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

523 Pages·2010·4.54 MB·English

by  Mental Floss

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 which point the Ice Age ended, the polar ice
BCE BCE
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,
BCE
forests, grasslands, swamps, 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
BCE
southeastern 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 – Asian nomads cross the land bridge connecting
BCE
9000 eastern Siberia to Alaska.
BCE
100 Teotihuacan in Central Mexico has a population of
CE
150,000+.
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, St. Augustine, Florida, is founded by Spanish
1565 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 Puritans found Boston, Massachusetts.
17, 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, Royal charter granted to William Penn for Quaker
1681 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 ,
BCE CE
and Hawaii 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
CE
Monk’s Mound, a 100-foot-tall 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