Long before anything resembling the 'United States' existed, North America was peopled by hundreds of indigenous nations of astonishing diversity. The first inhabitants arrived from Asia more than fifteen thousand years ago, most likely crossing the Beringia land bridge during the last ice age, and over millennia they spread across the whole continent, adapting to deserts, forests, prairies, mountains and coasts. Out of those hunters of large mammals there emerged, in time, farming societies, permanent villages and true cities.
Around the year 1000 AD the Mississippian culture, a builder of great earthen mounds, flourished in the Mississippi valley. Its center, Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, came to hold between 10,000 and 40,000 inhabitants at its height, around 1050-1150: it was the largest city north of Mexico and outstripped the London or Paris of the time in population. In the Southwest, the Ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi) raised the cliff cities of Mesa Verde and the great complexes of Chaco Canyon, with a sophisticated astronomy and a network of roads.
At the moment of European contact, the mosaic was vast: the Iroquois and Algonquin of the eastern woodlands, organized in confederacies; the farming Pueblo peoples of the Southwest; the Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche and Blackfeet of the Great Plains, hunters of bison; the Navajo and Apache of the desert; the wealthy fishing and totem-carving peoples of the northwest coast; and the Inuit and Yupik of the far Arctic. It is estimated that millions of people, speaking hundreds of different languages, inhabited what is now United States territory before 1492.
The first Europeans to explore what is now United States territory were the Spanish. Juan Ponce de León landed in Florida in 1513, and in 1565 St. Augustine was founded, the oldest continuously inhabited city of European origin in the country. During the 16th century, expeditions such as those of Hernando de Soto and Francisco Vázquez de Coronado traveled the south and the southwest, while in 1598 Juan de Oñate colonized New Mexico, where Santa Fe was founded in 1610. The French and the English would arrive later, and contact brought with it diseases —smallpox, measles, influenza— that, without anyone understanding it at the time, decimated entire indigenous populations.
The English colonization that would give rise to the United States began in 1607, when the Virginia Company founded Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America. The colonists, who were looking for gold, almost perished of hunger and disease until the cultivation of tobacco saved them economically. In 1619 the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia and the first representative assembly in the colonies met. A year later, in 1620, the separatist Pilgrims of the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, and signed the Mayflower Compact, an early agreement of self-government.
Over the course of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th, thirteen British colonies took shape along the Atlantic coast, grouped into three very different regions: Puritan New England (Massachusetts, founded in 1630, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire), given over to trade, fishing and shipbuilding; the Middle Colonies (New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware), a 'melting pot' of religions and origins; and the Southern colonies (Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas and, last of all, Georgia in 1732), of great plantations that depended more and more on slave labor. A religious awakening, the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, shook all of them and, without meaning to, began to weave a first common identity.
The seed of the break sprouted, paradoxically, from a British victory. In the French and Indian War (1754-1763), part of the global conflict known as the Seven Years' War, Great Britain drove France out of North America and won a colossal empire; but the war left it in debt, and London decided that the colonies should pay their share. A succession of taxes and laws —the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts— set off protest under the slogan 'no taxation without representation'. Tension escalated with the Boston Massacre of 1770 and, above all, with the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, when colonists in disguise threw 342 chests of tea into the sea.
The British reprisal, the so-called 'Intolerable Acts', united the colonies. In 1774 the First Continental Congress met, and in April 1775 fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord. On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, approved the Declaration of Independence drafted by Thomas Jefferson, with its famous assertion that 'all men are created equal'. The war was long and hard: George Washington's army survived the terrible winter at Valley Forge, and the turning point came with the victory at Saratoga in 1777, which decided France to ally itself with the rebels.
With French military and financial support, and figures such as the Marquis de Lafayette, the Continental troops besieged and defeated the British at Yorktown in 1781. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 recognized the independence of the United States and set its borders as far as the Mississippi River. A new nation was born, though still a fragile one: thirteen former colonies turned into states that had to learn to live together under a single political roof.
Independence did not settle how to govern. The first Articles of Confederation created a union so weak that it left the country on the edge of ungovernability. To put that right, delegates from the states met in Philadelphia between May and September 1787 and, instead of amending the Articles, drafted an entirely new Constitution. The document designed a federal republic with a strong national government, divided into three branches that checked one another —Congress, the Presidency and the Supreme Court— through an ingenious system of checks and balances. It is the oldest written constitution still in force in the world.
Its ratification set off an intense debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists, and was achieved only with the promise of adding a declaration of rights. So, in 1791, the first ten amendments were ratified, the Bill of Rights, which guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of religion and other individual protections. George Washington took office as the first president in 1789 and set decisive precedents, among them that of stepping down after two terms. Around Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson the first political parties emerged.
The republic got moving quickly. In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase from France, negotiated by Jefferson for some 15 million dollars, doubled the size of the country at a stroke; the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806) explored those lands all the way to the Pacific. The War of 1812 against Great Britain —during which the British went so far as to burn Washington in 1814— ended in a draw, but strengthened national feeling and consolidated the young nation as an independent actor with a voice of its own on the continent.
During the first half of the 19th century, the young republic threw itself into a dizzying territorial expansion, guided by the idea of 'manifest destiny': the conviction, popularized in 1845, that the nation had been called by Providence to stretch from one ocean to the other. The annexation of Texas in 1845 set off the war with Mexico (1846-1848), which ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: Mexico ceded more than 1.3 million square kilometers, the whole of today's Southwest, from California to New Mexico. That same year, an agreement with Great Britain fixed the Oregon border in the northwest.
Millions of settlers pushed toward the Pacific along legendary routes such as the Oregon Trail, and the California gold rush of 1849 explosively accelerated the settlement of the West. In 1869, the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, in Utah, finally joined the two oceans with a 'golden spike' and transformed the interior of the country forever. The bison, the basis of life on the plains, was almost entirely exterminated.
This expansion had a devastating human cost for the native peoples. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, pushed through by President Andrew Jackson, brought about the Trail of Tears, in which thousands of Cherokee and other peoples of the southeast died as they were deported west of the Mississippi. Over the course of the century came the Indian Wars, treaties systematically broken, massacres such as those of Sand Creek (1864) and Wounded Knee (1890), and the confinement of the native nations on reservations. The conquest of the West was, at one and the same time, a national epic and an indigenous tragedy.
The great wound of American history was slavery. By 1860, almost four million African Americans lived enslaved in the South, where the cotton economy depended entirely on their forced labor, while the North was moving toward an industrial society of free labor. The question of whether slavery should extend to the new territories of the West poisoned politics for decades, with failed compromises such as the Missouri one (1820) or that of 1850, and outbreaks of violence such as 'Bleeding Kansas'.
The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, an opponent of the extension of slavery, precipitated the secession of eleven Southern states, which formed the Confederate States. The war began on April 12, 1861 with the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter and became the bloodiest conflict in the country's history, with some 620,000 to 750,000 dead. On January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation declared the slaves of the rebel states free, and the battle of Gettysburg, that same July, marked the turning point. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. A few days later, on April 14, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth.
The Union victory and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery; the Fourteenth (1868) granted citizenship to those born in the country, and the Fifteenth (1870) prohibited denying the vote on grounds of race. The Reconstruction period tried to bring the four million freedmen into the political life of the South, with real achievements but also with fierce resistance, embodied in the Ku Klux Klan. When in 1877 the federal government withdrew its troops from the South, the regime of racial segregation of the Jim Crow laws took hold, endorsed by the 'separate but equal' doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which would keep discrimination in place for almost a century.
Between 1870 and 1900, the United States went through a colossal transformation that turned it into the largest industrial economy in the world. It was the 'Gilded Age', an ironic term coined by Mark Twain for a time of dazzling wealth and brutal inequality. Steel, oil, the railroad and electricity reshaped the country, and a handful of magnates —John D. Rockefeller in oil with Standard Oil, Andrew Carnegie in steel, Cornelius Vanderbilt in the railroads, J. P. Morgan in finance— amassed unprecedented fortunes. Their critics called them 'robber barons' for their monopolies and for the harsh conditions of their workers; they saw themselves as captains of progress, and many later turned to philanthropy.
That growth rested on mass immigration. Between the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, more than twenty million Europeans —Italians, Eastern European Jews, Poles, Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, Greeks— crossed the Atlantic. From 1892 on, most passed through the station at Ellis Island, in New York Bay, under the gaze of the recently inaugurated Statue of Liberty (1886). Across the Pacific came thousands of Chinese and Japanese, who suffered harsh discrimination, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
The other face of prosperity was social conflict. Workers organized in unions and staged massive and sometimes bloody strikes, such as the Haymarket strike in Chicago in 1886 —the origin of May Day— or the Pullman strike of 1894. The cities grew chaotically, with overcrowding and extreme poverty, while the first skyscrapers were going up. That accumulated discontent prepared the ground for the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, which would seek to tame big capital, fight corruption and regulate an economy that had grown faster than its own rules.
In 1898, the Spanish-American War marked the irruption of the United States as a world power. After the explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana, the country declared war on Spain, defeated it in a few months and, with the Treaty of Paris, acquired Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, as well as establishing a protectorate over Cuba. Almost four centuries of Spanish presence in the Americas were coming to an end, and the United States became for the first time an empire with overseas possessions, which opened a fierce internal debate about expansionism.
The Progressive Era (roughly 1900-1917) tried to correct the excesses of the Gilded Age. Presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt, with his 'Square Deal', pushed for the breaking up of the great monopolies, the regulation of the railroads, the protection of consumers and the creation of the national parks. Historic amendments were passed: the income tax (16th, 1913), the direct election of senators (17th, 1913) and, in 1920, women's suffrage with the Nineteenth Amendment, after decades of struggle by the suffragists.
In foreign policy, the United States stayed neutral when the First World War broke out in 1914, but the sinking of ships by German submarines and the Zimmermann telegram pushed it into the war. On April 6, 1917 it declared war on Germany, and more than two million American soldiers crossed the Atlantic; some 50,000 died in combat. Their intervention proved decisive for the Allied victory of November 1918. President Woodrow Wilson proposed his 'Fourteen Points' and the creation of a League of Nations, but the American Senate itself rejected the treaty, and the country fell back into isolationism.
The 1920s, the 'Roaring Twenties', were a time of euphoria and modernity. The country's wealth more than doubled, the automobile became a mass product, radio and the talking pictures reached millions of homes, jazz defined an era and the cities buzzed with energy. It was also the time of the Prohibition of alcohol (1920-1933), which instead of putting an end to drinking bred the speakeasies and the organized crime of figures such as Al Capone. Beneath the surface, however, stock market speculation was growing unchecked.
On October 29, 1929 —'Black Tuesday'— the New York Stock Exchange collapsed, starting the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in the history of the country and of the world. Thousands of banks failed, production collapsed and unemployment came to exceed 20 percent in 1933. On top of the crisis came the environmental catastrophe of the Dust Bowl, the gigantic dust storms that ruined the farmers of the Great Plains and pushed millions of people to migrate.
In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency with the promise of a 'New Deal'. From 1933 he launched a vast program of reforms: a rescue of the banking system, great public works that gave employment to millions, regulation of the stock market and, above all, the creation in 1935 of Social Security, which established pensions and unemployment insurance. The New Deal did not end the Depression on its own —the stimulus of the war would be needed for that— but it redefined forever the role of the state in the American economy and society, and made Roosevelt the only president elected four times.
The United States kept its neutrality during the first years of the Second World War, although it supplied the Allies through the Lend-Lease program. Everything changed on December 7, 1941, when Japanese aircraft made a surprise attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii. The next day, the country declared war on Japan, and a few days later Germany and Italy declared war on it. The whole nation mobilized: the factories were converted to war production on an enormous scale, and millions of women entered the world of work, symbolized in the figure of 'Rosie the Riveter'.
In Europe, American troops fought in North Africa, Italy and, above all, in the Normandy landings of June 6, 1944 —D-Day—, the largest amphibious operation in history, which opened the way to the liberation of France and to the defeat of Nazi Germany in May 1945. In the Pacific, the war against Japan was fought island by island in atrocious battles. In a dark chapter of the period, more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese origin were interned in camps by decision of their own government.
The war ended in the most devastating way. In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs —developed in secret by the Manhattan Project— on Hiroshima on the 6th and Nagasaki on the 9th, killing more than 100,000 people and forcing the surrender of Japan. The country emerged from the conflict transformed: with its territory intact, its economy booming, its army deployed across half the world and a monopoly on the nuclear weapon, it had become, together with the Soviet Union, one of the two superpowers on the planet.
As soon as the war was over, the Cold War began: the global, ideological and military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, which never came to direct nuclear confrontation. Washington adopted the policy of 'containment' of communism: the Marshall Plan (1947) rebuilt Western Europe with billions of dollars, and in 1949 NATO was born, the first peacetime military alliance in American history. The rivalry was fought out in settings all over the world: the Korean War (1950-1953), the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 —which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war— and, above all, the long and traumatic Vietnam War, which deeply divided American society. In parallel, the space race culminated in the symbolic triumph of the Moon landing: on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on it.
At home, the central struggle of the era was the civil rights movement. From the mid-1950s, African Americans challenged the segregation system of the Jim Crow laws in an organized way. The Brown v. Board of Education ruling (1954) declared school segregation unconstitutional; the Montgomery bus boycott (1955), set off by Rosa Parks, catapulted a young pastor, Martin Luther King Jr., into the leadership of the movement. With his preaching of nonviolent resistance, King led the March on Washington of 1963, where he delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech before 250,000 people.
The pressure of the movement bore historic fruit: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial discrimination, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King's assassination in 1968 shocked the country. The sixties were, moreover, a decade of broader cultural and political upheaval: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the youth counterculture, the feminist movement, the protests against the war and the Watergate scandal, which in 1974 forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon, the only one in the country's history.
After the trauma of Vietnam and Watergate, the United States lived through the seventies amid the oil crisis, inflation and a sense of decline. Ronald Reagan's arrival in the presidency in 1981 marked a conservative turn —tax cuts, deregulation, rearmament— and a stance of hard confrontation with the Soviet Union. At the end of the decade, however, the Soviet bloc crumbled: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 left the United States as the only global superpower, in what many experienced as the definitive triumph of its model. The 1990s, with the rise of the internet and the technological revolution of Silicon Valley, were years of prosperity and optimism.
