The Mental Floss HISTORY of the UNITED STATES THE (ALMOST) COMPLETE AND (ENTIRELY) ENTERTAINING STORY OF AMERICA Erik Sass with Will Pearson and Mangesh Hattikudur Contents Introduction 1 Prehistory, Puritans, Plantations, and Pirates (23,000 BCE–1715 CE) 2 Don’t Worry, Be Scrappy! (1715–1815) 3 Drunk and Illiterate (and Not Just a Little Bit) (1815–1850) 4 Time for Your Bloodbath (1850–1880) 5 Empire State of Mind (1880–1910) 6 The United State of Amazing (1910–1930) 7 Superpower Surprise (1930–1955) 8 Sex, Drugs, and Mocking Roles (1955–1975) 9 Morning in America? (1975–1992) 10 America the Decider (1992–2010) Appendix: 44 Presidents in 45 Minutes Index Acknowledgments About the Authors Also available from mental_floss Copyright About the Publisher Introduction Americans are patriotic people: a 2008 poll showed 72 percent believe the USA is “the best nation in the world.” But it turns out that “patriotic” and “historically knowledgeable” can be two different things: in recent surveys, almost half of Americans didn’t know that the Constitution gives Congress the right to declare war, while one-quarter of high school students said Columbus set sail after 1750 and a third couldn’t say in which century the American Revolution occurred. Why is that, when there are so many amazing, fascinating, weird, unbelievable but still true facts and stories? Probably because some history books—and some history teachers—just aren’t putting the “fun story” into “fundamental history.” The truth is, learning about American history doesn’t have to be a death-march through dusty dates, dreary details, and dead dudes in wigs. America is an amazing place, and it’s all in the history, baby. How did rum and tobacco save the colonies? When did geopolitics hinge on a large rodent? Who made the first potato chip? What was the worst accident during a U.S. nuclear test? Who invented rock-and-roll? Did the CIA really support Osama bin Laden? Does internet dating really work? You’ll find all the answers in this book—plus plenty of other weird, intriguing, and downright incredible facts omitted by the average high school history course. Of course, there’s absolutely no way a single volume can cover all the stuff you’re supposed to know about American history, but we promise this book contains most of the stuff you really ought to know … along with crazy trivia and terribly ironic quotes perfect for breaking the ice at cocktail parties, wedding receptions, blind dates, armed standoffs, and other awkward situations. THE STATE OF THE UNION “Begin at the beginning” is tricky advice when you’re talking about American history. Do you start with the arrival of the first human beings? The first native civilizations? The first European contact? The first permanent European settlement? But we’ll give it a shot. The first human inhabitants of North America arrived during the last Ice Age, when hunter-gatherers from northern Asia followed tasty wooly mammoths across a land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska. Several waves of nomads may have crossed from Asia to North America between 23,000 and 9000 , at which point the Ice Age ended, the polar ice BCE BCE caps melted, and sea levels rose about 400 feet, submerging the land bridge and isolating the nomads in North America. Over thousands of years their descendants migrated south, crossing 10,000 miles of incredibly varied terrain to reach the southern tip of South America no later than 8000 . Spreading out across tundra, BCE forests, grasslands, swamps, deserts, and jungles, they gradually formed separate linguistic and cultural groups. By one count, there are still about 2,000 native languages spoken in the Western Hemisphere, the vast majority–about 1,450–in South America. Around 4000 , one Mesoamerican group, the Olmecs of BCE southeastern Mexico, invented agriculture by domesticating maize (corn), leading to the first Native American civilization. The Olmecs are considered the “mother culture” of the civilizations that followed, including the Maya and Aztecs. The domestication of maize and another staple crop, the potato, triggered the formation of complex societies in the Andean region of South America, including the Nazca, Moche, Chimu, and Inca. But native societies in what became the United States never attained the same level of complexity. Although some groups had large populations that supported craftsmen, royalty, and priests, they never developed systems of writing, so much of their history remains mysterious. Sources like oral histories, linguistics, and archaeology generally only go back about 3,000 years, leaving the period from 7000 to 1000 pretty darn enigmatic. The arrival of Europeans added BCE assault to mystery, with new diseases and brutality decimating the native population of the future United States, which dropped from an estimated 5–10 million in 1492 to 250,000 in 1900. This tidal wave of death wiped out whole cultures and languages, so long story short: we know a lot more about the relatively short period of European settlement in the New World than we do about the much longer native history that preceded it. Acknowledging this bias, we’re mostly going to begin with the parts of the past we know more about—meaning Europe an settlement to the present—because a book filled with “gosh, we dunno” probably wouldn’t sell too many copies. WHAT HAPPENED WHEN 23,000 – Asian nomads cross the land bridge connecting BCE 9000 eastern Siberia to Alaska. BCE 100 Teotihuacan in Central Mexico has a population of CE 150,000+. 