 1867 for $7.2

million, approximately $150 million in today's money.

A spirit of progress gripped the United States in the years following the Civil

War, as it began industrializing and developing at a remarkable speed.

Much of this was owed to the completion of the first transcontinental railroad

in May 1869, which connected the Atlantic and Pacific coasts by rail,

collapsing journey times that would have taken months to just a few days.

New towns sprouted along the rail lines almost overnight, allowing for more new

settlers, known as homesteaders, from the eastern states and Europe to flood

onto the Great Plains, transforming it into sprawling acres of productive

farmland. But the area to the west of the Mississippi was still home to a

myriad of Native American tribes who viewed the ever-increasing number of

settlers encroaching onto their ancestral land as a direct threat to

their ancient way of life.

Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, the rapid expansion, settlement

and often lawless development of the American frontier made conflict between

natives and settlers an inevitability.

The United States Army conducted a decades-long campaign to pacify and

forcibly remove the tribes of the Great Plains and Southwest, with hundreds of

engagements being fought across the region.

Tribes like the Apache, led by Geronimo, and the Sioux, led by Sitting Bull,

offered fierce resistance, with the latter fighting in the most notable

battle of the period, at the Little Bighorn in June 1876, in which Lakota

and Cheyenne warriors annihilated the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment under

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer.

It would take another 20 years for the United States to bring the West under

full federal control, but some skirmishes with natives continued well

into the early 20th century.

The American frontier was also witnessing the emergence of another

iconic figure in its history during this time, the cowboy.

As cattle became the staple livestock of the Great Plains, cowboys were employed

to drive the cattle from the grazing fields to new market towns like Dodge

City, Cheyenne and Amarillo.

The sporadic and isolated nature of these new boom towns made law and order

difficult to enforce, and consequently, the region as a whole suffered greatly

at the hands of outlaw gangs and bandits, some of the most infamous being

the James Younger gang, Billy the Kid, as well as Butch Cassidy and the

Sundance Kid, who engaged in everything from duelling and cattle rustling to

robbing stagecoaches, banks and trains.

By the dawn of the 20th century, The wild nature of the American frontier had

largely been tamed, with the number of states in the Union growing to 47 and

the only unincorporated territories remaining being Oklahoma, New Mexico,

Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii, which had recently been annexed as part of a

military coup in 1898.

The US also gained control over the Philippines, Puerto Rico and occupied

Cuba that same year, following their victory in the Spanish-American War.

The country as a whole was transforming from a predominantly agricultural

society into the world's largest industrial economy, driven principally

by the exploitation of its abundant natural resources.

Coal, iron ore, oil, copper, silver and gold were extracted out of the ground to

fuel the fires of industry and generate unprecedented wealth for business

tycoons like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan.

America's cities also began to grow at an astonishing rate during this time.

Chicago, St. Louis, and above all New York City were transformed by a frenzied

building of skyscrapers, but they were also undergoing a broader societal

change as millions of new immigrants, mostly from southern and eastern Europe,

arrived on their streets to start new lives.

The efforts which the nation had exerted upon itself to become a major economic

and imperial power within such a short space of time resulted in a

protectionist attitude from global instability, especially in the lead-up

to the First World War.

Consequently, when war did break out in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson initially

declared neutrality, but Germany's targeting of merchant ships travelling

between the US and Britain, such as RMS Lusitania, which was sunk in 1915 with

the loss of 1,198 people, including 128 Americans, created mounting public

pressure for America to enter the war.

The deciding factor came in 1917 when the so-called Zimmermann Telegram

revealed that Germany was planning to offer Mexico a military alliance with

the prospect of recovering Texas, New Mexico and Arizona from the United

States.

War was declared in April of that year, and American forces soon began deploying

on the Western Front.

The U.S. Army provided the much-needed manpower for the beleaguered Allies in

repelling the German offensives of 1918, albeit at a cost of over 116,000

American casualties.

When the war came to an end that November, President Wilson subsequently

traveled to Paris to deliver his 14 points as part of the peace conference,

and above all, called for a League of Nations to resolve future conflicts

without recourse to war.

Ironically, however, the US Senate refused to ratify American membership to

the League, fearing it would become entangled in future European affairs.

Over the following decades of the interwar years, the United States

returned to a policy of isolationism.

This first produced a period of tremendous domestic prosperity during

the 1920s.

Although much of this period was characterized by prohibition, which

created an enormous illicit market for alcohol that was headed by mafia crime

lords such as Al Capone, that supplied drink to millions of Americans who

refused to stop consuming it, beneath this, the legitimate economy was

booming.

Henry Ford's assembly line made mass-produced cars easily obtainable for

ordinary Americans, and entertainment in the form of radio, Hollywood movies and

jazz music created the nation's first popular culture movements.

However, as America's wealth ballooned, so did greed and speculation, which

would come to expose the entire financial system's structural

vulnerabilities.

The 19th of October 1929, a day known as Black Tuesday, saw a catastrophic

collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, which wiped out billions of dollars,

triggering bank failures across the country, and plunging the nation into

the worst economic downturn in its history.

The Great Depression that followed saw unemployment reach 25% by 1933, while

the agricultural sector was simultaneously devastated by a

catastrophic series of drought-driven storms that turned the southern Great

Plains into a dust bowl.

