United States

From Indigenous homelands to a continental republic and global superpower.

The history of the United States spans the deep antiquity of Indigenous nations who peopled the continent for many thousands of years, the violent disruption of European colonisation, and the birth of a self-governing republic in the late eighteenth century. Founded on a Declaration that proclaimed human equality while tolerating slavery and the dispossession of Native peoples, the nation expanded across a continent, fractured in a civil war over human bondage, and reconstructed itself around abolition and citizenship. Industrialisation, mass immigration, and two world wars carried the United States to the centre of world affairs, where its mid-twentieth-century civil rights struggles and Cold War rivalry reshaped both its domestic order and the international system.