The history of the United States

The land that became the United States was home to hundreds of Native nations for at least 15,000 years before Europeans arrived, from the mound-building cities of the Mississippi valley to the pueblos of the Southwest. Spain, France, the Netherlands and England planted colonies from the sixteenth century, and the thirteen British colonies on the Atlantic coast declared independence in 1776, creating a republic founded on ideals of liberty while holding hundreds of thousands of people in slavery. Over the next century the country expanded across the continent at the expense of Native peoples and Mexico, and fought a civil war that ended slavery. By the twentieth century it was the world's largest economy, and after the Second World War it became a superpower whose rivalry with the Soviet Union shaped the globe, while at home the civil rights movement challenged the racial order that had survived emancipation.

The first people reached the Americas from northeast Asia, crossing Beringia, the land bridge exposed between Siberia and Alaska during the last Ice Age, or travelling down the Pacific coast by boat. When this happened is still debated: most researchers accept dates of at least 15,000 years ago, and fossilised footprints at White Sands in New Mexico have been dated by some scientists to more than 20,000 years ago. Around 13,000 years ago the Clovis culture, named after a site in New Mexico, spread its distinctive fluted spear points across much of the continent.

Over thousands of years the peoples of North America adapted to every environment, from Arctic coasts to deserts and forests. In the eastern woodlands, people began building large earthworks remarkably early: Poverty Point in Louisiana, a set of huge concentric ridges, was raised around 1700 to 1100 BCE by people who lived mainly by hunting, fishing and gathering. Later the Adena and Hopewell cultures of the Ohio valley built burial mounds and geometric enclosures and traded goods across much of the continent. Maize, first domesticated in Mexico, reached the region and slowly became a staple alongside native crops such as squash and sunflower.

From about 800 CE the Mississippian culture flourished along the Mississippi and its tributaries. Its people grew maize, beans and squash in river bottoms and lived in towns organised around plazas and flat-topped earthen mounds that carried temples and the houses of chiefs. The greatest of these was Cahokia, near modern St Louis, which at its height around 1050 to 1200 may have had 10,000 to 20,000 inhabitants. Its central earthwork, Monks Mound, is the largest prehistoric earthen structure north of Mexico. Cahokia declined after 1200, but Mississippian chiefdoms survived in the Southeast into the sixteenth century.

In the arid Southwest, the Ancestral Puebloans built multi-storey stone and adobe villages. Chaco Canyon in New Mexico became the centre of a network of great houses and roads between the ninth and twelfth centuries; Pueblo Bonito alone had around 800 rooms. Later, at Mesa Verde in Colorado, communities built dwellings into cliff alcoves. A long drought in the late thirteenth century drove migrations south and east, to the Rio Grande and Hopi and Zuni lands, where Pueblo peoples still live.

By the time Europeans arrived, the land held hundreds of distinct nations speaking languages from many unrelated families. Estimates of the pre-contact population of the territory of the modern United States vary enormously, from about half a million to around ten million. In the Northeast, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca formed the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy, governed by a council under the Great Law of Peace; its founding date is uncertain, with estimates ranging from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. The Southeast was home to the Cherokee, Muscogee, Choctaw and Chickasaw, the Plains to farming villages along the rivers, and the Pacific Northwest to fishing peoples who built plank houses and carved monumental poles. Alaska's Iñupiat, Yupik, Unangan and Tlingit peoples lived from the sea, and in the middle of the Pacific, Polynesian voyagers using long-distance navigation settled the Hawaiian Islands, probably around 1000 to 1200 CE.

Norse voyagers led by Leif Erikson reached Newfoundland around 1000, but lasting contact began after Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492. The Columbian exchange that followed carried horses, cattle, wheat and, above all, diseases such as smallpox and measles to the Americas. Native peoples had no immunity, and epidemics often ran ahead of the Europeans themselves, emptying whole communities.

The Spanish Empire came first. Juan Ponce de León landed in Florida in 1513, and the expeditions of Hernando de Soto across the Southeast (1539 to 1542) and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado through the Southwest and Plains (1540 to 1542) searched for gold, fought and enslaved Native people, and spread disease. Spain founded St Augustine in 1565 and, from 1598, colonised New Mexico as part of New Spain, with Santa Fe as its capital from about 1610. Franciscan missions and forced labour provoked the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, led by Popé, which drove the Spanish out for twelve years. Spain later built missions and presidios in Texas, where San Antonio was founded in 1718, and from 1769 in California. Meanwhile horses spread from Spanish settlements to the Plains, transforming the lives of peoples such as the Lakota, Cheyenne and Comanche, who built a powerful mounted society across the southern Plains.

