History:
The USA

The first human inhabitants arrived in North America thousands of years ago. They walked across the ice from Siberia to Alaska, and they gradually travelled all over the country. When the explorer Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492, he thought he was in India, so he called the Native Americans ‘Indians’.

In 1620 a group of 102 English people (‘the Pilgrim Fathers’) left Plymouth in southwest England and sailed to North America. Their ship was called the Mayflower. Two months later, they landed on the east coast, in the state of Massachusetts. They built wooden houses and their new town was called ‘New Plymouth’. The local Native Americans helped the new settlers and showed them how to grow food. But the Indians became less friendly when more and more settlers from Europe began to arrive. The settlers created new colonies, and they started to take more of the Indians’ land.

The European settlers spread up and down the east coast of America and established more colonies. Then they moved west and south and, in 1783, the colonies became ‘the United States of America’. But in 1860, a group of southern states decided to leave the United States, because they thought the northern states were too powerful. The northern states (the Union) wanted to end slavery, but the southern states (the Confederacy) wanted to keep their slaves. The president of the USA, Abraham Lincoln, supported the Union. In 1861, the Confederacy attacked the north and a terrible civil war followed. Over 600,000 soldiers died. Finally, the Union won the war in 1865, and slavery was abolished.

For the last hundred and fifty years, millions of people from all over the world have come to live in the USA: French, English, Irish, Spanish, Eastern European, Russian, Mexican, Chinese, Indian and many more. In one decade – the 1890s – the total population increased by 13 million. By 1907, more than a million people were arriving each year from Europe, hoping to start a new and better life. Many of them arrived in New York, and a special reception centre was built on Ellis Island. The USA became a ‘melting pot’ of different nationalities, languages and cultures.

Today there are 50 states, with a population of more than 320 million people, and America is one of the world’s richest countries.

For many years black Americans were second-class citizens. They couldn’t vote. Their children couldn’t go to the same schools as white children. Buses and shops had separate sections for whites and blacks. In the 1950s millions of people began a campaign of peaceful protest against segregation. Martin Luther King became the leader of the Civil Rights Movement. He was arrested 30 times and went to prison five times, but he continued to fight for equality and freedom for all black Americans. In 1963 he led 250,000 people in a march to the capital, Washington, where he made a famous speech: ‘I have a dream …’. The government finally listened, and racial discrimination became illegal in 1965.

Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. In 1968 he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. In 2009 Barack Obama became the USA’s first black president.