USA FOR BEGINNERS – a quick guide through history

Somewhere around 1500 a European wanted to find a west way to India. So after miles and miles of sailing he reached land. The man thought it was India and named the friendly inhabitants Indians. Many, many years later Bill Clinton named them Native Americans. The man that discovered America was Christopher Columbus.

The first people that arrived in America were the English, more exactly the Pilgrim Fathers. They left England because of political, religious and financial problems. Their first winter was hard and cold. The native Americans taught them how to grow plants and to survive in the wild. In the fall they celebrated their first successful harvest. This day is known as the Thanksgiving Day.

England took the migration as an advantage and taxed the food that was coming from England, because they still ruled them. But the Americans didn't like that so they resisted. They fought the war and won it. After the war George Washington and his co-workers signed the Declaration of Independence and designed a new flag called the Stars and Stripes.
 

From 1861 to 1865 there was a civil war in the USA between the northern and the southern states. The south needed a lot of workers to work on the cotton, sugar and tobacco farms. That's why all the traders went to Africa to capture Africans and forced them to work as slaves. The north didn't agree with that and a civil war broke out. The south lost the war and government stopped slavery, but not entirely.

Native Americans lived in America before the Europeans arrive. There were many battles between Native Americans and European settlers. The Sioux clan won the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 and kept their land. Many of them died in the battles. Today Native Americans live their traditional life in reservations.


In 1909 Henry Ford produced the first car, the model T Ford.

Americans were involved in both World Wars.

In 1963 Martin Luther King, the leader of black civil rights movement in the USA, gave his famous speech: I have a dream. He wanted the black and white people to be equal at school and work.

The cold war started between USA and Soviet Union. The struggle was called the Cold War because it did not actually lead to direct armed conflict between the superpowers. The Cold War was waged by means of economic pressure, selective aid, diplomatic maneuvering, propaganda, assassination, low-intensity military operations and full-scale proxy war from 1947 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Cold War saw the largest conventional and the first nuclear arms race in history.

In the 60s they fought in Vietnam that served them as a military testing site. The young people didn't agree with the government and started a Hippie movement. They wanted to stop the Vietnam war and equal rights for African-Americans. That came true.

The first people on the Moon were three American astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Ed Collin, they landed on the Moon in 1969.

Today America has one of the richest economy in the world. But sometimes their leaders do rubbish things that cause terrible consequences around the world.

Robert Rozina and Ana Splichal, 9.a