1. Five hundred years later, in late 15th century Christopher Columbus, a
mariner from Italy, mistakenly believed that he could reach the Far East by
sailing 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) west from Europe.
In 1492 he persuaded the King and Queen of Spain to finance such a
voyage.
Columbus sailed west, but he didn’t reach Asia. Instead he landed on one
of the Bahamas Islands in the Caribbean Sea.
2. Columbus returned home with gold, and
within 40 years treasury-hungry Spanish
adventurers conquered a huge empire in South
and Central America.
The Spanish also established some of the
earliest settlements in North America– St.
Augustine in Florida (1565), Santa Fe in New
Mexico (1609) and San Diego in California
(1769)
When Columbus and later Spanish
explorers returned to Europe with stories of
gold in the Americas, each European
sovereign wanted to claim as much territory
as possible in the New World along with its
wealth. Spanish priests also wanted to convert
the inhabitants of the Americas to Christianity.
3. The first successful English colony in the
Americas was founded at Jamestown, Virginia, in
1607.The Virginias discovered a way to earn
money by growing tobacco, which they began
shipping to England in 1614.
4. In New England (the north-eastern
region of what is now the United States), several
settlements were established by English
Puritans.
One group of Puritans, called the
“Pilgrims”, crossed the Atlantic in the ship May
Flower and settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts
in 1620.A much larger Puritan colony was
established in the Boston area in 1630.The
Puritans hoped to build “a city upon a hill” – an
ideal community.
The colonies of Maryland, settled in
1634 as a refuge for Roman Catholics,
Pennsylvania founded in 1681 by the Quaker
leader William Penn, were also characterized by
religious toleration.
5. Over time, the British colonies in North America were also occupied by
many non-British national groups. German farmers settled in Pennsylvania,
Swedes founded the colony of Delaware, and African slaves first arrived in
Virginia in 1619. In 1626 Dutch settlers bought Manhattan Islands from local
Native Americans or “Indian” chiefs and built the town of New Amsterdam;
in 1664 the settlement was captured by the English and renamed New York.
6. By 1770 several small but growing urban
centres had emerged, each had newspapers,
shops, merchants and craftsmen.
Philadelphia, with 28,000 inhabitants,
was the largest city, followed by New York,
Boston and Charleston, South Carolina.
Unlike most other nations, the United
States never had a feudal aristocracy.
There was a lot of land and very little
labour force in colonial America, and every
free man had an opportunity to achieve
economic independence and prosperity.
