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American History

American history

Pre-Columbian America

Main article: Population history of American indigenous peoples. Many cultures thrived in the Americas before Columbus came, including the Anasazi in the Southwest and the Adena Culture in the East. This period overlaps the Pre-Colonial period mentioned below.
Pre-Colonial America
For details, see the main Pre-Colonial America article. Native Americans arrived on the North American continent from North-East Asia at some time between 48,000 BCE and 9,000 BCE, and dominated the area until the influx of European settlers in the early 17th century.
Colonial America (1497-1776)
For details, see the main Colonial America article. Colonial America was defined by ongoing battles between (mainly English-speaking) Colonials and Native Americans, a severe labor shortage which gave birth to forms of unfree labor such as slavery and indentured servitude, and a British policy of benign neglect which permitted the development of an American spirit and culture which was distinct from that of its European founders.
History of the United States (1776-1789)
For details, see the main History of the United States (1776-1789) article. During this period the United States won its independence from the Great Britain during the American Revolutionary War and established itself as the United States of America with 13 States.
History of the United States (1789-1849)
For details, see the main History of the United States (1789-1849) article. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 gave Western farmers use of the important Mississippi River waterway, removed the French presence from the western border of the United States, and provided U.S. farmers with vast expanses of land, and furthered American leaders' vision of creating a Great Nation. Within weeks of the United States gaining control of the territory, war broke out between Britain and Napoleonic France. The United States, dependent on European revenues from the export of agricultural goods, tried to export food and raw materials to both warring great powers and to profit off transporting goods between their home markets and Caribbean colonies. Both sides permitted this trade when it benefitted them, but opposed it when it did not. Following the 1805 destruction of the French navy at the Battle of Trafalgar, Britain sought to impose a stranglehold over French overseas trade ties. Thus, in retaliation against U.S. trade practices, Britain imposed a loose blockade of the American coast. Believing that Britain could not rely on sources of food other than the United States, Congress and President Jefferson suspended all U.S. trade with foreign nations in 1807, hoping to get the British to end their blockade of the American coast. The embargo, however, devastated American agricultural exports while Britain found other sources of food. Also, luxury type goods such as cotton, indigo, and sugar were not as widely available. Led by Southern and Western Jeffersonians, Congress declared war on Britain in 1812 under the pretext of opposing British interference with American shipping, including the practice of impressment of American sailors into the British Navy, as well as British aid to Native Americans in Canada and west of the Mississippi. Westerners and Southerners were the most ardent supporters of the war, given their concerns about expanding settlement in Native American lands beyond the Mississippi and access to world markets for their agricultural exports. The New England Federalists opposed the war, and their reputation consequently suffered in its aftermath. The War of 1812 essentially resulted in the maintenance of the 'status quo ante bellum' after bitter fighting, which lasted until January 8, 1815 (after the peace treaty) on many fronts. Crucially, the Treaty of Ghent which officially ended the war saw the end of the British alliance with the Native Americans. After Napoleon's defeat and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, an era of relative stability began in Europe. U.S. leaders paid less attention to European trade and conflict, and more to the internal development in North America. With the end of the wartime British alliance with Native Americans east of the Mississippi River, white settlers were determined to colonize indigenous lands beyond the Mississippi. In the 1830s the federal government forcibly deported the Southeastern tribes to less fertile territories to the west. The Supreme Court had actually ruled in support of native claims to land, but was ignored by Andrew Jackson, president at the time, in favor of his own agenda. Americans did not question their right to colonize vast expanses of North America beyond their country's borders, especially into Oregon, California, and Texas. By the mid-1840s U.S. expansionism was articulated in terms of the ideology of "manifest destiny." In May 1846 Congress declared war on Mexico. The U.S. defeated Mexico, which was unable to withstand the assault of the American artillery, short on resources, and plagued by a divided command. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 ceded Texas (with the Rio Grande boundary), California, and New Mexico to the United States. In the next thirteen years, the territories ceded by Mexico became the focal point of sectional tensions over the expansion of slavery.
History of the United States (1849-1865)
For details, see the main History of the United States (1849-1865) article. In 1854 the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act abrogated the Missouri Compromise by providing that each new state of the Union would decide its stance on slavery. The settlement of Kansas by pro- and anti-slavery factions, and eventual victory of the anti-slavery camp, was fuelled by convictions signalled by the birth of the Republican party. By 1861, the admission of Kansas to the Union signalled a break in the balance of power. It also gave rise to various sundry movements which occasioned many anti-abolitionist and pro slave sentiments that still exist to this day. After the election of Abraham Lincoln, eleven Southern states seceded from the union between late 1860 and 1861, establishing a rebel government, the Confederate States of America on February 9, 1861. The Civil War began when Confederate General Pierre Beauregard opened fire upon Fort Sumter. The next four years were the darkest in American history, as the nation tore itself apart over the long and bitter issues of slavery and states' rights. The increasingly urban and industrialized Northern states (The Union) eventually defeated the mainly rural and agricultural Southern states (the Confederacy), but between 600,000 and 700,000 Americans on both sides were killed and much of the land in the South was devastated. In the end, however, slavery was abolished and the American nation was slowly reconstructed.
History of the United States (1865-1918)
For details, see the main History of the United States (1865-1918) article. The United States began its rise to international power in this period with substantial population and industrial growth domestically, and a number of imperalist ventures abroad. By the late 1800s, the United States had become the leading industrial power in the world, building on new technologies (such as the telegraph and the Bessemer process), an expanding railroad network, and abundant resources to usher in the Second Industrial Revolution. An unprecedented wave of immigration, 37 million people between 1840 and 1920, served both to provide the labor for American industry and to create diverse communities in previously undeveloped areas, such as California. The expansion of industry and population had a substantial cost as well. Native American tribes were mostly forced onto small reservations so that white farmers and ranchers could take over their lands, and abusive industrial practices led to the origins of the labor movement in the United States. During this period, the United States also became an international player in race for overseas possessions. In the 1900-1903 war to conquer the Philippines, as many as 1 million people, mostly Filipinos, were killed. The United State's late entry in the First World War on the side of the Allied Powers shifted the balance of the war, and made the United States a major military as well as financial power.
Interwar America and World War II (1918-1945)
For details, see the main History of the United States (1918-1945) article. The after-shock of Russia's October Revolution manifested real fears of communism in the United States, leading to a three year period of mass-hysteria and anti-communist legislative preparations made by the United States government. This period is known as the Red Scare. The Allied Powers imposed severe economic penalties on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. Despite President Woodrow Wilson's calls for agreeable terms, the economic impact of the reparations mandated by the Treaty were severe. The misery they produced in Germany helped Adolf Hitler to seize power in Germany in 1933. The United States Senate did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles; instead, the United States signed separate peace treaties with Germany and her allies. Disillusioned by the failure of the war to achieve the high ideals promised by President Woodrow Wilson, the American people chose isolationism: they turned their attention inward, away from international relations and solely toward domestic affairs. During most of the 1920s the United States enjoyed a period of unbalanced prosperity: prices for agricultural commodities and wages fell at the end of the war while new industries (radio, movies, automobiles, and chemicals) flourished. The unevenness was also geographic: the standard of living in rural areas fell increasingly behind that of urban and suburban areas which saw dramatic improvements in housing and urban planning. The boom was reflected by the extension of credit to a dangerous degree, including in the Stock Market, which rose to dangerously inflated levels. In 1920, the manufacture, sale, import and export of alcohol was prohibited by the 18th amendment to the United States Constitution in order to alleviate problems due to drunkenness and alchoholisim. It was enacted through the Volstead Act. Prohibition ended in 1933 by another change to the constitution; it is considered to have been a failure by most: consumption of alcohol did not decrease markedly while organized crime was strengthened. But it did represent the first instance of a constitutional amendment that directly regulated social activity. The 18th Amendment, then, represented the growing strength of the state in the early 20th century. The Stock Market crash in 1929 and the ensuing economic depression have been endlessly debated, often along ideological lines. The limited amount of reliable economic information suggests that construction and housing stagnated after 1926, joining declines in the agriculture, mining, and petroleum industries. In all of these industries, overproduction dragged down prices and profits. Wages did not rise fast enough to enable consumers to purchase all the new homes and home products available. Foreign trade was constrained by growing protectionism in the industrialized world. The Stock Market crash drained away remaining consumer confidence and, more importantly, the confidence of financial institutions. They were extremely reluctant to invest. Thus, the economy sank into a severe depression, referred to by Americans as the "Great Depression", marked by punishing levels of unemployment, negligible investment, and falling prices and wages. In response to the depression, Congress and the Hoover administration enacted a somewhat isolationist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, tried to fix prices for farmers, and enacted a public works program based on the belief that the federal government was obliged to maintain high employment levels. These efforts were unprecedented, and economists today have still not come to a consensus over the appropriateness of these policies. While some feel that these efforts did not go far enough and were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the depression, others believe that these policies were destructive and contributed to the worsening of the depression. With millions unemployed, political ferment and discontent greatly increased among the working classes. An unsympathetic or repressive response from the U.S. government might well have sparked a socialist uprising, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected in 1932, implemented a number of programs to aid the poor and unemployed. He also contributed to the future stability of the economy by instituting new regulations in business, particularly banking. Over the past twenty years, historians have de-emphasized the "revolutionary" legislation of the Roosevelt administration, seeing instead a logical, and even conservative, outgrowth of Hoover administration policies. The recovery, however, was very slow. The nadir of the Great Depression was in 1933, but the economy showed very little improvement through the end of the decade, and remained grim until it was dramatically reshaped through America's involvement in World War II. Isolationist sentiment in America had ebbed, but the United States at first declined to enter the war, limiting itself to giving supplies and weapons to Britain, China, and the Soviet Union. American feeling changed drastically with the sudden Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the United States quickly joined the British-Soviet alliance against Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, known as the "Axis Alliance". Even with American participation, it took nearly four more years to defeat Germany and Japan. Though the Soviet Union suffered far more casualties than its allies, America's active involvement in the war was vital to preventing an eventual Axis victory. After the Second world war, America experienced a period of great economic growth characterized by the growth of suburban housing, etc. The Allied Powers (which included the United States) financed the reconstruction of Germany and Japan and eventually turned the former foes into allies.
History of the United States (1945-1964)
For details, see the main History of the United States (1945-1964) article. The post-war era in the United States was defined internationally by the beginning of the Cold War, where the United States and the Soviet Union attempted to expand their influence at the expense of the other, checked by each side's massive nuclear arsenal. The result was a series of conflicts during this period including the Korean War and the tense nuclear showdown of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Within the United States, the Cold War prompted concerns about Communist influence, and also resulted in government efforts to encourage math and science towards efforts like the space race. Meanwhile, the American people completed their great migration from the farms into the cities, and experienced a period of sustained economic expansion. At the same time, institutionalized racism across the United States, but especially in the American South, became increasingly challenged by the growing Civil Rights movement and African American leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. During the 1960s, the Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation between Whites and Blacks had come to an end.
History of the United States (1964-1980)
For details, see the main History of the United States (1964-1980) article. The Cold War continued through the 1960s and 1970s, and the United States entered the Vietnam War, whose growing unpopularity fed already existing social movements, including those among women, minorities and young people. President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society social programs and the judicial activism of the Warren Court added to the wide range of social reform during the 1960s and 70s. The period saw the birth of feminism and the environmental movement as political forces, and continued progress towards Civil Rights. In the early 1970s, Johnson's successor, President Richard Nixon brought the Vietnam War to a close, and the American-backed South Vietnamese government collapsed. The war cost the lives of 58,000 American troops and millions of Vietnamese. Nixon's own administration was brought to an ignominious close with the political scandal of Watergate. The OPEC oil embargo and slowing economic growth led to a period of stagflation under President Jimmy Carter as the 1970s drew to a close. Space Stations were launched as early as 1971. Huge space advancements became known to man.
Contemporary United States History (1980-present)
For details, see the main History of the United States (1980-1988) and History of the United States (1988-present) articles. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan was elected, and instituted a domestic program of tax cuts on the belief that the economy would thereby expand. He had an international policy of aggressive anti-Soviet actions, including funding the Contras a opposition army to attack the socialist government and economy of Nicaragua. The United States deficit rapidly expanded, the Eastern Bloc began to unravel under increasing economic strain, finally and dramatically collapsing because of the reform policies of Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, during the administration of President George H.W. Bush. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States still involved itself in military action overseas, including the 1990 Gulf War. In 1992, President Bill Clinton oversaw the longest economic expansion in American history, a side effect of the digital revolution and new business opportunities created by the Internet (see Internet bubble). At the beginning of the new millennium, the United States found itself attacked by Islamist terrorism, with the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon orchestrated by Osama bin Ladin. In response, under the administration of President George W. Bush, the United States (with the military support of NATO and the political support of most of the international community) invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban regime, which had supported and harbored bin Ladin. More controversially, President Bush continued what he dubbed the "war on terror" by invading Iraq and overthrowing and capturing Saddam Hussein. This second invasion proved very unpopular amongst the international community, even amongst long-time American allies such as France and Germany, and resulted in a global wave of anti-American sentiment. As of 2005, the political climate remains polarized as debates continue over partial birth abortion, federal funding of stem cell research, separation of the church and the state issues, same-sex marriage, as well as the ongoing war in Iraq. A Washington Post Op-Ed article on November 22nd, 2005, named the insurgent death toll in Iraq as being supposedly between 45,000 and 50,000.
See also

