in this and the next few videos is just give

a scaffold of American history.

I'm clearly going to glaze over a lot of the details,

but hopefully it'll give you a sense

of how everything at least fits together,

at least the major events in American history.

So you can kind of, and when I say American history,

I'm talking about United States history.

And so the first real successful settlement

in what's now the United States was at Jamestown.

That's Jamestown, Virginia right over here.

And it was 1607.

It was set up as kind of a commercial settlement

and then shortly after that, and we always

learned this in school, you know the pilgrims on the Mayflower,

sailing the oceans blue and all the rest.

They were kind of the next major settlement in the New World.

Or I guess we should say the next major successful English

settlement.

There were obviously the Spanish and the Portuguese were already

settling the New World with a good bit of success

at this point, but we're talking about the English settlements.

And so the pilgrims settled what's

now Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620.

And obviously from 1620 until the mid-1700s,

you just had a huge influx of people migrating and cities

developing.

But I'm going to fast forward all the way to the mid-1700s.

So this is actually a huge amount of time

that I'm just not providing any details over.

Because I'm really just quite focused on the major events

in American history.

And so this is a 130-year period where things were just

getting built out more, they were getting more developed.

And I'm going to fast forward to 1754, because

at this period you had essentially

the entire east coast of what's now the US.

These were the 13 colonies of the-- well,

they're not the United States yet,

they're the 13 British colonies.

But these are English settlements,

and then if you go a little bit to the northwest from there,

you have all the French settlements.

And obviously still in these parts of Quebec and Canada,

people speak French.

But you had the French settlements

up in this area over here.

I'm not going to go into the details.

Each of these can be a whole series of videos,

and hopefully in the future I will

make them whole series of videos.

But you fast forward to 1754, and you

start having the French and the British start

getting into squabbles over territory

where Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is right now.

In 1754.

And that starts the French and Indian War.

And I want to be very clear here because this is maybe

one of the biggest points of confusion

when people first learn American history.

Since it's called the French and Indian War,

they think it's between the French and the Indians.

But it's not.

It was the French and the Indians

against the British and the colonists.

So in this war, the British and the colonists

were on the same side against the French and the Indians.

And obviously there were some Indians

that were also on the side of the British,

but it's called the French and Indian War because these

were the people that the British were fighting against.

Now if anyone outside of the United States

talks about the French and Indian War,

they will not call it the French and Indian War.

They'll really just call that the American theater

of the Seven Years' War because it eventually

evolves into a much bigger conflict between Great Britain

and France that's going on in Europe,

and the French and Indian War was really

just the American theater of it.

So between-- the French and Indian

War starts in 1754 based on these disputes over Pittsburgh.

But that wasn't the only thing.

You had all of these other things, all

of these other tensions that were developing.

The thing that starts the war is never the only factor.

It's always just the tipping point.

But that leads to a bigger war in Europe.

And that's the Seven Years' War that starts in 1756.

And they both end because they're really the same war.

They both end in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris.

Treaty of Paris, 1763.

And the big takeaway of that is that really most of what France

had in the New World now becomes essentially

a part of the British Empire, now

becomes British colonies or British territories.

And even Louisiana goes over to Spain at this point.

And we'll see it goes back to France

for a little bit in 1800, and then

it goes back to the United States in 1803,

but we'll see that in a second.

So 1763, the British-- it was this huge costly war--

but they were able to win.

And at least from the point of view of the British,

they felt that the main beneficiaries of this war

were the Americans.

They were able to get all this new territory, all

this new area that they can now trade with,

or they could now potentially settle.

And so the British decide to start

taxing the Americans to recoup some portion

of the cost of the war.

So in 1765 they pass the Stamp Act.

And this wasn't a tax on stamps.

What this was is that they essentially

declared that a whole set of paper

that had to be used in the New World.

So the stuff for legal documents,

stuff that maybe even newspaper.

That that paper would have to be produced in Great Britain,

and it had to have a special stamp on it in order

for the contracts or whatever was on top of it,

in order for them to be legitimate.

So essentially it was a huge tax on paper and on documents.

