History is often seen, and taught, as a series of sequential moments that represent an illustrative, if not comprehensive, portrait of the important events that occurred in the past. This approach undoubtedly possesses some benefits, as attempting to teach everything that happened in history would take as long as that history itself. However, oftentimes this chronological method leaves out many examples of things that do not fit the pre-determined criteria for inclusion on a given historical timeline. In other words, students and the general public may be unaware of many interesting, meaningful, or simply surprising stories from history. This article follows the periodization that Chinese and American students alike are most likely to be familiar with, that of the standard AP US History course, and introduces lesser-known historical events that display America’s history as an international country of diverse people and ideas united under overarching, though often contentious, principals.
The Columbian Exchange (1492-1607) – Contested Discoveries and Ancient Exchanges
When discussing the Columbian exchange, history books will usually focus on how the flow of people, plants, animals, and microbes between the New World and the Old World forever changed the social and physical landscapes of both hemispheres. The simplistic version of this exchange begins in 1492 when Christopher Columbus sailed to the American continent. Most modern scholars, teachers, and students will quickly point out that this was not in fact a “discovery” – millions of Native Americans had lived on these lands for at least 15,000 years before Columbus’s arrival. But even if we are to talk about the first exchange of people or products, other events seem to indicate that the separation between these regions was not as absolute as most people might generally think.
Beginning in the late 8th century, the Viking Expansion saw settlers from Scandinavia move into new lands in the north Atlantic, including Iceland and Greenland. The Vikings did not halt their expansions in these locations, however, but continued onward to settle some lands in North America as well. The 13th century tales The Saga of the Greenlanders and Erik the Red’s Saga both mentioned settlement in an area called Vinland, which was located west of Greenland. Despite this textual evidence, it was not until the 1960s that archaeologists unearthed physical evidence of Viking settlement in what is now Newfoundland, Canada. The settlement only lasted a short time—about forty years from 980-1020—which, tragically, mirrors the pattern of Viking settlement in Greenland, whose inhabitants also all either fled or died, leaving no permanent colony.
The Vikings who settled in North America likely engaged in some form of interactions with the indigenous population of the area. Whether these interactions were peaceful or aggressive is impossible to know, for there does not at present seem to be any evidence one way or another. Evidence of (likely) peaceful and lasting interaction, however, seems to suggest an even earlier moment of exchange between people and cultures from the Old and New Worlds.
Perhaps the greatest maritime expansion in human history was that of the Polynesians across the Pacific Ocean. Navigating thousands of miles of open ocean using no technology beyond an understanding of the stars, the Polynesians populated the most remote spaces on earth. More than 1,000 years ago, it seems that the Polynesians also reached the coasts of South America. The evidence for this moment being the true start of an exchange between the two hemispheres is quite convincing. Not only did the Polynesians return to their Pacific island homes with sweet potatoes, they also adopted the Incan word for the vegetable, which is still used today. Modern DNA testing on Pacific sweet potatoes seems to confirm that these crops indeed originated in South America. Moreover, Polynesian seafarers apparently introduced quintessential Old World livestock to the Incans – chickens, which the conquistador Pizaro noted were present in the years before the arrival of Europeans.
The Colonial Period (1607-1776) – European Proxy Conflicts
Although separated from Europe by thousands of miles, America represented great promise to European powers for both commercial and territorial gains. In the years before strict national boundaries began to form, the political landscape of what is now America and Canada was an ever-shifting tapestry of different nationalities and religious denominations contending for a foothold in a hostile land. Much of this hostility came not necessarily from conflicts with Natives, but from conflict with other Europeans. The most well-known struggle between European powers is the misleadingly-named French and Indian War, which saw Britain and France, as well as their American Indian allies, fighting for control of territory in North America. Other instances of warfare between European nations, however, also helped to shape the demographic and political face of what would eventually come to be the United States of America.
Although most people remember Britain, France, and to a lesser extent Spain, as the dominant powers in the Americas, other European nations attempted to exert control over the area as well. Perhaps the most surprising European country to establish a presence in North America was Sweden. In the 17th century Sweden was a rising world power and had acquired not only prestige but also massive territorial gains through its success in the Thirty Years’ War. Seeking to capitalize its newfound power and position, Sweden sought to expand its presence in the New World along the lines of the other great European empires. The kingdom officially established the colony of New Sweden in 1638 in the area that now comprises parts of Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. As Sweden’s power fell in Europe, however, its rivals soon lay claim to this territory.
