A n O u t l i n e o f A m e r i c a n H i s t o r y美国历史纲要 Document rial number【LGGKGB-LGG98YT-LGGT8CB-LGUT-
An Outline of American History
Chaper 1Early America
•The First Americans
退休党员•Beringia
•The First Europeans:
•The first Europeans to arrive in North America -- at least the first for whom there is solid evidence -- were Nor, traveling west from Greenland .
•In 1497, just five years after Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean looking for a western route to Asia, a Venetian sailor named John Cabot arrived in
Newfoundland on a mission for the British king. Although fairly quickly forgotten, Cabot's journey was later to provide the basis for British claims to North America.
I t also opened the way to the rich fishing grounds off George's Banks, to which
European fishermen, particularly the Portugue, were soon making regular visits. •Among the most significant early Spanish explorations was that of Hernando De Soto,
a veteran conquistador who had accompanied Francisco Pizzaro during the conquest of
Peru.
•While the Spanish were pushing up from the south, the northern portion of the prent-day United States was slowly being revealed through the journeys of men such as什么是教师
Giovanni da Verrazano. A Florentine who sailed for the French, Verrazano made
进口猫粮landfall in North Carolina in 1524, then sailed north along the Atlantic coast past what is now New York harbor.
• A decade later, the Frenchman Jacques Cartier t sail with the hope -- like the other Europeans before him -- of finding a a passage to Asia. Cartier's expeditions along the St. Lawrence River laid the foundations for the French claims to North America, which were to last until 1763.
•Following the collap of their first Quebec colony in the 1540s, French Huguenots attempted to ttle the northern coast of Florida two decades later. The Spanish,
viewing the French as a threat to their trade route along the Gulf Stream, destroyed the colony in 1565. Ironically, the leader of the Spanish forces, Pedro Menendez, would soon establish a town not far away -- St. Augustine. It was the first permanent
European ttlement in what would become the United States.
•In 1578 Humphrey Gilbert, the author of a treati on the arch for the Northwest Passage, received a patent from Queen Elizabeth to colonize the "heathen and
barbarous landes" in the New World which other European nations had not yet claimed.
It would be five years before his efforts could begin. When he was lost at a, his half-brother, Walter Raleigh, took up the mission.
•I n 1585 Raleigh established the first British colony in North Amer ica, on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina. It was later abandoned, and a cond effort two years later also proved a failure. It would be 20 years before the British would try again. This time -- at Jamestown in 1607 -- t
he colony would succeed, and North
America would enter a new era.
•Most European emigrants left their homelands to escape political oppression, to ek the freedom to practice their religion, or for adventure and opportunities denied them at home. Between 1620 and 1635, economic difficulties swept England. Many people
could not find work. Even skilled artisans could earn little more than a bare living. Poor crop yields added to the distress. In addition, the Industrial Revolution had created a burgeoning textile industry, which demanded an ever-increasing supply of wool to keep the looms running.
•Landlords enclod farmlands and evicted the peasants in favor of sheep cultivation.
Colonial expansion became an outlet for this displaced peasant population.
•Majestic rivers -- the Kennebec, Hudson, Delaware, Susquehanna, Potomac and numerous others -- linked lands between the coast and the Appalachian Mountains with the a.
•Only one river, however, the St. Lawrence -- dominated by the French in Canada -- offered a water
passage to the Great Lakes and into the heart of the continent. Den forests, the resistance of some Indian tribes and the formidable barrier of the
Appalachian Mountains discouraged ttlement beyond the coastal plain. Only trappers and traders ventured into the wilderness. For the first hundred years the colonists built their ttlements compactly along the coast.
•Political considerations influenced many people to move to America. In the 1630s, arbitrary rule by England's Charles I gave impetus to the migration to the New World.
The subquent revolt and triumph of Charles' opponents under Oliver Cromwell in the 1640s led many cavaliers -- "king's men" -- to cast their lot in Virginia.
•In the German-speaking regions of Europe, the oppressive policies of various petty princes -- particularly with regard to religion -- and the devastation caud by a long ries of wars helped swell the movement to America in the late 17th and 18th centuries. •In contrast to the colonization policies of other countries and other periods, the emigration from England was not directly sponsored by the government but by private groups of individuals who chief motive was profit.
•Jamestown:The first of the British colonies to take hold in North America was Jamestown.
•It was not long, however, before a development occurred that revolutionized Virginia's economy. In 1612 John Rolfe began cross-breeding imported tobacco ed from the West Indies with native plants and produced a new variety that was pleasing to
European taste. The first shipment of this tobacco reached London in 1614. Within a decade it had become Virginia's chief source of revenue.
•MASSACHUSETTS
•During the religious upheavals of the 16th century, a body of men and women called Puritans sought to reform the Established Church of England from within. Esntially, they demanded that the rituals and structures associated with Roman Catholicism be replaced by simpler Protestant forms of faith and worship. Their reformist ideas, by destroying the unity of the state church, threatened to divide the people and to
undermine royal authority.
•In 1620, a group of Leyden Puritans cured a land patent from the Virginia Company, and a group of 101 men, women and children t out for Virginia on board the
大熊猫的生活习惯Mayflower. A storm nt them far north and they landed in New England on Cape Cod.
