中西文化概况(修订版)
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Section B History of the United States of America

1. Pre-Colonial America

Archeologists believe that the present-day U. S. was first populated by people migrating from Asia via the Bering Land Bridge sometime between 50,000 and 11,000 years ago. These people became the indigenous people who inhabited the Americas prior to the arrival of European explorers in the 1,400s and who are now called Native Americans.

One recorded European exploration of the Americas was by Christopher Columbus in 1492, sailing on behalf of the King and the Queen of Spain. He sailed west in search of a new sea route to India. However, he failed to reach India but reached a group of islands which now are called Bahamas. He mistook these islands for part of India and called the people there Indians. Another important figure in the process of the discovery of the New World was Amerigo Verspucci. He was not the discoverer of the new continent, but it was he who first confirmed the fact that a new continent rather than Asia had been discovered. Therefore, the newly-found continent was later named after him and became known as America. After a period of exploration by various European countries, Dutch, Spanish, English, French, Swedish, and Portuguese settlements were established.

2. America in the Colonial Era

The Mayflower

European colonists arrived at the New World after 1600. In 1607, the Virginia Company of London established the Jamestown Settlement on the James River, and it was the first successful English colony in North America. In 1620, a group of Puritans, who were later called the Pilgrim Fathers, sailed for Virginia on a ship called the Mayflower. They had been persecuted in Britain, because they refused to abide by the rules of the Church of England, and they went to the New World in search of religious freedom. They finally landed in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. By 1679 they had set up four New England colonies. Spain controlled a large part of what is now the central and western U. S.. In 1682, French explorer, Sieur de La Salle, discovered the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, and claimed the entire territory as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. By the 1770s, 13 British colonies contained 2.5 million people. They were prosperous and growing rapidly, and had developed their own autonomous political and legal systems.

3. Formation of the United States

Soon afterwards, the contradiction between Britain and her 13 colonies became acute. Britain imposed new taxes partly in order to defray the cost of fighting in the Seven Years' War[5], and expected Americans to lodge British soldiers in their homes. The colonists resented the taxes and resisted the quartering of soldiers. Some colonies such as Massachusetts began to make preparations for war with Britain.

The Boston Tea Party in 1773 was often seen as the event which started the American Revolution. The first continental congress was held in Philadelphia in September, 1774. The Battles of Lexington and Concord in April, 1775, were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. The battles marked the outbreak of open armed conflict between Britain and its 13 colonies in the mainland of British North America. On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia declared the independence of the U. S. in a remarkable document, the Declaration of Independence, primarily authored by Thomas Jefferson.

The Declaration of Independence

Finally the U. S. won its independence from Britain with the help of France in the American War of Independence, and the Declaration of Independence rejected British authority in favor of self-determination. During and after the war, the 13 states were united under a weak federal government established by the Articles of Confederation[6]. The structure of the government was profoundly changed on March 4, 1789, when the states replaced the Articles of Confederation with the U. S. Constitution. The new government reflected a radical break from the normative governmental structures of the time, favoring representative, elective government, rather than the existing monarchial structures common within the western traditions of the time.

4. Westward Expansion

Westward expansion is the history of U. S. territorial acquisitions. In 1783, the Treaty of Paris with Britain defined the original borders of the U. S.. The Louisiana Purchase, in 1803, gave western farmers use of the important Mississippi River waterway, removed the French presence from the western border of the U. S., and provided U. S. settlers with vast potential of expansion.

Westward Expansion

The Monroe Doctrine in 1823, proclaimed that European powers should no longer colonize or interfere in the Americas, but it was later extended to justify U. S. imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, and it was an important symbol of American expansionism. In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the president to negotiate treaties that exchanged Indian tribal lands in the eastern states for lands west of the Mississippi River.