The 21st century opened with a brutal blow. On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda terrorist attacks destroyed the Twin Towers in New York and struck the Pentagon, killing almost 3,000 people. The response was the 'war on terror': the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and that of Iraq in 2003, long and costly conflicts that divided public opinion. In 2008, the outbreak of a gigantic financial crisis —originating in subprime mortgages— unleashed the Great Recession, the worst since 1929. That same year, Barack Obama was elected the first African American president in the country's history, a milestone loaded with symbolism.
The last few decades have shown a country as powerful and innovative as it is deeply divided. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 reflected the rise of populism and a growing political polarization, sharpened by social media and by debates over immigration, race, inequality and the role of the state. The COVID-19 pandemic, from 2020 on, caused more than a million deaths and an economic and social crisis without recent precedent. Today, with more than 340 million inhabitants, an economy that is still the largest in the world and undisputed leadership in technology, culture and science, the United States faces the challenge of holding together its internal cohesion in an increasingly multipolar world. Its history, that of a nation always under construction, remains open.
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Long before the Europeans arrived, the territory of Alabama was inhabited by complex indigenous societies. Between the years 1000 and 1600 the Mississippian culture flourished, and its most important center in the region was Moundville, on the banks of the Black Warrior River: a ceremonial city with more than twenty earthen mounds around a great plaza, one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in the southeast of North America.
When the first explorers came, the region was occupied by Muskogean-speaking peoples —the Creek (Muscogee), Choctaw, Chickasaw, Alabama and Koasati— and, in the north, by the Cherokee, who spoke an Iroquoian language. The state's own name, and that of its main river, comes from the Alabama, or Alibamu, people. These nations lived on the farming of corn, beans and squash, on hunting, and on a dense network of villages and trading paths.
The first European to push into the region was the Spaniard Hernando de Soto, whose expedition crossed the territory in 1540 and fought the bloody battle of Mabila against the chief Tuscaloosa, one of the first great clashes between indigenous peoples and Europeans in the interior of the continent. After De Soto, the region remained beyond the effective reach of the European powers for more than a century.
It was the French who founded the first permanent settlement: Old Mobile, established in 1702 and moved around 1711 to the present site of Mobile, which went on to be the capital of French Louisiana. Control of the territory changed hands several times: it passed to Great Britain after the Seven Years' War in 1763, and much of the coast remained under Spanish rule until 1813, which explains the deep French-Spanish imprint of the city of Mobile, where the first Mardi Gras in North America was celebrated.
Alabama was admitted as the 22nd state of the Union on December 14, 1819. The constitutional convention had met that same year in Huntsville, which briefly served as capital before the seat moved to Cahaba (1820-1825), then to Tuscaloosa and finally to Montgomery in 1847.
The engine of that dizzying growth was cotton. The fertile lands of the so-called Black Belt —a strip of dark soils across the center of the state— filled with plantations worked by tens of thousands of enslaved Africans. The population jumped from fewer than 10,000 inhabitants in 1810 to more than 300,000 in 1830. That plantation economy, wholly dependent on forced labor, shaped the society, the politics and the tensions that would lead to the Civil War.
On January 11, 1861, Alabama seceded from the Union, and shortly afterwards Montgomery became the first capital of the Confederate States of America: it was there that Jefferson Davis was sworn in, in February 1861, which earned the city the nickname 'cradle of the Confederacy'. The state contributed some 120,000 soldiers to the Southern cause.
Confederate defeat and the end of slavery opened the stage of Reconstruction, soon reversed by the imposition of the segregationist Jim Crow laws. For almost a century, Alabama's African American population —a majority across wide areas— was subjected to legal discrimination, denial of the vote and racial violence, a system that would make the state, decades later, the great stage of the struggle for civil rights.
No state was as central to the struggle for civil rights as Alabama. It all began in Montgomery: in December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus, and the boycott that followed, led by a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr., lasted more than a year and put an end to segregation on public transport. Montgomery was also home to King's first church and the base of much of his movement.
The campaign intensified in Birmingham in 1963, where the images of police attacking peaceful demonstrators —many of them children— with dogs and fire hoses shocked the country; that same year, a bomb attack on the 16th Street Baptist Church killed four girls. In 1965, the Selma to Montgomery marches, and the brutal repression of 'Bloody Sunday' on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, gave decisive impetus to the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That chain of events made Alabama a worldwide symbol of the winning of equality.
In economic terms, Alabama went through a second transformation at the end of the 19th century: Birmingham was born almost out of nothing as a great industrial city, nicknamed the 'Pittsburgh of the South' for its iron and steel foundries, thanks to the rare local coincidence of coal, iron and limestone. Agriculture, after the boll weevil plague, diversified into other crops and into livestock.
In 1960, the installation of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville —where Wernher von Braun's team developed the Saturn V rocket that carried man to the Moon— turned the city into 'Rocket City' and diversified the economy towards high technology and the aerospace industry. Today the visitor finds in Alabama a singular heritage: the civil rights sites of Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma; the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville; the Creole legacy of Mobile; and the Gulf of Mexico beaches at Gulf Shores.
Alaska was one of the gateways through which human beings entered the American continent: some 14,000 years ago, groups of hunters crossed from Asia over the Bering land bridge, which joined Siberia to what is now western Alaska during the last ice age. From those migrations descend the various native peoples who still inhabit the state today.
In the Arctic north and west live the Iñupiat and the Yup'ik, hunters of whales, seals and caribou adapted to one of the most extreme climates on the planet. The Unangan (Aleuts) settled in the Aleutian Islands; and on the southern and southeastern coast, the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian developed a rich maritime culture, famous for their carved totem poles, their canoes and their complex social organization. In the forested interior lived the Athabaskan peoples. All of them survived for millennia in a territory of colossal scale.
The first documented European contact came in 1741, when the Danish-born explorer in Russian service Vitus Bering sighted the coasts of Alaska. His voyage revealed the extraordinary abundance of sea otters, whose fur was worth a fortune in the markets of China, and set off the arrival of Russian hunters and traders.
So was born 'Russian America', administered by the Russian-American Company. Its key figure was Alexander Baranov, who around 1804 established the colonial capital at Novo-Arkhangelsk, today's Sitka. The mass hunting of otters was the great business, at the cost of the brutal exploitation of the native peoples, especially the Aleuts, decimated by forced labor and disease. In time, overhunting exhausted the otters and left the colony barely profitable for the Russian empire.
In 1867, the United States bought Alaska from Russia for 7.2 million dollars, a deal driven by Secretary of State William Seward and ridiculed at the time as 'Seward's Folly', since it was seen as a worthless frozen wasteland.
Time proved the skeptics wrong. At the end of the 19th century, the discovery of gold changed the fate of the territory: the Klondike rush of 1896-1899, in neighboring Canadian Yukon, turned ports such as Skagway into gateways for tens of thousands of prospectors, and in 1899 the find of gold on the beaches of Nome set off a new stampede. Those rushes, together with fishing and logging, populated and shaped modern Alaska. The territory obtained official status in 1912.
Alaska became the 49th state of the Union on January 3, 1959, after decades of demands by its inhabitants for full representation. The Second World War had already shown its strategic importance: the Japanese went so far as to occupy two of the Aleutian Islands, in the only battle of the conflict fought on American soil.
The event that definitively transformed the economy was the discovery in 1968 of enormous oil reserves at Prudhoe Bay, on the Arctic Ocean. To carry it, the gigantic Trans-Alaska Pipeline was built, completed in 1977, crossing 1,300 kilometers of tundra and mountains. Oil revenues finance a large part of the state and feed the Permanent Fund, which pays an annual dividend to every resident. In 1971, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) granted the native peoples broad territories and financial compensation.
Alaska is the largest state in the United States —more than twice the size of Texas— and one of the emptiest and wildest. Its landscape is dominated by Mount Denali, at 6,190 meters the highest summit in North America, protected within Denali National Park. Glaciers, fjords, tundra, brown bears, moose, whales and salmon define a natural world of outsized scale, shaken as well by geological forces: on Good Friday 1964, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake —the strongest recorded in the history of the United States— devastated Anchorage.
Juneau, reachable only by sea or air, is the capital; Anchorage, the largest city. Cruise tourism, fishing, hunting and adventure travel coexist with the life of the native communities. The fragility of this environment became plain with the disaster of the tanker Exxon Valdez, which in 1989 spilled millions of liters of crude into Prince William Sound. Under the midnight sun in summer and the northern lights in winter, Alaska embodies like nowhere else the idea of the 'last frontier'.
Arizona was inhabited for millennia by societies that mastered one of the most arid environments in North America. The Hohokam were masters of hydraulic engineering: between the years 300 and 1500 they built hundreds of kilometers of irrigation canals in the valley where Phoenix stands today, making sophisticated agriculture possible in the middle of the desert. To the north, the Ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi) and the Mogollon raised villages and cliff dwellings.
When the Spanish arrived, the region was occupied by the descendants of those cultures and by peoples who came later: the Navajo (Diné) and Apache, of Athabaskan origin; the Hopi, heirs of the ancient Puebloans; the Tohono O'odham of the Sonoran Desert; and many more. Today Arizona is home to 27 recognized tribes and to the largest reservation in the country, the Navajo Nation, with more than 300,000 members and territory in three states.
The first Europeans arrived very early: in 1539 the friar Marcos de Niza and, the following year, the great expedition of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado (1540-1542) traveled the region in search of the mythical golden cities of Cíbola. At the end of the 17th century, the Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino evangelized the south and founded a chain of missions, among them the beautiful San Xavier del Bac, near Tucson, a jewel of desert baroque. Spain raised presidios at Tubac (1752) and Tucson (1775).
After Mexican independence, Arizona was part of the neighboring country until it passed to the United States in two stages: most of it in 1848, under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the strip south of the Gila River in 1853-1854, with the Gadsden Purchase. It was frontier territory and a legendary setting of the Old West, with mining towns such as Tombstone —famous for the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881— and with the last Apache wars, led by figures such as Cochise and Geronimo, who held out until 1886.
The territory's economy was built on mining and ranching. From the 1880s on, copper eclipsed the precious metals and turned towns such as Bisbee, Jerome and Morenci into mining giants; the red metal earned Arizona the nickname 'Copper State' and it is still today the country's leading producer. The arrival of the railroad and the great irrigation works, such as the Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River, completed in 1911, made agricultural development and the growth of Phoenix possible.
Arizona was the last of the contiguous territories to become a state: on February 14, 1912 it joined the Union as number 48. Over the course of the 20th century, the arrival of air conditioning and its sunny climate drew millions of people, and Phoenix went from being a farming town to one of the fastest-growing metropolises in the country, the heart of the Sun Belt.
Arizona holds one of the most astonishing natural spectacles on Earth: the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, a chasm almost 450 kilometers long and more than 1,800 meters deep, which lays bare almost two billion years of geological history in its colored walls. Protected as a National Park since 1919 and declared a World Heritage Site, it receives millions of visitors from all over the world every year.
The canyon is only the emblem of an extraordinary geography. Around it unfolds a catalogue of legendary landscapes: Monument Valley and its reddish mesas —an icon of western movies—, on Navajo land; the undulating folds of Antelope Canyon; the perfect curve of Horseshoe Bend; the stone trunks of the Petrified Forest; and the red formations of Sedona, amid deserts of giant saguaros.
Arizona preserves an identity forged by the meeting of the native, Hispanic and Anglo-American cultures. The Navajo and Hopi reservations keep alive languages, ceremonies and crafts —silverwork, weaving, pottery— that draw travelers from all over the world. Tucson, with its deep Mexican heritage, and Phoenix, the capital and fifth most populous city in the country, combine modern life with the landscape of the Sonoran Desert.
The state also offers singular corners: the cool-climate university town of Flagstaff, gateway to the north; old Route 66, which crosses it laden with nostalgia; the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, on the border with Nevada; and the astronomical observatories that take advantage of its clear skies. That combination of outsized nature, living culture and the myth of the West makes Arizona one of the great tourist destinations in the United States.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, the territory of Arkansas was inhabited by Indigenous peoples with very different traditions. In the southeast lived the Quapaw, farmers of the lowlands of the Mississippi Delta; in the north and the west, the Osage controlled vast hunting grounds; and in the southwest, the Caddo kept a culture of farming villages and ceremonial mounds, heir to the ancient mound-building societies.
The state's own name comes from an Osage term for the Quapaw, passed on through French, and is usually translated as 'people of the south wind'. These peoples were the first to be affected by European contact and, later, by the removal policies that pushed them toward Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma.
The first European to set foot in the region was the Spaniard Hernando de Soto, who crossed the Mississippi River and travelled through central Arkansas in 1541. More than a century later came the French: the explorers Marquette and Jolliet went down the river in 1673, and in 1686 Henri de Tonti, La Salle's lieutenant, founded Arkansas Post beside a Quapaw village, the first permanent European settlement in the territory.
Arkansas was part of French and then Spanish Louisiana, until in 1803 it passed to the United States with the Louisiana Purchase, which at a stroke doubled the size of the country. In 1819 it was organized as a territory of its own, with its capital first at Arkansas Post and later at Little Rock, and settlers arriving from the states of the southeast began to fill it.
Arkansas was admitted as the 25th state of the Union on June 15, 1836. Its economy was deeply marked by a geographic divide that still persists: across the fertile lowlands of the southeast and the Mississippi Delta spread the great cotton plantations, worked by enslaved people, who in 1860 made up more than a quarter of the population; in the mountains of the northwest, by contrast, small subsistence farms prevailed.
That fracture showed in the Civil War: Arkansas seceded from the Union in 1861 and joined the Confederacy, although many people in the mountains sympathized with the North. The state was the scene of battles such as Pea Ridge (1862) and suffered a devastating guerrilla war. It was readmitted to the Union in 1868, after Reconstruction, which gave way to long decades of segregation.
Arkansas holds a central place in the history of civil rights because of the 1957 crisis at Central High School in Little Rock. When nine African American students —the 'Little Rock Nine'— tried to enter the school, until then reserved for whites, in application of the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), governor Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard to stop them.
The standoff forced president Dwight Eisenhower to send federal Army troops to escort the students and enforce school integration, in one of the most dramatic confrontations between a state government and the federal government since the Civil War. The images went around the world and turned Little Rock into a symbol of desegregation. Today the building is a national historic site.
