History of North America
[2] People settled throughout the continent and, over time, developed into diverse communities, from the Inuit in the far north to the Mayans and Aztecs in the south.
Conflict over resources in North America ensued in various wars between these powers, but the new European colonies gradually developed desires for independence.
Modern developments include the opening of free trade agreements in 1994[3] and heightened emigration rates and drug trafficking concerns in Mexico and Latin America.
The specifics of Paleo-Indians' migration to and throughout the Americas, including the exact dates and routes traveled, are subject to ongoing research and discussion.
[1][5] These people are believed to have followed herds of now-extinct Pleistocene megafauna along ice-free corridors that stretched between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets.
Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been linked to North Asian populations by linguistic dialects, the distribution of blood types, and in genetic composition as reflected by molecular data, such as DNA.
[16] 8,000–7,000 BCE (10,000–9,000 years ago) the climate stabilized, leading to a rise in population and lithic technology advances, resulting in a more sedentary lifestyle.
Before contact with Europeans, the indigenous peoples of North America were divided into many different polities, from small bands of a few families to large empires.
[17] The majority of population groups at this time were still highly mobile hunter-gatherers; but now individual groups started to focus on resources available to them locally, thus with the passage of time there is a pattern of increasing regional generalization, for example the Southwest, Arctic, Poverty Point culture, Plains Arctic, Dalton, and Plano traditions.
This type of regional adaptation became the norm, with reliance less on hunting and gathering among many cultures, with a more mixed economy of small game, fish, seasonally wild vegetables and harvested plant foods.
The more southern cultural groups of North America were responsible for the domestication of many common crops now used around the world, such as tomatoes and squash.
[citation needed] The Mayan culture was still present when the Spanish arrived in Central America, but political dominance in the area had shifted to the Aztec Empire further north.
In the Southwest of North America, Hohokam and Ancestral Pueblo societies had been engaged in agricultural production with ditch irrigation and a sedentary village life for at least two millennia before the Spanish arrived in the 1540s.
The only Norse site outside of Greenland yet discovered in North America is at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada.
Even the permanent settlement in Greenland, which persisted until the early 1400s, received little attention and Europeans remained largely ignorant of the existence of the Americas until 1492.
As part of a general Age of Discovery, Italian sailor Christopher Columbus proposed a voyage west from Europe to find a shorter route to Asia.
The Fur Trade soon became the primary business on the continent and as a result transformed the indigenous North American ways of life.
Further to the south, plantation slavery became the main industry of the West Indies, and this gave rise to the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade.
Rivalry between the European powers created a series of wars on the North American landmass that would have great impact on the development of the colonies.
Peace was not achieved until French forces in North America were vanquished at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham at Quebec City, and France ceded most of her claims outside of the Caribbean.
During Pontiac's Rebellion from 1763 to 1766, a confederation of Great Lakes-area tribes fought a somewhat successful campaign to defend their rights over their lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, which had been "reserved" for them under the Royal Proclamation of 1763.
Viceroyalty of New Spain (present-day Mexico) was the name of the viceroy-ruled territories of the Spanish Empire in Asia, North America and its peripheries from 1535 to 1821.
Canada bore the brunt of several major battles during the early stages of the war including the use of poison gas attacks at Ypres.
The destruction of Europe wrought by the war vaulted all North American countries to more important roles in world affairs.
The early Cold War era saw the United States as the most powerful nation in a Western coalition of which Mexico and Canada were also a part.
The Caribbean saw the beginnings of decolonization, while on the largest island the Cuban Revolution introduced Cold War rivalries into Latin America.
Canada's Brian Mulroney ran on a similar platform to Reagan, and also favored closer trade ties with the United States.
The optimism of the 1990s was shattered by the 9/11 attacks of 2001 on the United States, which prompted the 20-year period of military intervention war in Afghanistan, which Canada also participated in.
Between January 2020 and May 2022, the three North American nations were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and Delta cron hybrid variant, which claimed the lives of 1.3 million people by May 2022.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a snap election in 2021 to try and increase the Liberals seat share and reach a majority government.
