Americanpageant
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THE AMERICAN PAGEANT PART O NE FOUNDING THE NEW NATION ᇻᇾᇻ c. 33,000 B.C.–A.D.1783 he European explorers their country as an independent T who followed Christopher nation. How did this epochal Columbus to North America in transformation come about? the sixteenth century had no How did the colonists overcome notion of founding a new nation. the conflicts that divided them, Neither did the first European unite against Britain, and declare settlers who peopled the thirteen themselves at great cost to be an English colonies on the eastern “Am e r ic a n ” p e o p le ? shores of the continent in the sev- They had much in common enteenth and eighteenth cen- to begin with. Most were English- turies. These original colonists speaking. Most came determined may have fled poverty or religious to create an agricultural society persecution in the Old World, but modeled on English customs. they continued to view them- Conditions in the New World selves as Europeans, and as sub- deepened their common bonds. jects of the English king. They Most learned to live lives unfet- regarded America as but the tered by the tyrannies of royal western rim of a transatlantic authority, official religion, and European world. social hierarchies that they had Yet life in the New World left behind. They grew to cherish made the colonists different from their European ideals that became synonymous with American cousins, and eventually, during the American Revo- life—reverence for individual liberty, self-govern- lution, the Americans came to embrace a vision of ment, religious tolerance, and economic opportu- 2 nity. They also commonly displayed a willingness to dragged in the colonists during the French and subjugate outsiders—first Indians, who were nearly Indian War from 1756 to 1763. That war in one sense annihilated through war and disease, and then strengthened ties with Britain, since colonial mili- Africans, who were brought in chains to serve as tias fought triumphantly alongside the British army slave labor, especially on the tobacco, rice, and against their mutual French and Indian enemies. indigo plantations of the southern colonies. But by driving the French from the North American But if the settlement experience gave people a continent, the British made themselves less indis- common stock of values, both good and bad, it also pensable to the American colonies. More important divided them. The thirteen colonies were quite dif- still, after 1763 a financially overstretched British ferent from one another. Puritans carved tight, government made the fateful choice of imposing pious, and relatively democratic communities of taxes on colonies that had been accustomed to small family farms out of rocky-soiled New England. answering mainly to their own colonial assemblies. Theirs was a homogeneous world in comparison to By the 1770s issues of taxation, self-rule, and trade most of the southern colonies, where large land- restrictions brought the crisis of imperial authority holders, mostly Anglicans, built plantations along to a head. Although as late as 1775 most people in the coast from which they lorded over a labor force the colonies clung to the hope of some kind of of black slaves and looked down upon the poor accommodation short of outright independence, white farmers who settled the backcountry. Differ- royal intransigence soon thrust the colonists into a ent still were the middle colonies stretching from war of independence that neither antagonist could New York to Delaware. There diversity reigned. Well- have anticipated just a few years before. to-do merchants put their stamp on New York City, Eight years of revolutionary war did more than as Quakers did on Philadelphia, while out in the anything in the colonial past to bring Americans countryside sprawling estates were interspersed together as a nation. Comradeship in arms and the with modest homesteads. Within individual struggle to shape a national government forced colonies, conflicts festered over economic interests, Americans to subdue their differences as best they ethnic rivalries, and religious practices. All those could. But the spirit of national unity was hardly clashes made it difficult for colonists to imagine that universal. One in five colonists sided with the they were a single people with a common destiny, British as “Loyalists,” and a generation would pass much less that they ought to break free from Britain. before the wounds of this first American “civil war” The American colonists in fact had little reason fully healed. Yet in the end, Americans won the Rev- to complain about Brit- olution, with no small ain. Each of the thir- measure of help from teen colonies enjoyed the French, because in a good deal of self- every colony people rule. Many colonists shared a firm belief profited from trade that they were fighting within the British for the “un alien able Em pire. But by the rights” of “life, liberty, 1760s, this stable and the pursuit of arrangement began to happiness,” in the crumble, a victim of words of Thomas Jef- the imperial rivalry ferson’s m agn ificen t between France and Declaration of Inde- Britain. Their struggle pendence. Almost two for suprem acy in hundred years of liv- North America began ing a new life had pre- in the late seventeenth pared Americans to century and finally foun d a n ew n ation . 