Nicknamed 'The Natural State', Arkansas is a state of great beauty and geographic variety. To the northwest rise the Ozark Mountains and, further south, the Ouachitas, with forests, clear rivers and trails. At its heart sits Hot Springs, whose thermal waters were already protected in 1832 and today make up an unusual National Park woven into the city, with the historic line of bathhouses of 'Bathhouse Row'.
The state also holds a worldwide rarity: Crater of Diamonds State Park, near Murfreesboro, the only diamond field on the planet open to the public, where visitors can search for gems and keep whatever they find. On the human side, Arkansas is the birthplace of president Bill Clinton, born in Hope and raised in Hot Springs, whose presidential library stands in Little Rock. All of that, along with river culture, bluegrass and southern cooking, defines the state's appeal.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, California was one of the regions of greatest human diversity on the whole continent: more than a hundred different languages were spoken there and more than seventy ethnic groups lived side by side. Chumash, Ohlone, Miwok, Pomo, Yokuts, Tongva and a great many others lived from fishing, hunting and, above all, from gathering and grinding acorns, the basis of their diet.
The abundance of resources along the coast and in the valleys allowed remarkable population densities without the need for intensive agriculture. These were societies of great cultural richness, with complex trade networks, refined basketry and economies of plenty. European colonization, late compared with the east of the continent, would tragically upend that world.
The first European to explore the coast was Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, in 1542, but effective colonization did not begin until 1769, when the Franciscan Junípero Serra founded the mission of San Diego de Alcalá, the first of a chain of 21 missions linked by the Camino Real that reached as far as Sonoma. Under Spanish rule and, from 1821, Mexican rule, the missions and the great cattle ranches shaped colonial life.
That system was sustained at the cost of the Indigenous population, forced to labor in the missions and decimated by disease. Cities such as San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Jose, Monterey —the capital of Alta California— and San Francisco were born around those presidios and missions. In 1846, in the middle of the American advance, Anglo-American settlers staged the short-lived Bear Flag Revolt.
After the war between Mexico and the United States, California passed into American hands in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Just a few days earlier, in January 1848, James Marshall had found gold at Sutter's Mill, near Sacramento. The news set off the greatest gold rush in history: in 1849, hundreds of thousands of prospectors —the 'forty-niners'— arrived from all over the world, and the population multiplied explosively.
Growth was so headlong that, as part of the Compromise of 1850, California entered directly as the 31st state of the Union on September 9, 1850, skipping the territorial stage and doing so as a free state. The gold rush turned San Francisco into a metropolis, drew heavy Chinese and European immigration, and laid the foundations of a diverse society bent on progress. The transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869, finally linked it with the rest of the country.
In the 20th century, California became a byword for innovation and popular culture. Hollywood, in Los Angeles, made the state the world capital of cinema from the 1910s and 1920s; the aerospace industry flourished in the south during and after the Second World War; and from the 1970s on, the southern end of San Francisco Bay —Silicon Valley— turned into the global epicenter of technology, cradle of companies such as Apple, Google, Intel and dozens of internet giants.
Today California is the most populous state in the United States, with close to 39 million inhabitants, and its economy alone is the largest subnational economy on the planet, comparable to those of the great world powers. It is also a state of enormous cultural diversity, with a strong Latino and Asian imprint, and a political and cultural weight that radiates across the whole country.
California's geography is among the most varied on the planet: Pacific beaches, the mythical Highway 1 through Big Sur, the lush wine country of the Napa Valley, the deserts of Joshua Tree and Death Valley —the lowest and hottest point in North America— and the imposing Sierra Nevada.
In the mountains lie some of the country's most famous national parks: Yosemite, with its granite domes, its waterfalls and its sequoias; and Sequoia, home to the largest trees in the world, such as the General Sherman. Lake Tahoe, an alpine jewel shared with Nevada, rounds out the mountain catalogue. Cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, Sacramento —the capital—, Santa Barbara and the coast of Monterey and Carmel condense a good part of the dreams and landscapes of the United States.
The territory of Colorado has been inhabited by human beings for at least 13,500 years. Its most astonishing legacy is that of the Ancestral Puebloans, who in the southwest built the spectacular cliff cities of Mesa Verde, lived in between the 6th and 13th centuries and today protected as a National Park and World Heritage Site. Those farming communities abandoned the region around 1300, probably because of long droughts.
In historical times, the mountains and valleys of the west were Ute territory, while the Great Plains of the east belonged to the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa and Comanche, hunters of bison. These peoples ruled the region for centuries, until the massive arrival of Anglo-American settlers in the mid-19th century set off an era of conflict and dispossession.
The eastern part of Colorado came to the United States with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and the western part after the war with Mexico and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848. But it was gold that changed its fate: the discovery of veins near Pikes Peak in 1858 set off a rush —under the motto 'Pikes Peak or Bust'— that brought tens of thousands of prospectors to the region and gave rise to the city of Denver.
The Colorado Territory was organized in 1861. The settlers' expansion led to tragedies such as the Sand Creek massacre, in November 1864, when a militia commanded by colonel John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho camp that had surrendered, killing more than a hundred people, most of them women, children and the elderly: one of the darkest episodes of the Indian Wars.
Gold was soon joined by silver. The discovery of enormous deposits near Leadville in 1878 set off Colorado's great silver boom, which turned mountain towns into opulent cities and then, after the silver crash of 1893, into ghost towns. Later came the gold of Cripple Creek. Mining, ranching and the railroad, which climbed spectacular mountain passes, gave the young territory its economic structure.
Colorado was admitted as a state on August 1, 1876, exactly on the centennial of the independence of the United States, hence its nickname 'Centennial State'. It became in this way the 38th state of the Union. Denver grew as the capital and commercial center of the Rocky Mountains, and its mining bonanza left an architectural mark that can still be seen in many of its old towns.
Colorado is, above all, a mountain state: more than fifty summits rise above 4,000 meters, the celebrated 'fourteeners' that draw climbers from all over the country. Rocky Mountain National Park, created in 1915, protects an alpine landscape of peaks, lakes, tundra and abundant wildlife of moose, elk and bighorn sheep.
From the 20th century on, old mining towns such as Aspen, Vail, Breckenridge, Telluride and Steamboat Springs reinvented themselves as world-famous ski resorts, making the most of the dry, light snow of the Rockies. Skiing, hiking, cycling and rafting made the state a benchmark for life outdoors, and much of its present-day identity revolves around that bond with nature.
In recent decades, Colorado has become one of the fastest-growing states in the west of the country. Its economy, once dependent on mining and agriculture, has diversified toward technology, aerospace, energy, tourism and a thriving craft beer scene. Denver, the 'Mile High City' thanks to the exactly 1,609 meters of altitude on the steps of the state Capitol, is a young, dynamic metropolis in full expansion.
The state combines that urban vigor with first-rate natural and cultural heritage: the ruins of Mesa Verde, the giant dunes of Great Sand Dunes, the impressive gorge of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, the historic narrow-gauge railroad from Durango to Silverton and charming cities such as Colorado Springs, at the foot of Pikes Peak. All of it makes Colorado a destination that appeals equally to the adventure lover and the cultural traveler.
Before European colonization, the valley of the Connecticut River and the shores of Long Island Sound were inhabited by Algonquian-speaking peoples, among them the Pequot, the Mohegan, the Quinnipiac and the Podunk. The state's own name comes from an Algonquian word, quinnitukqut, which means roughly 'beside the long tidal river', referring to the Connecticut River, the largest in New England.
The first European to explore the region was the Dutch navigator Adriaen Block, in 1614, and Dutch fur traders set up a post called the House of Hope on the site of present-day Hartford. But it was the English who would carry out the effective colonization a few decades later.
English colonization began in 1633 at Windsor, and took hold in 1636, when the Puritan minister Thomas Hooker led a group of settlers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to found Hartford, in search of greater religious and political autonomy. From that venture came the Connecticut River Colony.
In January 1639, the settlers adopted the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, a compact of government that many historians consider the first written constitution in the history of America, since it set up a government based on the consent of the governed. From that pioneering document comes the state's nickname, the 'Constitution State'. Its expansion came, however, at the expense of the Native peoples: the Pequot War of 1637 ended with the near annihilation of that nation.
Connecticut was one of the original thirteen British colonies that rebelled against the crown and an active participant in the Revolution. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, its delegates Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth put forward the famous 'Connecticut Compromise' (or Great Compromise), which settled the conflict between large and small states by creating a bicameral Congress: a House of Representatives proportional to population and a Senate with two seats per state. It is the formula that still governs today.
On January 9, 1788, Connecticut ratified the Constitution of the United States, becoming the fifth state of the Union. Its tradition of self-government and its part in the design of the federal system gave it an influence far greater than its small size.
Through the 19th century, Connecticut became one of the great industrial engines of the country, with a tradition of manufacturing inventiveness known as 'Yankee ingenuity'. It was the capital of the firearms industry —with legendary firms such as Colt in Hartford and Winchester in New Haven—, a pioneer of manufacturing with interchangeable parts, and a center for the production of clocks, brass, tools and sewing machines.
Hartford also established itself as the world capital of insurance, home to historic companies such as Aetna and The Hartford, a sector that remains a pillar of its economy. During the two world wars, the state was a key arsenal, and firms such as Pratt & Whitney (aircraft engines) and Sikorsky (helicopters) made it a first-rate aerospace center.
Despite being one of the smallest states in the country, Connecticut packs in a remarkable cultural heritage. It is home to Yale University, founded in 1701 in New Haven, one of the most prestigious in the world, with its celebrated museums and libraries. In Hartford lived and wrote authors such as Mark Twain —whose Victorian house is now a museum— and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'.
The state offers the traveler the colonial towns of New England, the Long Island Sound coast with seafaring places such as Mystic and its famous historic seaport, the autumn landscapes of the Connecticut River valley and a privileged position between the two great metropolises of the east coast, New York and Boston. That combination of founding history, industrial wealth and New England charm defines its character.
The Delaware region was inhabited by Eastern Algonquian-speaking peoples, above all the Lenape (also called Delaware by the Europeans), who lived along the coast and the rivers, and the Nanticoke, in the south of the Delmarva Peninsula. They were communities of farmers, fishers and hunters who would give their name to a whole family of Indigenous peoples of the Northeast.
The name 'Delaware' is not, however, of Indigenous origin: it comes from Thomas West, third Baron De La Warr, first governor of the colony of Virginia. His surname was applied first to the bay and the river, and from there to the region and to the Lenape people, who came to be known in English as the 'Delaware'.
Delaware was one of the most contested regions of early European colonization. The Dutch attempted the first settlement in 1631, with the colony of Zwaanendael, near present-day Lewes, but its settlers were wiped out in less than a year. In 1638, Swedish and Finnish colonists founded New Sweden, with Fort Christina on the site of present-day Wilmington, led by Peter Minuit: it was the first permanent European settlement and brought with it the tradition of the log cabin.
The Swedish colony lasted barely seventeen years: in 1655 it was captured by the Dutch under Peter Stuyvesant, and in 1664 it passed into English hands. Finally, in 1682, it came under the control of William Penn, who administered it as the 'Lower Counties' of Pennsylvania, though it kept an assembly of its own.
Delaware, one of the thirteen colonies, holds a place of honor in the founding of the nation: on December 7, 1787 it was the first state to ratify the Constitution of the United States, unanimously and ahead of all the others. Hence its proud official nickname, 'The First State'.
That pioneering gesture reflected the interest of a small state in a federal system that would guarantee equal representation to the less populated members —the Senate, with two seats per state, protected it from its large neighbors—. Despite its reduced size, Delaware thus secured itself a prominent role from the very birth of the republic.
Delaware's modern economic history is inseparably tied to a single company: DuPont. In 1802, the French immigrant Éleuthère Irénée du Pont founded a gunpowder mill on the banks of the Brandywine Creek, near Wilmington, which in time would become one of the largest chemical conglomerates in the world.
DuPont diversified into explosives, paints and, in the twentieth century, revolutionary materials such as nylon, neoprene and, later, Kevlar. The company completely shaped the economy, the society and even the look of Wilmington and its surroundings, and turned Delaware into a center of the chemical industry. The du Pont family also left a rich legacy of mansions, gardens and museums, such as Winterthur, Hagley and Nemours, today among the state's great attractions.
Delaware is famous today for a singular phenomenon: it is the legal home of an enormous share of the big American companies. More than half of the firms listed on the New York Stock Exchange and a wide majority of the Fortune 500 are incorporated in Delaware, drawn by its flexible corporate legislation and, above all, by its Court of Chancery, a court specializing in company law with centuries of case law behind it. That status as 'corporate capital' is a central source of revenue.
For the traveler, Delaware offers far more than offices: historic Wilmington and its DuPont mansions; the colonial capital of Dover; old New Castle, with its cobbled center; and, above all, the popular Atlantic beaches, such as Rehoboth Beach and Lewes, the summer refuge of the mid-Atlantic coast. Delaware Bay, rich in birds and marine life, rounds out the appeal of this small but historic state.
Long before the capital existed, the lands along the Potomac and Anacostia rivers were inhabited by Algonquian-speaking peoples. The most important on the exact site of present-day Washington were the Nacotchtank (also called Anacostans, from which the name of the Anacostia river derives), linked to the Piscataway confederacy.
These peoples lived from fishing, hunting and growing corn in riverside villages. Contact with the European settlers who established themselves in Maryland and Virginia over the course of the seventeenth century brought disease and displacement that, within a few decades, made their presence in the area disappear almost entirely.
The birth of Washington was the fruit of a political agreement. The Residence Act, signed on July 16, 1790, established that the new permanent capital would be built in a federal district on the banks of the Potomac river, on land ceded by the states of Maryland and Virginia. A square of some 260 square kilometers was chosen, sited personally by President George Washington.
The layout of the city was entrusted to the French engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant, who in 1791 designed a monumental plan of broad diagonal avenues, squares and vistas inspired by the capitals of Europe. Benjamin Banneker, an African American astronomer, took part in the team of surveyors who fixed the boundaries of the district. In 1800, the federal government moved from Philadelphia and Congress held its first session in the new seat.
The young capital soon suffered a devastating blow. During the War of 1812 against Great Britain, on August 24, 1814, after winning the battle of Bladensburg, British troops entered Washington and burned the main public buildings, including the Capitol, the Library of Congress and the White House. The rebuilding that followed cemented the symbolism of those buildings.
In 1846, the portion of the district originally ceded by Virginia, on the other side of the Potomac, was returned to that state (the so-called 'retrocession'), which reduced Washington to the lands contributed by Maryland. During the Civil War, the city was the bastion of the Union, and in 1862 Abraham Lincoln signed the emancipation of the district's slaves, nine months before the general Proclamation.
