1. 1\2colonial life, 4 types

At daybreak on the morning of Friday August3, 1942, an Italian adventurer named Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain to find a new way from Europe to Asia. His aim was to open lip J shorter talk route between the two continents. in Asia. He intended to load his three small ships with silks. spices and gold and sail back to Europe a rich man.By the year 1733 the English owned thirteen separate colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America. The colonies stretched from New Hampshire in the north to Georgia in the south. Most people divided them into three main groups. Each group had its own way of life and character. In the far north was the New England group centered on Massachusetts. Since the time of the Pilgrims the people of New England had spread in land and along the coast. Most were small farmers or craftsmen. working the stony soil and governing themselves in small towns and villages. Other New Englanders depended on the sea for a living. They felled the trees of the region's forests to build ships. The nearest colonies to the south of New England were called the Middle Colonies. The biggest were New York and Pennsylvania. As in New England most of their people lived by farming . But in the cities of New York and Philadelphia there were growing numbers of craftsmen and merchants. The people of the Middle Colonies were- usually more tolerant of religious. The Southern Colonies of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia formed the third group. In their hot and fertile river valleys wealthy landowners farmed large Plantations. They lived in fine houses, with wide cool verandahs from which they could look out over their fields of tobacco or cotton. Most of the work in the fields was done by black slaves. In all three groups of colonies most people still lived less than fifty miles from the Coast, This was called “the tidewater” period of settlement.

Each individual American state had its own government and behaved very much like an independent country. It made its own laws and its own decisions about how to run its affairs. The first big problem that faced the new United States was how to join together these sometimes quarrelsome little countries into one united nation. When the War of Independence was over individual states began to behave more and more like independent nations. Many Americans became worried about the future. It was clear that for the United States to survive there would have to be changes in the Articles of Confederation. In February 1787, Congress asked each state to send delegates to a meeting or "convention;" in Philadelphia to talk about such changes. The meeting became known as the Constitutional Convention. It began in May I787, and fifty-five men attended. They chose George Washington to lead their discuss ions. The original purpose of the Constitutional Convention was simply to revise the Articles of Confederation. But the delegates did more than this. They worked out a completely new system of government for the United States. They set out the plan for this government in a document called the Constitution Of the United States. The new Constitution still left the individual state governments with a wide range of powers. But it made the federal government much stronger than before. It gave it the power to collect taxes, to organize armed forces, control trade of all kinds. The Constitution made sure that there was a "balance of power" between these three main parts, or "branches," of the federal government. To each branch it gave powers that the other two did not have. The Constitution went into effect in March 1789. But it was still not really complete. In 1791 ten amendments, or additions , were made to it . Together these tell amendments are called the Bill of Rights. The reason for the Bill of Rights was that the original Constitution had said nothing about the rights and freedoms of individual citizens. The Bill of Rights altered this. It promised all Americans freedom of religion, free press, free speech, the right to carry arms, the right to a fair trial by jury, and protection against crud and unusual punishments.

The American Civil War (1861–1865) was a civil war in the United States of America. Eleven Southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America, also known as "the Confederacy". Led by Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy fought for its independence from the United States. The U.S. federal government was supported by twenty mostly-Northern free states in which slavery already had been abolished, and by five slave states that became known as the border states. These twenty-five states, referred to as the Union, had a much larger base of population and industry than the South. After four years of bloody, devastating warfare (mostly within the Southern states), the Confederacy surrendered and slavery was outlawed everywhere in the nation. The restoration of the Union, and the Reconstruction Era that followed, dealt with issues that remained unresolved for generations.

In the history of the United States, the term Reconstruction Era has two senses; the first covers the entire nation in the period 1865–1877 following the Civil War; the second one, used in this article, covers the transformation of the Southern United States from 1863 to 1877, with the reconstruction of state and society in the former Confederacy. Three amendments to the Constitution affected the entire nation. In the different states, Reconstruction began and ended at different times; federal Reconstruction policies were finally abandoned with the Compromise of 1877.

Reconstruction policies were debated in the North when the war began, and commenced in earnest after the Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863. Reconstruction policies were implemented when a Confederate state came under the control of the Union Army. President Abraham Lincoln set up reconstructed governments in several southern states during the war, including Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana. He experimented with giving land to ex-slaves in South Carolina. Following Lincoln's assassination, president Andrew Johnson tried to follow Lincoln's lenient policies and appointed new governors in the summer of 1865. Johnson quickly declared that the war goals of national unity and the ending of slavery had been achieved, so that reconstruction was completed. Republicans in Congress refused to accept Johnson's terms, rejected the new members of Congress elected by the South, and in 1865–66 broke with the president. A sweeping Republican victory in the 1866 Congressional elections in the North gave the Radical Republicans enough control of Congress that they over-rode Johnson's vetoes and began what is called "Radical reconstruction" in 1867.

In ten states, coalitions of freedmen, recent black and white arrivals from the North, and white Southerners who supported Reconstruction cooperated to form Republican biracial state governments. They raised taxes for their own purposes; offered massive aid to support railroads to improve transportation and shipping. Conservative opponents charged that Republican regimes were marred by widespread corruption. Violent opposition towards freedmen and whites who supported Reconstruction emerged in numerous localities. Conservative white Democrats calling themselves "Redeemers" regained control state by state, sometimes using fraud and violence to control state elections. A deep national economic depression following the Panic of 1873 led to major Democratic gains in the North, the collapse of many railroad schemes in the South, and a growing sense of frustration in the North.

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   11.The USA in World War I
   

The Great Depression began with the Wall Street Crash of October, 1929 and rapidly spread worldwide. The market crash marked the beginning of a decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation, plunging farm incomes, and lost opportunities for economic growth and personal advancement.

Industries that suffered the most included construction, agriculture as dust-bowl conditions persisted in the agricultural heartland, shipping, mining, and logging as well as durable goods like automobiles and appliances that could be postponed. The economy reached bottom in the winter of 1932-33; then came four years of very rapid growth until 1937, when the Recession of 1937 brought back 1934 levels of unemployment. The depression caused major political changes in America. Three years into the depression. Roosevelt's economic recovery plan, the New Deal, instituted unprecedented programs for relief, recovery and reform, and brought about a major realignment of American politics.

The Great Depression was a worldwide economic downturn starting in most places and ending at different times for different countries. It was the largest and most important economic depression in modern history. The Great Depression originated in the United States; historians use as a starting date on October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday. The end of the depression in the U.S is associated with the onset of the war economy of World War II.

International trade was deeply affected, as were personal incomes, tax revenues, prices, and profits.

Effects of depression in the United States:

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  13 million people became unemployed.
  
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  Industrial production fell by nearly 45%.
  
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  Home-building dropped by 80%.
  
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  About 5,000 banks went out of business.