When Does United States History Really Begin?

There’s a lot of controversy going on right now about when we should say that United States history begins. In 2019, The New York Times Magazine launched an initiative called “The 1619 Project,” which argues that the year 1619 should be seen as the true year when the United States was founded because that is the year when the first enslaved Black people arrived in the English colonies in North America.

In response to this, in September 2020, the Trump administration announced that it was creating a “1776 Commission” to promote “patriotic education” throughout the United States and to defend traditional narratives about American history against the claims made by the 1619 Project. I’ve already written an entire article about what a ridiculous idea I think this is, so I’m not going to talk any more about it.

What is interesting, though, is the way that both the 1619 Project and the 1776 Commission fixate on particular dates for the supposed founding of the United States. I contend that both of these proposed dates are fundamentally flawed. In fact, I believe that it is a mistake to try to pin down any particular date for the founding of the United States. This country has come into existence through a long, gradual process and focusing on exact dates and saying those dates matter more than all the others limits the ways we can think about American history and naturally tends to marginalize certain groups of people from the American story.

A little anecdote

I grew up in a small, rural town in northern Indiana. When I was in high school, we had a class called “Face2Face,” which was basically a homeroom class that had been rebranded in a futile effort to make it seem “cool.” During my freshman year, there was a group of students in my Face2Face class who would always complain about how much they hated their world history class. They would constantly complain that everything we were learning in the class was “useless” and that it had nothing to do with their present-day lives.

We stayed in the same Face2Face class with the same group of students for all four years of high school. During my sophomore year, one of the boys who had always complained about how he hated world history class made a comment that I still remember to this day because it encapsulates the way that many white Americans seem to think about world history. He said: “The only thing that anyone needs to know about world history is that everything before 1776 was a mistake.”

Many white Americans seem to think this way. In their minds, nothing that happened before 1776 really matters, because 1776 is the year that the United States was born ex nihilo in the New World to serve as a majestic city on a hill, enlightening the whole world with the glorious lamp of liberty and salvation. This narrative, however, is abysmally wrong.

The story of the United States is not one of a new culture born ex nihilo in a New World, but rather a story of ancient cultures interacting with each other and slowly adapting to an old but changing world. As these cultures have adapted, they have changed, melded, and found expression in new ways. Nevertheless, every single facet of the United States as we know it is ultimately a product of the world as it existed before the United States.

American history before 1776

The North American continent first took on something resembling its present shape sometime around 200 million years ago. Humans probably first arrived in North America sometime around 20,000 years ago. By at least 2100 BCE, there were Native peoples in the present-day United States who were practicing agriculture. By 1000 CE, there were Native towns and cities across much of what is now the United States.

The Mississippian culture flourished in what is now the central United States from around 1000 CE until around 1540 CE. The largest of all the known Mississippian settlements was the city of Cahokia, located near present-day St. Louis, Missouri. It was a sprawling city and, at the center, was Monks Mound, the third-largest human-constructed pyramid structure in the western hemisphere. At its height in the twelfth century CE, Cahokia may have had a population of around 40,000 people, meaning it may have had a greater population than the city of London did at the time.

Other major Mississippian cities included Moundville (located near present-day Tuscaloosa, Alabama), Angel Mounds (located near present-day Evansville, Indiana), the Parkin Site (located near Parkin, Arkansas), and Kincaid Mounds (located in southern Illinois).

ABOVE: Image from Wikimedia Commons of a modern artist’s recreation of what the city of Cahokia would have looked like at its height in the twelfth century CE

The first Europeans to settle in North America were the Norse, who established at least one short-lived settlement at the site of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland sometime around 1000 CE. The remains of this settlement first began to be excavated in 1960 by the Norwegian archaeologists Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad. It is thought to have lasted for maybe a hundred years at most until it was abandoned.

In 1492, the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus led a voyage of three ships that had been given to him by the Spanish crown across the Atlantic Ocean. He and his crew stopped on several islands in the Caribbean Sea, where they encountered the Native peoples who were already living there—mostly members of the Taíno, Arawak, and Lucayan nations. Columbus founded the short-lived settlement of La Navidad on the island of Hispaniola and took some of the Native people captive. He brought these captive Native people back to Spain with him as slaves.