Following Sweden’s defeat in the Second Northern War, the Dutch seized the land and expanded their own colony of New Netherland, which also included the island of Manhattan. Sweden would not feature prominently in the demography of America again for more than 200 years until a massive flux of immigration to the midwestern states, such as Minnesota, began in the late 19th century. A similar fate befell the Dutch however, who likewise lost control of their New World holdings at the end of the Third Anglo-Dutch War in 1675. This event saw the colonial capital, New Amsterdam, renamed to its more familiar moniker, New York.
A model of Fort Christina, the first Swedish settlement in the Americas
Revolutionary Period (1776-1789) – Diverse Origins of American Democracy
Although the Constitution and the American Revolution of 1776 are the birth of democracy in the Americas, the exact political and philosophical origins of this event are less straight forward than one might think. Three of the Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, wrote the Federalist Papers in support of American democracy. In their writings, these authors borrow heavily from European examples including the Italian city-states, the English and Dutch Republics, and polities as far back as the Roman Republic and ancient Athens. Earlier experiments with egalitarian rule on the American continent, such as the first democratically elected legislative body in the colonies, the House of Burgesses at Jamestown, also featured as examples in these essays. However, one important source of inspiration is often absent from discussion of the origins of American democracy: the role of indigenous democracy among Native Americans.
By the time of the arrival of the earliest Europeans in North America, one of the largest American Indian groups, the Iroquois Confederacy, had already existed for several hundred years. This confederacy, which began in the 12th century, is in fact the oldest living democracy on earth. The main figure in the story of the Iroquois Confederacy is a man named Hiawatha, who was known among his tribe, the Mohawk, as a skilled orator and advocate for peace. He became the representative of a spiritual leader named The Great Peacemaker, who also supported peace among different groups, but who had a speech impediment that initially limited his influence.
Hiawatha and the Great Peacemaker successfully united several groups into their confederacy. The final group to join was led by a man named Tadodaho, who was a fierce warrior who was opposed to peace (he had even previously killed Hiawatha’s wife and daughters). Eventually, however, the five tribes were united in a system that exhibits many of the same features established in the Constitution, including: a process of removing leaders, two branches of legislature for the passage of new laws, a clear prescription for who has the power to declare war, and outlining a balance of power between the federal government and its component political entities. To this day, the leader of the Iroquois nation is known as the Tadodaho.
Interactions with the Iroquois helped to inspire the Founding Fathers as they pondered the form of governance that they hoped to create in America. In 1744, the Iroquois leader Canassantego gave a speech urging the thirteen colonies to unite. In his speech, which Benjamin Franklin reprinted so that colonial Americans might also hear his words, he used a metaphor of many arrows being much more difficult to break than a single arrow. This metaphor is represented in part of the iconography of the Great Seal of the United States. In 1988, the US Senate acknowledged the role of the Iroquois Confederacy in helping to inspire American democracy with a resolution that states “The confederation of the original 13 colonies into one republic was influenced by the political system developed by the Iroquois Confederacy, as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the constitution itself.”
The Era of Jeffersonian & Jacksonian Democracy (1800-1848) – Global Cases in Democracy
The first half of the 19th century was a period of great change in the area of not only American politics but also public opinion towards many social issues. Not only did new and old political parties alike rise and fall, but the definitions of freedom and democracy began to expand to include more than just white land-owning males. Although the legal system of the United States was extremely slow in acknowledging the rights of non-whites, one important instance in the pre-Civil War era highlights the incremental gains that have been made throughout the country’s history, as well as the kind of contentious debates that existed at that time.
By 1808 America had outlawed the trade of new slaves from Africa. Despite this, slavery was still an entrenched institution in the southern states, and the import of slaves from existing populations in other areas of the Americas was still common. In 1839, Spanish plantation owners bought 53 slaves from Cuba, who had been illegally trafficked there after being abducted from Africa and labeled as Cuban slaves to avoid the law. Several days into the journey back to the plantations, a slave known as Joseph Cinque managed to free himself and several other captives. Armed with knives, the captives killed most of the sailors and took control of the ship, the Amistad. They ordered the remaining sailors to return them to Africa, but the sailors tried to avoid this by sailing east during the day, when the Africans were awake, but reversing course west during the night. After 63 days, American customs agents detained the ship off the coast of Long Island, New York.
