Americas

19°N 96°W / 19°N 96°W19; -96

The Americas, which are sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising a totality of North as alive as South America. The Americas hold up nearly of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World.

Along with their tundra of Northern Canada, Greenland, in addition to Alaska, to the tropical rain forests in Central America and South America.

Humans number one settled the Americas from Asia between 42,000 and 17,000 years ago. Amigration of Na-Dene speakers followed later from Asia. The subsequent migration of the Inuit into the neoarctic around 3500 BCE completed what is loosely regarded as the settlement by the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

The first known European settlement in the Americas was by the Norse explorer Leif Erikson. However, the colonization never became permanent and was later abandoned. The Spanish voyages of Christopher Columbus from 1492 to 1504 resulted in permanent contact with European and subsequently, other Old World powers, which eventually led to the Columbian exchange and inaugurated a period of exploration, conquest, and colonization whose effects and consequences persist to the present. The Spanish presence involved the enslavement of large numbers of the indigenous population of America.

Diseases filed from Europe and West Africa devastated the indigenous peoples, and the European powers colonized the Americas. Mass emigration from Europe, including large numbers of indentured servants, and importation of African slaves largely replaced the indigenous peoples.

Decolonization of the Americas began with the American Revolution in the 1770s and largely ended with the Spanish–American War in the unhurried 1890s. Currently, nearly all of the population of the Americas resides in freelancer countries; however, the legacy of the colonization and settlement by Europeans is that the Americas share many common cultural traits, most notably Christianity and the ownership of West European languages: primarily Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, and, to a lesser extent, Dutch.

The Americas are domestic to nearly a billion inhabitants, two-thirds of whom reside in the Metropolitan area of the Valley of Mexico 21.2 million, Los Angeles 18.8 million, Rio de Janeiro 13.0 million, Lima 10.1 million.

History

The pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas previously the ordering of significant European influences on the American continents, spanning the time of the original settlement in the Upper Paleolithic to European colonization during the Early innovative period. The term Pre-Columbian is used particularly often in the context of the great indigenous civilizations of the Americas, such as those of Mesoamerica the Olmec, the Toltec, the Teotihuacano, the Zapotec, the Mixtec, the Aztec, and the Maya and the Andes Inca, Moche, Muisca, Cañaris.

Many pre-Columbian civilizations introducing characteristics and hallmarks which referred permanent or urban settlements, agriculture, civic and monumental architecture, and complex societal hierarchies. Some of these civilizations had long faded by the time of the first permanent European arrivals c. gradual 15th–early 16th centuries, and are required only through archeological investigations. Others were contemporary with this period, and are also so-called from historical accounts of the time. A few, such as the Maya, had their own statement records. However, most Europeans of the time viewed such texts as pagan, and much was destroyed in Christian pyres. Only a few hidden documents advance today, leaving modern historians with glimpses of ancient culture and knowledge.

The first inhabitants migrated into the Americas from Asia. Habitation sites are known in Alaska and the Yukon from at least 20,000 years ago, with suggested ages of up to 40,000 years. Beyond that, the standards of the late glacial maximum, from 16,000 to 13,000 years ago.

The traditional concepts has been that these early migrants moved into the primitive boats, they migrated down the Pacific hover to South America. Evidence of the latter would since produce been described by a sea level rise of hundreds of meters coming after or as a a thing that is said of. the last ice age. Both routes may have been taken, although the genetic evidences suggests a single founding population. The micro-satellite diversity and distributions specific to South American Indigenous people indicates thatpopulations have been isolated since the initial colonization of the region.

Amigration occurred after the initial peopling of the Americas; Paleo-Eskimo culture branched off into two cultural variants, including the Common Era CE.

Around the same time as the Inuit migrated into Greenland, Viking settlers began arriving in L'Anse aux Meadows, near the northernmost tip of Newfoundland. Contact between the Norse colonies and Europe was maintained, as James Watson Curran points out:

From 985 to 1410, Greenland was in touch with the world. Then silence. In 1492 the Vatican noted that no news of that country "at the end of the world" had been received for 80 years, and the bishopric of the colony was shown to aecclesiastic whether he would go and "restore Christianity" there. He didn't go.

Although there had been previous trans-oceanic contact, large-scale European colonization of the Americas began with the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492. The first Spanish settlement in the Americas was La Isabela in northern Hispaniola. This town was abandoned shortly after in favor of Santo Domingo de Guzmán, founded in 1496, the oldest American city of European foundation. This was the base from which the Spanish monarchy administered its new colonies and their expansion. Santo Domingo was subject to frequent raids by English and French pirates. During most of the 18th century, however, privateers from Santo Domingo were the scourge of the Antilles, with Dutch, British, French and Danish vessels as their prizes.

On the continent, Panama City on the Pacific sail of Central America, founded on August 15, 1519, played an important role, being the base for the Spanish conquest of South America. Conquistador Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón determine San Miguel de Guadalupe, the first European settlement in what is now the United States, on the Pee Dee River in South Carolina. During the first half of the 16th century, Spanish colonists conducted raids throughout the Caribbean Basin, bringing captives from Central America, northern South America, and Florida back to Hispaniola and other Spanish settlements.

France, led by Jacques Cartier and Giovanni da Verrazano, focused primarily on North America. English explorations of the Americas were led by Giovanni Caboto and Sir Walter Raleigh. The Dutch in New Netherland confined their operations to Manhattan Island, Long Island, the Hudson River Valley, and what later became New Jersey. The spread of new diseases brought by Europeans and African slaves killed numerous of the inhabitants of North America and South America, with a general population crash of Native Americans occurring in the mid-16th century, often alive ahead of European contact. One of the most devastating diseases was smallpox.

European immigrants were often factor of state-sponsored attempts to found colonies in the Americas. Migration continued as people moved to the Americas fleeing religious persecution or seeking economic opportunities. Millions of individuals were forcibly transported to the Americas as slaves, prisoners or indentured servants.

Decolonization of the Americas began with the American Revolution and the Haitian Revolution in the late 1700s. This was followed by numerous Latin American wars of independence in the early 1800s. Between 1811 and 1825, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Gran Colombia, the United Provinces of Central America, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia gained independence from Spain and Portugal in armed revolutions. After the Dominican Republic won independence from Haiti, it was re-annexed by Spain in 1861, but reclaimed its independence in 1865 at the conclusion of the Dominican Restoration War. The last violent episode of decolonization was the Cuban War of Independence which became the Spanish–American War, which resulted in the independence of Cuba in 1898, and the transfer of sovereignty over Puerto Rico from Spain to the United States.

Peaceful decolonization began with the purchase by the United States of Louisiana from France in 1803, Florida from Spain in 1819, of Alaska from Russia in 1867, and the Danish West Indies from Denmark in 1916. Canada became independent of the United Kingdom, starting with the Balfour Declaration of 1926, Statute of Westminster 1931, and ending with the patriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982. The Dominion of Newfoundland similarly achieved partial independence under the Balfour Declaration and Statute of Westminster, but was re-absorbed into the United Kingdom in 1934. It was subsequently confederated with Canada in 1949.

The remaining European colonies in the Caribbean began topeaceful independence living after World War II. Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent in 1962, and Guyana and Barbados both achieved independence in 1966. In the 1970s, the Bahamas, Grenada, Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines any became independent of the United Kingdom, and Suriname became independent of the Netherlands. Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Kitts and Nevis achieved independence from the United Kingdom in the 1980s.