The first permanent European settlers in what is now the United States were the Spanish, who established settlements in Florida and New Mexico in the early sixteenth century. In 1565, a group of Spanish colonists under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded the city of St. Augustine in Florida. The city of St. Augustine remains the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the continental United States founded by Europeans.

The Spanish colonists under Avilés brought with them a large number of enslaved people of African descent, whom they forced to work for them. We don’t know how many enslaved Africans there were in St. Augustine at the time of its founding in 1565, but, in 1602, there were fifty-six enslaved people in the city.

ABOVE: Portrait of the Spanish colonial admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who led the founding of the city of St. Augustine, Florida—the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the continental United States founded by Europeans

The earliest Asian people who are known to have settled in the land that is now the United States were a group of Filipinos known as “Luzonians” who came from the city of Manila and arrived in Morro Bay in what is now California on 17 October 1587 on board the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Buena Esperanza.

The first English settlement in North America was the Roanoke Colony, which was first established in 1585, reestablished in 1587, and finally abandoned sometime between 1587 and 1590. The first successful English colony in North America was the Jamestown settlement, which was established in 1607.

In August 1619, the first enslaved African people in an English colony in North America arrived on board The White Lion, a man-of-war ship with an English pilot that was privateering under a Dutch letter of marque, at Port Comfort, Virginia. They had been captured earlier that year from the kingdom of Ndongo in what is now Angola.

By the time the United States declared independence from Britain in 1776, it had been 191 years since the first permanent English settlers arrived in North America. To put that into perspective, 191 years ago, Andrew Jackson was president and John Adams had been dead for a little less than three years.

ABOVE: Photograph from 1902 of the ruined nave of the Jamestown Church, originally built in the seventeenth century during the early years of English settlement in North America

Ways the United States continued to form after 1776

Meanwhile, the United States really wasn’t much of an independent country in 1776. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence was at first an entirely unilateral one. The first sovereign nation to recognize the United States as an independent country was the Kingdom of Morocco, which did so on 20 December 1777. The Kingdom of France recognized the United States’ independence a few months later in 6 February 1778—nearly two years after the Declaration of Independence.

Even then, the United States still didn’t have any kind of formal constitution at the federal level. The Articles of Confederation, the first formal agreement among the thirteen states that laid out how the states would be governed once they were independent of British rule, came into force on 1 March 1781. By that time, it had been nearly half a decade since the Continental Congress had ratified the Declaration of Independence.

Meanwhile, the main fighting of the American Revolution continued until General Charles Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington on 19 October 1781 after the Siege of Yorktown. Britain did not officially recognize the United States’ independence until British representatives signed the Treaty of Paris on 3 September 1783.

Even after Britain recognized the United States’ independence, there was still a lot of disagreement about what sort of country the United States was going to be. The present United States Constitution wasn’t ratified until 21 June 1788 and George Washington wasn’t sworn in as the first president under this Constitution until 30 April 1789—nearly thirteen years after the Declaration of Independence.

ABOVE: Photograph of the final page of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, through which Britain officially recognized the United States as an independent nation

A lot, though, has changed since the time of George Washington’s inauguration. For one thing, in 1789, the United States ruled a lot less territory than it does today. At the time, the United States included less than half of the land it currently covers. It didn’t include any lands west of the Mississippi River, nor did it include Florida, nor did it include any island territories that were significantly separated from the North American continent.

Over the course of the next century and half, however, the United States pursued a policy of aggressive territorial expansion, resulting in the much larger country we know today. (Alaska and Hawaii were only admitted as states in 1959. That means that, when President-Elect Joe Biden was born in 1942, neither Alaska nor Hawaii was yet a state!)

The population of the United States also looked rather different in 1789 than it does today. In 1789, most of the population was made up of Indigenous people, people of western European descent, and people of West African descent. Over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, however, the United States has received large numbers of immigrants from other parts of the world, including eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, Central and South America, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.

The religious composition of the United States has also changed. In 1789, the vast majority of the English settlers in North America were Protestant Christians, the vast majority of Native people were still practicing Native religions, and the majority of enslaved Black people had been forcibly converted to Christianity. Very few people were openly irreligious.

