A Political Chronology of the Americas

Europa Publications

• Publisher: Routledge
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135356521
• Year: 2003

Charts the major events and memorable dates in the political histories of the countries of the region. * Alphabetically listed individual country chapters * Chronologically lists the major events of each country * Covers the economic, social and cultural developments that have affected the political history of each country

United States of America

c. 30,000 BC: During the late Pleistocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period, the last Ice Age exposed a land bridge, subsequently submerged beneath the Bering Sea, across which Asian peoples migrated from the north-eastern part of what is now Siberia to what is now Alaska. They gradually spread throughout the Americas and were the first known inhabitants of the continent. Sparse archaeological evidence indicates that these peoples were probably nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived in groups of about 100 individuals, used stone tools and tanned reindeer or caribou skins.

11,000–8500 BC: Archaeological discoveries near the modern town of Clovis, in eastern New Mexico, reveal that a civilization there used spear points and stone blades of a style not found in other regions of the world.

8000 BC: By this time, climate change had caused polar ice to melt and raise the sea-level above the Bering Sea land-bridge, ending overland migration into the Americas from Asia.

6000 BC–5000 BC: Archaeological evidence suggests the presence of distinct cultures in areas now in California and Texas during this period.

2000 BC: Finds in Georgia and Florida indicate that indigenous Americans of the Southeast made pottery by this time.

1000 BC: The so-called ‘Mound Builders’ flourished in the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers; they were the ancestors of the people living in this area more than 2,000 years later when the first Europeans arrived there. The earliest mounds, known as midden mounds, were filled with domestic refuse, suggesting that by this time the people who built them lived in permanent villages and practised settled agriculture, cultivating crops including maize and beans.

200 BC–AD 300: Mound City flourished in the south of the modern state of Ohio; archaeological evidence suggests that the various indigenous groups of the region had interacted with each other, exchanged technologies and traded extensively by this time.

c. 700: The Hohokam migrated north from modern Mexico into the south-western area of the USA. They developed the technology of irrigation, harnessing water from the Salt and Gila Rivers to grow maize, beans, marrows and avocados.

c. 1025: The Navajo migrated southward into what would become Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.

1050–1250: The Pueblo built cities of interconnected terraces on cliff-faces in central Arizona; 22 such cities survive.

1100–1300: The mound-building tradition, shared by large numbers of tribes and tribal groupings, reached its zenith at this time.

1490: When the Europeans began to arrive in North America, the population of the area now comprising the USA was about 6m. people. They comprised Eastern Woodland peoples, who inhabited the north-eastern quarter of the future USA, farmed maize and beans, and comprised 35 tribes including the Iroquois Confederacy of New York, the Winnebago of Wisconsin, and the Peoria and Illinwa of Illinois; the Southeast peoples, who lived in an area extending from eastern Texas to Maryland to the southern tip of Florida, traded extensively, developed large towns, grew maize and comprised 48 tribes, the best known of which were the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Creek and the Seminole, whom the Europeans dubbed the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’; the Great Plains peoples, who inhabited the prairies from Texas to the Dakotas, were nomadic and comprised 27 tribes including the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Sioux and the Comanche; the Southwest peoples, who lived in and around Arizona and New Mexico, farmed maize and other crops by means of irrigation, built adobe cliff dwellings and cities and comprised 27 tribes including the Navajo and the Hopi; the Plateau peoples, comprising 22 tribes in and around inland Washington, Oregon and Idaho; the North-West Pacific Coast peoples, 6 tribes, including the Chinook, who inhabited a thin strip all along the Pacific coast of Washington and Oregon; and the California Intermountain peoples, 47 tribes who lived primarily in California and Nevada.

12 October 1492: The Genovese Italian navigator Cristoforo Colombo (known in English as Christopher Columbus), sailing in the service of the Spanish joint monarchs King Fernando of Aragon and Queen Isabel of Castile, landed on an island now considered to be Guanahaní (Samana Cay), in the Bahamas group. Columbus erroneously believed that he had arrived at an island near India, his destination. For this reason, he called the local people of this island ‘Indians’; this name for indigenous Americans was retained after the discovery that this was a new continent. Columbus was not the first European to visit the New World (Leif Ericsson had founded a temporary settlement on Newfoundland in Canada in 1000), nor did Columbus realize at the time that he had discovered a new continent. Nevertheless, it is his voyage credited with establishing the American continent as a destination for European explorers and colonists.

