Summary of United States History–In 5 Paragraphs…
American history in the smallest of nutshells…
The Colonial Era, Independence and Constitution, 1550-1789
After exploring North America, the Spanish, French and English engaged in a establishing colonies. Following the establishment, in a haphazard way, of ultimately thirteen unique colonies along the East Coast, the English emerged as triumphant over the French and their Indian allies in North America. Despite English origins, the colonies were remarkably diverse in their ethnic, religious, and even racial diversity. The one notion to which nearly every American colonist adhered was the concept that all of them deserved equal protections as those afforded to Britons back home. A dispute over American rights and privileges, as well as obdurate British mercantilism, led to a colonial insurrection, then independence. Interstate squabbles and intrastate debt led many to conclude that the Articles of Confederation provided an inadequate system for governing over the newly minted states.
Watershed Moment: the Boston Tea Party
Symbol: Land and Opportunity in New World
The Federal, Antebellum Period, National Power vs. States’ Rights, 1789-1865
The new Constitution, though it contained a supremacy clause, also spoke of state sovereignty. Indeed, the concept of federalism is at its core. This fragile balance left room for battle between the national government and the states. The issues of centralized banking, tariffs, slavery, and the power of the judiciary exacerbated the increasingly regional dispute and political divide. When nullification advanced to secession, a civil war ensued and the overarching issue appeared to be resolved–national power vanquished states’ rights. Officially tolerated slavery ended and the tariff would remain high for the industrial decades that followed.
Watershed Moment: Fort Sumter
Symbol: The Constitution
Reconstruction, Industrialization, and Depression, 1865-1939
The nation recovered from the cataclysm of the Civil War as the federal government imposed Reconstruction upon a defeated South. A second industrial revolution created an even greater demand for labor than that which existed in decades prior. Industrialization led to rapid urbanization, concerns about city life, and the rise of a labor movement that appeared to mitigate the gains of unleashed capitalism in the Gilded Age. White American settlement of the West continued and the frontier dissolved. While populists and progressives coalesced to solve the socio-economic problems of the era, government-led reforms were restricted by Constitutional restraints and periods of immense prosperity. Statists did have significant success at highlighting poor working conditions and associated urban blight so as to expand the scope, authority and expense of government. Grandiose plans to engage with and reshape the world along American lines moved the United States to participate–albeit late in the contest/catastrophe–in World War I. Post-war boom ended in bust. The regulated, Keynesian quasi-capitalism of Hoover and Roosevelt failed to resolve the economic tragedy of the Great Depression, and New Deal programs actually worsened the crisis.
Watershed: Great Depression
Symbol: Prohibition
World War II and the Cold War, 1939-1990
Isolationism gave way to a new activism on the part of the United States in foreign affairs–indeed, the rise of totalitarian regimes throughout the globe seemed to necessitate such a move. From Pearl Harbor to the “Iron Curtain”, the United States joined in foreign alliances to defeat first totalitarianism and fascism, and then communism. Success in this regard was very limited as post-war treaties left a large portion of the world including all of eastern Europe within a decidedly Soviet sphere. The omnipresence of an existential enemy was used as justification for the creation and eternal continuance of the warfare/welfare state. NATO replaced the Allies as the international organization through which Western nations, led by the United States, attempted to order the globe. Massive arsenals were constructed on both sides of the curtain, such arsenals were often deployed in inconclusive proxy wars, and the world remained divided until the disintegration of the Soviet sphere and then the Soviet Union itself.
Watershed: Korea/Vietnam
Symbol: Sputnik/the Berlin Wall
Globalization, 1991-present
Globalization is the international system that increasingly binds together the 200-plus countries and territories on Earth. Western Europe and the United States have embraced a post-modernism that dismisses any claims of the exceptional nature of the West. Keys to globalization involve the Internet and mass availability of cell phones and personal computers. No longer do nation-states alone move world events; indeed, small groups and even individuals can alter history in quick and dramatic fashions. Wars have become prohibitively expensive, and after constant refusal to alter entitlement programs (and refusal to even curtail the creation of new ones without adequate funding), the United States has amassed enormous deficits which threaten the future of the American experiment, all the while, successive administrations and Congresses recoil at the notion of rolling back exhausting global ambitions.
Watershed: 9/11
Symbol: the Internet