- Pre-Columbian era
- Colonial Era
- Articles of Confederation
- Jacksonian Democracy
- Industrial Revolution
- Antebellum
- American Civil War
- Reconstruction
- Gilded Age
- Progressive Era
- Roaring Twenties
- Great Depression
- Atomic Age
- Space Age
- Cold War
- Information Age
- Dot-com era
Literature

- The state of U.S.history, ed. by Melvyn Stokes, Berg Publishers 2002
- A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, Perennial Classics 2003
- The American Pageant: A History of the Republic (12th Ed.), Bailey, Thomas A., Cohen, Lizabeth, and David M. Kennedy. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001. ISBN 061810349X
External links

- Civil War Research & Discussion Group - [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FieldsOfConflict/ Fields Of Conflict] - Containing 1000+ Links And 350+ Articles.
- [http://www.badley.info/history/USA.country.year.index.html USA Chronology World History Database]
- [http://college.hmco.com/history/us/resources/students/index.html Houghton Mifflin Company: U.S. History Resource Center]
- [http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_1741500823/United_States_(History).html#s1 United States History article] from Encarta Encyclopedia. Extensive information plus over 200 multimedia files.
- [http://www.loc.gov/wiseguide Library of Congress American History Guide]
- [http://www.historians.org/ American Historical Association]
- [http://www.gilderlehrman.org/ The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History] Category:North American history
- ko:미국의 역사 ja:アメリカ合衆国の歴史