Once in America, the debate over the fate of those aboard the Amistad became a highly political national discussion. American judges needed to determine if the African occupants were lawfully free or the property of the Spanish plantation owners and, moreover, if they should be tried for piracy and murder given their role in seizing the ship. The case became an issue not only domestically, as it split opinions between those who supported and opposed the slave trade, but also internationally as Spain urged president Martin Van Buren to return the Africans to Spain without trial. Abolitionist groups were the biggest defenders of Cinque and his compatriots. Prominent figures, including a Yale professor and former president John Quincy Adams, who acted as their defense lawyer, supported the men and women all the way to the Supreme Court. Eventually, the court ruled that the Africans were not property but free persons. While this case did not end slavery in America, it helped to greatly change the perceptions that many Americans had towards slavery as a practice, as well as the rights owed to non-whites under the principals of American democracy.
An artistic depiction of the Amistad rebellion as it appeared in American newspapers
The Civil Strife Era (1850-1877) – Local Violence, Global Consideration
The Civil War is the deadliest conflict in American history; more Americans died in this war than in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. In the south, approximately 20% of all men of fighting age perished. Despite the fighting taking place exclusively on American soil, the Civil War attracted international attention from individuals and governments alike, and at times threatened to erupt into a full-fledged world war. Most European governments, such as Britain, France, and Spain, tended to favor recognition of the Confederate States of America for various reasons.
Britain hoped to establish peace between the two belligerents and thereby secure its cotton imports, which derived from southern plantations. The French empire under Napoleon III took advantage of the internal strife in America to launch a war against Mexico, also known as the Second Franco-Mexican War. Spain, likewise, used the inability of America to prevent European powers from involving themselves in territories of the Americas, a principle of America’s Monroe Doctrine, to recolonize areas that they had lost to rebellion in the Caribbean. A key international ally of the union, however, was Russia, who threatened to launch a war against France should the empire declare war on the United States, as it had several times indicated it intended to do.
In the end, it was as much skilled diplomacy as it was new technologies, such as modern battleships, that helped the Union prevail over the Confederacy. Compared to the sophisticated and experienced statesmen of the Union, the Confederacy cycled through several inept and inexperienced politicians, including three different Secretaries of State in its first thirteen months of existence. Moreover, Confederate president Jefferson Davis took for granted that European powers would be necessarily inclined to recognize and support the independence of the Confederacy due to a reliance on its agricultural exports. This meant that he did not devote as much effort towards cultivating positive diplomatic relationships as was ultimately necessary.
One final example of international involvement in the American Civil War is the fact that one out of every four regiments in the Union army contained a majority of immigrant soldiers. These immigrants came from countries whose governments were sometimes in support of the Confederacy, such as England and France, as well as other nations such as Germany, Poland, and Italy. These soldiers, along with a large number of former slaves and other African-American recruits, bolstered the Union army’s strength. In comparison, the Confederacy recruited very few non-Americans to their cause and resisted arming non-whites until the final month of the war.
English soldiers in the Union Army
The Gilded Age (1877-1900) – To Read or not to Read
Following the tumultuous years of the Civil War and Reconstruction, American society underwent more peaceful, though no less dramatic, changes. History books discuss the Gilded Age as a period of rapid urbanization and industrialization for the nation. Moreover, it was a period that saw the striking juxtaposition between a small section of wealthy elites, including the wealthiest Americans to ever live, and the largely poor and overworked masses that helped to build the structural and economic transformations that took place across the country. Amidst the growth of inequality, child labor, and racial discrimination, one positive growth during this time was the rise of education in American society.
Prior to the Gilded Age, schools were a relatively rare institution in America. What schools did exist were typically either affiliated with the church or established for the exclusive use of the rich. By the start of the Civil War, the number of public schools numbered only a few hundred, whereas by 1900 over 6,000 high schools existed across the country. The number of teacher-training schools (normal schools) also increased from around a dozen at the start of the Civil War to over 300 by the end of the Gilded Age. By this point America’s illiteracy rate dropped to the lowest it had ever been, around 10%.