3 1 New World Beginnings ᇻᇾᇻ 33,000 B.C.–A.D.1769 I have come to believe that this is a mighty continent which was hitherto unknown. Your Highnesses have an Other World here. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, 1498 everal billion years ago, that whirling speck of East, developing a primitive culture, gradually Sdust known as the earth, fifth in size among the emerged from the haze of the past. planets, came into being. Five hundred years ago—only a few seconds in About six thousand years ago—only a minute the past, figuratively speaking—European explorers ago in geological time—recorded history of the stumbled on the American continents. This dra- Western world began. Certain peoples of the Middle matic accident forever altered the future of both 4000 B.C. 4–8 B.C. 1607 1976 RECORDED JESUS VIRGINIA BICEN- HISTORY BORN FOUNDED TENNIAL BEGINS 1492 1607 1776 1945 1991 2000 115 years 169 years 169 years 46 years 9 years COLUMBUS' S VIRGINIA INDEPENDENCE WORLD WAR I I COLD NEW DISCOVERY FOUNDED DECLARED ENDS WAR MILLENNIUM ENDS BEGINS 4 The Effects of the Great Ice Age 5 the Old World and the New, and of Africa and Asia ing Pacific, where the Coast Ranges rose steeply as well. from the sea. Nature laid a chill hand over much of this ter- rain in the Great Ice Age, beginning about 2 million The Shaping of North America years ago. Two-mile-thick ice sheets crept from the polar regions to blanket parts of Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In North America the great glaciers Planet earth took on its present form slowly. Some carpeted most of present-day Canada and the 225 million years ago, a single supercontinent con- United States as far southward as a line stretching tained all the world’s dry land. Then enormous from Pennsylvania through the Ohio country and chunks of terrain began to drift away from this the Dakotas to the Pacific Northwest. colossal continent, opening the Atlantic and Indian When the glaciers finally retreated about 10,000 Oceans, narrowing the Pacific Ocean, and forming years ago, they left the North American landscape the great landmasses of Eurasia, Africa, Australia, transformed, and much as we know it today. The Antarctica, and the Americas. The existence of a sin- weight of the gargantuan ice mantle had depressed gle original continent has been proved in part by the the level of the Canadian Shield. The grinding and discovery of nearly identical species of fish that flushing action of the moving and melting ice had swim today in the long-separated freshwater lakes scoured away the shield’s topsoil, pitting its rocky of the various continents. surface with thousands of shallow depressions into Continued shifting and folding of the earth’s which the melting glaciers flowed to form lakes. The crust thrust up mountain ranges. The Appalachians same glacial action scooped out and filled the Great were probably formed even before continental sepa- Lakes. They originally drained southward through ration, perhaps 350 million years ago. The majestic the Mississippi River system to the Gulf of Mexico. ranges of western North America—the Rockies, the When the melting ice unblocked the Gulf of St. Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, and the Coast Ranges— Lawrence, the lake water sought the St. Lawrence arose much more recently, geologically speaking, River outlet to the Atlantic Ocean, lowering the some 135 million to 25 million years ago. They are Great Lakes’ level and leaving the Missouri- truly “American” mountains, born after the conti- Mississippi-Ohio system to drain the enormous nent took on its own separate geological identity. midcontinental basin between the Appalachians By about 10 million years ago, nature had and the Rockies. Similarly, in the west, water from sculpted the basic geological shape of North Amer- the melting glaciers filled sprawling Lake Bon- ica. The continent was anchored in its northeastern neville, covering much of present-day Utah, corner by the massive Canadian Shield—a zone Nevada, and Idaho. It drained to the Pacific Ocean undergirded by ancient rock, probably the first part through the Snake and Columbia River systems of what became the North American landmass to until diminishing rainfall from the ebbing ice cap have emerged above sea level. A narrow eastern lowered the water level, cutting off access to the coastal plain, or “tidewater” region, creased by Snake River outlet.