Population history of American indigenous peoples
There were millions of people living in the Americas when Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. Columbus's voyage to what Europeans called the "New World" set the stage for the later European colonization of the Americas, with millions of emigrants (willing and unwilling) from the "Old World" eventually resettling in the Americas. While the population of Old World peoples in the Americas steadily grew in the centuries after Columbus, the population of the American indigenous peoples plummeted. The extent and causes of this population decline have long been the subject of controversy and debate, which became particularly widespread in 1992 during the 500th anniversary of Columbus's famous voyage, with a number of people claiming that the natives of the Americas have been the victims of genocide.
Population overview
Estimates of how many people were living in the Americas when Columbus arrived have varied tremendously; in the 20th century scholarly estimates ranged from a low of 8.4 million to a high of 112.5 million persons. Given the fragmentary nature of the evidence, precise pre-Columbian population figures are impossible to obtain; estimates are often produced by extrapolation from comparatively small bits of data. In 1976, geographer William Denevan used various estimates to derive a "consensus count" of about 54 million people, although some recent estimates are lower than that. Historian David Henige, representing a minority opinion, has argued that many population figures are the result of arbitrary formulas selectively applied to numbers from unreliable historical sources. He believes there is not enough solid evidence to produce population numbers that have any real meaning, and characterizes the modern trend of high estimates as "pseudo-scientific number-crunching." This population debate has often had ideological underpinnings. Low estimates were sometimes reflective of European notions of their own cultural and racial superiority, as historian Francis Jennings has argued: "Scholarly wisdom long held that Indians were so inferior in mind and works that they could not possibly have created or sustained large populations." At the other end of the spectrum, some have argued that contemporary estimates of a high pre-Columbian indigenous population are rooted in a bias against aspects of Western civilization and/or Christianity. Robert Royal writes that "estimates of pre-Columbian population figures have become heavily politicized with scholars who are particularly critical of Europe often favoring wildly higher figures." Since civilizations rose and fell in the Americas before Columbus arrived, the indigenous population in 1492 was not necessarily at a high point, and may have already been in decline. Indigenous populations in most areas of the Americas reached a nadir by the early twentieth century, and in a number of cases started to climb again.
Depopulation from disease
The earliest European immigrants offered two principal explanations for the population decline of the American natives. The first was the brutal practices of the Spanish conquistadors, as recorded by the Spanish themselves, most notably by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose writings vividly depict atrocities committed on the natives by the Spanish. The second explanation was religious: God had removed the natives as part of His divine plan in order to make way for a new Christian civilization. Scholars now believe that, among the various contributing factors, epidemic disease was the overwhelming cause of the population decline of the American natives. Disease began to kill immense numbers of indigenous Americans soon after Europeans and Africans began to arrive in the New World, bringing with them the infectious diseases of the Old World. One reason this death toll was overlooked (or downplayed) for so long is that disease, according to the widely held theory, raced ahead of European immigration in many areas, thus often killing off a sizeable portion of the population before European observations (and thus written records) were made. Many European immigrants who arrived after the epidemics had already killed massive numbers of American natives assumed that the natives had always been few in number. The scope of the epidemics over the years was enormous, killing millions of people — in excess of 90% of the population in the hardest hit areas — and creating "the greatest human catastrophe in history, far exceeding even the disaster of the Black Death of medieval Europe." The most devastating disease was smallpox, but other deadly diseases included typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, mumps, yellow fever, and whooping cough. The Americas also had endemic diseases, perhaps including a type of syphilis, which soon became rampant in the Old World. (This transfer of disease between the Old and New Worlds was part of the phenomenon known as the "Columbian Exchange.") But the diseases brought to the New World proved to be exceptionally deadly. The epidemics had very different effects in different parts of the Americas. The most vulnerable groups were those with a relatively small population. Most island based groups were utterly annihilated. The Caribs and Arawaks of the Caribbean nearly ceased to exist, as did the Beothuks of Newfoundland. While disease ranged swiftly through the densely populated empires of Mesoamerica, the more scattered populations of North America saw a slower spread.
Why were the diseases so deadly?
A disease (viral or bacterial) that kills its victims before they can spread it to others tends to flare up and then die out, like a forest fire running out of fuel. A successful disease establishes an equilibrium, which means the victims live long enough after infection to further spread the disease. Hence there is a long-term evolution process tending to select against quick lethality, and for relative mildness. There is also an evolutionary pressure on the victim populations. Those without resistance to common diseases die and do not leave descendants; those who survive have children, and may pass the genes conferring resistance to their children. Thus both diseases and victim populations tend to evolve towards an equilibrium in which the common diseases are non-symptomatic, mild, or manageably chronic. When a population that has been relatively isolated is exposed to new diseases, they have no inborn resistance to the new diseases (they are "biologically naïve") and succumb at much higher rates, resulting in what is known as a "virgin soil" epidemic. Before the European arrival, the Americas had been isolated from the Eurasian-African landmass. The people of the Old World had had thousands of years to accommodate to their common diseases; the natives of the Americas faced them all at once. Other contributing factors:
- People fled whenever there were outbreaks of disease, which inadvertently helped spread the disease even further. This also left few people behind to care for the infected people, who often died from lack of food and water.
- Native American medical treatments such as sweat baths and cold water immersion (practiced in some areas) weakened patients and probably increased mortality rates.
- Europeans brought so many deadly diseases with them because they had many more domesticated animals than the Native Americans. Domestication usually means close and frequent contact between animals and people, which is an opportunity for animal diseases to mutate and migrate into the human population. (In the colder areas of the Eurasian landmass, houses were often built in two stories. The bottom story was used to stable animals, the top to house humans. In winter, the animal heat would rise and warm the human section of the house. This arrangement is efficient, but it also contributes to disease.)
Deliberate infection?
One of the most contentious issues relating to disease and depopulation in the Americas concerns the question of whether or not American indigenous peoples were intentionally infected with diseases such as smallpox. There is no evidence that the Spanish attempted to deliberately infect the American natives. However, there is one documented incident in which intentional infection was attempted by the British. During Pontiac's Rebellion in 1763, some Native Americans ("Indians") launched a widespread and effective offensive against British soldiers and settlers. Fort Pitt, with a garrison of 330 men (and over 200 women and children inside), was attacked on June 22, 1763, primarily by Delaware (Lenape) Indians. Too strong to be taken by force, the fort was kept under siege. On 24 June 1763, the commander of Fort Pitt gave representatives of the besieging Delawares two blankets that had been exposed to smallpox, in hopes of spreading the disease to the Indians in order to end the siege. Indians in the area contracted smallpox. It is impossible to verify how many people (if any) contracted the disease as a result of the Fort Pitt incident; the disease was already in the area and may have reached the Indians through other vectors. Even before the blankets had been handed over, the disease may have been spread to the Indians by native warriors returning from attacks on infected white settlements. Although British General Jeffrey Amherst is usually associated with this incident, by the time he suggested trying to spread the disease to the Indians, officers at Fort Pitt had already made the attempt, apparently on their own initiative. It is certain that these British soldiers attempted to intentionally infect Indians with smallpox; what is uncertain is whether they succeeded. A second alleged incident is disputed. Colorado professor Ward Churchill has written that in 1837 the United States Army deliberately infected Mandan Indians by distributing blankets that had been exposed to smallpox, resulting in 125,000 deaths. Others have made similar charges, though without the high death toll. However, sociology professor Thomas Brown argues that Churchill's cited sources do not support these claims. According to Brown, one of Churchill's sources, Russell Thornton, agrees that Churchill has misrepresented him, saying, "The history is bad enough — there's no need to embellish it." Historian Guenter Lewy agrees that there is no evidence that the United States ever attempted to deliberately infect Native Americans. In fact, he says, the opposite was taking place: the U.S. government had implemented a program of smallpox vaccination for Indians at the time of the alleged Mandan incident. Vaccination for Native Americans had been suggested in 1801 by President Thomas Jefferson, who attempted to send smallpox vaccine on the Lewis and Clark expedition for distribution to western tribes. An official U.S. vaccination program was first funded in 1832 during the administration of President Andrew Jackson, with an act passed "for the purpose of arresting the progress of smallpox among the several tribes by vaccination." One study concludes that in some areas of the United States, American Indians were eventually more thoroughly vaccinated against smallpox than their white neighbors.
Other causes of depopulation
While diseases from the Old World accounted for most of the population decline of the American natives after 1492, there were other contributing factors, all of them related to European contact and colonization. Population decline was not only the result of increased death rates—decreased birth rates resulting from oppression and disruption of ways-of-life also had an impact. According to demographer Russell Thornton, war was a comparatively minor cause of overall Native American population decline, although many lives were lost in numerous wars over the centuries, and war sometimes contributed to the near extinction of certain tribes. There is some disagreement among scholars about how widespread warfare was in pre-Columbian America, but there is general agreement that war became deadlier after the arrival of the Europeans. The Europeans brought with them gunpowder and metal weapons, which made killing easier and war more deadly. Over the long run, Europeans proved to be consistently successful in achieving domination when engaged in warfare with indigenous Americans, for a variety of reasons that have long been debated. Massive death from disease certainly played a role in the European conquest, but also decisive was the European approach to war, which was less ritualistic than in native America and more focused on achieving decisive victory. European colonization also contributed to an increased number of wars between displaced native groups. gunpowder Exploitation has often been cited as a cause of Native American depopulation. The Spanish conquistadors, the first settlers in the New World, divided the conquered lands among themselves and ruled as feudal lords, treating their subjects as something between slaves and serfs. Serfs stayed to work the land; slaves were exported to the mines, where large numbers of them died. Some Spaniards objected to this encomienda system, notably Bartolomé de Las Casas, who insisted that the indigenes were humans with souls and rights. Largely due to his efforts, the New Laws were adopted in 1542 to protect the Indians, but the abuses were not entirely or permanently abolished. Las Casas's vivid descriptions of the atrocities inflicted upon the natives gave rise to the "Black Legend" of the unparalleled cruelty of the Spanish. However, since Las Casas's writings were polemical works, intended to provoke moral outrage in order to facilitate reform, some scholars speculate that his depictions may have been exaggerated at least to some degree. No mainstream scholar dismisses the idea that atrocities were widespread, but many now believe that mass killings (massacres) were not a primary factor in native depopulation. The Spanish rulers in America were unhappy at the high mortality rate of the natives, since they wanted to exploit the Indians laborers. There is still much debate as to what proportion of native depopulation was due to disease and how much to warfare and subsequent mistreatment. For instance, Newsom, in a 1987 discussion of the Central American population plunge, estimates that "the general impression is that the Indian slave trade and disease were of equal importance, perhaps accounting for one-third each of the total decline. The remaining one-third can be attributed to the ill-treatment and overwork of the Indians and to the disruption of Indian communities brought about by Spanish conquest and colonization." The more settlers to arrive from the Old World, the worse the peoples of the New World fared. Also, the importation of African slaves tended to displace native peoples. Conquistador, trader, and settler men took native wives and concubines; the children were often lost to their maternal tribes. There was also a great deal of intermarriage between indigenes and imported African slaves, leading to further dissolution of native communities. The new, mixed communities developed their own cultures in many cases, cultures estimable in their own right, but still a displacement from the aboriginal point of view.
The genocide debate
The most controversial question relating to the population history of American indigenous peoples is whether or not the natives of the Americas were the victims of genocide. After the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust during World War II, genocide was defined (in part) as a crime "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." Does genocide apply to the experience of the indigenous peoples of the New World? Some scholars believe that it does. Historian David Stannard has argued that "The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world." [http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryAmerican/NativeAmerican/?ci=0195085574&view=usa] Like Ward Churchill, Stannard believes that the natives of the Americas were deliberately and systematically exterminated over the course of several centuries, and that the process continues to the present day. Stannard estimates that almost 100 million Native Americans have been killed what he calls the American Holocaust. Stannard's claim of 100 million deaths has been disputed because he makes no distinction between death from violence and death from disease. Noble David Cook considers books such as Stannard's — a number of which were released around the year 1992 to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the Columbus voyage — to be an unproductive return to Black Legend-type explanations for depopulation. In response to Stannard's combined figure, the political scientist R. J. Rummel has instead estimated that over the centuries of European colonization about 2 million to 15 million Native Americans were the victims of what he calls democide. "Even if these figures are remotely true," writes Rummel, "then this still make this subjugation of the Americas one of the bloodier, centuries long, democides in world history." While no mainstream historian denies that death and suffering were unjustly inflicted by a number of Europeans upon a great many American natives, many argue that genocide, which is a crime of intent, was not the intent of European colonization. Historian Stafford Poole wrote: "There are other terms to describe what happened in the Western Hemisphere, but genocide is not one of them. It is a good propaganda term in an age where slogans and shouting have replaced reflection and learning, but to use it in this context is to cheapen both the word itself and the appalling experiences of Jews and Armenians, to mention but two of the major victims of this century." Therefore, most mainstream scholars tend not to use the term "genocide" to describe the overall depopulation of American natives. However, a number of historians, rather than seeing the whole history of European colonization as one long act of genocide, do cite specific wars and campaigns which were arguably genocidal in intent and effect. Usually included among these are the Pequot War and campaigns waged against tribes in California starting in the 1850s.
See also
The European immigrants came from many countries, and arrived over the course of hundreds of years. In fact, from the viewpoint of many small tribes in the remote reaches of the Amazon Basin, the process of "European" expansion is not yet over. Any generalizations are but an imprecise summation of hundreds of individual historical studies. For further investigation, please see:
- European colonization of the Americas
- Spanish colonization of the Americas
- British colonization of the Americas
- French colonization of the Americas
- Dutch colonization of the Americas
- Portuguese colonization of the Americas
See also

