The Mental Floss History of the United States: The (Almost) Complete and (Entirely) Entertaining Story of America

455 Pages·2010·3.1 MB·English

by  Erik Sass

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
BCE BCE
which point the Ice Age ended, the polar ice 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, forests, grasslands, swamps,
BCE
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 southeastern
BCE
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 –9000 Asian nomads cross the land bridge connecting eastern
BCE
BCE Siberia to Alaska.
100 Teotihuacan in Central Mexico has a population of 150,000+.
CE
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, 1565 St. Augustine, Florida, is founded by Spanish 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 17, Puritans found Boston, Massachusetts.
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, 1681 Royal charter granted to William Penn for Quaker 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 , and Hawaii
BCE CE
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 Monk’s Mound, a 100-foot-tall
CE
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 from Spaniards.
In the Southwest, the Anasazi of modern-day New Mexico built multi-story
stone structures (some as tall as four stories) that are still standing–and they
didn’t even use mortar or cement! At its height in the tenth and eleventh
centuries, the Chaco Canyon proto-city probably had a population of 4,000–
5,000 people, while the surrounding network of villages may have housed
25,000–50,000 people. Two hundred and fifty miles of roads, some of them
paved with cobblestones, connected Chaco and the surrounding villages. No one
knows why Chaco Canyon was abandoned around 1150, but there is evidence
prolonged drought caused a famine. There may also have been violent upheaval;
the oral histories of Navajo pueblo-dwellers recall Chaco as a place where
“people got power over other people,” suggesting exploitation and social unrest.
LIE: Columbus realized he’d discovered a new land.
THE TRUTH: You’ve probably heard that Columbus discovered America by
mistake. That’s fair. After all, Renaissance Europeans believed that creation had
been fully revealed, so they weren’t exactly expecting to find two giant
continents hidden on the other side of the planet. Plus, Columbus had drastically
miscalculated the circumference of the earth at 19,000 miles instead of 24,900
miles–he based his projections on the work of Pierre d’Ailly, a Catholic cardinal
who used Roman miles (4,840 feet) instead of nautical ones (6,080 feet). Units,
people!
In 1592, exactly 100 years after Columbus “discovered” the New World,
the English Parliament passed a law setting the “statute mile” at its current
length of 5,280 feet.
Thus when the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria made landfall in the Bahamas on
October 12, 1492, Columbus naturally assumed he had hit Asia. Sure, he saw no
sign of the silk and pepper he was looking for, but he did find some people to
call “Indians,” with a small (but still worth it) amount of gold to steal. In 1493
his patrons, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, sent Columbus back across the
ocean. He was given a sweet new title, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and instructed
to rob the place–wherever it was–blind. The admiral was then to serve as
governor of whatever was left.
This is where an understandable mistake turns into bullheaded stupidity. On
the four return expeditions from 1493 to 1502, it gradually dawned on everyone
but Columbus that the land they were exploring wasn’t the East Indies. This
suspicion was supported by a whole bunch of evidence, including the testimony
of natives who insisted, again and again, that they’d never heard of China, Japan,
India, silk, pepper, elephants, or any of that nonsense.
Amerigo Vespucci, dispatched in 1499 by the king of Portugal as quality
control, wrote in his first report that “these regions … may rightly be called a
new world,” and was later honored by having his name stamped on the place.
But Columbus scoffed at his colleague. He dismissed the locals as “bestial men
who believe the whole world is an island,” and forced his crew, under threat of
corporal punishment, to sign an affidavit declaring they’d discovered Asia.
Obstinate till the very end, Columbus died in 1506, still believing he was right.
CHAINS YOU CAN BELIEVE IN
Geography wasn’t the only subject Columbus failed at: he was also a terrible
governor. In fact, he was so bad that Ferdinand and Isabella called him back to
Spain in chains in 1503 to answer charges of corruption and brutality. In 1546,
the Dominican monk Bartolomé de las Casas wrote:
On the island of Hispaniola, of the above three million souls that we once saw, today there be no more
than two hundred of those native peoples remaining … The Spaniards have shown not the slightest
consideration for these people, treating them (and I speak from first-hand experience, having been there
from the outset) not as brute animals–indeed, I prayed to God that they might treat them as well as
animals–so much as piles of dung in the middle of the road.