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History of the United States - Wikipedia. Contents. hide. (Top) Indigenous inhabitants. Europeans arrive (c. 1000–1763) Revolution and the new nation (1763–1815) Expansion and reform (1815–1860) Civil War and Reconstruction (1860–1876) Development of modern America (1876–1914) Modern America and World Wars (1914–1945) Cold War (1945–1980)
- Overview
- History of the United States
- Virginia
- Maryland
The territory represented by the continental United States had, of course, been discovered, perhaps several times, before the voyages of Christopher Columbus. When Columbus arrived, he found the New World inhabited by peoples who in all likelihood had originally come from the continent of Asia. Probably these first inhabitants had arrived 20,000 to 35,000 years before in a series of migrations from Asia to North America by way of the Bering Strait. By the time the first Europeans appeared, Indigenous people (commonly referred to as Indians) had spread and occupied all portions of the New World.
The foods and other resources available in each physiographic region largely determined the type of culture prevailing there. Fish and sea mammals, for example, contributed the bulk of the food supply of coastal peoples, although the acorn was a staple for California Indians; plant life and wild game (especially the American bison, or buffalo) were sources for the Plains Indians; and small-game hunting and fishing (depending again on local resources) provided for Midwestern and Eastern American Indian groups. These foods were supplemented by corn (maize), which was a staple food for the Indians of the Southwest. The procurement of these foods called for the employment of fishing, hunting, plant and berry gathering, and farming techniques, the application of which depended, in turn, upon the food resources utilized in given areas.
Foods and other raw materials likewise conditioned the material culture of the respective regional groups. All Indians transported goods by human carrier; the use of dogs to pull sleds or travois was widespread; and rafts, boats, and canoes were used where water facilities were available. The horse, imported by the Spanish in the early 16th century, was quickly adopted by the Indians once it had made its appearance. Notably, it came to be used widely by the buffalo-hunting Indians of the Great Plains.
American Indian culture groups were distinguished, among other ways, by house types. Dome-shaped ice houses (igloos) were developed by the Eskimos (called Inuit in Canada) in what would become Alaska; rectangular plank houses were produced by the Northwest Coast Indians; earth and skin lodges and tepees, by plains and prairie tribes; flat-roofed and often multistoried houses, by some of the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest; and barrel houses, by the Northeast Indians. Clothing, or the lack of it, likewise varied with native groups, as did crafts, weapons, and tribal economic, social, and religious customs.
The territory represented by the continental United States had, of course, been discovered, perhaps several times, before the voyages of Christopher Columbus. When Columbus arrived, he found the New World inhabited by peoples who in all likelihood had originally come from the continent of Asia. Probably these first inhabitants had arrived 20,000 to 35,000 years before in a series of migrations from Asia to North America by way of the Bering Strait. By the time the first Europeans appeared, Indigenous people (commonly referred to as Indians) had spread and occupied all portions of the New World.
The foods and other resources available in each physiographic region largely determined the type of culture prevailing there. Fish and sea mammals, for example, contributed the bulk of the food supply of coastal peoples, although the acorn was a staple for California Indians; plant life and wild game (especially the American bison, or buffalo) were sources for the Plains Indians; and small-game hunting and fishing (depending again on local resources) provided for Midwestern and Eastern American Indian groups. These foods were supplemented by corn (maize), which was a staple food for the Indians of the Southwest. The procurement of these foods called for the employment of fishing, hunting, plant and berry gathering, and farming techniques, the application of which depended, in turn, upon the food resources utilized in given areas.
Foods and other raw materials likewise conditioned the material culture of the respective regional groups. All Indians transported goods by human carrier; the use of dogs to pull sleds or travois was widespread; and rafts, boats, and canoes were used where water facilities were available. The horse, imported by the Spanish in the early 16th century, was quickly adopted by the Indians once it had made its appearance. Notably, it came to be used widely by the buffalo-hunting Indians of the Great Plains.
American Indian culture groups were distinguished, among other ways, by house types. Dome-shaped ice houses (igloos) were developed by the Eskimos (called Inuit in Canada) in what would become Alaska; rectangular plank houses were produced by the Northwest Coast Indians; earth and skin lodges and tepees, by plains and prairie tribes; flat-roofed and often multistoried houses, by some of the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest; and barrel houses, by the Northeast Indians. Clothing, or the lack of it, likewise varied with native groups, as did crafts, weapons, and tribal economic, social, and religious customs.