- Columbus Day
- Indian Wars (in the United States)
- Native American massacres (mass killings in the United States)
- Pandemic
Notes

- 20th century estimates in Thornton, p. 22; [http://www.usna.edu/Users/history/kolp/HH345/PRE1492.HTM Denevan's consensus count]; [http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat0.htm#America recent lower estimates]
- Henige, p. 182. Henige does not advocate a "low" population estimate; rather, he argues that the scanty and unreliable nature of the evidence renders broad estimates suspect, and that "high counters" (as he calls them) have been particularly flagrant in their misuse of sources.
- Jennings, p. 83; [http://www.youdebate.com/DEBATES/rush_indian_population.HTM Royal's quote]
- Thornton, p. xvii, 36.
- Cook, p. 1.
- Cook, p. 13.
- Cook, p. 208; Thornton, p. 47.
- Cook, p. 214.
- Dowd, p. 190; McConnell, p. 195.
- Anderson, pp. 541-2; McConnell, p. 195.
- [http://hal.lamar.edu/~browntf/Churchill1.htm Brown's essay]; others who made the claim include Ann F. Ramenofsky in Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), p. 148; Churchill first published his disputed claims in Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994).
- [http://hnn.us/articles/7302.html Lewy's essay]; vaccination policy mentioned in Lewy, more detailed in Stearn and Stearn, p. 62-3. The vaccine sent by Jefferson to Lewis & Clark apparently spoiled in transit (Stearn & Stearn, p. 57); the American Indian vaccination program was poorly funded until 1900 (Stearn & Stearn, p. 70); Indians eventually better vaccinated than whites (Stearn & Stearn p. 59).
- Thornton, p. 43.
- Thornton, p. 44, 47-49; for deadliness of European warfare, see Hanson, ch. 6.
- Cook, p. 212.
- Newson, pp. 123-124.
- Stannard, p. x (quotation), p. 151 (death toll estimate).
- Cook, p. 12; Rummel's quote and estimate from [http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.CHAP3.HTM his website], about midway down the page, after footnote 82. Rummel's estimate is presumably not a single democide, but a total of multiple democides, since there were many different governments involved.
- Stafford Poole, quoted in Royal, p. 63.
- For example, The Oxford Companion to American Military History (Oxford University Press, 1999) states that "if Euro-Americans committed genocide anywhere on the continent against Native Americans, it was in California."
References

- Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (1^st ed.) New York: Knopf, 2000. ISBN 0375406425.
- Cook, Noble David. Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0521622085, ISBN 0521627303.
- Dowd, Gregory Evans. War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, & the British Empire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2002. ISBN 0801870798.
- Hanson, Victor Davis. Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. New York: Doubleday, 2001. ISBN 0385500521.
- Henige, David. Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. ISBN 080613044X.
- Jennings, Francis. The Founders of America: How Indians discovered the land, pioneered in it, and created great classical civilizations, how they were plunged into a Dark Age by invasion and conquest, and how they are reviving (1^st ed.) New York: Norton, 1993. ISBN 0393033732.
- Lewy, Guenter. [http://hnn.us/articles/7302.html Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?]
- Lord, Lewis. [http://www.usna.edu/Users/history/kolp/HH345/PRE1492.HTM How many people were here before Columbus?] U.S. News and World Report, August 18, 1997.
- Mann, Charles C. "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus". Knopf Publishing Group, August 2005, ISBN 140004006X.
- McConnell, Michael N. A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724-1774. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1992.
- McNeill, William H. "Plagues and Peoples." Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., New York, NY, 1976, ISBN 0-385-12122-9.
- Newson, Linda A. Indian Survival in Colonial Nicaragua (1^st ed.) Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. ISBN 0806120088.
- Royal, Robert. 1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History. Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1992.
- Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0195085574
- Stearn, E. Wagner and Allen E. Stearn. The Effect of Smallpox on the Destiny of the Amerindian. Boston: Humphries, 1945.
- Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (1^st ed.) University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. ISBN 0806120746.
External links

- [http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/na_030500_precontactto.htm Article by Russell Thornton on American Indian population history in North America]
- [http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/History/American_Holocaust.html Extracts from David Stannard's American Holocaust]
- [http://www.zkea.com/archives/archive01002.html "Smallpox, Native Americans" from ZKEA]
- [http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat0.htm#America "The Annihilation of the Native Americans" by Matthew White]
- [http://www.usna.edu/Users/history/kolp/HH345/PRE1492.HTM "How many people were here before Columbus?" in US News & World Report, August 18, 1997]. Category:Genocides Category:Native American history Category:Colonization of the Americas Category:Demographic history of the United States Category:Indigenous peoples of the Americas

Adena culture

The Adena culture was a Pre-Columbian Native American culture that existed from c. 1000 BCE to 100 BCE, in a time known as the Woodland Period. The Adena culture probably refers to a number of related Native American societies sharing a burial complex and ceremonial system.

The Adena culture

The Adena were one of the earliest of the Mound Builder cultures that flourished in eastern North America before the time of European contact. The Adena lived in a variety of locations, including: Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, and parts of Pennsylvania and New York. The Adena culture eventually underwent cultural change, with the new cultural traditions being called the Hopewell culture. The Adena culture is sometimes viewed as part of the roots of the Mississippian culture mound-building peoples. Although the Adena culture did not last, a number of their earthen monuments survived. These mounds generally ranged in size from 20 to 300 feet in diameter, and served as burial grounds. The mounds were built using hundreds of thousands of basketfuls of specially selected and graded earth, requiring members of the community to spare much time from hunting, gathering, and other everyday pursuits. The Adena often built mounds over the remains of their chiefs, shamans, priests, and other honored dead.

Mounds

Adena culture's most lasting artifacts were substantial earthworks, a number of which still survive and can be studied by archaeologists. According to archaeological investigations, Adena mounds were usually built as part of burial ritual, in which the earth of the mound was piled immediately atop a burned mortuary building. These mortuary buildings were intended to keep and maintain the dead until their final burial was performed. Before the construction of the mounds, some utilitarian and grave goods would be placed on the floor of the structure, which was burned with the goods and honored dead within. The mound would be built on top of that, and often a new mortuary structure would be placed atop the new mound. After a series of repetitions, mound/mortuary/mound/mortuary, a quite prominent earthwork would remain. In the later Adena period, circular ridges of unknown function were sometimes constructed around the burial mounds.
- The Grave Creek Mound, at 62 feet high and 240 feet in diameter, is the largest conical type burial mound in the United States. It is located in Moundsville, West Virginia. In 1838, much of the archaeological evidence in this mound was destroyed when several non-archaeologists tunneled into the mound.
- The Criel Mound, a 35-foot high and 175-foot diameter conical mound, is the second largest of its type in West Virginia. It is located in South Charleston, West Virginia. The Adena Pipe, pictured above, was recovered here. P. W. Norris of the Smithsonian Institution oversaw the excavation. His team discovered numerous skeletons along with weapons and jewelry.
- Several mounds attributed to the Adena culture can be found between Charleston and Institute in West Virginia. Category:Mound Builders Category:Archaeological cultures ja:アデナ文化

Indigenous peoples of the Americas

The scope of this indigenous peoples of the Americas article encompasses the definitions of indigenous peoples and the Americas as established in their respective articles.

