USA Etymology and History

 

USA Etymology and History

Use of the term "United States of America" in writing can be traced back to January 2, 1776. That is when Stephen Moylan, an aide in the Continental Army to General George Washington, wrote to Joseph Reed, aide-de-camp to Washington, asking to travel "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" in order to request aid in the Revolutionary War cause. The earliest known public use is an anonymous essay that was printed in the Williamsburg newspaper The Virginia Gazette on 6 April 1776. At some point on or after 11 June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote "United States of America" in a preliminary draft of the Declaration of Independence, which was approved by the Second Continental Congress on 4 July 1776.

The name "United States" and its abbreviation "U.S.", used as nouns or as adjectives in English, are standard short forms of the country. The abbreviation "USA", used as a noun, is standard. "United States" and "U.S." are the standard names across the U.S. federal government, with regulated conventions. "The States" is a standard informal reduction of the name, used especially from overseas; "stateside" is the related adjective or adverb.

"America" is the feminine version of the first name of Americus Vesputius, the Latinized form of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512); it was originally used as a toponym by German cartographers Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann in 1507. Vespucci was the first to suggest that the West Indies discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492 were part of an unknown landmass and not part of the Indies at the eastern edge of Asia. In English, "America" is not normally used to talk about things other than the United States, even though "the Americas" is used to refer to the entirety of the North American and South American continents. 

History
Indigenous peoples

The earliest inhabitants of North America immigrated from Siberia more than 12,000 years ago, either along the now-vanished Ice Age coastline or across the Bering land bridge.

Clovis culture, which emerged around 11,000 BC, is said to be the earliest extensive culture in the Americas. Indigenous North American cultures became more complex over time, and some developed agriculture, architecture, and complex societies, like the Mississippian culture. During the post-archaic era, the Mississippian cultures were situated in the Midwest, east, and south, and Algonquian in the Great Lakes and along the Eastern Seaboard, whereas the southwest was occupied by the Hohokam culture and Ancestral Puebloans. Native estimates of populations within present-day United States prior to European immigration vary from an estimated 500,000 to almost 10 million. European exploration, colonization and conflict (1513–1765) Colonial past of the United States and Colonial American armed forces history Christopher Columbus started exploring the Caribbean on behalf of Spain in 1492, which resulted in Spanish-speaking colonies and missions from what is currently Puerto Rico and Florida to New Mexico and California.

The initial Spanish colony in the current continental United States was Spanish Florida, which was chartered in 1513. Following a series of failed settlements there because of starvation and illness, Spain's first permanent city, Saint Augustine, was established in 1565.

France also established its own colonies in French Florida in 1562, but these were either abandoned (Charles fort, 1578) or captured by Spanish attacks (Fort Caroline, 1565). Later permanent French colonies were established along the Great Lakes (Fort Detroit, 1701), the Mississippi River (Saint Louis, 1764) and particularly along the Gulf of Mexico (New Orleans, 1718).

Early European colonies also comprised the successful Dutch colony of New Nederland (colonized 1626, now New York) and the little Swedish colony of New Sweden (colonized 1638 in Delaware). British colonization of the East Coast commenced with the Virginia Colony (1607) and the Plymouth Colony (Massachusetts, 1620). The Massachusetts Mayflower Compact and the Connecticut Fundamental Orders set precedents for representative self-rule and constitutionalism that would emerge over the course of the American colonies. Though European colonists in present-day America had conflicts with Native Americans, the latter also traded with them, exchanging animal skins and food for European implements. The relationship varied from intimate collaboration to bloodshed and massacres.

The colonial powers tended to follow policies aimed at making Native Americans adopt the European mode of living, and this included conversion to the Christian faith. Along the Atlantic seaboard, African slaves were traded by the settlers via the Atlantic slave trade. The initial Thirteen Colonies that would eventually establish the United States were governed as British Empire possessions by governors appointed by the Crown, although local governments did conduct elections to which most white male property owners were eligible. The population of the colonies increased very quickly from Maine to Georgia, surpassing Native American populations; by the 1770s, the natural growth of the population was such that only a small minority of Americans had been born outside the country. The remoteness of the colonies from Britain made it easy for self-rule to take root, and the First Great Awakening, a sequence of Christian awakenings, stimulated colonial desire for assured religious freedom.