In the 1840s, western expansion proceeded at a rapid pace. Promises of wide-open spaces and inexpensive land with rich soil enticed many people in the east to pack up their possessions and head west. The 1840s became a decade of rapid territorial acquisition and expansion. Americans streamed into Texas, settled there, formed an independent republic, and asked that Texas become part of the U. S., but Mexico refused to accept the annexation of Texas, which led to Mexican-US War (1846-1848). California, New Mexico and adjacent areas were ceded to the U. S. under the 1848 Treaty of Cuadalupe Hidalgo.

Through the westward expansion, the U. S. expanded from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast, and it became one of the most powerful nations in the 20th century. However, this expansion also resulted in great suffering, destruction, and cultural loss to the Native Americans.

5. Civil War Era

The Civil War was from 1861 to 1865. Abraham Lincoln was elected president, the South seceded to form the Confederate States of America, and the Civil War followed, with the ultimate defeat of the South.

The Civil War began when Confederate Army opened fire upon Fort Sumter. They fired because Fort Sumter was in a confederate state. After four years of bloody combat that left over 600,000 soldiers dead and destroyed much of the South's infrastructure, the Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and the difficult reconstruction process of restoring national unity and guaranteeing rights to the freed slaves began. In the Reconstruction era (1863-1877), the U. S. ended slavery and extended legal and voting rights to the Freedmen.

6. America Before and During World War Ⅰ

After its civil war, America experienced an accelerated rate of industrialization, mainly in the northern states. Machinery steadily replaced the use of hand labor; railway extended from coast to coast; ships were built. Transportation and communications were greatly improved to meet the needs of an industrial society. By 1894, America had become the world leading industrial country.

The U. S. began its rise to international power in this period with substantial population and industrial growth domestically, and a number of military ventures abroad. The US-Spanish War was the first imperialist war for redividing the world, and it marked a new stage in which the U. S. transformed into an imperialist power.

At the outbreak of World War Ⅰ in 1914, the U. S. pursued a policy of non-intervention. As the war went on, Germany announced that submarines were to be used to sink all ships, including neutral ones, going to Britain, which would greatly harm the American trade. Besides, the Germans attempted to interest Mexico in going to war as Germany's ally against the U. S., and Britain intercepted the message and presented it to the U. S. embassy in Britain. After the sinking of several U. S. merchant ships by submarines and the publication of the Zimmerman telegram[7], the U. S. declared war against Germany on 6 April 1917. In 1918, Wilson implemented a set of propositions titled the Fourteen Points to ensure peace, but they were denied at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Isolationist sentiment following the war also blocked the U. S. from participating in the League of Nations, an important part of the Treaty of Versailles.

7. America Before and During World War Ⅱ

Between World War I and World War Ⅱ, there were two decades—the 1920s and 1930s. The 1920s was noted for the so-called prosperity, while the 1930s was characterized by the Great Depression and the New Deal. During most of the 1920s, the U. S. enjoyed a period of unbalanced prosperity, and the boom was fueled by an inflated stock market, which later led to the Great Depression. The first outward sign of the depression was the collapse of the stock market in October 1929, followed by the closing of thousands of plants and banks. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal program had some initial remedial effect, but it failed to produce recovery and solve the problem of unemployment. The crisis continued to deepen until a change was brought about by the outbreak of World War Ⅱ.

The U. S. didn't enter World War Ⅱ until after the rest of the active allied countries had done so, and its first contribution to the war was simultaneously to cut off the oil and raw material supplies needed by Japan to maintain its offensive in China.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor killing over 2,000 people and damaging or destroying eight battleships, greatly harming the Pacific fleet. The following day, Roosevelt successfully urged a joint session of Congress to declare war against Japan. After that, Germany and Italy declared war against the U. S., and America had to fight on two fronts: Europe and the Pacific. The U. S. did play an important role in the war against fascists. On the other hand, however, it is necessary to point out that the U. S. entered the war mainly for its own benefits, which reveals the nature of imperialism.

8. Cold War Era

During World War Ⅱ, the U. S. and the Soviet Union fought together as allies against the Axis powers. However, the relationship between the two nations was tense. Americans had long been wary of Soviet communism. For their part, the Soviets resented the Americans' decades-long refusal to treat the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) as a legitimate part of the international community as well as their delayed entry into World War Ⅱ. After the war, these grievances ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity. In a hostile atmosphere, the U. S. and the Soviet Union emerged as opposing superpowers and began the Cold War, confronting one another indirectly in the arms race and space race.