The leaders of the Virginia Company, a joint-stock company in charge of the Jamestown enterprise, were for the most part wealthy and wellborn commercial and military adventurers eager to find new outlets for investment. During the first two years of its existence, the Virginia colony, under the charter of 1607, proved an extraordinarily bad investment. This was principally due to the unwillingness of the early colonizers to do the necessary work of providing for themselves and to the chronic shortage of capital to supply the venture.
A new charter in 1609 significantly broadened membership in the Virginia Company, thereby temporarily increasing the supply of capital at the disposal of its directors, but most of the settlers continued to act as though they expected the Indians to provide for their existence, a notion that the Indians fiercely rejected. As a result, the enterprise still failed to yield any profits, and the number of investors again declined.
The crown issued a third charter in 1612, authorizing the company to institute a lottery to raise more capital for the floundering enterprise. In that same year, John Rolfe harvested the first crop of a high-grade and therefore potentially profitable strain of tobacco. At about the same time, with the arrival of Sir Thomas Dale in the colony as governor in 1611, the settlers gradually began to practice the discipline necessary for their survival, though at an enormous personal cost.
Dale carried with him the “Laws Divine, Morall, and Martial,” which were intended to supervise nearly every aspect of the settlers’ lives. Each person in Virginia, including women and children, was given a military rank, with duties spelled out in minute detail. Penalties imposed for violating these rules were severe: those who failed to obey the work regulations were to be forced to lie with neck and heels together all night for the first offense, whipped for the second, and sent to a year’s service in English galleys (convict ships) for the third. The settlers could hardly protest the harshness of the code, for that might be deemed slander against the company—an offense punishable by service in the galleys or by death.
Dale’s code brought order to the Virginia experiment, but it hardly served to attract new settlers. To increase incentive the company, beginning in 1618, offered 50 acres (about 20 hectares) of land to those settlers who could pay their transportation to Virginia and a promise of 50 acres after seven years of service to those who could not pay their passage. Concurrently, the new governor of Virginia, Sir George Yeardley, issued a call for the election of representatives to a House of Burgesses, which was to convene in Jamestown in July 1619. In its original form the House of Burgesses was little more than an agency of the governing board of the Virginia Company, but it would later expand its powers and prerogatives and become an important force for colonial self-government.
Despite the introduction of these reforms, the years from 1619 to 1624 proved fatal to the future of the Virginia Company. Epidemics, constant warfare with the Indians, and internal disputes took a heavy toll on the colony. In 1624 the crown finally revoked the charter of the company and placed the colony under royal control. The introduction of royal government into Virginia, while it was to have important long-range consequences, did not produce an immediate change in the character of the colony. The economic and political life of the colony continued as it had in the past. The House of Burgesses, though its future under the royal commission of 1624 was uncertain, continued to meet on an informal basis; by 1629 it had been officially reestablished. The crown also grudgingly acquiesced to the decision of the Virginia settlers to continue to direct most of their energies to the growth and exportation of tobacco. By 1630 the Virginia colony, while not prosperous, at least was showing signs that it was capable of surviving without royal subsidy.
Maryland, Virginia’s neighbour to the north, was the first English colony to be controlled by a single proprietor rather than by a joint-stock company. Lord Baltimore (George Calvert) had been an investor in a number of colonizing schemes before being given a grant of land from the crown in 1632. Baltimore was given a sizable grant of power to go along with his grant of land; he had control over the trade and political system of the colony so long as he did nothing to deviate from the laws of England. Baltimore’s son Cecilius Calvert took over the project at his father’s death and promoted a settlement at St. Mary’s on the Potomac. Supplied in part by Virginia, the Maryland colonists managed to sustain their settlement in modest fashion from the beginning. As in Virginia, however, the early 17th-century settlement in Maryland was often unstable and unrefined; composed overwhelmingly of young single males—many of them indentured servants—it lacked the stabilizing force of a strong family structure to temper the rigours of life in the wilderness.
The colony was intended to serve at least two purposes. Baltimore, a Roman Catholic, was eager to found a colony where Catholics could live in peace, but he was also eager to see his colony yield him as large a profit as possible. From the outset, Protestants outnumbered Catholics, although a few prominent Catholics tended to own an inordinate share of the land in the colony. Despite this favouritism in the area of land policy, Baltimore was for the most part a good and fair administrator.
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