When Franklin Roosevelt won the presidential election by a landslide in

1932, he immediately launched the most ambitious program of government

intervention in American history, the New Deal, which saw some levels of

financial stability return and government-sponsored infrastructure

projects like New Roads and the Hoover Dam be built to provide the much-needed

jobs.

The economic recovery, however, was nevertheless slow, with the effect of

the Depression lasting throughout the 1930s and only coming to an end

following the outbreak of the Second World War.

Although the conflict had begun in 1939, American isolationism had thus far

prevented it from being drawn in.

But that all changed on the 7th of December 1941, as the Empire of Japan

conducted a pre-emptive strike against the American Navy's Pacific Fleet,

stationed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

The United States declared war the next day and entered the conflict on the side

of the Allies, sending its forces to fight against the Japanese in the

Pacific. as well as Germany and Italy in Europe.

The struggling American economy was revitalized into the greatest war

machine in human history, producing aircraft, tanks, ships, weapons, and

ammunition not only for American forces, but also supplying the militaries of

Britain, the Soviet Union, and a dozen other allies.

Pivotal engagements like the D-Day landings in France and the taking of Iwo

Jima in the Pacific turned the tide of the war in Americans' favor.

meaning that by the spring of 1945, Nazi Germany had effectively been defeated

and Japanese forces had been pushed back all the way to Japan itself.

The war had already become the deadliest in human history, with US forces alone

having sustained over one million casualties, either killed or wounded.

However, it was known that this number would only rise further if a planned

ground invasion of Japan was to go ahead.

So instead, President Harry Truman authorized the deployment of a secret

weapon to end the war once and for all.

Known under the codename of the Manhattan Project, the United States had

undertaken a program of research and development of nuclear weapons, and

after successfully testing in the New Mexico desert, on the 6th of August

1945, the US dropped a uranium bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima,

killing between 70,000 and 80,000 people.

instantly. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, which

forced Japan to surrender and bring the Second World War to an end at last.

The United States that emerged from the conflict was a fundamentally different

country from the one which had entered it.

Alongside the Soviet Union, it now stood as one of the world's two superpowers,

which despite having fought on the same side against Nazi Germany, were now

opposed to one another.

through different ideologies throughout the remaining years of the 20th century

the cold war between the democratic west headed by the united states and

communist east headed by the ussr saw the world divided into two competing

spheres of influence the united states poured billions of dollars into europe

in the form of the marshall plan in 1948 in a bid to halt and contain any further

spread of communism on the continent this was furthered in the following year

when it led the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO,

which formed a military alliance of Western powers in anticipation of a

future nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.

Although this never materialized, the United States did engage in numerous

clandestine operations around the world to stop the spread of communism, but

also fought in open conflicts, like that in Korea during the 1950s, and most

notably of all in Vietnam.

during the 1960s and 1970s.

Perhaps more than anything else, however, the Cold War between East and

West was symbolically fought in the Space Race, which although the Soviets

were the first to put a man in space, the Americans were able to go one step

further with the Apollo 11 mission of 1969 and became the first to put a man

on the moon.

Meanwhile, back home, The United States was undergoing a remarkable social

change during this time.

Despite the American Civil War ending a century ago, lives for most black

Americans had changed little, and were still defined by rigid racial

segregation and discrimination, especially in the South.

Matters finally began to change when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat

to a white passenger on a bus in Alabama in 1955, which ignited the civil rights

movement. Led by Martin Luther King Jr., it systematically exposed the violent

and discriminatory nature of segregation, forcing the Kennedy

administration to confront it as a defining moral issue.

Although Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963, it fell to

President Lyndon Johnson to drive the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through

Congress, which thereafter made it illegal to discriminate on grounds of

race, color, religion, sex.

or national origin.

The Voting Rights Act followed in the next year of 1965, allowing black

Americans to vote freely and elect their own black officials to local and state

office, although much of the progress achieved was undone by the assassination

of Martin Luther King himself in Memphis in April 1968.

The remaining decades of the 20th century saw the United States evolve

into the nation that it is today.

Although it was marked by some embarrassing events, such as the

resignation of President Nixon in relation to the Watergate scandal in

1974, and humiliating withdrawal of troops at the end of the Vietnam War

with the fall of Saigon in 1975.

By the turn of the 1980s, relations with the Soviet Union had begun to thaw,

before eventually leading to the collapse of communism within the USSR

entirely, following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

leaving the United States as the undisputed superpower on the world

stage.

Throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium, America exerted a

triumphalist confidence, embodied through liberal democracy and free

market capitalism.

But there were still some in the world that opposed these views and considered

American influence in their countries as nothing less than modern imperialism

that must be stopped.

The attacks on September 11th horrified the nation.

and the wider world, prompting President George W. Bush to launch the so-called

War on Terror, which resulted in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which

would define American foreign policy for the next two decades.

Today, the United States stands as a nation of some 340 million people, the

third largest in the world by population, occupying a landmass that

stretches from the sub-Arctic tundra of Alaska to the tropical reefs of Hawaii,

from the Atlantic beaches of Maine to the Pacific cliffs of California.

Through migration, colonization, settlement, conflict, revolution,

fracture and expansion, the United States has been irreversibly shaped by

every event in its history to become the pre-eminent world superpower of the

modern day.

And central to this has been the idea that was laid down 250 years ago.

that anyone from anywhere can arrive on its shores cast off the tyranny or

poverty they left behind and claim for themselves life liberty and the pursuit

of happiness as an american