700 Mayan city of Tikal has a population of 100,000+. 900 Mayan civilization mysteriously disappears. 1002/3 Vikings led by Leif Ericson discover Vinland (Newfoundland). 1150 Chaco Canyon culture sites are abandoned. 1427 Aztec Empire is founded in Mexico. 1438 Inca Empire is founded in Peru. October 12, Columbus makes landfall in the Bahamas. 1492 1499 Amerigo Vespucci explores coast of South America. 1519 Aztec Empire is destroyed by Hernán Cortés. 1533 Inca Empire is destroyed by Francisco Pizarro. August 28, St. Augustine, Florida, is founded by Spanish 1565 settlers. 1585 English colonists settle on Roanoke Island, Virginia. 1590 Roanoke colony is mysteriously abandoned. May 14, 1607 English colonists found Jamestown, Virginia. July 3, 1608 French colonists found Quebec. December 18, Puritan Separatists (Pilgrims) found Plymouth, 1620 Massachusetts. 1625 Dutch colonists found New Amsterdam. September Puritans found Boston, Massachusetts. 17, 1630 1634 English colonists (including persecuted Catholics) settle Maryland. 1641–1666 Beaver Wars pit Iroquois against rival tribes, with European support. May 18, 1642 French colonists found Montreal. June 6, 1676 Nathaniel Bacon leads rebellion against royal governor in Virginia. March 4, Royal charter granted to William Penn for Quaker 1681 colony in Pennsylvania. LIES YOUR TEACHER TOLD YOU LIE: Columbus was the first to discover America. THE TRUTH: Columbus gets his own holiday for his so-called accomplishment, but there’s no doubt he was late to the discovery game. The Vikings discovered America about 500 years before he got there, and it’s likely that the Polynesians found it even earlier! The seafaring Polynesians reached Fiji by 1300 , Tahiti by 300 , BCE CE and Hawaii by 400. Given their remarkable feats of navigation, it seems likely they reached the Americas as early as 500. In South America, they appear to have brought chickens to Peru. BREAST ASSURED While the Vikings weren’t in the New World for long, they did pick up some good stories. One saga tells of a Viking hunting party in Newfoundland surrounded by native warriors. The Viking men were inclined to withdraw, but Freydis, the pregnant half sister of Leif Ericsson, would have none of this cowardice. She charged the field, revealed her ample bosom, and slapped one of her breasts with the flat side of a sword–because that’s how Viking ladies do it. The startled natives retreated without a fight. Can you blame them? The Viking case is as solid as a battle axe: Leif Ericsson, the adventurer who sailed from Greenland to Newfoundland in 1002 or 1003, made several trips and reported his adventures in “Vinland” in detail. The sheer numerical superiority of the local Native Americans eventually persuaded the Vikings to pack it in. They abandoned Vinland around 1015, and the American adventure became a thing of legend. No one is certain of the dates because, well, the Vikings were illiterate (or preliterate, if you want to be nice about it), but Leif’s adventures were incorporated into oral histories that were passed down until they were finally transcribed in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. CONSTRUCTION SEASON The Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas tend to get all the credit for building awesomely gigantic monuments. But it wasn’t all teepees and totem poles up North: there was plenty of major construction afoot. In the Midwest, a succession of “mound-builder” tribes or tribal confederations lived in clusters of villages along the main tributaries of the Mississippi River. They are best known for, yes, building earthen mounds, beginning around the tenth century , including CE Monk’s Mound, a 100-foot-tall flattened pyramid covering almost 14 acres, in modern-day Cahokia, Illinois. Most likely, the tribes used these mounds like the ancient Mesopotamians and Central Americans did, as platforms to bring the priestly elite closer to the gods. Around the same time, the “Fort Ancient” culture in the Midwest was busy raising enormous structures in the shapes of animals. The largest of these, the Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio, is three feet tall, six feet wide, and more than 1,300 feet long. The last mound-building society disappeared in the sixteenth century–possibly destroyed by nomadic Plains tribes, newly mobile with the acquisition of horses