Today, on the other hand, it is far more common for people to be openly irreligious and, largely as a result of immigration, there are many religions that are widely practiced today that were not nearly as widely practiced in the United States two hundred years ago, such as non-Protestant varieties of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions.

ABOVE: The Early Puritans of New England Going to Church, painted in 1867 by George Henry Boughton

There have been a lot of other significant changes. The abolition of slavery, for instance, is a huge change that separates the United States of today from the United States of George Washington’s era. When Washington was inaugurated, slavery was still legal in at least some form throughout nearly the entire United States. The northern states gradually abolished slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but it remained legal in the southern states.

On 22 September 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which decreed that all people who were enslaved in states that had sided with the Confederacy were to be set free. This executive order did not mandate the emancipation of enslaved people in states that had sided with the Union, such as Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Ultimately, however, slavery was at least nominally abolished throughout the entire United States through the Thirteenth Amendment, which was ratified on 6 December 1865.

Another huge change came in the form of women’s suffrage. In the 1790s when George Washington was president, women who owned property greater than or equal to the value of fifty pounds Proclamation money were allowed to vote in the state of New Jersey, but the state revoked women’s right to vote in 1807 and, for over half a century after that, women were not allowed to vote anywhere in the country.

The territory of Wyoming first guaranteed women the right to vote in 1869. The territory of Utah followed suit in 1870. When Wyoming was admitted to the union as a state in 1890, it became the first state to formally guarantee women the right to vote in its state constitution. Over the following thirty years, many other states granted women the right to vote. Finally, on 26 August 1920, the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment was certified, guaranteeing women the right to vote nationwide.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s fought for the restoration of voting rights for Black Americans and the end of race-based segregation. (Black people had previously been granted suffrage through the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, but, in many jurisdictions, they had been disenfranchised through racist Jim Crow Laws.) The Civil Rights Movement met with mixed success and failed in many of its more radical goals, but it nonetheless did secure major advances for the rights of Black citizens, including the passage of the the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

These are just a few of the more obvious ways that the United States has changed since the early days of the republic. Quite frankly, the United States under George Washington in 1789 had vastly more in common with the English colonies of 1773 than with the United States of 2020. Why, then, do so many people—including the Trump administration—see the year 1776 as being so fundamentally important? Clearly, the years before and after 1776 matter more than 1776 itself.

ABOVE: Photograph of suffragettes marching in New York City in 1917. The state of New York granted women the right to vote through a referendum later that year.

Dates and exclusion

I agree that important events happened in both 1619 and 1776, but I think that saying that the history of the United States begins in either of these years does more to exclude than anything else.

If you say 1619 is the year that the United States was founded, then you are saying that the most important thing that defines the United States as a nation is the specific relationship between Black people and white English settlers. The problem is that this inherently implies that certain groups of people are not essential to the American story, including:

• the Native Americans who had already been living here for thousands of years before anyone else arrived
• the Spanish colonists who settled in parts of what is now the United States in the sixteenth century before the English
• the enslaved Black people owned by those Spanish colonists
• non-English European and Asian immigrants, who mostly arrived in North America long after 1619

Picking 1619 as the date for the beginning of United States history is therefore ironically inherently Anglocentric.

Meanwhile, if you say that 1776 is the year that the United States was founded, then you are saying that the most important thing that defines the United States as a nation is the decision made by a bunch of extremely elite white men of mostly English descent to declare independence from Britain.

This naturally implies that anyone who is not an elite white man of mostly English descent is not essential to the American story. It also ignores the fact that independence was at first unilateral and that it took many years for anything resembling the current federal government to come into being.

I think that the solution here is to let go of the desire to have an exact year for the founding of the United States and to instead accept that history is complicated. Nations don’t suddenly spring into existence fully-formed in a single instant, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus. All nations are constantly changing and being re-founded and, frankly, that’s ok.

ABOVE: The Birth of Minerva, painted by the French Neoclassical painter René-Antoine Houasse (lived c. 1645 – 1710). This is not how the United States was born.