19 November 1493: During his second voyage of discovery, Columbus landed on the island of Boriquen, now known as Puerto Rico and an ‘autonomous commonwealth’ of the USA. Columbus named the island San Juan de Bautista, which persists in the name of Puerto Rico’s capital city, San Juan.

1497–98: The Venetian Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, sailing under the name John Cabot in the service of King Henry VII of England, explored along North America’s east coast between Labrador, in what is now Canada, and Chesapeake Bay, in what would become the states of Virginia and Maryland. Cabot may have been the first European to visit the future USA.

1497–98: The Florentine Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci, by now a resident in the Spanish city of Seville, stated that during a first voyage he had made at this time, he had become the first European to reach the North American mainland. Despite doubts about the validity of his claim, the continent was subsequently known by Latinized form of his forename.

2 April 1513: Juan Ponce de León, searching for the legendary ‘Fountain of Youth’ about which he had heard the native Borinqueno people of Puerto Rico speak, landed on the North American mainland, naming the area ‘Florida’, meaning ‘flowery’.

1521: Ponce de León led some 200 mainly Spanish settlers in an unsuccessful attempt to found a colony on the west coast of Florida. Native American resistance was strong, and Ponce de León himself was fatally wounded. The party retreated to Cuba, where he died shortly after arriving.

1524: The Florentine Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazano, sailing in the service of King François I of France, became the first European of record to visit the settlement which eventually developed into New York City.

1526: Spanish settlers made an unsuccessful attempt to found a colony in future South Carolina, at a site on the estuary of the Pee Dee River.

28 September 1542: The Portuguese explorer and soldier Juan Rodríquez Cabrillo sailed into San Diego Bay, believed to be the first instance of European landing on North America from the Pacific.

c. 1550: Five Eastern Woodland tribes of what is now the northern part of New York state—the Cayuga, the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga and the Seneca—formed a confederacy called the Five Nations of Iroquois. They traded among themselves and with others using wampum (shell currency) and grew maize, beans, pumpkins and tobacco, not only for subsistence but as cash crops. The tribes’ matrilinear system vested power in councils rather than in ‘chiefs’, a term applied by Europeans seeking a focal point for their dealings with the tribes. The Five Nations proved themselves to be astute at dealing with the new demands placed upon them by the arrival of the Europeans; maintaining their independence amid the rival British and French territorial ambitions.

1562: French Protestants, known as Huguenots, attempted to found a colony on Parris Island, in future South Carolina, fleeing persecution in Roman Catholic France, but were unable to remain. Another Huguenot group established a colony in Florida in 1564.

1565: The Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilés led a party of Spanish Roman Catholics who founded the first permanent European settlement on the mainland of the future USA, at St Augustine, in north-eastern Florida. He also massacred all the settlers of the nearby French Huguenot colony of Fort Caroline.

1566: The Spanish built a fort on Parris Island; this, too, would be temporary.

1579: The English navigator and soldier Sir Francis Drake sailed up the west coast of the Americas as far north as Vancouver Island. He and his party were the first Europeans known to have seen the west coast of the Americas north of San Diego Bay. He gave this coast of America the name New Albion.

1580–1606: Chief Wahunsonacoh, better known as Powhatan, the name of the tribe of whom he was chief, formed the Powhatan Confederacy, grouping 32 Algonquin-speaking Eastern Woodland tribes on and near the...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Antigua and Barbuda
• Argentina
• Bahamas
• Barbados
• Belize
• Bolivia
• Brazil
• Canada
• Chile
• Colombia
• Costa Rica
• Cuba
• Dominica
• The Dominican Republic
• Ecuador
• El Salvador
• Grenada
• Guatemala
• Guyana
• Haiti
• Honduras
• Jamaica
• Mexico
• Nicaragua
• Panama
• Paraguay
• Peru
• Saint Christopher and Nevis
• Saint Lucia
• Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
• Suriname
• Trinidad and Tobago
• United States of America
• Uruguay
• Venezuela