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Long before European contact, hundreds of distinct Native American nations inhabited the land that is now the United States, from the Pueblo peoples' adobe cities in the Southwest to the Mississippian mound-building civilizations of the Midwest and South.
European colonization began in earnest in the early 1600s, with English settlements at Jamestown (1607) and Plymouth (1620), a process that, over the following centuries, dispossessed Native nations of their land through war, treaty, and forced removal. The Declaration of Independence in 1776 announced a break from British rule, and the Constitution, ratified in 1788, established the federal system that still operates today -- though it left slavery intact, a contradiction that would define the country's first century.
That contradiction erupted into the Civil War (1861-1865), the deadliest conflict in American history, which ended slavery but was followed by a century of legal segregation under Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-60s finally dismantled that legal segregation and expanded voting rights nationwide.
The Constitution's framers built a federal system durable enough to survive its own founding contradiction; Abraham Lincoln held the union together through the Civil War and ended slavery; and Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership of the Civil Rights Movement forced the country to finally confront the legal segregation that contradiction had left behind.
Westward expansion through the 19th century, driven by the belief in "Manifest Destiny," alongside the forced displacement of Native nations (including the Trail of Tears), shaped a national identity built as much on movement and reinvention as on any single founding document. The 20th century's global wars and Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union turned that identity outward, positioning the US as a global power whose culture and politics reached far beyond its own borders.
Today's United States remains the world's largest economy and a global cultural and political power, still actively working through the long legacy of the inequalities woven into its founding -- a tension that has run through the country's history from the Constitution's original compromise on slavery to the Civil Rights Movement to today.