Washington was conceived as a showcase of the power and the ideals of the republic, and its National Mall is today the country's great ceremonial axis. Around that great esplanade rise the Capitol, seat of Congress; the White House, the presidential residence; the obelisk of the Washington Monument; and the memorials dedicated to Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Martin Luther King and the veterans of the country's wars.
The capital is also the largest museum complex in the United States: the Smithsonian Institution brings together more than ten free-admission museums —Air and Space, Natural History, American History, African American History and Culture— alongside the National Gallery of Art. It was also the setting of the historic March on Washington of August 28, 1963, when Martin Luther King delivered, before the Lincoln Memorial, his 'I Have a Dream' speech.
The District of Columbia has a unique and paradoxical status: it is the capital of the largest democracy in the world, yet for much of its history its inhabitants had neither self-government nor voting representation in Congress. In 1973, the Home Rule Act gave the city back the election of its mayor and a city council; in 1975 Walter Washington took office, the first elected mayor and the first Black mayor. Even so, residents have only a non-voting delegate in Congress, which fuels the debate over turning the district into a state.
Beyond its institutional role, Washington is a lively and diverse city, with historic neighborhoods such as Georgetown, a vibrant cultural and culinary scene, and a cosmopolitan population. Its tree-lined avenues, its cherry blossoms along the Tidal Basin —a gift from Japan in 1912— and its incomparable concentration of history and symbols make it one of the country's great destinations.
Florida was inhabited for at least 14,000 years. When the first Europeans arrived, several distinct Indigenous peoples lived there: the Timucua in the north and the center; the Apalachee in the northwest (the Panhandle); the Calusa, skilled sailors and fishers, in the southwest; the Tequesta in the southeast, where Miami stands today; and the Ais on the central Atlantic coast.
They were societies adapted to an environment of wetlands, coasts and subtropical forests. The Calusa, in particular, built a complex society without agriculture, based on the extraordinary wealth of marine resources. As in the rest of the continent, the diseases brought by the Europeans and the wars decimated these nations, which by the eighteenth century had practically disappeared.
Florida holds a unique place in the history of the United States as the region with the oldest European presence. The Spaniard Juan Ponce de León sighted the peninsula at Pascua Florida in 1513 —hence its name— and claimed it for the crown. In 1565, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine, the oldest continuously inhabited settlement of European origin in all of present-day United States territory.
For more than two centuries, Florida was a Spanish possession, contested with the French and the English. It passed briefly into British hands between 1763 and 1783, only to return to Spain afterwards. It was a land of missions, forts and a refuge for slaves who fled the Anglo-American South. From that era St. Augustine preserves jewels such as the Castillo de San Marcos, an imposing fortress of coquina stone.
In the nineteenth century, American pressure for control of Florida led to the three Seminole Wars (1816-1858), among the longest and costliest of the Indian Wars. The Seminoles were a people formed out of Creek and other groups, together with escaped slaves who found refuge in the peninsula. The Second Seminole War (1835-1842), led on the Indigenous side by Osceola, was especially devastating, and ended with the deportation of most of the Seminoles to Indian Territory, though a core group held out in the Everglades.
Spain ceded Florida to the United States by the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, which took effect in 1821. The territory grew and, on March 3, 1845, it was admitted as the 27th state of the Union. Shortly afterwards, in 1861, Florida joined the Confederacy during the Civil War, supplying salt and cattle to the southern troops.
Florida's transformation into the great tourist destination it is today began in the late nineteenth century, thanks to railroad magnates such as Henry Flagler, who laid track along the Atlantic coast until reaching, in a feat of engineering, Key West. The train opened the peninsula to tourism and to citrus, which made Florida the country's great orange producer.
The twentieth century brought explosive growth: the real-estate boom of the twenties, the mass arrival of retirees drawn by the climate, and above all the leisure revolution. In 1971 Walt Disney World opened near Orlando, which became the world capital of theme parks. The state went from fewer than a million inhabitants in 1920 to being today the third most populous in the country.
Florida is also a leading player in the space age: since the sixties, NASA's missions have lifted off from Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center, including those of the Apollo program that took man to the Moon, and today the rockets of the new private space industry. The 'Space Coast' is a magnet for travelers from all over the world.
At its southern tip stretches Everglades National Park, a vast subtropical wetland unique on the planet, home to alligators, manatees and water birds. And on the human side, Florida has become a vibrant Latino melting pot: the mass arrival of Cubans after the revolution of 1959, and later of Haitians, Colombians, Venezuelans and other Latin Americans, made Miami a Spanish-speaking capital and a cultural bridge between the United States and Latin America. Its beaches, its keys and its multicultural energy round out the profile of the 'Sunshine State'.
The territory of Georgia was inhabited by Indigenous societies of long standing. During the Mississippian era, mound-building chiefdoms such as those of Etowah and Ocmulgee flourished, with great earthen platforms for temples and for the dwellings of the chiefs. When the Europeans arrived, two great nations dominated the region: the Cherokee, in the northern mountains, and the Muscogee or Creek, in the center and the south.
These peoples kept farming economies based on corn, trade networks and complex political systems. The Cherokee, in particular, adopted many elements of European culture, developed an alphabet of their own thanks to Sequoyah and founded a nation with a written constitution, in an attempt to preserve their land that would nevertheless fail to prevent their expulsion.
Georgia was the last of the original thirteen colonies to be founded. In 1732, the general and philanthropist James Oglethorpe obtained a royal charter to create a colony conceived as a refuge for debtors and the poor of England, and in February 1733 he established the first settlement at Savannah, with an urban layout of garden squares that still sets it apart today.
Oglethorpe's original plan was for a society of smallholders, and he even banned slavery and rum at first. But economic pressure ended up imposing the plantation model of the rest of the South: in 1752 the colony passed to the crown and slavery was legalized. Georgia took part in the Revolution and, on January 2, 1788, ratified the Constitution as the fourth state of the Union.
Georgia's economy turned to cotton, above all after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in Georgia itself in 1793, which made the crop enormously profitable and tied the state's fate to slavery. The plantations multiplied and with them the enslaved population.
The discovery of gold in northern Georgia in 1829 sharpened the greed for Cherokee land. Even though the Supreme Court, in the case of Worcester v. Georgia (1832), upheld the sovereignty of the Cherokee nation, the state and the federal government ignored it. The result was the Trail of Tears of 1838: the forced expulsion of the Cherokee to Indian Territory, on a march in which more than four thousand people died. It was one of the most tragic episodes in the country's history.
Georgia seceded from the Union on January 19, 1861 and was a pillar of the Confederacy. Decisive battles were fought on its soil, such as Chickamauga and the Atlanta campaign. But the most remembered event was the 'March to the Sea' of Union general William Tecumseh Sherman: after taking and razing Atlanta in 1864, his troops advanced as far as Savannah, destroying a broad swath of the state as they went, with a scorched-earth policy meant to break the South's will to fight.
Georgia was the last of the Confederate states to be readmitted into the Union, in 1870. The postwar years brought Reconstruction and then a harsh regime of segregation: poll taxes, 'whites only' primaries and a racial violence that made the state one of those with the highest number of lynchings in the country. In 1915, at Stone Mountain, the Ku Klux Klan was refounded.
Georgia gave the struggle for civil rights its most universal figure: Martin Luther King Jr., born in Atlanta in 1929, a Baptist minister who became the moral leader of the movement and won the Nobel Peace Prize. In Atlanta he founded, in 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the engine of the great campaigns of the 1960s. His birthplace and his tomb are today a national historic site.
In parallel, Atlanta established itself as the capital of the 'New South': chosen as state capital in 1868, it was transformed into a thriving metropolis of services, home to giants such as Coca-Cola —born there in 1886— and the news network CNN, and to the busiest airport in the world. The city hosted the Olympic Games of 1996. For the traveler, Georgia today combines the historic elegance of Savannah, the civil rights sites of Atlanta, the Appalachian mountains of the north and the plantations and islands of the coast. All of it, with the peach as its symbol, defines the 'Peach State'.
The Hawaiian Islands were one of the last great habitable territories on Earth to be settled by human beings. Between roughly the years 1000 and 1200, Polynesian navigators from the Marquesas Islands and, later, from Tahiti crossed thousands of kilometers of open ocean in great double-hulled canoes, guiding themselves by the stars, the currents and the flight of birds, in one of the greatest feats of seamanship in human history.
In isolation these settlers developed a complex, hierarchical society, governed by chiefs (ali'i) and priests and ruled by a system of sacred laws and taboos called kapu. They grew taro, raised pigs and fish in ponds, and created a rich culture of dance (the hula), chant, navigation and mythology, deeply bound to the land and the sea.
The first documented contact with Europe came in January 1778, when the British explorer James Cook arrived at the islands, which he named the 'Sandwich Islands'. Cook would die there the following year in a clash with the natives. Contact opened the islands to trade and to disease, which would cause a catastrophic fall in the native population.
In the decades that followed, a warrior chief named Kamehameha I managed, with the help of European weapons, to unify the whole archipelago for the first time under a single scepter, completing the process around 1810 with the peaceful incorporation of Kauai. Thus was born the Kingdom of Hawaii, a monarchy that would be recognized by the world powers. From 1820 on, American Protestant missionaries arrived, converting much of the population and profoundly transforming the kingdom's culture, laws and written language.
The 19th century transformed the islands' economy with the boom in sugarcane plantations and, later, in pineapple, controlled in good measure by businessmen of American and European origin. The demand for labor drew tens of thousands of workers from Japan, China, the Philippines, Portugal and other places, giving rise to the extraordinary ethnic mix that characterizes Hawaii to this day.
The growing economic power of those businessmen collided with the monarchy. In 1893, a group of American and European businessmen, backed by United States marines, overthrew Queen Liliuokalani and put an end to the kingdom. In 1898, in the middle of the American expansion across the Pacific, the United States formally annexed Hawaii, which became a territory of the Union.
Hawaii's strategic position in the middle of the Pacific shaped its destiny in the 20th century. The naval base at Pearl Harbor, on the island of Oahu, became the country's main stronghold in the ocean. On December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft launched a surprise attack on the base that sank warships, caused more than 2,400 deaths and precipitated the entry of the United States into the Second World War. The memorial to the battleship USS Arizona recalls that tragedy today.
After decades as a territory, Hawaii became the 50th state of the Union on August 21, 1959, the most recent one and the only one made up entirely of islands, as well as the only one lying in the tropics. Its incorporation completed the map of today's fifty states.
Hawaii is an archipelago of volcanic origin, formed by the rise of magma from a 'hotspot' on the ocean floor. On the Big Island, Volcanoes National Park protects two of the most active volcanoes in the world, Kilauea and Mauna Loa, whose eruptions keep enlarging the island. Beaches of black, green and golden sand, waterfalls, tropical rainforests and valleys such as Waipio complete a spectacular geography.
Hawaiian culture, with its music, its hula and its philosophy of 'aloha' —a concept of love, hospitality and harmony—, permeates life on the islands. Hawaii is also the cradle of modern surfing, a sport of ancestral root already practiced in the time of the kings. Today tourism is the pillar of its economy, drawn by the beaches of Waikiki in Honolulu, the landscapes of Maui and Kauai and a multicultural identity unique in the United States.
Idaho was home to several Indigenous peoples adapted to a territory of mountains, rivers and arid plateaus. In the north and the west lived the Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) and the Coeur d'Alene; in the south and the east, the Shoshone and the Bannock. These peoples lived on salmon fishing, as the fish came up the rivers in enormous runs, on hunting and on gathering, and after the arrival of the horse they became skilled riders and traders.
The Lewis and Clark expedition crossed the region in 1805, on the hardest stretch of its journey to the Pacific, and survived thanks to the help of the Nez Perce, who fed and guided them. That first contact was friendly, but it announced the end of a world: decades later, the arrival of settlers and miners would set off conflict.
Across southern Idaho, following the course of the Snake River, ran the Oregon Trail, the great route of the tens of thousands of pioneers who in the middle of the 19th century marched toward the fertile lands of the Northwest. For years, Idaho was above all a territory of passage, crossed by wagon trains that left behind ruts still visible today.
The pressure of the settlers ended up colliding with the native peoples. The most remembered episode is the resistance of the Nez Perce: in 1877, ordered to move to a reservation, a part of the nation, led by Chief Joseph, undertook an extraordinary retreat of more than 1,700 kilometers toward Canada, pursued by the army. Captured a few kilometers from the border, Chief Joseph delivered his celebrated surrender: 'From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever'.
Idaho's fate changed with mining. The rush for gold and, above all, for silver, from the 1860s on, drew the first settlers en masse and gave rise to mining towns. The north of the state holds the Silver Valley, around Coeur d'Alene, one of the richest silver-bearing regions in the history of the United States. Mining also brought very violent labor conflicts at the beginning of the 20th century.
Idaho was admitted as a state on July 3, 1890, the 43rd of the Union. Meanwhile, the irrigation of the arid south, fed by the Snake River, turned vast plains into farmland. The product that gave the state worldwide fame was the potato: Idaho is the country's largest producer, to the point that the potato appears on its license plates. Today its modern economy also includes technology, with Boise as its hub, timber and agribusiness.
Idaho is one of the most mountainous and rugged states in the country, with enormous protected wilderness areas, ranges of the Rocky Mountains and one of the largest expanses of roadless nature in the contiguous United States. Through its interior run legendary whitewater rivers, such as the Salmon, nicknamed the 'River of No Return', a destination for rafting and whitewater running.
Among its geographical marvels stands out Hells Canyon, the deepest gorge in North America —deeper even than the Grand Canyon—, carved by the Snake River on the border with Oregon. The volcanic landscape of the Craters of the Moon, with its fields of black lava, offers an almost lunar panorama. All this nature, little crowded, makes Idaho a paradise for lovers of adventure and the outdoors.
Idaho has a place in the history of American tourism: in 1936 Sun Valley opened its doors, the first great ski resort conceived as a destination in the United States, created by the railroad magnate Averell Harriman. The world's first chairlift was invented there, and the glamour of the place attracted Hollywood stars and writers such as Ernest Hemingway, who spent his last years there and is buried in nearby Ketchum.