Attitudes towards the structure of the school year also changed during this time. In the 1840s, most American students spent between 250-260 days in school each year, and as late as 1890, most students were in school for 11 months out of the year. Around this time, however, reformers, who often also advocated for labor issues such as the 8-hour work day, began to push to standardize the academic calendar for both urban and rural schools across the country. These reformers combined their ideas with the rapidly growing wave of support for ending child labor and argued that spending too much time in school was detrimental to children’s intellectual, emotional, and physical growth. Their efforts resulted in the modern school calendar by which American children spend about 180 days each year in school.
America on the World Stage (1900-1945) – The Rise of Entertainment
During the first half of the 20th century America grew into the preeminent world power in terms of industry and economy as well as technology and intellectual production. However, the Great Depression ranks as one of the worst moments in not only American but also world history, and certainly shows another side of America’s rise to prominence. One area of American culture that developed during this time was the proliferation of all forms of entertainment, which undoubtedly occurred due to Americans’ desire to escape the difficulties of the Depression, if only for a moment.
First, board games became widely popular. One of the most impactful board games to appear during the Depression was none other than Monopoly, which allowed players to indulge in the fantasy of earning money at a time when the national unemployment rate was around 25%. Next, the film industry entered a kind of golden age as an average of 70 million Americans visited the movie theater every week. During this time, a ticket included not just a feature film but also a cartoon, a newsreel, and a B-feature, approximately four hours of total content. Popular pictures such as Snow White and The Wizard of Oz provided escapes while other films grounded in social realism allowed moviegoers to reflect on their own situations. Other forms of cheap entertainment included the rise of mini golf as a popular pastime. In fact, mini golf became so popular that the so-called “Madness of 1930” arose when the number of established courses reached 30,000 nationwide. Beyond this, many people set up their own informal courses using simple materials available to them.
Although miniature golf might not be a current global phenomenon, many aspects of tabletop games such as monopoly still endure to this day. Moreover, American cinema dominates theaters around the globe, and is one of the most recognizable aspects of American cultural production. In many ways America rose to become a global leader during the war-torn years of the First and Second World Wars. On the other hand, prominent aspects of American cultural influence, specifically its entertainment industry, developed during the peaceful, if not difficult, years of the Great Depression.
The Cold War Era (1946-1988) – Hot-Headed Plans for a Cold War
The Cold War era was a time of tense global posturing between the world’s two leading powers, America and the Soviet Union. Struggle for ideological dominance between these two nations included not only proxy wars, fought in so-called “Third World” countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America, but also attempts to manipulate public opinion and soft power across the globe. Despite being one of the most technologically developed nations, some of the plans that America came up with at this time seem to be less than intelligent in hindsight. Many of these plans either failed to be enacted, often for good reason, or simply failed.
American espionage during the Cold War might generously be called creative. One plan to spy on Russian operatives involved equipping cats with recording devices and was appropriately called Operation Kitty. The CIA only ever produced one covert cat, however, and the project was abandoned after the animal agent wandered away from its target and was unfortunately hit by a car. Another abandoned project involved an attempt to project American “power” by airdropping oversized condoms into the USSR in an attempt to demoralize the populace.
A perhaps more sinister plan, which was actually implemented, was the notorious MK-Ultra. This was a top-secret CIA project whereby unsuspecting test subjects were given massive amounts of the hallucinogenic drug LSD in order to test its potential as a mind control serum. The most drastic plan to come out of the Cold War, however, is potentially Project A119. Worrying that the Soviets might prevail in the space race and reach the moon before America, the Air Force assembled a team in 1958 to study the possibility of launching nuclear missiles at the moon to produce an explosion visible from earth in order to demonstrate American strength and superiority.
Most history books will discuss the triumph of America in the Cold War, which ended in dramatic fashion with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Soviet Union two years later. In terms of setbacks or otherwise regrettable actions taken up to that point, most books will discuss American involvement in fledgling independences movements in the so-called Third World, which were at the time in line with the principles of global containment. Beyond these often-publicized events, however, there is a plethora of lesser-known moments that are worth remembering.
Cover of one of the studies conducted as a part of Project A119
Samuel Gonzales
耶鲁大学 -东亚研究硕士学位
匹兹堡大学-中国历史学学士学位，优秀毕业生
Samuel导师有丰富的留学相关行业工作经验。在匹兹堡的一个中美留学公司工作期间，协助中国留学生寻找美国寄宿家庭、帮助他们适应在国外生活。Samuel导师教学经验也很丰富：教过SAT课程、一对一英语课程、等等。