Early history

See also: Archeology of the Americas, Models of migration to the New World

The Bering Strait Land Bridge Theory

Based on anthropological and genetic evidence, scientists generally agree that most indigenous peoples of the Americas descend from people who migrated from Siberia across the Bering Strait, between 17,000–11,000 years ago. According to a recent study by Ilya Zakharov, deputy director of Moscow's Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, the Northern Native Americans are related to the Tuvians, a Turkic group of people in Siberia. The exact epoch and route is still a matter of controversy, as is whether it happened at all. Until recently there was a consensus among anthropologists that the alleged migrants crossed the strait 12,000 years ago via the Bering Land Bridge which existed during the last ice age (which occurred 26,000 to 11,000 years ago), and that they followed an inland route through Alaska and Canada that had just been freed of its ice cover. There are a number of difficulties in this theory — in particular, growing evidence of human presence in Brazil and Chile 11,500 years ago or earlier [http://www.andaman.org/book/chapter53/luzia/luzia.htm]. Thus other possibilities, not necessarily exclusive, have been suggested:
- The migrants may have crossed the land bridge several millennia earlier and followed a coastal route, thus avoiding the ice-covered interior.
- They may have been seafaring people who moved along the coast, a theory disputed due to the relative lack of seafaring skills of peoples of this time period, but supported strongly with anecdotal evidence of sea migration to Australia at least 60,000 years ago over more than 250 kilometers of open ocean at that time period.
- The crossing of the Bering Land Bridge may have occurred during the previous ice age, around 37,000 years ago. This is also supported by the archaeology dating of some sites in South America prior to the previously assumed date of 12–14,000 years ago.
- A more radical alternative is that the Siberians were preceded by migrants from Oceania, who arrived either by sailing across the Pacific Ocean or by following the land route through Beringia at a much earlier date. Proponents of this theory claim that the oldest human remains in South America and in Baja California show distinctive non-Siberian traits, resembling those of Australian Aborigines or the so-called "negrito" peoples of South and Southeast Asia, such as the Andamanese of the Andaman Islands. These hypothetical American Aborigines would have been displaced by the Siberian migrants, and may have been ancestral to the distinctive indigenous peoples of the Tierra del Fuego, who are nearly extinct. Tierra del Fuego Some mainstream anthropologists and archaeologists consider the genetic and cultural evidence for a primarily Siberian origin overwhelming. According to their theories, at least three separate migrations from Siberia to the Americas are highly likely to have occurred:
- The first wave came into a land populated by the large mammals of the late Pleistocene, including mammoths, horses, giant sloths, and woolly rhinoceroses. The Clovis culture would be a manifestation of that migration, and the Folsom culture, based on the hunting of bison, would have developed from it. This wave eventually spread over the entire hemisphere, as far south as Tierra del Fuego.
- The second migration brought the ancestors of the Na-Dene peoples. They lived in Alaska and western Canada, but some migrated as far south as the Pacific Northwestern U.S. and the American Southwest, and would be ancestral to the Dene, Apaches and Navajos.
- The third wave brought the ancestors of the Eskimos and the Aleuts. They may have come by sea over the Bering Strait, after the land bridge had disappeared.
- In recent years, molecular genetics studies have suggested as many as four distinct migrations from Asia. These studies also provide surprising evidence of smaller-scale, contemporaneous migrations from Europe, possibly by peoples who had adopted a lifestyle resembling that of Inuits and Yupiks during the last ice age. One result of these successive waves of migration is that large groups of peoples with similar languages and perhaps physical characteristics as well, moved into various geographic areas of North, and then Central and South America. While these peoples have traditionally remained primarily loyal to their individual tribes, ethnologists have variously sought to group the myriad of tribes into larger entities which reflect common geographic origins, linguistic similarities, and life styles. (See Classification of indigenous peoples of the Americas.) While many indigenous peoples of the Americas retained a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle through the time of European settlement of the New World, in some regions, specifically in the Mississippi River valley of the United States, in Mexico, Central America, the Andes of South America, they built advanced civilizations with monumental architecture and large-scale organization into cities and states. See also: Mississippian culture, Cahokia, Mesoamerica, Maya, Olmec, Zapotec, Toltec, Teotihuacan, Aztec, Aymara, Inca, indigenous people of Brazil.

European colonization of the Americas

The European colonization of the Americas forever changed the lives and cultures of the indigenous peoples of the continent. In the 15th to 19th centuries, their populations were ravaged by the privations of displacement, by disease, and in many cases by warfare with European groups and enslavement by them. The first indigenous group encountered by Columbus were the 250,000 Arawaks of Hispaniola. They were enslaved, and only 500 survived by the year 1550. The group was extinct before 1650. In the 15th century Spaniards and other Europeans brought horses to the Americas. Some of these animals escaped and began to breed and increase their numbers in the wild. Ironically, the horse had originally evolved in the Americas, but the last American horses, (species Equus scotti and others [http://www.acnatsci.org/museum/jefferson/otherFossils/equus.html]) died out at the end of the last ice age with other megafauna. The re-introduction of the horse had a profound impact on Native American and First Nations culture in the Great Plains of North America. This new mode of travel made it possible for some tribes to greatly expand their territories, exchange many goods with neighboring tribes, and more easily capture game. Europeans also brought diseases against which the indigenous peoples of the Americas had no immunity. Chicken pox and measles, though common and rarely fatal among Europeans, often proved fatal to the indigenous people, and more dangerous diseases such as smallpox were especially deadly to indigenous populations. It is difficult to estimate the total percentage of the indigenous population killed by these diseases. Epidemics often immediately followed European exploration, sometimes destroying entire villages. Some historians estimate that up to 80% of some indigenous populations may have died due to European diseases. For more information, see population history of American indigenous peoples.

United States

Indigenous peoples in what is now the United States are commonly called "American Indians" but more recently have been referred to as "Native Americans".

Canada

In Canada, the most commonly preferred term for the indigenous peoples of what is now the country is Aboriginal peoples. Of these Aboriginal peoples who are not Inuit or Métis, "First Nations" is the most commonly preferred term of self-identification. First Nations peoples make up approximately 3% of the Canadian population. The official term for First Nations people — that is, the term used by both the Indian Act which regulates benefits received by members of First Nations, and the Indian Register which defines who is a member of a First Nation — is Indian.

Mexico

The territory of modern-day Mexico was home to numerous indigenous civilizations prior to the arrival of the European conquistadors: The Olmecs, who flourished from between 1200 BC to about 800 BC in the coastal regions of the Gulf of Mexico; the Zapotecs and the Mixtecs, who held sway in the mountains of Oaxaca and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; the Maya in the Yucatán (and into neighbouring areas of contemporary Central America; and, of course, the Aztecs, who, from their central capital at Tenochtitlan, dominated much of the centre and south of the country (and the non-Aztec inhabitants of those areas) when Hernán Cortés first landed at Veracruz. In contrast to what was the general rule in the rest of North America, the history of the colony of New Spain was one of racial intermingling (mestizaje). Mestizos quickly came to account for a majority of the colony's population; however, significant pockets of pure-blood indígenas (as the native peoples are now known) have survived to the present day. With mestizos numbering some 60% of the modern population, estimates for the numbers of unmixed indigenous peoples vary from a very modest 10% to a more liberal (and probably more accurate) 30% of the population. The reason for this discrepancy may be the Mexican government's policy of using linguistic, rather than racial, criteria as the basis of classification. In the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca and in the interior of the Yucatán peninsula the majority of the population is indigenous. Large indigenous minorities, including Nahuas, Purépechas, and Mixtecs are also present in the central regions of Mexico. In Northern Mexico indigenous people are a small minority: they are practically absent from the northeast but, in the northwest and central borderlands, include the Tarahumara of Chihuahua and the Yaquis and Seri of Sonora. While Mexicans are universally proud of their indigenous heritage (generally more so than of their Spanish roots), modern-day indigenous Mexicans are still the target of discrimination and outright racism. In particular, in areas such as Chiapas — most famously, but also in Oaxaca, Puebla, Guerrero, and other remote mountainous parts — indigenous communities have been left on the margins of national development for the past 500 years. Indigenous customs and uses enjoy no official status. The Huichols of the states of Jalisco, Nayarit, Zacatecas, and Durango are impeded by police forces in their ritual pilgrimages, and their religious observances are interfered with.

Belize

Mestizos (European with indigenous peoples) number about 45% of the population; unmixed Mayans make up another 10%.

Guatemala

The indigenous peoples of Guatemala are of Maya stock. Pure Mayans account for some 45% of the population; although around 40% of the population speaks an indigenous language, those tongues (of which there are more than 20) enjoy no official status. Mayan sources, however, place estimates at around 60% of the population. Maya

Brazil

Argentina

Argentina's Native American population is a subject of controversy. Estimates vary from a minimum of 300,000 (0.7% of total population) to a maximum of two million (5.6% of the population). Indigenous nations include the Toba, Wichí, Mocoví, Pilagá, Chulupí, Diaguita Calchaquí, Kolla, Guaraní (Tupí Guaraní and Avá Guaraní in the provinces of Jujuy and Salta, and Mbyá Guaraní in the province of Misiones), Chorote, Chané, Tapieté, Mapuche, Tehuelche and Selknam (Ona).