Beyond skiing, the state preserves a strong rural identity of the American West, tied to ranches, hunting, fishing and wide open spaces. Its capital, Boise, has become one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, with a vibrant cultural scene and a notable community of Basque origin, a legacy of the sheepherders who emigrated from the Basque Country. Nature, pioneer history and quality of life define the appeal of Idaho.
Illinois holds one of the most impressive archaeological sites in North America: Cahokia, near present-day Collinsville. Between the years 1050 and 1350, this city of the Mississippian culture was the largest urban center north of Mexico, with a population that may have exceeded 15,000 inhabitants and more than a hundred earthen mounds. The largest of them, Monks Mound, rises some 30 meters and covers a base wider than that of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
When the Europeans arrived, that great civilization had already vanished, and the region was inhabited by the Illinois Confederation (or Illiniwek), from which the state takes its name, and later by peoples such as the Potawatomi, Miami, Sauk and Kickapoo, of Algonquian language, who dominated the vast prairies and the riverside woods.
The first Europeans to travel the region were the French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet, who in 1673 sailed the Illinois River. Marquette later founded a mission at the Grand Village of the Illinois. France established a series of settlements —Kaskaskia, Cahokia— in the so-called 'Illinois Country', which was part of French Louisiana and supplied New Orleans with wheat.
After the French defeat in the Seven Years' War, in 1763 the region passed to Great Britain and, after American independence, was folded into the Northwest Territory. Illinois was admitted as the 21st state of the Union on December 3, 1818. In 1837 the capital moved to Springfield, thanks in part to the efforts of a young legislator and lawyer named Abraham Lincoln.
Illinois takes pride in its bond with Abraham Lincoln, to the point that its license plates read 'Land of Lincoln'. Although he was born in Kentucky, Lincoln built his political and legal career in Springfield, where he lived for decades before reaching the presidency. It was in Illinois that the celebrated Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 took place, centered on the question of slavery.
As president, Lincoln led the Union through the Civil War (1861-1865) and signed the Emancipation Proclamation. After his assassination in 1865, he was buried in Springfield, where his tomb and his former house are today sites of historical pilgrimage. Lincoln's legacy made Illinois a central place in American national memory.
The event that transformed Illinois was the dizzying rise of Chicago. Founded as a modest settlement beside Lake Michigan and incorporated as a city in 1837, its strategic position made it the great hub of the country's trade and railroads: the cattle, the grain and the timber of the Midwest all passed through it. The Great Chicago Fire, between October 8 and 10, 1871, razed a good part of the city and caused some 300 deaths.
The rebuilding that followed was, paradoxically, the occasion for an architectural revolution: the modern skyscraper was born in Chicago, with the first steel structures of the Chicago School. The city established itself as the economic capital of the interior, seat of the agricultural futures exchange and the setting, in 1893, of a celebrated World's Fair. Its skyline beside the lake is still one of the most admired in the world.
The industrial growth of Illinois drew waves of European immigrants —Germans, Irish, Poles, Italians— and, during the Great Migration of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of African Americans who left the rural South in search of work and freedom. Chicago thus became a cultural melting pot and the cradle of electric blues, of jazz and of gospel. The city was also the setting for milestones of the labor movement, such as the Haymarket riot of 1886, which lies at the origin of Workers' Day.
Beyond the great metropolis, Illinois is a deeply agricultural state: its prairies of black, fertile soil make it one of the country's largest producers of corn and soybeans. For the traveler, the state offers the urban richness of Chicago —its architecture, its museums, its food—, the Lincoln sites in Springfield, the mounds of Cahokia and the historic Route 66, which begins precisely in Chicago and heads west.
The territory of Indiana was inhabited by peoples of Algonquian language, among them the Miami, the Potawatomi, the Delaware (Lenape) and the Shawnee, as well as earlier mound-building societies, such as those of the Mississippian culture visible at Angel Mounds, near Evansville. The very name 'Indiana' means 'land of the Indians', in reference to that dense native presence.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the region was the setting for the last great Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi. The Shawnee leader Tecumseh and his brother, the prophet Tenskwatawa, tried to unite the nations in a great confederation to halt the advance of the settlers. At the Battle of Tippecanoe, on November 7, 1811, the troops of Governor William Henry Harrison —a future president— defeated the Indigenous forces, and the death of Tecumseh in 1813 put an end to organized resistance.
The first Europeans in the region were French fur traders, who at the beginning of the 18th century established posts such as Vincennes, on the Wabash River, and forts such as the one at Kekionga (present-day Fort Wayne). After the defeat of France and American independence, the territory became part of the Northwest Territory.
The Indiana Territory was created in 1800, with Vincennes as its capital. The region filled quickly with settlers arriving from the states of the South and the East, and on December 11, 1816, Indiana was admitted as the 19th state of the Union. In 1825 the capital moved to a new, centrally located site created for the purpose: Indianapolis. Among the early settlers was the family of Abraham Lincoln, who spent his childhood and youth in southern Indiana.
Indiana is, above all, an agricultural state of the Corn Belt: its fertile plains place it among the country's great producers of corn and soybeans. But at the end of the 19th century, the discovery of natural gas drew heavy industry to the north of the state.
The most notable case was the founding of Gary in 1906 by the United States Steel Corporation, which built it from scratch as an industrial city on the shore of Lake Michigan, in the Calumet region, to house one of the largest steelworks in the world. Along with the vehicle and parts factories, industry turned northern Indiana into a powerful manufacturing hub and attracted European immigrants and African Americans from the South, forging industrial cities of great diversity.
Indiana has an early and deep bond with the automobile: the city of Kokomo claims one of the first commercially manufactured gasoline cars in the country, the work of Elwood Haynes in the 1890s, and dozens of pioneering makes were born in the state. That past culminated in a worldwide icon: in 1909 the oval of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was built, and in 1911 the legendary Indianapolis 500 (Indy 500) was run for the first time.
Every May, the Indy 500 turns Indianapolis into the world capital of motor racing, gathering hundreds of thousands of spectators at what is considered the largest single-day race on the planet. Speed and the engine are an essential part of the state's identity, alongside a deep-rooted industrial and sporting culture.
The people of Indiana are known as 'Hoosiers', a nickname of uncertain origin that has become a mark of state identity. Few places in the country live sport the way Indiana lives basketball: 'Hoosier Hysteria' is a genuine passion that fills school and university gyms, immortalized on film and rooted in the culture of its small towns.
For the traveler, Indiana combines that sporting and automotive identity with varied attractions: the dunes of Indiana Dunes National Park, on the shore of Lake Michigan; the Amish and Mennonite culture of the north, around Shipshewana; the historic towns and universities such as Notre Dame; and Indianapolis itself, with its monuments and museums. A crossroads of the Midwest —it calls itself 'the crossroads of America' for its highway network—, Indiana offers a genuine portrait of the agricultural and industrial heart of the United States.
The territory of Iowa was inhabited for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples, as the animal-shaped mounds of Effigy Mounds, on the banks of the Mississippi, attest: the work of ancient woodland cultures. When the Europeans arrived, the region was home to several nations: the Ioway (Baxoje), Siouan speakers, who gave the state its name; the Meskwaki (Fox) and the Sauk; the Dakota (Sioux); and the Otoe and Ho-Chunk, among others.
These peoples lived from hunting bison on the prairies, from growing corn in the river valleys and from trade. The name 'Iowa' derives from the river of the same name, and that in turn from the ethnonym of the Ioway people. The rich black prairie soil, which would be the key to the state's future agricultural wealth, sustained at that time one of the most extensive grassland ecosystems in North America.
Iowa passed to the United States in 1803, as part of the Louisiana Purchase. For decades it was a territory of passage and fur trading, with scant settler presence. The turning point came with the Black Hawk War of 1832, a conflict in neighboring Illinois led by the Sauk chief Black Hawk.
After the Indigenous defeat, the treaty known as the Black Hawk Purchase forced the Sauk and Meskwaki to cede a broad strip of land along the Mississippi, which was opened to settlement and set off the massive arrival of settlers in Iowa. Curiously, part of the Meskwaki managed to return years later and, through a land purchase authorized by the state legislature in 1856, established a permanent settlement that endures to this day.
The Territory of Iowa was established in 1838, and on December 28, 1846 Iowa was admitted as the 29th state of the Union, with Des Moines as its capital. Settlement was swift and massive: drawn by the extraordinary fertility of the prairie, settlers came from the eastern United States and, above all, waves of European immigrants, especially Germans and Scandinavians, whose heritage still marks the state's culture, food and surnames.
Singular communities such as the Amana Colonies —founded by a German religious community that lived communally— or the settlements of Dutch, Czech and Norwegian origin bear witness to that diversity. During the Civil War, Iowa contributed proportionally more soldiers than almost any other state to the Union cause, with more than 75,000 volunteers.
Iowa is, par excellence, the agricultural heart of the United States. Its soil, formed by the accumulation of prairie organic matter over millennia, is one of the most fertile on the planet. The state is the country's largest corn producer and also a leader in hog raising, as well as a major producer of soybeans, eggs and ethanol. Agriculture and agribusiness are the axis of its economy and its identity.
This agricultural dominance has shaped Iowa's landscape and life: endless rolling fields of corn and soybeans, silos, barns and small rural towns. The Iowa State Fair, one of the largest and most famous in the country, celebrates that farm culture every summer. The image of the barn and the infinite fields, immortalized in works such as the painting 'American Gothic' —painted by the Iowan Grant Wood—, is inseparable from the state.
Despite its modest size, Iowa wields a disproportionate political influence in the United States thanks to its caucuses, the party assemblies that for decades were the first on the calendar in the process of selecting presidential candidates. Because of their 'first in the nation' status, the Iowa caucuses turned the state, every four years, into the center of the country's political attention, with hopefuls touring its 99 counties town by town.
Beyond politics, Iowa offers the traveler an authentic portrait of the rural Midwest: the picturesque towns, the covered bridges of Madison County —famous thanks to the novel and the film—, the European heritage of the Amana Colonies, the birthplace of President Herbert Hoover in West Branch and the banks of the two great rivers that frame the state, the Mississippi and the Missouri. It is the quiet, fertile essence of the heart of America.
The state takes its name from the Kansa (or Kaw) people, Siouan speakers, whose ethnonym is usually translated as 'people of the south wind'. Alongside them, other nations inhabited the Great Plains: the Osage, the Pawnee, the Wichita —of a more agricultural and settled tradition—, and, in the west, nomadic bison-hunting peoples such as the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Kiowa and the Comanche.
These peoples lived from hunting the bison, which roamed the prairies in herds of millions of head, and from growing corn in the river valleys. The region was one of the last great areas of Indigenous resistance on the plains, before the expansion of the railroad and the mass slaughter of the bison destroyed their way of life in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The first European to set foot in Kansas was the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, who in 1541 pushed into the plains in search of the legendary golden kingdom of Quivira, which turned out to be a Wichita village. For centuries, the region remained outside effective colonization, as fur-trading territory under French and later Spanish rule.
Kansas passed to the United States in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. For decades it was considered part of the 'Great American Desert' and Indian territory, crossed by legendary routes such as the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail, whose wagons left ruts across the prairie on the way to the Southwest and the Pacific.
Kansas holds a central place in the crisis that led to the Civil War. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 established that the settlers themselves would decide, by vote ('popular sovereignty'), whether the new territory would be slave or free. The measure turned Kansas into a battlefield: antislavery settlers poured in from the north and founded towns such as Lawrence, and proslavery settlers came from neighboring Missouri.
The confrontation turned into a guerrilla war known as 'Bleeding Kansas', with episodes such as the Pottawatomie massacre carried out by the abolitionist John Brown in 1856. That violence was the dress rehearsal for the War of Secession. Kansas was finally admitted on January 29, 1861 as the 34th state and as a free state, barely weeks before the outbreak of the war, during which it would still suffer Quantrill's bloody Confederate raid on Lawrence in 1863.
After the Civil War, Kansas became the stage par excellence of the cattle-driving Old West. The arrival of the railroad and the great cattle drives up from Texas along the Chisholm Trail made the legendary 'cowtowns' flourish —Abilene, Wichita and, above all, Dodge City—, where the cowboys ended the drive. Dodge City came to ship as many as half a million head of cattle a year.
Those bustling, lawless towns filled with saloons, gamblers and gunfighters, and gave fame to legendary lawmen such as Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok, who tried to impose order. The Homestead Act of 1862 also drew thousands of settlers —among them communities of Volga German immigrants who brought winter wheat— who broke the prairie sod and transformed the landscape forever.
That wheat brought by the settlers turned Kansas into the great granary of the United States: year after year it is the country's largest wheat producer, with vast rolling plains covered in golden ears. Alongside wheat, the sunflower —its emblematic flower, which gives it the nickname 'Sunflower State'— and livestock round out a deeply agricultural economy. The Flint Hills region also preserves one of the last great tallgrass prairies on the continent.
Set squarely in 'Tornado Alley', Kansas is also synonymous with those violent whirlwinds, to the point that it was a Kansas tornado that carried Dorothy to the land of Oz in L. Frank Baum's classic. The state is the birthplace of President Dwight Eisenhower, raised in Abilene, where his presidential library stands. With its Old West museums, its protected prairies and its deep rural culture, Kansas embodies the geographic and agricultural heart of the nation.
The territory of Kentucky had, in historical times, a peculiarity: although it had been inhabited for millennia —as numerous archaeological sites attest—, at the moment of European contact it functioned largely as a vast and disputed shared hunting ground, rather than as the permanent home of a single nation.
Through its forests, rich in bison, deer and bears, hunted the Shawnee, who dominated much of the region from the north; the Cherokee, from the south; and the Chickasaw, in the west, toward the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. That status as a disputed frontier hunting land made it especially dangerous for the first explorers and settlers, and gave rise to intense violence once colonization began.
The settlement of Kentucky is inseparable from the figure of Daniel Boone, the pioneer par excellence of the American frontier. From 1769 onward, Boone explored the region through the Cumberland Gap pass, in the Appalachians, and in 1775 he opened the Wilderness Road, the route that allowed thousands of settlers to cross the mountains westward. That same year he helped found Boonesborough.
The first permanent European settlement had been Harrod's Town (today's Harrodsburg), founded by James Harrod in 1774. Kentucky was then part of Virginia, but its remoteness and its rapid growth drove it toward autonomy. On June 1, 1792, Kentucky was admitted as the 15th state of the Union, and the first west of the Appalachian Mountains, leading the nation's march into the interior of the continent.
