Long before any European ship arrived, millions of people lived in the Americas. They belonged to hundreds of nations, speaking hundreds of languages. They farmed corn, beans, and squash. They traded across the continent. Near where St. Louis stands today, a city called Cahokia held thousands of people and raised an earth mound taller than a ten-story building. The land was not empty. It was somebody's home, and had been for thousands of years.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed west for Spain, looking for a sea route to Asia. He landed in the Caribbean instead. He never set foot in what is now the United States, but his voyages opened the door. Spain came, then France, the Netherlands, and England — for gold, for land, for furs, and for converts to their religion.
The Europeans brought something they did not intend to bring: disease. Smallpox and other sicknesses were new here, and the people of the Americas had no protection against them. In many places, nine out of every ten people died. Whole villages emptied before most colonists ever saw them. It was the worst disaster in the history of this half of the world, and the colonies were built in its shadow.
The newcomers built different kinds of colonies. Spain built forts and missions in the South and Southwest — St. Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565, is the oldest European city in what is now the United States. The French traded furs along the rivers. The English settled thick along the Atlantic coast. Their first lasting colony, Jamestown in Virginia, began in 1607, nearly starved, and then found its money crop: tobacco. Tobacco made fortunes, and tobacco needed many hands.
In 1619, a ship brought the first enslaved Africans to be sold in Virginia. Over the next two centuries, hundreds of thousands of people were carried here in chains, out of millions taken across the Americas. Colonial law made slavery permanent and total: a person could be owned, bought, sold, and willed to heirs, and a child born to an enslaved mother was enslaved for life. This was not a side business. It became the foundation of the Southern economy.
Farther north, English settlers seeking religious freedom built New England: small farms, towns gathered around churches, and town meetings where local men argued and voted on their own affairs. The habit of self-government started early, long before anyone imagined independence. In the middle colonies — New York, Pennsylvania — peoples and religions mixed more than anywhere else on earth at the time.
Through all of it, the Native nations did not vanish. They traded with the newcomers, made alliances with them, fought them, and were pushed from their lands piece by piece as the colonies grew. By 1700, three peoples were bound together on this land — Native nations, Europeans, and Africans — and nothing that follows in this story can be understood without all three.