France claimed the Mississippi basin after René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle travelled down the river in 1682, naming it Louisiana, and founded New Orleans in 1718. The Dutch Republic established New Netherland on the Hudson River in the 1620s, with New Amsterdam on Manhattan, which the English seized in 1664 and renamed New York.

The Kingdom of England founded Jamestown in Virginia in 1607. It nearly collapsed from hunger and war with the Powhatan Confederacy, but survived by exporting tobacco. In 1619 Virginia held its first elected assembly, and in the same year the first recorded enslaved Africans arrived. In New England, Puritan religious dissenters founded Plymouth in 1620 and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, centred on Boston, in 1630. Other colonies followed, among them Maryland, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, founded by the Quaker William Penn in 1681, and finally Georgia in 1732, making thirteen colonies along the Atlantic.

The colonies differed sharply. New England was a land of small farms, towns and Congregational churches; the middle colonies were religiously and ethnically mixed; and the South built plantation economies of tobacco, rice and indigo worked increasingly by enslaved Africans. Through the Atlantic slave trade, around 400,000 Africans were carried directly to the territory of the future United States, and slavery was legal in every colony. Colonial expansion meant constant conflict with Native nations. King Philip's War of 1675 to 1676, led by the Wampanoag leader Metacom, was proportionally one of the deadliest wars in the country's history, and ended with many Native survivors sold into slavery.

The rivalry between Britain and France culminated in the French and Indian War of 1754 to 1763, part of the global Seven Years' War. Britain's victory removed France from North America: Canada and the lands east of the Mississippi went to Britain, and western Louisiana passed to Spain as Louisiana. The British Empire now faced a large war debt and a vast interior, and its Proclamation of 1763, which barred settlement west of the Appalachians, angered colonists who wanted Native land.

Britain's attempts to raise revenue from the colonies, beginning with the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765, met protests under the slogan "no taxation without representation". Colonists drew on English constitutional traditions and the ideas of the Enlightenment, especially John Locke's argument that government rests on the consent of the governed. Tensions rose through the Boston Massacre of 1770 and the Boston Tea Party of 1773, and fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. The Continental Congress appointed George Washington to command its army, and Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense made a popular case for breaking with the king.

On 2 July 1776 Congress voted for independence, and on 4 July it adopted the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, which proclaimed that all men are created equal. Its author, like many signers, enslaved people, a contradiction critics noted at the time. The American Revolution turned into a long war. The American victory at Saratoga in 1777 helped Benjamin Franklin secure an alliance with France in 1778, and a combined American and French force trapped the British army at Yorktown in 1781. In the Treaty of Paris of 1783, Britain recognised the independence of the United States, with a western border on the Mississippi. Around 60,000 Loyalists left, many for Canada, and most Native nations, many of which had sided with Britain, were left out of the peace.

The first national government under the Articles of Confederation was weak, with no power to tax. In 1787 delegates meeting in Philadelphia wrote a new Constitution, creating a federal system with a president, a two-chamber Congress and a Supreme Court. To win the support of slaveholding states it counted three-fifths of enslaved people for representation and protected the slave trade until 1808. It took effect in 1789 with Washington as the first president, and the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, followed in 1791. Rival parties soon formed around Alexander Hamilton, who wanted a strong central government, and Jefferson, who idealised a republic of small farmers. The capital moved to the new city of Washington in 1800.

As president, Jefferson bought Louisiana from France in 1803 for 15 million dollars, roughly doubling the country's size, and sent Lewis and Clark to cross the continent to the Pacific between 1804 and 1806. The War of 1812 against Britain ended in a draw, though British troops burned Washington in 1814. It destroyed the Native confederacy led by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, who was killed in 1813, and removed the last serious barrier to settlement of the Ohio valley. Spain ceded Florida in 1819, and the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 warned European powers against new colonisation in the Americas.

Eli Whitney's cotton gin of 1793 made short-staple cotton enormously profitable, and slavery, which the northern states gradually abolished, expanded across the Deep South. The number of enslaved people grew from about 700,000 in 1790 to nearly 4 million in 1860, and around a million were forcibly moved from the upper South to the cotton states through the domestic slave trade. Enslaved people resisted in many ways, from escape to the revolt led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. Abolitionists, including the formerly enslaved writer Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, who led people to freedom along the Underground Railroad, campaigned for emancipation.