Kentucky's geography forged two of its most emblematic industries. The central Bluegrass region, with its gentle hills and its calcium-rich pastures —ideal for strengthening horses' bones—, became the world capital of thoroughbred breeding. The farms of Lexington, with their white fences and their stables, and above all the Kentucky Derby, the country's most famous race, run every May at Churchill Downs, in Louisville, made the state famous.
Kentucky's other great product is bourbon, the whiskey characteristic of the United States, whose production is traditionally concentrated in the state thanks to the water filtered through limestone and to the region's corn. More than 90% of the world's bourbon is produced in Kentucky, and its 'Bourbon Trail' is today a major tourist attraction. The name 'bluegrass' also alludes to the variety of grass that gives the fields their bluish tint in spring.
Kentucky lived through the Civil War in a singular way: as a border and slaveholding state yet loyal to the Union, it was deeply divided, with families set against one another and armies of both sides operating on its soil. Its strategic position made it coveted by Washington and by Richmond; President Lincoln himself went so far as to say that he hoped to have God on his side, but that he needed to have Kentucky.
A remarkable coincidence underlines that divided character: both Abraham Lincoln, president of the Union and born in Hodgenville in 1809, and Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, were born in Kentucky, a few kilometers and a few months apart. The state officially remained in the Union, but came to have a parallel Confederate government, a reflection of a split loyalty that marked its later history.
Kentucky is home to a unique natural wonder: Mammoth Cave National Park, which protects the longest known cave system in the world, with more than 640 kilometers of mapped passages beneath the limestone hills of the center of the state. Declared a World Heritage Site, it is an underground labyrinth of colossal chambers, rivers and formations that fascinates visitors.
In the east, Kentucky's Appalachian Mountains hold another story: that of coal, whose extraction shaped the economy, the culture and the labor struggles of the region for generations, as well as the birth of bluegrass and country music. For the traveler, Kentucky today offers an appealing mosaic: the horse farms and the Derby of Lexington and Louisville, the Bourbon Trail, the caves of Mammoth Cave, the Lincoln sites and the music and southern cooking of its mountains.
The territory of Louisiana holds one of the oldest Indigenous legacies in North America: at Poverty Point, in the north of the state, an enormous complex of mounds and earthworks was raised more than 3,000 years ago, today a World Heritage Site, the work of a sophisticated hunter-gatherer society. Older still is the Watson Brake complex.
When the Europeans arrived, the region was inhabited by various peoples: the Caddo in the northwest, the Natchez —heirs of the Mississippian cultures, with their hierarchical society and their sun worship—, the Chitimacha, the Houma, the Tunica and others. They lived from fishing, hunting and farming in the rich, humid environment of the Mississippi delta and of the bayous, that labyrinth of channels and swamps that defines the geography of the south of the state.
In 1682, the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, descended the Mississippi to its mouth and claimed the entire river basin for France, naming it 'La Louisiane' in honor of King Louis XIV. The French founded settlements on the Gulf coast and, in 1718, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville established New Orleans, destined to be the great city of the colony.
In 1762-1763, France ceded Louisiana to Spain, which administered it for almost four decades and left a deep mark on its architecture, its law and its culture —today's French Quarter of New Orleans is, in good part, of Spanish construction after the colonial fires—. In this period the Acadians also arrived, French speakers expelled by the British from Nova Scotia (Canada) from 1755 onward, who settled in the southwest and gave rise to Cajun culture. The mixture of French, Spanish, Africans, Creoles and Indigenous peoples forged a society unique in the whole continent.
In 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte —who had recovered the territory from Spain— sold all of Louisiana to the United States for some 15 million dollars: the celebrated Louisiana Purchase, which at a stroke doubled the size of the young country. Of that vast territory, the southern part, around New Orleans, became the state of Louisiana, admitted on April 30, 1812 as the 18th of the Union.
Shortly afterwards, during the War of 1812 against Great Britain, a resounding American victory commanded by General Andrew Jackson took place on the outskirts of New Orleans, in January 1815. The state's economy turned to growing sugarcane and cotton on large plantations worked by slaves, and New Orleans became the largest port and the largest slave market in the south of the country. Louisiana joined the Confederacy in 1861, and New Orleans was taken by the Union as early as 1862.
Louisiana's most universal contribution to world culture was born of its extraordinary mixture of peoples: jazz. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in New Orleans, the fusion of African musical traditions, religious hymns, the blues, work songs, the brass bands of the parades and European music gave birth to a completely new genre. From its streets and its venues emerged founding figures such as Louis Armstrong.
From there jazz spread up the Mississippi, to Chicago and to the entire world, transforming the music of the twentieth century. New Orleans remains today a living temple of music, with its clubs, its street bands and its 'second lines'. The city is also famous for its celebration of Mardi Gras, the great carnival of French Catholic roots, and for a Creole and Cajun cuisine —gumbo, jambalaya, beignets— recognized all over the world.
Louisiana preserves traits that make it different from any other state. It is the only one that organizes its local administration into 'parishes' instead of counties, a legacy of its Catholic past, and the only one whose legal system is based on civil law of Napoleonic root and not on Anglo-Saxon common law. French and Louisiana Creole are still alive in some communities in the south.
Its geography of bayous, swamps and delta wetlands —home to alligators, herons and exuberant wildlife— is at once its great attraction and its great vulnerability, exposed to hurricanes such as the devastating Katrina of 2005. For the traveler, the state offers the magic of New Orleans and its French Quarter, the historic plantations along the banks of the Mississippi, the Cajun culture of the Acadiana country around Lafayette, boat rides through the swamps and a musical and culinary identity unmatched in the United States.
For some 12,000 years Maine was home to Algonquian-speaking peoples grouped in the Wabanaki Confederacy —'people of the dawnland', for being among the first to see the sun rise in North America—. It was made up of the Penobscot, the Passamaquoddy, the Maliseet and the Mi'kmaq, among others. They lived by fishing, hunting, gathering and seasonal farming, and moved with the seasons between the coast and the wooded interior.
These peoples kept a deep relationship with the rivers, the forests and the sea of the region. They were among the first to come into contact with the Europeans exploring the northeastern coast, and they built trading alliances —above all with the French— that would shape the colonial wars. Several of these nations still have communities and territories in the state today.
The coast of Maine was one of the first on the continent to receive Europeans. There are hints of possible Viking contact around the year 1000, suggested by the discovery of an 11th-century Norwegian coin. In the age of exploration proper, in 1604 the Frenchman Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons, set up a short-lived settlement on Saint Croix Island.
The English tried in 1607 with the Popham Colony, at the mouth of the Kennebec River, founded at almost the same time as Jamestown; but the harsh winter and the hardships led to its abandonment after little more than a year. Through the colonial period Maine was part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to which it would belong for more than a century, and it was a theater of the wars between the French and the English and their respective Native allies.
For almost the whole colonial era and the first decades of independence, Maine was a district of Massachusetts, from which it was geographically separated by the strip of New Hampshire. Its inhabitants' wish for autonomy coincided with a decisive moment in national politics.
In 1820, on March 15, Maine became the 23rd state of the Union as part of the Missouri Compromise: to keep the balance between free and slave states in the Senate, Maine entered as a free state at the same time as Missouri entered as a slave state. Maine's birth was thus tied to the great question dividing the country, that of slavery, although Maine itself was always a free state and a stronghold of abolitionism.
Maine's economy has traditionally rested on the extraordinary wealth of its natural resources. More than 80% of its territory is covered in forest, which earned it the nickname 'Pine Tree State': timber and paper were pillars of its industry for centuries, and Maine's tall white pines supplied masts to the British navy.
Its bond with the sea runs just as deep. Shipbuilding thrived in its yards during the age of sail, and fishing shaped the life of its coastal towns. Above all, Maine today is synonymous with lobster: it is by far the largest producer in the country, and the image of the traps, the colored buoys and the fishing villages is inseparable from the state. Alongside that, wild blueberries and northern potatoes, in Aroostook County, round out its productive tradition.
Maine's great tourist draw is its shoreline: a jagged, rocky coast studded with peninsulas, islands, coves and dozens of historic lighthouses that make it one of the most picturesque in the United States. Its jewel is Acadia National Park, on Mount Desert Island, around Bar Harbor: it was the first national park east of the Mississippi River, with its granite mountains dropping to the sea, its forests and its famous Cadillac Mountain, one of the first places in the country where the sunrise can be seen.
Beyond Acadia, the visitor finds picture-postcard seafaring towns, the lively city of Portland with its renowned food scene, the great inland forests —a paradise for hiking, canoeing and fishing, with Mount Katahdin as the northern end of the Appalachian Trail— and a New England identity that is quiet, independent and tied to nature. With its colorful autumns, its cool summers and its seafood cooking, Maine is a destination of serene beauty in the northeastern corner of the country.
The territory of Maryland, organized around the great Chesapeake Bay, was inhabited by Algonquian-speaking peoples such as the Piscataway and the Nanticoke, and by the Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannock in the north. They lived off the extraordinary abundance of the bay —fish, oysters, crabs— and off hunting and farming in the dense riverside forests.
Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States, was the heart of their world, crossed by canoes and lined with villages. Contact with the English colonists who settled the region from the 17th century onward, and the diseases and pressures it brought with it, drastically reduced these nations within a few generations.
Maryland was born of a singular project. George Calvert, first Baron Baltimore, a Catholic nobleman in a Protestant England, conceived a colony that would serve as a refuge for English Catholics, persecuted at home. Though he died before seeing it realized, his son Cecil Calvert obtained the royal charter in 1632, and in March 1634 the first colonists founded St. Mary's City, the first capital. The colony was named Maryland in honor of Henrietta Maria, queen consort of Charles I.
The experiment in tolerance took shape in 1649 with the Maryland Toleration Act, which guaranteed freedom of worship to all Trinitarian Christians: one of the first laws of its kind in the colonies, although its application was rocky because of tensions between Catholics and Protestants. That seed of religious tolerance left a lasting mark on the state's identity.
Maryland was one of the thirteen colonies and took an active part in the Revolution. Having been the last state to ratify the Articles of Confederation, in 1788 it ratified the Constitution of the United States, becoming the seventh state of the Union. In 1790 it ceded, along with Virginia, the lands on the banks of the Potomac on which the federal capital, Washington, would be built.
Its colonial economy was based on tobacco, grown on large plantations worked by slaves. Maryland is also famous for the Mason-Dixon line, the boundary drawn in the 18th century with Pennsylvania that, in time, became the symbolic divide between the free North and the slaveholding South. The state was thus left, geographically and culturally, straddling both worlds, a position that would shape its fate in the Civil War.
Maryland gave the United States one of its best-loved symbols. During the War of 1812, in September 1814, the British fleet bombarded Fort McHenry, the fort guarding the harbor of Baltimore, for an entire night. At dawn the huge American flag was still flying over the fort, a sign that the city had held out.
That sight moved a lawyer named Francis Scott Key, who was watching the bombardment from a ship, and inspired him to write a poem that would in time become the lyrics of 'The Star-Spangled Banner', the national anthem of the United States. Fort McHenry is a national monument today. In the Civil War, Maryland —a slave state but of divided loyalty— stayed in the Union, in part because of federal pressure, and on its soil the Battle of Antietam was fought in 1862, the bloodiest day in American military history.
Maryland's economic heart has for centuries been Baltimore, one of the great historic ports of the Atlantic coast and a city with a deep industrial, seafaring and railroad tradition —the country's first commercial railroad, the B&O, was born there—. Its revitalized Inner Harbor, its aquarium and its historic neighborhoods are major attractions today, and the city is also home to the prestigious Johns Hopkins University and its celebrated hospital.
Chesapeake Bay still defines the life and the cooking of the state: the blue crab, steamed with Old Bay seasoning, is a culinary institution and an emblem of Maryland. The visitor also finds historic Annapolis, the capital, seat of the United States Naval Academy and of a beautiful colonial old town; the bay's seafaring villages; and a privileged position in the corridor between Washington and the great cities of the northeast. All of it defines the 'Free State' of Maryland.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, the territory of Massachusetts was inhabited by Algonquian-speaking peoples, among them the Wampanoag —from whose name and whose language comes that of the Massachusett people—, the Nipmuc, the Pocomtuc and the Nauset. They lived in villages of wigwams and longhouses, led by chiefs called sachems, and farmed corn, beans and squash, alongside fishing and hunting.
Just before colonization, between 1616 and 1619, a devastating epidemic —probably brought by European fishermen and traders— decimated the peoples of the coast, leaving whole villages empty. That tragic depopulation would make it easier, shortly afterward, for the first English colonists to settle on land that was, in part, empty.
In 1620 a group of English religious separatists —the pilgrims— crossed the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower and landed at Plymouth, founding the second permanent English colony in what is now the United States. Before going ashore they signed the Mayflower Compact, an agreement of self-government considered a forerunner of American constitutionalism.
The first winter was brutal and killed half the colonists, but help from Native people such as Squanto —who taught them to farm and fish— allowed them to survive. The harvest of the autumn of 1621 was celebrated with a feast shared with the Wampanoag, at the origin of the Thanksgiving tradition. A decade later, in 1630, a far larger migration of Puritans led by John Winthrop founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the city of Boston, conceived as a model religious community, 'a city upon a hill'.
The growth of the colonies collided with the Native peoples. King Philip's War (1675-1678), named after the Wampanoag leader Metacomet (King Philip), was one of the bloodiest conflicts in proportion to population in the history of New England, and it devastated dozens of Native villages and colonial towns before ending in Native defeat.
Puritan society also lived through one of its darkest episodes: the Salem witch trials of 1692, in which collective hysteria led to dozens of people being accused and twenty executed for supposed witchcraft, a case still studied today as a warning about fanaticism and injustice. Despite these shadows, a culture of self-government, literacy and public debate was taking root in Massachusetts that would prepare it for its leading role in the Revolution.
No place was as central to the outbreak of independence as Massachusetts, the 'cradle of liberty'. Boston was the epicenter of resistance to British taxes: there took place the Boston Massacre (1770) and the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773, when colonists in disguise threw cargoes of tea into the sea in protest against the crown.
The war itself began on Massachusetts soil: on April 19, 1775, the battles of Lexington and Concord —with the 'shot heard round the world'— started the Revolution, followed by the bloody Battle of Bunker Hill. Massachusetts contributed founding leaders such as John Adams, Samuel Adams and John Hancock. On February 6, 1788, it ratified the Constitution, becoming the sixth state of the Union, and its state constitution of 1780, still in force, is the oldest written constitution in the world still in operation.