Other parts of the Americas

Indigenous peoples make up the majority of the population in Bolivia and Peru, and are a significant element in most other former Spanish colonies. Exceptions to this include Costa Rica, Cuba, Argentina, Dominican Republic, and Uruguay. At least three of the Amerindian languages (Quechua in Peru and Bolivia, Aymara also in Bolivia, and Guarani in Paraguay) are recognized along with Spanish as national languages.

Cultural aspects

Though cultural features including language, garb, and customs vary enormously from one tribe to another; there are certain elements which are encountered frequently and shared by many indigenous peoples.

Gender

Most indigenous peoples had traditional gender roles. Agriculture was often women's work while war and hunting was men's. In some tribes, social and clan relationships were matrilinear and matriarchal but several different systems were in use. Men filled the war leader role. The cradle board is used by mothers to carry their baby whilst working or traveling. As in many indigenous cultures around the world, homosexual and transgender individuals (and animals) are considered routine and expected. Many indigenous groups formally recognize these homosexual and transgender individuals in the role of the "two-spirit" person (previously labeled by Europeans as "berdache", a term now considered obsolete). Two-spirit transgender and homosexual roles are known to have been recognized and honored, at the present time or historically, in more than 150 different tribes. The two-spirit is a man or woman who mixes gender roles by wearing clothes of the opposite or both genders, doing both male and female (or primarily "opposite-gender") work, and often engaging in same-sex relations with other members of the tribe. Two-spirit people often are shamans, performing religious and/or mediating functions. Their special status is thought to invest them with exceptional spiritual power, as a result of which they are both feared and respected.

Music and art

shamans Native American music of North American Indians is almost entirely monophonic, but there are notable exceptions. Traditional Native American music often includes drumming but little other instrumentation, although flutes are played by individuals. The tuning of these flutes is not precise and depends on the length of the wood used and the hand span of the intended player, but the finger holes are most often around a whole step apart and, at least in Northern California, a flute was not used if it turned out to have an interval close to a half step. Music from indigenous peoples of Central Mexico and Central America often was pentatonic. Before the arrival of the Spaniards it was inseparatable from religious festivities and included a large number of instruments such as drums, flutes, sea snails shells (used as a kind of trumpet), "rain" tubes, etc. No string instruments were used, though, only percussion and wind. Art of the indigenous peoples of the Americas comprises a major category in the world art collection. Contributions include pottery, paintings, jewelry, weavings, sculptures, basketry, and carvings.

Controversial terminology

:See discussion in Native American name controversy article. Generally, ethnic groups desire that others use the name they give themselves. This preference has gained importance recently as a means of avoiding ethnic discrimination. The principle applies poorly to larger, multi-ethnic groups since different sub-groups often have incompatible preferences. English, like other natural languages, has traditionally ignored this principle, exerting its privilege to invent its own ethnic terms, such as German, Dutch, and Albanian, and disregarding the self-appellations and preferences of the subjects. Not surprisingly, English names for the pre-Columbian Americans are largely assigned by tradition, and are not always accepted by the peoples themselves. English The terms Indian or American Indian are commonly thought to have been born of the misconception by Christopher Columbus that the Caribbean islands were the islands in Southeast Asia known to Europeans as the Indies. Despite Columbus's mistake, the name stuck, and for centuries the native people of the Americas were collectively called Indians. Another theory says the term came from Colombus observing their peaceful way of life. He referred to the natives as Indians, or In Dios, a people of God. Red Indian is a common British term, useful in differentiating this group from a distinct group of people referred to as East Indians, but considered offensive in North America, where it is rarely if ever used. In the French language, the term Amérindien has been coined, and the English term Amerindian (sometimes abbreviated Amerind) is sometimes used in the social sciences to refer collectively to all indigenous peoples of the Americas or their cultures.

Canada and the North

A more serious difficulty with this term is that several ethnic groups traditionally excluded from the American Indians were just as "native" to the Americas as them. These groups include the Inuit, Yupik, and Aleut peoples of the far north of the continent. Eskimos was once used for these groups, but this term is in disfavor because it is perceived by many of them as derogatory. In Canada the term First Nations has generally replaced the use of the word Indian, though the Canadian Indian Act which defines the rights of recognized First Nations, does refer to them as Indians. The term First Nations does not refer to the Inuit, Inuvialuit, or Métis. Collectively they and the First Nations are referred to as Aboriginals. In Alaska, the term Alaskan Native predominates, because of its legal use in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANSCA) and because it includes the Eskimo peoples.

Latin America

In Latin America, the preferred expression is Indigenous Peoples (pueblos indígenas in Spanish, povos indígenas in Portuguese). However, Indians (indios, índios) is often used too, even by indigenous peoples themselves.

External links

- [http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ch/dec/wmn_e.html Indigenous Women of the Americas]

North America

North America is a continent in the northern hemisphere bordered on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the east by the North Atlantic Ocean, on the south by the Caribbean Sea, and on the west by the North Pacific Ocean. It covers an area of 24,497,994 km² (9,458,728 sq mi), or about 4.8% of the Earth's surface. As of July 2002, its population was estimated at more than 514,600,000. It is the third largest continent in area, after Asia and Africa, and is fourth in population after Asia, Africa, and Europe. Both North and South America are named after Amerigo Vespucci, who was the first European to suggest that the Americas were not the East Indies, but a previously undiscovered (by Europeans) New World. North America occupies the northern portion of the landmass generally referred to as the New World, the Western Hemisphere, the Americas, or simply America. North America's only land connection is to South America at the narrow Isthmus of Panama. (For geopolitical reasons, all of Panama – including the segment east of the Panama Canal in the isthmus – is often considered a part of North America alone.) According to some authorities, North America begins not at the Isthmus of Panama but at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, with the intervening region called Central America and resting on the Caribbean Plate. Most, however, tend to see Central America as a region of North America, considering it too small to be a continent on its own. Greenland, although a part of North America geographically, is not considered to be part of the continent politically.

Physical features

Greenland, plutonic, metamorphic rock types of North America. ]] Plate tectonics recognizes the vast majority of North America as being the surface of the North American Plate. Parts of California and western Mexico are known for being the edge of the Pacific Plate, with the two plates meeting along the San Andreas fault. The continent can be divided into four great regions (each of which contains many sub-regions): the Great Plains stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian Arctic; the geologically young, mountainous west, including the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, California and Alaska; the raised but relatively flat plateau of the Canadian Shield in the northeast; and the varied eastern region, which includes the Appalachian Mountains, the coastal plain along the Atlantic seaboard, and the Florida peninsula. Mexico, with its long plateaus and cordilleras, falls largely in the western region, although the eastern coastal plain does extend south along the Gulf. The western mountains are split in the middle, into the main range of the Rockies and the coast ranges in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia with the Great Basin – a lower area containing smaller ranges and low-lying deserts – in between. The highest peak is Denali in Alaska. Since 1931, Rugby, North Dakota, has officially been recognized as being at the geographic center of North America. The location is marked by a 4.5 metre (15 foot) field stone obelisk. Image:North america terrain 2003 map.jpg|North America bedrock and terrain. Image:North america basement rocks.png|North American cratons and basement rocks. Image:North America Tectonic Elements.jpg|Tectonic elements of North America Image:North america craton nps.gif|North American craton.