Cotton land was taken from Native nations. Under President Andrew Jackson, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, and the Choctaw, Muscogee, Chickasaw, Seminole and Cherokee were forced to leave the Southeast for Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokee had adopted a written constitution and won a Supreme Court ruling in their favour, but in 1838 and 1839 soldiers and militia drove more than 16,000 of them west along what became known as the Trail of Tears. More than a thousand died on the journey and perhaps several thousand more from its consequences. The Seminole resisted in Florida in a series of wars lasting until 1858.

Many Americans came to believe in a "manifest destiny" to spread across the continent. Texas, where American settlers had rebelled against Mexico and won independence in 1836, was annexed in 1845. The Mexican–American War of 1846 to 1848 ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, under which Mexico gave up California and most of the Southwest; counting Texas, it lost about half its territory. The California Gold Rush of 1848 to 1849 drew hundreds of thousands of migrants to San Francisco and the goldfields, and California's Native population fell from perhaps 150,000 to around 30,000 within two decades through disease, starvation and deliberate killing, which many historians, and in 2019 California's governor, have described as genocide.

Each new territory raised the question of whether slavery would spread. The Compromise of 1850, the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which led to violence in "Bleeding Kansas", and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857, which denied that Black Americans could be citizens, deepened the split. When Abraham Lincoln of the new Republican Party, which opposed slavery's expansion, won the presidency in 1860, South Carolina seceded, followed by ten more southern states, which formed the Confederate States of America. Their leaders stated openly that they were defending slavery.

The American Civil War began when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861. Despite the North's far greater resources, the war dragged on through battles such as Antietam, Shiloh and Gettysburg in July 1863. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863 declared enslaved people in rebel territory free and opened the Union army to Black soldiers, nearly 200,000 of whom served. Under Ulysses S. Grant, Union armies wore the Confederacy down, and Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on 9 April 1865. Days later Lincoln was assassinated. Around 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers died, more than in any other American war.

During Reconstruction, the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery, the Fourteenth (1868) made all people born in the country citizens with equal protection of the laws, and the Fifteenth (1870) barred racial discrimination in voting. Formerly enslaved people founded churches and schools and Black men were elected to office, including to Congress. But white resistance, including terror by the Ku Klux Klan, eroded these gains, and after federal troops left the South in 1877, white Democrats restored their power. Over the following decades southern states imposed segregation under "Jim Crow" laws, which the Supreme Court upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, stripped most Black citizens of the vote, and tolerated thousands of lynchings.

After the war, the conquest of the West was completed. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered free land to settlers, and the first transcontinental railroad was finished in 1869. The army fought a long series of wars with the peoples of the Plains and the West, while commercial hunters slaughtered the bison herds on which many of them depended until almost none remained. The Lakota and their allies, led by figures such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, defeated George Custer's cavalry at the Little Bighorn in 1876, but were forced onto reservations. Massacres of Native civilians, at Sand Creek in Colorado in 1864 and at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in December 1890, where soldiers killed around 250 to 300 Lakota, bracketed the period. The Dawes Act of 1887 broke up reservation land into individual plots, and boarding schools sought to erase Native languages and cultures. Alaska was bought from the Russian Empire in 1867.

The Industrial Revolution transformed the country. Railways, steel, oil and electricity, the field of inventors such as Thomas Edison, made the United States the world's largest industrial economy by the 1890s. In this Gilded Age, industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller made vast fortunes while workers fought bitter strikes. Chicago grew from a small town to one of the world's largest cities. More than 20 million immigrants arrived between 1880 and 1920, mostly from southern and eastern Europe, though the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese labourers. The Progressive movement responded with reforms: a federal income tax and the direct election of senators in 1913, Prohibition of alcohol from 1920, and, after a long campaign, votes for women through the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

In the 1890s the United States became an overseas power. American-led businessmen, backed by US Marines, overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, and the islands, with Honolulu as their capital, were annexed in 1898. In the same year the Spanish–American War, fought over Cuba, gave the United States Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, while Cuba became nominally independent under American supervision. Filipino nationalists fought American rule in the Philippine–American War of 1899 to 1902, in which hundreds of thousands of Filipinos died, mostly civilians from war, famine and disease. President Theodore Roosevelt backed the separation of Panama from Colombia in 1903 to build the Panama Canal, which opened in 1914,.