And essentially, this is what societies ran on.

So it was just a way to extract money from the colonists

in order to, I guess, help pay back some of the costs

that the empire felt that they had incurred

on behalf of the colonists.

You could debate whether who was the main beneficiary, but

regardless you could imagine this didn't make--

this whole period over here-- the colonists weren't happy.

Especially because they didn't have

any representation in Parliament.

This was done without anybody from the colony

saying, hey, wait I don't think that's fair.

Or this is fair or whatever.

And so you fast forward.

1773, you have the Boston Tea Party

where you have a bunch of people who, for whatever reason,

and there's multiple interests here.

But there was three ships in Boston Harbor full of tea

and the tea was owned by the East India Tea company.

And they decide, in protest, and there

was a whole series of acts and other taxes

that went back and forth, but once again, we're

not going to go into the details here.

But in revolt they dumped the tea.

They dressed up as Indians, as American Indians,

and they dumped the tea into Boston Harbor,

and then you could imagine well that was

kind of a very exciting act for the colonists,

but it didn't make the British very happy.

And then after that, they passed the Coercive Act.

They essentially did a blockade of Boston.

So things started to get really, really,

really tense in the early 1770s.

And then you fast forward to 1775,

you have essentially the first conflicts of the American

Revolutionary War, and we're going

to do a whole series of videos on really

the whole Revolutionary War.

1776, you have the Declaration of Independence.

This is them right here drafting the Declaration

of Independence.

And that's really just saying, hey, we've

had enough of you Great Britain!

We are now declaring ourselves as an independent country.

No more of this colonies business.

And so all the way until 1783 you

have the American Revolutionary War.

And once again, you can do a lot of videos on this,

but I'm just going to go over it just

so you have a sense of when everything happened

and when everything ended.

And we can later dig deeper into the scaffold.

And it ends with the Treaty of Paris.

The US becomes a free independent state.

And then you fast forward.

Until this point, the US has been

governed by Congress, and the Articles of Confederation.

But the Constitution that we have now,

it was drafted in 1787.

It was ratified-- it had to get at least nine of the states

to ratify it-- that happened in 1788.

And then it went into effect in 1789.

So it depends what you consider the birth of the country.

Well, it would definitely be the Declaration of Independence,

but the country in its current form,

with its current institutions, with this current constitution,

started in 1789.

And that was also the beginning of Washington's first

of two terms as president, and those ended in 1797.

And then John Adams comes into the picture.

And the reason why I put this-- obviously

this is actually the only president that I showed--

is that it was actually very important

that he decided to step down after two terms.

He was hugely popular.

If he wanted to, he probably could

have become one of these characters that

stick around maybe a little bit longer

than some people would want.

So it was really good that he set this example of stepping

down after two terms, and that he

wasn't this kind of power hungry dude.

You fast forward a little bit more.

1803, I mentioned that after the French and Indian War what's

Louisiana-- I want to be clear when I say Louisiana.

Louisiana isn't just what's the current state of Louisiana.

It's this whole region that includes

the state of Louisiana, but all the way up

to roughly what the United States'

current border with Canada.

And after the French and Indian War,

all of this business over here went to Spain.

And then in 1800, it went back to France.

But then in 1803, Napoleon had a bunch of stuff

that he-- his Naval fleet was destroyed,

he had a suffered some defeats in the West Indies,

I guess we could call it.

In particular in Haiti, and he said,

well, you know I probably won't be

able to control this territory anyway,

so he sold it to the United States

for what turned out to be a very, very, very cheap price.

But it was kind of like, it's not

like he could have protected it anyway.

The United States might have been

able to take it from him without him being able to do anything.

So he might as well get some money for it

so that he could fund his battles in Europe.

So in 1803, the United States almost doubled in size.

It went from these territories that it

had after the American Revolution for Independence,

and now it got all of this region over here in 1803.

Then you fast forward a bit.

And the War of 1812, it's an interesting one,

because there weren't any really serious outcomes from it.

But what was interesting about it, this whole time period,

even after independence, the British

continued to harass America.