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THE USA
Alison Baxter
Oxford Bookworms
Factfiles
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1 America
Think of a big, beautiful, empty land
with mountains, forests, lakes,
animals and fish, but no people. This
was America 30,000 years ago.
Around that time, the first people
probably arrived in Alaska from
Asia. They travelled south and
became the North American Indians,
and the Aztecs, Mayas and Incas and
other peoples of Central and South
America. Later came the Inuit
(Eskimos) of Canada and the Arctic.
But there are only a few of these early
peoples in America today.
In the sixteenth century Europeans
started to come to America, and soon
after that, they brought workers -
slaves - from Africa. Large numbers
of immigrants continued to arrive
from all over the world until the
middle of the twentieth century.
The empty land was now full of
people, speaking different languages
and with different ideas. There are
just three countries now in North
America: Canada, Mexico and the
USA. But there
were nearly several
more. The 'United
States of America'
was not always
united. The 252
million people who
live in its fifty states
are not all the
same. So how was
the USA born?
How did it grow?
And what sort of
country is it now?
2 The Pilgrim Fathers
For thousands of years, America and
its peoples were unknown to the rest
of the world. The Vikings visited
Canada from Scandinavia around
AD 1000, but did not stay. Then, in
1492, a brave Italian sailor called
Christopher Columbus reached the
Caribbean, while he was looking for
a sea route from Europe to India.
Columbus did not stay either. It was
only in the sixteenth century that the
French, the Spanish, and the
British all started to come and
live in North America.
In the early seventeenth
century, two very different
groups of English people
made the dangerous
journey across the Atlantic.
In 1607, a group of farmers
began the colony of
Jamestown, in Virginia. They
fought with the Indians, and
many died because they were ill and
did not have enough to eat. But
Pocahontas, the daughter of an
Indian chief, became a friend of
Captain John Smith and helped him
and the other English people. She
later married a man called John Rolfe
Slaves working in the tobacco fields
Pocahontas
and went to England, where she died.
The farmers discovered that it
was easy to grow tobacco in
Virginia, so they brought
African people to work
in the fields as their slaves.
Smoking was becoming
very fashionable, and
the Americans found a big
market for their tobacco
in Europe.
In 1620, another group of
101 English men, women and
children arrived in Plymouth,
Massachusetts. We know these
people, who had very strong ideas
about religion, as the 'Pilgrims', or
'Pilgrim Fathers'. They did not want
to live in England because they did
not agree with the Church of
England, so they sailed to America in
a ship called the
Mayflower.
They
became not only farmers, but also
businessmen who bought and sold
animal skins. They thought that all
men were equal and so they did not
have slaves.
The Pilgrims too were often ill and
hungry, and nearly half of them died
in the first year. But they were helped
by friendly Indians, who showed
them how to grow corn. In the
autumn of 1621, the Pilgrims had a
big dinner to give thanks for the first
food that they had grown themselves.
This day became known as
Thanksgiving, and Americans still
celebrate it every year, on the fourth
Thursday of November. It is one of
the most important holidays in the
year, and people often travel many
hundreds of kilometres to be with
their family.
USA facts
'America' was named after an
Italian businessman called Amerigo
Vespucci, who sailed to South
America between 1499 and 1502.
Columbus called the Native
Americans 'Indians' because he
thought that he had reached India.
The Pilgrim Fathers landing at Plymouth
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