Territories and regions

craton On the main continent landmass, there are three large and relatively populous countries:
- Canada - many large islands off the shore of North America belong to Canada, including Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands on the west, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Cape Breton Island on the east, and the Canadian Arctic islands (including Ellesmere Island, Baffin Island, and Victoria Island) in the north
- Mexico - the Revillagigedo archipelago and numerous smaller islands off its coast belong to Mexico
- The United States - the 48 contiguous states and Alaska are part of North America, while the state of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean is not; the Aleutian Islands south of Alaska also belong to the U.S. At the southern end of the continent, in a relatively small area known as Central America, are the countries of:
- Belize
- Costa Rica
- El Salvador
- Guatemala
- Honduras
- Nicaragua
- Panama ¹ At the southeastern end of the continent lies a chain of islands territories called the Antilles, the Caribbean or the West Indies, which include the countries:
- Antigua and Barbuda
- Bahamas
- Barbados
- Cuba
- Dominica
- Dominican Republic
- Grenada
- Haiti
- Jamaica
- Saint Kitts and Nevis
- Saint Lucia
- Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
- Trinidad and Tobago ¹ And the dependencies:
- Anguilla (British overseas territory)
- Aruba ² (part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands)
- Cayman Islands (British overseas territory)
- Guadeloupe (French région d'outre-mer)
- Martinique (French région d'outre-mer)
- Montserrat (British overseas territory)
- Navassa Island (U.S. territory)
- Netherlands Antilles ¹ (part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands)
- Puerto Rico (U.S. commonwealth)
- Turks and Caicos Islands (British overseas territory)
- British Virgin Islands (British overseas territory)
- U.S. Virgin Islands (territory of the USA) Lying in the Atlantic Ocean but considered part of the continent are the dependencies:
- Bermuda, a British overseas territory found about 1,072 km (670 mi.) southeast of New York City
- Greenland, the largest island in the world and a self-governing dependency of Denmark, which is located in the far north of the continent to the east of Nunavut.
- Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a French collectivité d'outre-mer off the south coast of Newfoundland, is the last of France's once vast possessions in America north of the Caribbean. ¹ These states and dependencies have territory both in North and South America.
² These dependencies lie in South America, but are considered North American because of cultural and historical reasons.
See here for details.

Usage

The United States, Canada, and the other English-speaking nations of the Americas (Belize, Guyana, and the Anglophone Caribbean) are sometimes grouped under the term Anglo-America, while the remaining nations of North and South America are grouped under the term Latin America. Alternatively, Northern America is used to refer to Canada and the U.S. together (plus Greenland and Bermuda), while Central America is mainland North America south of the United States. The West Indies generally include all islands in the Caribbean Sea. In this respect, Latin America generally includes Central America and South America and, sometimes, the West Indies. The term Middle America is sometimes used to refer to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean collectively. The term "North America" may mean different things to different people. The term in common usage is often taken to mean "the United States and Canada, only" by some people of the United States and Canada, excluding Mexico and the countries of Central America, unless the context makes it clear that they are to be included (such as with specific reference to Mexico, when talking about NAFTA). For example, guides to wild flora and fauna published by the National Audubon Society for "North America" frequently include only species found in Canada and the U.S. This may be attributed to the fact that culturally and economically, the U.S. and Canada are more alike to each other than they are to the rest of North America. Mexicans, however, are acutely aware that Mexico is a part of North America and object to this usage. Central Americans, however, are generally content to be called Central Americans – largely because of their shared history, which includes several attempts at supranational integration in the region and in which Mexico, their much larger northern neighbor, was never involved.

Political divisions and regions

Notes:
¹ Continental regions as per UN categorisations/map.
² Depending on definitions, Aruba, Netherlands Antilles, Panama, and Trinidad and Tobago have territory in one or both of North and South America.
³ Due to ongoing activity of the Soufriere Hills volcano beginning 1995, much of Plymouth, Montserrat's de jure capital, was destroyed and government offices relocated to Brades.

External links

- http://www.america-norte.com/america-norte-mapa.htm Category:Continents Category:North America zh-min-nan:Pak Bí-chiu ko:북아메리카 ja:北アメリカ simple:North America th:ทวีปอเมริกาเหนือ

9th millennium BC

(10th millennium BC – 9th millennium BC – 8th millennium BC – other millennia) :Beginning of the Neolithic time period of the Holocene epoch.

Events

- Circa 9000 BC– Mediterranean - Settling on Mediterranean isles started
- Circa 8700 BC–8400 BC– Britain - Star Carr site in Yorkshire, Britain inhabited by Maglemosian peoples
- Circa 8500 BC– Britain - Neolithic hunters camp at Cramond, Prehistoric Scotland
- Circa 8350 BC– Middle East - Neolithic settlement at Jericho
- Circa 8300 BC– Britain - Nomadic hunters arrive in England
- Circa 8000 BC– Norway - Øvre Eiker of Norway inhabited
- Circa 8000 BC– Africa - Earliest recorded African stone engravings, in the Apollo 1 cave.

Environmental changes

- Circa 8000 BC– World - Rising Sea
- Circa 8000 BC– Antarctica - long-term melting of the Antarctic ice sheets is commencing
- Circa 8000 BC– Asia - rising sea levels caused by postglacial warming
- Circa 8000 BC– World - Obliteration of more than 40 million animals about this time
- Circa 8000 BC– North America - The glaciers were receding and by 8,000 B.C. the Wisconsin had withdrawn completely.
- Circa 8000 BC– World - Inland flooding due to catastrophic glacier melt takes place in several regions

Inventions and discoveries

- Circa 8000 BC– Mesopotamia - Agriculture in Mesopotamia
- Circa 8000 BC– Asia - Domestication of the pig in China and Turkey
- Circa 8000 BC– Middle East - Domestication of sheep and goats
- Circa 8000 BC– Asia - Evidence of domestication of dogs from wolves
- Circa 8000 BC– World - Alleged transatlantic trade in tobacco between Africa and South America
- Circa 8000 BC– Middle East - Ancient flint tools from north and central Arabia belong to hunter-gatherer societies
- Circa 8000 BC– Middle East - Clay vessels and modeled human and animal terracotta figurines are produced at Ganj Dareh in western Iran
- Circa 8000 BC– Exchange of goods, a three-dimensional combination of an accounting/inventory system and medium of exchange
- Circa 8000 BC– Exchange of goods may represent the earliest pseudo-writing technology

Cultural landmarks

- World - Total world population may be under 10 million -1 ja:紀元前9千年紀

Colonial America

:For colonies not among the 13 colonies see European colonization of the Americas or British colonization of the Americas. Starting in the late 16th century, the English, the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch began to colonize eastern North America. The first attempts, notably the Colony of Jamestown, resulted in failure, but successful colonies were soon established. The colonists who came to the New World were by no means a homogeneous band, but rather a variety of different social and religious groups which settled in different locations on the seaboard. The Dutch of New Netherland, The Quakers of Pennsylvania, the Puritans of New England, the gold-hungry settlers of Jamestown, and the convicts of Georgia each came to the new continent for vastly different reasons, and they created colonies with very different social, religious, political, and economic structures. To summarize the areas of development in colonial America, historians typically recognize four regions in the lands that later became the eastern United States. Listed from north to south, they are: New England, the Middle Colonies, the Chesapeake Bay Colonies and the Southern Colonies. Some historians add a fifth region, the frontier, which had certain unifying features no matter what sort of colony it sprang from. By the late 18th century, these different colonies found themselves more closely united than ever before, at odds with the British government on issues of taxation and representation.

Motives for exploration and colonization

Europe

During the 15th and 16th centuries, Europe emerged from the Middle Ages and entered the Renaissance, a development that encouraged exploration and colonization in many ways. A revival in classical learning sparked an interest in geography and an intellectual curiosity about the world that had subsided during the Middle Ages. At the same time, the intellectual growth of the Renaissance led to the development of seafaring technologies needed to make long voyages acro