The country stayed neutral at first in the First World War, but German submarine warfare led it to declare war in April 1917. Over two million American soldiers reached France, helping to tip the balance in 1918, and about 116,000 died. President Woodrow Wilson shaped the peace with his Fourteen Points and the League of Nations, but the Senate refused to join the League. In the 1920s the country turned inward, sharply limiting immigration in 1924, the same year all Native Americans born in the country were made citizens. During the Great Migration, millions of Black southerners moved to northern and western cities.

The stock market crash of October 1929 began the Great Depression. By 1933 about a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, thousands of banks had failed and drought turned the southern Plains into the Dust Bowl. Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected in 1932, launched the New Deal, a series of programmes that regulated banks, created public works jobs, protected union rights and, through the Social Security Act of 1935, established old-age pensions. It greatly expanded the role of the federal government.

In the Second World War the United States first supplied Britain and the Soviet Union while remaining neutral. On 7 December 1941 the Empire of Japan attacked the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and within days the country was at war with Japan and Nazi Germany. American industry became the "arsenal of democracy", and some 16 million Americans served in the forces. In 1942 about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens, were forcibly removed from the West Coast to incarceration camps. American forces fought across the Pacific and, under Dwight D. Eisenhower, led the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944. In August 1945 the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing well over 100,000 people, and Japan surrendered. Around 400,000 American service members died in the war. The country emerged as the world's leading power and hosted the founding of the United Nations in 1945.

Rivalry with the Soviet Union quickly became the Cold War. The United States committed itself to containing communism, funded European recovery through the Marshall Plan from 1948 and founded the NATO alliance in 1949. It fought the Korean War from 1950 to 1953 and built up a vast nuclear arsenal, while at home fear of communist subversion fuelled the McCarthy era. The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 started a space race, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 brought the two powers close to nuclear war before Soviet missiles were withdrawn. Alaska and Hawaii became the 49th and 50th states in 1959.

Black Americans led a mass movement against segregation. The Supreme Court ruled segregated schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and Rosa Parks's arrest in 1955 sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, which brought Martin Luther King Jr. to prominence. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963, his successor Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing segregation and discrimination, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King was assassinated in 1968. The 1965 Immigration Act ended national-origin quotas, and the movement inspired campaigns for the rights of women, Latinos, Native Americans and gay people.

The Vietnam War divided the country. American troop numbers in South Vietnam passed half a million by 1968, and the war provoked mass protests before American forces withdrew in 1973; Saigon fell to North Vietnam in 1975. About 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians died. In July 1969 the Apollo 11 mission put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. The Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon to resign in 1974, the only president to do so. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan cut taxes, expanded military spending and pressed the Soviet Union hard, before negotiating arms reductions with Mikhail Gorbachev. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower.

The United States led a coalition that expelled Iraq from Kuwait in 1991. On 11 September 2001, al-Qaeda hijackers flew airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people. The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, wars that lasted far longer than planned and cost hundreds of thousands of lives, mostly Afghan and Iraqi. The financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 caused the deepest recession since the 1930s. Barack Obama, elected in 2008, became the first African American president and signed the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

Politics grew increasingly polarised. Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 and lost to Joe Biden in 2020. Trump disputed the result with false claims of fraud, and on 6 January 2021 a crowd of his supporters stormed the Capitol as Congress counted the electoral votes. The COVID-19 pandemic killed more than a million Americans by 2022. In 2021 the last American troops left Afghanistan as the Taliban took power, and after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 the United States sent large amounts of military and economic aid.

Trump won the 2024 election and returned to office in January 2025, the second president, after Grover Cleveland, to serve non-consecutive terms. His administration imposed sweeping tariffs on trading partners, tightened immigration enforcement, cut the federal workforce and withdrew from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement. In June 2025 American aircraft struck Iranian nuclear sites, and a budget standoff caused a 43-day government shutdown, the longest on record, which ended in November 2025. On 3 January 2026 American forces captured Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, in Caracas and flew him to New York to face criminal charges. On 28 February 2026 the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran in which Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed; Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz caused a global fuel crisis before a peace deal was announced in June. On 4 July 2026 the country marked 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, with a population of around 340 million in 50 states.