A new policy, the Cold War policy, went into effect by the spring of 1947 when Truman Doctrine came forth. This was a plan to give money and military aid to countries threatened by communism. A major event in the Cold War was the Berlin Airlift[8]. After World War Ⅱ, the U. S. and its allies divided Germany into two parts: West Germany, controlled by the U. S. and East Germany, supported by the Soviet Union. Then there rose the Berlin crisis.

After World War Ⅱ, the cold war became the basis of the American foreign policy. It fully revealed the ambition of the U. S. to gain the world domination. In East and Southern Asia, the U. S. tried hard to control as many regions as possible through military and economic aggression to achieve this goal.

From 1953 to 1961, General Eisenhower was in presidency. The Eisenhower Doctrine contained the points of instant and massive retaliation, avoidance of getting involved in frustrating wars of containment. Crisis in Korea, and Vietnam prompted the use of this doctrine, but with little success. In Africa, the U. S. took the advantage of the weakening old colonial powers and the national liberation struggles for independence in those countries to intervene in their affairs by means of economic aid. The American relation with the Latin American countries was deteriorating, and the Latin American countries were getting more disenchanted with the U. S..

On January 20th, 1969, Richard Nixon took the oath of office as president. He gave priority to foreign affairs and significantly redirected U. S. policies. Nixon continued to bomb on a large scale many cities in North Vietnam and in April 1970, he cast American troops into Cambodia, escalating the aggressive war. A negotiated peace settlement finally came in January 1973 through a long time bargaining. Two months later, the last American left Vietnam and the long-lasting Vietnam War ended. The Vietnam War was a long-time suffering for the U. S.. The war started under Eisenhower and was continued by Kennedy and Johnson. The war greatly weakened the U. S. imperialism and sharpened the country's internal contradictions. Relations between East and West also improved when Richard Nixon was president. Besides, it is President Nixon who moved toward improving relations with China, and the "ping-pong diplomacy" helped normalize the relations between the two countries.

The Vietnam War

A major change in the Cold War took place in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union. He met four times with President Ronald Reagan, and he withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan, and signed an agreement with the U. S. to destroy all middle-distance and short-distance nuclear missiles. The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

Ronald Reagan (Right) and Gorbachev (Left)

9. The U. S. after the Cold War

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the U. S. emerged as the world's sole remaining superpower and continued to involve itself in military action overseas. Following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the 1990s saw one of the longest periods of economic expansion.

As the 21st century began, international conflicts centered on the Middle East and were heightened significantly following the September 11 attacks and the War on Terrorism that was subsequently declared. On September 11,2001, the U. S. was struck by a terrorist attack when 19 al-Qaeda hijackers commandeered four airliners and intentionally crashed into both twin towers of the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people, mostly civilians. On October 7,2001, the U. S. and NATO then invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime, which had provided safe haven to al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden.

In 2003, the U. S. launched an invasion of Iraq, which led to the collapse of the Iraqi government and the eventual capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

In December 2007, the U. S. entered the longest post-World War Ⅱ recession, Major problems included the housing market crisis, subprime mortgage crisis, soaring oil prices, automotive industry crisis, rising unemployment, and the worst financial crisis.

In 2008, the unpopularity of President Bush and the Iraq war, along with the 2008 financial crisis, led to the election of Barack Obama, the first African American President of the U. S.. As president, Obama officially ended combat operations in Iraq on August 31, 2010. At the same time, Obama increased American involvement in Afghanistan, starting a surge strategy using an additional 30,000 troops. In May 2011, after nearly a decade's hiding, the founder and leader of Al Qaeda Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in a raid conducted by U. S. naval special forces under President Obama's direct orders. In 2012, President Obama was reelected in November with the help of a similar voter coalition as in 2008.

Barack Obama