Massachusetts has always stood out for its intellectual life. It is home to Harvard University, founded in 1636, the oldest in the country, and to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with dozens of institutions that make the Boston area one of the great educational and research hubs of the world. It was also the cradle of the abolitionist movement and of literary figures such as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson.
In the 19th century the state led the American Industrial Revolution, with the great textile mills of cities such as Lowell, and it pioneered compulsory public education. For the traveler, Massachusetts today combines that historical weight —Boston's Freedom Trail, Plymouth, Salem, Concord— with the charms of a New England summer: the beaches and dunes of Cape Cod, the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, with their whaling past, and the autumn landscapes of the Berkshire mountains. A founding land of the nation, it remains one of its most vibrant cultural centers.
The territory of Michigan, surrounded by four of the five Great Lakes, was home to Algonquian-speaking Anishinaabe peoples grouped in a historic alliance known as the Council of Three Fires: the Ojibwe (or Chippewa), the Odawa (or Ottawa) and the Potawatomi. The Ojibwe were the largest group, with a population in the tens of thousands.
These peoples lived by hunting, fishing in the lakes, gathering wild rice and producing maple sugar, and they controlled the trade and canoe routes of the Great Lakes region. The name 'Michigan' itself comes from an Ojibwe word, mishigami, meaning 'great water' or 'great lake', a clear reference to the overwhelming presence of fresh water that defines the state.
The first Europeans in the region were French explorers and missionaries. Étienne Brûlé arrived around 1622, and Father Jacques Marquette founded a mission at Sault Ste. Marie in 1668, one of the oldest settlements of European origin in the Midwest. Michigan became a key territory of the French fur trade.
In 1701, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit, on the strait (détroit) linking Lake Erie and Lake Huron: it was the seed of the city of Detroit, which would become a great fur-trading center. After the French defeat in 1763, the region passed into British hands and, after the Revolution, to the United States, although the British did not fully hand it over until after the War of 1812. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 threw the doors open to a wave of settlers.
Michigan entered the Union as the 26th state on January 26, 1837, as a free state. Its admission was preceded by a curious border conflict with Ohio, the so-called 'Toledo War', an almost bloodless dispute over a strip of land around the city of Toledo. Michigan ended up ceding the 'Toledo Strip' to Ohio, but received in exchange the Upper Peninsula, then considered a worthless wasteland.
That compensation turned out to be a treasure: the Upper Peninsula hid enormous deposits of copper and iron that made it a mining power, and its immense forests made Michigan one of the country's largest timber producers between the 1850s and the 1880s. Water, timber and ore laid the foundations for the state's future industrial takeoff.
In the early 20th century Michigan became the heart of the world's automobile industry. In Detroit and its surroundings the pioneers of the motor car came together: Henry Ford, who perfected the moving assembly line at his Highland Park plant and launched the Ford Model T, putting the automobile within reach of the masses; and the founders of General Motors (1908), Chrysler and other legendary marques such as Buick, Olds and Dodge.
Mass production revolutionized the American economy and society, and turned Detroit into a prosperous metropolis —the fourth-largest city in the country by around 1920— that drew European immigrants and hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South during the Great Migration. During the Second World War, Michigan's factories were retooled into the 'Arsenal of Democracy', turning out tanks, aircraft and military vehicles en masse. Out of that urban diversity would come, in the 1960s, the unmistakable Motown sound.
Michigan is unique in its geography: split into two peninsulas by the Great Lakes, it has the longest freshwater coastline of any political division in the world, with more than 5,000 kilometers of shore, and it counts tens of thousands of inland lakes. Water is everywhere, and with it a splendid collection of historic lighthouses, more than in any other state in the country.
That lakeside setting is a great tourist draw today. The Upper Peninsula offers wild landscapes such as the colored cliffs of Pictured Rocks; the Lower Peninsula, beaches, giant dunes such as those of Sleeping Bear and coastal towns. Between the two, in the Straits of Mackinac, historic Mackinac Island bans automobiles and keeps the charm of another era, with its horse-drawn carriages and its grand Victorian hotel. Watery nature, industrial heritage and the legacy of the automobile define Michigan.
For centuries the territory of Minnesota was home to the Dakota (part of the great Sioux nation), who lived there when the Europeans arrived, and later to the Ojibwe (Anishinaabe or Chippewa), who migrated from the east through the Great Lakes region and settled in the forests and lakes of the north. The two peoples, allies at first, ended up fighting each other over territory and resources.
They lived by hunting, fishing, harvesting wild rice (manoomin) along the lakeshores, and trade. The name 'Minnesota' itself comes from a Dakota expression describing the river of the same name, usually translated as 'sky-tinted water' or 'cloudy water'. The abundance of water —lakes, rivers and wetlands— is the hallmark of the state's geography and culture.
The first Europeans to travel the region were the French explorers and fur traders, the famous voyageurs, who from the 17th century onward paddled its lakes and rivers by canoe along routes such as the Grand Portage. The western part of the present-day state came to the United States with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and the eastern part through the Treaty of Paris of 1783.
Between 1819 and 1825 the U.S. Army built Fort Snelling at the strategic confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, an outpost that became the nucleus of the future settler colony. The Minnesota Territory was organized in 1849, and on May 11, 1858, Minnesota was admitted as the 32nd state of the Union, with Saint Paul as its capital.
Colonization brought with it a tragic conflict. Driven by hunger, broken treaties and the delay of promised payments, the Dakota took up arms in the summer of 1862 in what became known as the Dakota War (or Sioux Uprising). The conflict was brief but devastating, and hundreds of settlers and fighters died.
After the Dakota defeat, hundreds of warriors were tried in summary proceedings. President Lincoln commuted most of the sentences, but in December 1862, at Mankato, 38 Dakota men were hanged in the largest mass execution in United States history. Many Dakota were expelled from the state. It is one of the most painful episodes in the history of Minnesota and of relations between the United States and Native peoples.
Minnesota's economy was built on three pillars. The first was timber from its great northern forests. The second was iron: in the late 19th century some of the country's largest iron ore deposits were discovered in the north of the state, above all in the Mesabi Range (the Iron Range), which supplied the American steel industry for decades and was shipped out through the port of Duluth, on Lake Superior.
The third pillar was wheat and flour: Minneapolis, thanks to the power of Saint Anthony Falls on the Mississippi, became the flour milling capital of the world, the cradle of giants such as Pillsbury and General Mills. All of this drew heavy European immigration, especially of Scandinavians —Swedes, Norwegians— and Germans, whose heritage is still alive in the state's culture, food and character, giving it a singular identity in the Midwest.
Minnesota's nickname, 'Land of 10,000 Lakes', falls short: it actually has more than eleven thousand. In the heart of the state, at Lake Itasca, the great Mississippi River is born, starting out as a modest stream before crossing the country to the Gulf of Mexico. The northern forests, the vast canoeing country of the Boundary Waters on the Canadian border, and the prairies of the south round out a geography of great beauty and legendarily cold winters.
The urban heart is formed by the Twin Cities: Minneapolis, the larger one, modern and devoted to culture and business, and Saint Paul, the capital, more historic, separated by the Mississippi. Together they make up one of the most prosperous metropolitan areas in the country, and one with the highest quality of life, home to major companies and a vibrant arts scene. Nature, water, Scandinavian heritage and urban energy define the appeal of Minnesota.
The territory of Mississippi was inhabited for millennia, and its most visible legacy is the great earthen mounds of the Mississippian culture, such as those of Emerald Mound —one of the largest in the country— and Winterville, ceremonial centers of hierarchical farming societies that flourished between the years 1000 and 1600.
When the Europeans arrived, two great Muskogean-speaking nations dominated the region: the Choctaw, in the center and the south, corn farmers; and the Chickasaw, in the north, feared warriors. In the southwest lived the Natchez, direct heirs of the mound cultures, with their sun king and their complex caste society, until they were destroyed by the French in the 18th century. These peoples would later be driven west, particularly after the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek of 1830, which forced the cession of Choctaw lands.
The first European to venture into the region was the Spaniard Hernando de Soto, who crossed it around 1540 and was one of the first to sight the great Mississippi River. But it was the French who colonized the territory: they founded a settlement near present-day Ocean Springs in 1699 and established Natchez in 1716, on the river, as their main trading and plantation post.
The territory passed through French, British and Spanish hands before the United States organized the Mississippi Territory in 1798. On December 10, 1817, Mississippi was admitted as the 20th state of the Union, with David Holmes as its first governor. The name of the state, like that of the river, derives from an Ojibwe word meaning 'great river' or 'big river'.
No state embodied the Deep South's 'cotton kingdom' as fully as Mississippi. The fertile alluvial land of the Mississippi Delta, in the northwest, was covered with cotton plantations that made their owners enormously rich and turned the state into one of the world's largest producers. That wealth rested entirely on the forced labor of an immense enslaved population.
In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, enslaved Africans made up 55% of the state's population —more than 430,000 people—, one of the highest proportions in the whole country. True to those interests, Mississippi was the second state to secede from the Union, on January 9, 1861, and it gave the Confederacy its president, Jefferson Davis, the owner of a plantation in the state. During the war, the siege of Vicksburg by General Ulysses S. Grant, which fell in July 1863, gave the Union control of the Mississippi River and marked a decisive turning point.
After Reconstruction, Mississippi led the way in imposing racial segregation. Its constitution of 1890, with poll taxes and literacy tests, stripped virtually the entire Black population of the vote, and its model —the 'Mississippi Plan'— was copied throughout the South. For generations the state was synonymous with the most rigid system of Jim Crow laws and with racial violence, which drove hundreds of thousands of African Americans north in the Great Migration.
For all these reasons, Mississippi became a central and bloody stage of the civil rights struggle. In 1955 the brutal murder of the teenager Emmett Till shocked the country; in 1963 the leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson; and during Freedom Summer in 1964, the murder of three young activists —Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner— outraged the nation and gave impetus to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Figures such as Fannie Lou Hamer emerged from that struggle.
Mississippi's most universal cultural contribution was born of the suffering and the creativity of its African American population: the blues. On the plantations and in the towns of the Mississippi Delta, in the early 20th century, this foundational musical genre took shape, and from it would come jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll and much of modern popular music. From that land came legends such as Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Charley Patton.
Today the Delta's 'Blues Trail', with mythic places such as Clarksdale and its 'crossroads', draws musical pilgrims from around the world. The state is also the birthplace of the king of rock, Elvis Presley, born in Tupelo, and of great writers such as William Faulkner, in Oxford. Alongside its musical and literary heritage, Mississippi offers the antebellum mansions of Natchez, the civil rights sites and the Gulf beaches, in a state marked by an intense and painful history but one of enormous cultural richness.
The territory of Missouri has been inhabited for some eleven thousand years. In the era of the Mississippian culture, the region around present-day St. Louis lay within the sphere of influence of Cahokia —across the river, in Illinois—, the largest prehistoric city north of Mexico, and St. Louis itself held so many mounds that the city came to be nicknamed 'Mound City'.
When the Europeans arrived, the region was home to peoples such as the Missouria —who gave their name to the state and the river—, the Osage, who controlled vast hunting territories, and other Siouan-speaking groups. The name 'Missouri' comes from a Native term usually translated as 'those who have dugout canoes' or 'people of the big canoes'. These peoples lived by hunting bison, farming and trading along the great rivers.
European colonization was the work of the French. The first permanent settlement was Ste. Geneviève, founded around 1750 by French Canadian colonists drawn by the fertile land and the lead mines. In 1764 the fur traders Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau founded St. Louis, on the bank of the Mississippi, which would become the great center of the western fur trade.
The territory passed briefly to Spain and back to France, until in 1803 the United States acquired it, along with the rest of Louisiana, in the historic Louisiana Purchase. St. Louis thus became the gateway to the immense newly acquired territory, and in 1804 it was the starting point of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which went up the Missouri River to explore and map the West as far as the Pacific.
Missouri's request to enter the Union as a slave state set off, in 1820, one of the greatest political crises of the young republic, resolved by the famous Missouri Compromise: the state entered as a slave state, balanced by the admission of Maine as a free state, and slavery was banned in the rest of the territory north of a certain line. On August 10, 1821, Missouri became the 24th state of the Union.
Sitting at the confluence of the two great rivers, Missouri set itself up as the 'gateway to the West'. Its cities were the starting points of the great routes of expansion: from Independence and other towns left the wagons of the Santa Fe Trail, the Oregon Trail and the California Trail, and from St. Joseph rode the riders of the Pony Express. Through Missouri passed the pioneers who settled the western half of the continent.
As a border state, a slave state but with divided loyalties, Missouri lived through the Civil War in a particularly savage way. Although it officially remained in the Union, it had a parallel Confederate government and its population was split in two. The state was the stage of a brutal guerrilla war between the pro-Confederate bands of the 'bushwhackers' and the pro-Union 'jayhawkers'.
Out of that violence came figures who would become legends of Western banditry, such as Jesse James, a former Confederate guerrilla. The war left deep wounds in the state, whose communities remained at odds for generations. After the conflict, Missouri went on growing as a great commercial and industrial center of the country's interior.
Missouri made decisive contributions to American music. Kansas City, in the west of the state, became in the early 20th century one of the great capitals of jazz, with a vibrant style of its own that produced figures such as Count Basie and Charlie Parker. In St. Louis and its surroundings flourished the ragtime of Scott Joplin and a deep blues tradition. The food also left its mark, with the famous barbecue of Kansas City and of St. Louis.
The state's most recognizable symbol is the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, a stainless steel arch 192 meters high built in the sixties as a monument to westward expansion, today the heart of a national park. Missouri is also the land of two great figures: the writer Mark Twain, raised in Hannibal on the banks of the Mississippi, whose landscapes inspired 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn', and President Harry Truman, of Independence. With its rivers, its music, its Ozark Mountains and the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis, Missouri condenses a good part of the history of the heart of America.
Montana was home to many Native peoples adapted to two different worlds: the Great Plains in the east and the Rocky Mountains in the west. The prairies were dominated by the Blackfeet, the Crow (Apsáalooke), the Assiniboine, the Gros Ventre, the Northern Cheyenne and the Lakota, all of them great bison hunters who, after the arrival of the horse, developed a nomadic horse culture of enormous vitality. In the mountain valleys of the west lived the Salish (Flathead) and the Kootenai.
