United States of America

United States of America
Type	Federal republic in North America
Founded	July 4, 1776
Headquarters	Washington, D.C., capital city
Key people	Donald Trump (45th and 47th president)
Industry	Machine building, military equipment, chemicals, mining, metallurgy, textiles, food processing, tourism
Products	Military equipment
Number of people	340.11 million
Website	https://www.usa.gov/

The United States of America, abbreviated as USA, US, or simply America, is a constitutional federal republic composed of fifty states that began regressing democratically in the 2010s. It constitutes the center third of North America, with Canada to the north and Mexico to the south.

Early history

The first humans arrived in the land that would become the American state of Alaska. This occurred approximately 3,300 years before the end of the Pleistocene epoch, or in around 9,700 BCE, although humans might have arrived by sea routes prior to this period.

They followed herds of animals over the Bering Land Bridge that connected what would become the Russian autonomous okrug of Chukotka to the future American state of Alaska. The Bering Land Bridge would be submerged at least 14,000 years later, 1,000 years into the Holocene epoch or in at least 9,000 BCE, to become the Bering Strait.

People spread across North America, with hundreds of civilizations and an estimated 10 million people living in what became the United States prior to colonialization.

Early colonialization outside of the continental United States

While the Norse explorer Leif Erikson sailed from Greenland to North America in 1003 and founded a settlement named Vinland, it was on the land that later became the Canadian province of Newfoundland, rather than in the United States. This settlement was short lived and was not common knowledge to the people of the Old World.

Nearly half a century after Erikson, on August 3, 1492, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus sailed with a Spanish fleet of three ships. The trip was an attempt to find a Northern trade route to East Asia, or the Indies as it was known at the time, which was a shorter distance to China than the Silk Road. Columbus instead sailed to the Caribbean and landed on an island, known by the people native to the island at the time as Guanahani, on October 12, 1492. The crew sailed to other islands in the Caribbean as well as the the islands that would become known as Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In his letter on the first voyage, he wrote that he claimed a series of islands on the edge of the Indian Ocean in Asia, not knowing that he had sailed near a continent unexplored by most Europeans. As a result, Columbus claimed in his description that the Arawak people native to these islands were Indians.

Columbus sailed on an additional voyage, leaving Spain on September 25, 1493. Future Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León was aboard the vessel on this voyage. The ships did not reach the land that would become country of the United States, but did land on the island that would become the United States territory of Puerto Rico on November 19, 1493. The crew also returned to Hispaniola. On the first voyage, the interactions between the Spanish and the indigenous Taíno people of the island were described as positive. However, on the second voyage, Columbus discovered that the small fort named La Navidad that was erected on the last trip was destroyed and the 39 men left stationed there had been killed by the Taíno. Columbus then participated in one of the earliest conquests by the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores by murdering, raping, and enslaving the Taíno. Michel de Cuneo, a member of Columbus's second expedition, documented that Columbus ordered 1,500 Taíno men and women kidnapped. 400 were let go, 600 were enslaved by Spanish men remaining on the island and sold, and 500 were sent to Spain to be sold. 200 of the latter died, and their bodies were dumped overboard by the Spanish. Cuneo also wrote of an incident where Columbus kidnapped a Carib woman and gave her to him to rape.

Laurence Bergreen made estimates of the death toll of Taíno in his biography, Columbus: The Four Voyages. He estimated that there were 300,000 inhabitants of Hispaniola in 1492. 100,000 died between 1494 and 1496, with half dying by mass suicide.

In 1902, Nicolás de Ovando became the third Governor of the Indies, and was sent by the Spanish crown to bring order to Hispaniola. Juan de Esquivel was sent by Nicolás de Ovando with 400 men to subjugate the inhabitants of the Taíno chiefdom of Caíçimu-Higüey.

The massacre in the major Taíno chiefdom of Jaragua was authorized in July 1503. It took place in the village of Guava near what would become Léogane, in the southwestern part of the island of Hispaniola. Many of the defeated Taíno were enslaved.

Juan Ponce de León was assigned to suppressed an uprising of the Taíno, which be in the land that would become the country of the Dominican Republic in the capital city of Higüey in 1504. He explored the neighboring island of Puerto Rico in 1508, the year in which Bergreen estimated that the Taíno population was down to 60,000.

The Spanish crown appointed Ponce de León as first Governor of Puerto Rico in 1509. In 1511, he crushed a major uprising of the Taíno people in Puerto Rico.

Colonialization inside of the continental United States

Ponce de León made landfall in Florida in 1513, marking one of the first documented European landings in the continental United States.