Believing themlves outside the jurisdiction of any organized government, the men drafted a formal agreement to abide by "just and equal laws" drafted by leaders of their own choosing. This was the Mayflower Compact.
•In December the Mayflower reached Plymouth harbor; the Pilgrims began to build their ttlement during the winter. Nearly half the colonists died of exposure and dia, but neighboring Wampanoag Indians provided information that would sustain them: how to grow maize. By the next fall, the Pilgrims had a plentiful crop of corn, and a growing
trade bad on furs and lumber.
•Massachutts Bay was not the only colony driven by religious motives. I n 1681 William Penn, a wealthy Quaker and friend of Charles II, received a large tract of land west of the Delaware River, which became known as Pennsylvania. To help
populate it, Penn actively recruited a host of religious disnters from England and the continent -- Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, Moravians and Baptists.
•When Penn arrived the following year, there were already Dutch, Swedish and English ttlers living along the Delaware River. It was there he founded Philadelphia, the "City of Brotherly Love."
•Georgia was ttled in 1732, the last of the 13 colonies to be established. CHAPTER 2: The Colonial Period
•NEW ENGLAND儿童房子简笔画
•New England shippers soon discovered, too, that rum and slaves were profitable commodities. One of the most enterprising -- if unsavory -- trading practices of the time was the so-called "triangular trade." Merchants and shippers would purcha slaves off the coast of Africa for New England rum, then ll the slaves in the West Indies where they would buy molass to bring home for sale to the local rum producers.
•THE MIDDLE COLONIES
•THE SOUTHERN COLONIES
•THE SOUTHERN COLONIES
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•SOCIETY, SCHOOLS AND CULTURE
•Of equal significance for the future were the foundations of American education and culture established during the colonial period. Harvard College was founded in 1636 in Cambridge, Massachutts.
• A few years later, the Collegiate School of Connecticut, later to become Yale College, was chartered.
•The first immigrants in New England brought their own little libraries and continued to import books from London. And as early as the 1680s, Boston bookllers were doing a thriving business in works of classical literature, history, politics, philosophy, science, theology and belles-lettres. In 1639 the first printing press in the English colonies
and the cond in North America was installed at Harvard College.
•I n 1704 Cambridge, Massachutts, launched the colonies' first successful newspaper.By 1745 there were 22 newspapers being published throughout the
colonies
•EMERGENCE OF COLONIAL GOVERNMENT
•In all phas of colonial development, a striking feature was the lack of controlling influence by the English government. All colonies except Georgia emerged as
companies of shareholders, or as feudal proprietorships stemming from charters granted by the Crown.
•For their part, the colonies had never thought of themlves as subrvient.
•The colonists -- inheritors of the traditions of the Englishman's long struggle for political liberty -- incorporated concepts of freedom into Virginia's first charter . It
provided that English colonists were to exerci all liberties, franchis and immunities •it was generally accepted that the colonists had a right to participate in their own government.
• in the mid-17th century, the English were too distracted by the Civil War (1642-1649) and Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Commonwealth and Protectorate to pursue an effective colonial policy.
•The remoteness afforded by a vast ocean also made control of the colonies difficult.
•Added to this was the character of life itlf in early America. On such a continent, natural conditions promoted a tough individualism, as people became ud to making
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their own decisions.
•Equally important, John Locke's Second Treati on Government (1690) t forth a theory of government bad not on divine right but on contract, and contended that the people, endowed with natural rights of life, liberty and property, had the right to rebel
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when governments violated the natural rights.
THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR
•France and Britain engaged in a succession of wars in Europe and the Caribbean at veral intervals in the 18th century. Though Britain cured certain advantages from
them -- primarily in the sugar-rich islands of the Caribbean -- the struggles were
generally indecisive, and France remained in a powerful position in North America at the beginning of the Seven Years War in 1754.
•By that time France had established a strong relationship with a number of Indian tribes in Canada and along the Great Lakes, taken posssion of the Mississippi River and, by establishing a line of f
orts and trading posts, marked out a great crescent-shaped empire stretching from Quebec to New Orleans. Thus, the British were confined to the narrow belt east of the Appalachian Mountains.
•The French threatened not only the British Empire but the American colonists themlves, for in holding the Mississippi Valley, France could limit their westward
expansion.
•An armed clash took place in 1754 at Fort Duquesne, the site where Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is now located, between a band of French regulars and Virginia
militiamen under the command of 22-year-old George Washington, a Virginia planter
and surveyor.
•England's superior strategic position and her competent leadership ultimately brought victory in the Seven Years' War .
•In the Peace of Paris, signed in 1763, France relinquished all of Canada, the Great Lakes and the upper Mississippi Valley to the British. The dream of a French
empire in North America was over.
•Having triumphed over France, Britain was now compelled to face a problem that it had hitherto neglected -- the governance of its empire. It was esntial that London organize its now vast posssions to facilitate defen, reconcile the divergent interests of
different areas and peoples, and distribute more evenly the cost of imperial
administration.
CHAPTER 3: The Road to Independence