These peoples depended on the bison for almost everything: food, clothing, shelter and tools. The Lewis and Clark expedition crossed the region in 1805 and 1806, on its journey out to the Pacific and back, and was among the first to describe its landscapes and its inhabitants. Their way of life would remain intact for decades, until the mass arrival of settlers and the slaughter of the bison destroyed it.
Montana was the stage of the most famous Native victory of all the wars of the West. On June 25, 1876, in the valley of the Little Bighorn River, a great coalition of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors, led spiritually and militarily by figures such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, wiped out the forces of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Cavalry.
The episode, known as 'Custer's Last Stand', shocked the United States, which was then celebrating the centennial of its independence. But the victory was short-lived: the army redoubled the pressure and, within a few years, the great peoples of the plains were confined to reservations. The battlefield is today a national monument that honors the fallen of both sides and recalls the tragic clash of two civilizations.
Mining changed Montana's economic destiny. The discovery of gold in the 1860s, in places such as Bannack and Virginia City, drew the first settlers en masse and gave rise to bustling mining towns. But the real fortune was underground, in Butte: there lay a copper deposit so colossal that the city was nicknamed 'the richest hill on earth'.
Butte's copper, essential in the age of electricity, turned Montana into a mining power and set off the struggle of the 'copper kings' —magnates such as Marcus Daly and William A. Clark, whose rivalry shaped the state's politics—. Mining, ranching and wheat, together with the arrival of the Great Northern railway, gave the economy its structure. Montana was admitted as the 41st state of the Union on November 8, 1889, and its mineral riches earned it the nickname 'Treasure State'.
Beyond the mines, Montana forged its identity around ranching and farming. Its immense prairies became the kingdom of cattle and of the great ranches, with their cowboys, their rodeos and a culture of the West that still endures strongly. The arrival of the railway in the late 19th century opened the eastern plains to thousands of farmers —the 'honyockers'— who bet on growing wheat, with uneven fortunes in the face of drought.
Today Montana's economy is still tied to the land: ranching, wheat, mining and, increasingly, nature tourism and guest ranches. With one of the lowest population densities in the country, the state keeps its wide open spaces and a strong rural, independent identity, bound up with horses, hunting, fishing and outdoor life, which give it an unmistakable character within the United States.
Montana is famous for its immense landscapes, which earned it the nickname 'Big Sky Country', from the sense of endless skies produced by its unobstructed horizons. Its natural jewel is Glacier National Park, created in 1910, in the northern Rocky Mountains, next to the Canadian border: a world of jagged peaks, glacial valleys, turquoise alpine lakes and abundant wildlife of grizzly bears, mountain goats and moose.
The park is crossed by one of the most spectacular mountain roads in the world, the Going-to-the-Sun Road, and together with its Canadian counterpart it forms the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, a World Heritage Site. Montana also offers the northern portion of Yellowstone, legendary rivers for fly fishing —such as the Madison and the Missouri— and charming Western towns such as Bozeman and Missoula. Overwhelming nature, the history of the West and wide open spaces define the appeal of this state.
Long before white settlers arrived, the prairies of what is now Nebraska were inhabited by nations deeply tied to the bison and to corn. In the center and the east lived the Pawnee —the most numerous Indigenous group in the region, farmers and hunters organized in villages of earth lodges— alongside the Omaha, the Ponca, the Otoe and the Missouria. In the drier west, the Lakota (Sioux) and the Cheyenne held sway, nomadic horsemen of the Great Plains. The name 'Nebraska' itself comes from an Otoe-Omaha word describing the Platte River as 'flat water', for its wide, shallow channel.
The state's level geography and its east-west rivers made it a natural corridor toward the Pacific. The treaties of the nineteenth century stripped these peoples of their lands one after another: the Pawnee ceded almost all their territory around mid-century and in 1876 were moved to the Indian Territory of Oklahoma, while the Omaha, after five successive cessions —negotiated in part by chief Logan Fontenelle in 1854—, were confined to a reservation in the north of the state, where they still remain.
During the 1840s and 1850s, hundreds of thousands of emigrants crossed Nebraska following the valley of the Platte River, the great highway of the conquest of the West. The Oregon Trail, the California Trail and the Mormon Trail all ran together there, sharing the same corridor across nearly the whole state. Rock formations such as Chimney Rock, Scotts Bluff and Courthouse Rock became legendary landmarks that pioneer diaries mention again and again as signs that they were leaving the prairie behind and drawing closer to the mountains.
That ceaseless traffic of wagons, livestock and people changed the ecosystem of the plains forever and put pressure on the Indigenous nations, whose hunting grounds were cut in two by the routes. Military forts such as Fort Kearny and Fort Laramie (just to the west) protected the emigrants and announced the definitive occupation of the territory.
Two federal laws of 1862 sealed Nebraska's fate. The Homestead Act offered 160 acres of land to any settler who worked and improved them for five years, and it set off an avalanche of farmers —many of them European immigrants— who plowed the prairie. At the same time, the transcontinental railroad began to be laid westward from Omaha, which became its eastern starting point and the state's great rail hub.
Nebraska was admitted to the Union on March 1, 1867 as the 37th state. Soon after, the capital moved from Omaha to the town of Lancaster, renamed Lincoln in honor of the president assassinated two years earlier. Omaha grew at dizzying speed as the capital of the meatpacking industry, with enormous stockyards (the Union Stockyards) and slaughterhouses that made it a rival of Chicago, while corn farming gave the state its enduring nickname of 'Cornhusker State'.
Nebraska is a state of wide horizons and a solidly farming and ranching economy. Across its central and northern third stretch the Sandhills, the largest grass-covered dune system in the Western Hemisphere, a sea of sand hills stabilized by grasses that supports enormous cattle ranches. The wetter east is a land of corn, soybeans and family farms, while corn and livestock remain the economic backbone of the state.
Every spring, the Platte valley near Kearney and Grand Island hosts one of the most astonishing natural spectacles in North America: the stopover of more than half a million sandhill cranes —some 736,000 were counted in 2025— which rest and feed for weeks before continuing on to their breeding grounds in the north. Omaha, the largest city, provides the urban counterpoint: home of the legendary investor Warren Buffett and of the insurance giant Mutual of Omaha, it now shows off a renewed historic district (Old Market) and one of the best zoos in the country.
Nebraska has forged an identity tied to the land, to plainness and to a remarkable literary tradition. The writer Willa Cather, raised on the prairie at Red Cloud, immortalized the life of immigrant settlers in novels such as 'My Ántonia' and 'O Pioneers!', which today shape much of the state's romantic image. The historic town of Nebraska City was the birthplace of Arbor Day, the tree-planting observance devised by J. Sterling Morton in 1872 and now celebrated around the world.
State pride is also concentrated in college football: the Cornhuskers of the University of Nebraska fill stadiums with nearly 90,000 people, who on game day turn Lincoln into the state's third most populous 'city'. From the coal of the Sandhills to the skyscrapers of Omaha, by way of the pioneer trails and the dance of the cranes, Nebraska embodies the quiet, hardworking spirit of the agricultural heart of the United States.
The arid territory of Nevada, in the Great Basin —that vast landlocked region where the rivers die in salt lakes or in the desert—, was for millennia one of the harshest inhabited environments in North America. There the Northern Paiute, the Western Shoshone and the Washoe, around Lake Tahoe, survived by their wits, peoples who mastered the knowledge of springs, pine nuts and small game in order to hold out in a landscape of extreme scarcity.
The first Europeans to cross the region were explorers and trappers in the early nineteenth century, such as Jedediah Smith and, later, John C. Frémont, who in the 1840s mapped the Great Basin and gave it its name. The territory belonged to Mexico until 1848, when it passed to the United States under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the war between the two countries. For a decade it was an almost unpopulated land of passage, barely crossed by emigrants heading for California.
Everything changed in 1859, when the Comstock Lode was discovered near Virginia City, one of the largest silver deposits in history, credited to Henry Comstock. The news set off a mining rush that drew thousands of prospectors from California and from all over the world, and some 400 million dollars in silver and gold were taken from its veins over the following decades. Virginia City became one of the richest and most bustling towns in the West, with an opera house, newspapers —where a young Mark Twain began his career— and mansions built on top of the ore.
That silver wealth gave Nevada its enduring nickname of 'Silver State' and shaped its boom-and-bust mining culture. The bonanza attracted capital, railroads and a cosmopolitan population, but also the volatility that would mark the state's economic history: towns that sprang up overnight and were abandoned as soon as the vein ran out.
Comstock silver made Nevada a strategic piece in the middle of the War of Secession. Although no battle was fought on its soil, President Abraham Lincoln and Congress rushed its admission to secure electoral votes and congressional support for the Union and for the antislavery amendments. Since the territory fell short of the population usually required, an exception was made: the complete state constitution was telegraphed to Washington —one of the longest and most expensive telegrams ever sent up to that point— so that it would arrive in time.
So it was that on October 31, 1864, barely five years after the silver was found, Nevada was admitted as the 36th state. From that wartime origin came its motto, 'Battle Born', which still appears on its flag. When mining declined at the end of the nineteenth century, the state looked for new sources of income along rather unconventional paths.
In 1931, in the depths of the Great Depression, Nevada made two decisions that would define its future: it legalized gambling —which it preferred to call 'gaming'— and made quick divorces easy, drawing those who wanted proceedings that were impossible in other states. That same year construction began on the Hoover Dam across the Colorado River, a colossal project that employed thousands of workers, created Lake Mead and supplied the cheap electricity that made possible the growth of a small railroad stop in the desert: Las Vegas.
From the 1940s and 1950s on, with the arrival of large casinos and hotels —and of capital sometimes linked to organized crime, with figures such as Bugsy Siegel and his Flamingo—, Las Vegas was transformed into the world capital of gambling and show business. The famous Strip, with its themed resorts, its shows and its endless neon, became a global icon of entertainment and excess.
Beyond the glare of Las Vegas, Nevada is a state of vast deserts, isolated mountain ranges and almost empty open spaces. It holds surprising natural areas such as the Valley of Fire, with its red sandstone formations; the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe, shared with California; and remote Great Basin National Park, with the Lehman Caves and forests of thousand-year-old bristlecone pines. Area 51 and the old nuclear testing grounds of the Nevada Test Site are part of its modern mythology, somewhere between military secrecy and UFO legend.
Today Nevada lives on tourism, conventions and, increasingly, technology and logistics: on the outskirts of Reno, Tesla's 'Gigafactory' symbolizes that diversification. Las Vegas and Reno hold most of a population that has grown very fast, drawn by the climate, the jobs and the absence of income tax. From the pick and shovel of the Comstock to the neon of the Strip, Nevada remains the great laboratory of reinvention of the American West.
For thousands of years, the territory of New Hampshire was inhabited by Algonquian peoples, above all Abenaki grouped in nations such as the Pennacook, who lived from fishing in the rivers, from hunting and from seasonal farming along valleys like that of the Merrimack. These peoples are reckoned to have occupied the region for more than 10,000 years before European contact.
English colonization began in the 1620s around the coast, with fishing and timber settlements near Portsmouth, at the mouth of the Piscataqua River. New Hampshire was one of the four founding colonies of New England and for decades alternated between governing itself and depending on Massachusetts, until it took hold as a royal colony with an identity of its own.
New Hampshire holds a singular place in the founding of the United States: on January 5, 1776, six months before the Declaration of Independence, it became the first of the thirteen colonies to adopt a constitution of its own and to establish a government independent of the British crown. It was also the ninth and decisive state to ratify the federal Constitution, in June 1788, thereby bringing the new national compact into force.
Its motto, 'Live Free or Die', comes from a toast by General John Stark, a local hero of the Battle of Bennington in the War of Independence. That phrase, today printed even on the state's license plates, sums up the strong independent, austere and libertarian spirit that still characterizes New Hampshire society.
In the nineteenth century, New Hampshire industrialized by harnessing the power of its rivers. Manchester, beside the falls of the Merrimack, became the seat of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, which grew into the largest cotton textile mill in the world, with some thirty buildings and as many as 17,000 employees at its peak. Those mills drew waves of immigrants, above all French Canadians and Irish, who gave the towns of the southern part of the state their working-class, Catholic character.
As across all of New England, the textile industry fell into crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century when production moved to the south of the country in search of cheaper labor, and Amoskeag went bankrupt in 1935. The state then redirected its economy toward precision manufacturing, technology and tourism, and kept its reputation for a light tax burden, with no general income tax and no sales tax.
Since 1920, New Hampshire has held the first presidential primary in the United States, a privilege it defends by state law against any attempt to get ahead of it. Every four years, this small state becomes the center of national attention: candidates tour its towns, diners and town halls in a campaign of direct contact with voters, and the result usually works as the first real gauge of an election.
That disproportionate weight in national politics —the 'first-in-the-nation primary'— has given New Hampshire an influence far greater than its size and has made its civic tradition of town meetings part of its identity. Few places so small play so visible a role in the democratic life of the country.
New Hampshire's great tourist draw is its mountain country. The White Mountains form the highest massif in the Northeast, crowned by Mount Washington (1,917 m), famous for having 'the world's worst weather': on its summit, on April 12, 1934, a wind gust of 372 km/h (231 mph) was recorded, for decades the fastest ever measured by a staffed weather station. Franconia Notch, with its waterfalls and its cable car, and the scenic Kancamagus Highway round out the landscape.
In autumn, the state's forests burst into reds, oranges and golds that draw crowds of 'leaf peepers' from all over the country. Add to that lakes such as Winnipesaukee, picture-postcard towns with white-steepled churches and a short but picturesque Atlantic coast around Portsmouth. Nature, history and an independent spirit make New Hampshire one of the most distinctive corners of New England.
The territory of New Jersey was for centuries home to the Lenape (also called Delaware), a network of Algonquian communities whose ancestral land stretched across parts of present-day New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania and New York. They lived from fishing, hunting and growing corn along the Hudson, Raritan, Passaic and Delaware rivers, and their language gave its name to many geographic features of the region.
The first Europeans were the Dutch, who folded the area into their colony of New Netherland, followed by Swedish colonists who founded settlements in the south, along the Delaware. After a struggle between the two, the Dutch prevailed in 1655, but in 1664 the English seized all of New Netherland from the Netherlands and named the territory New Jersey, in honor of the British island of Jersey.
Because of its strategic position between New York and Philadelphia, the two most important cities of the colonies, New Jersey was a constant battlefield during the War of Independence, to the point of earning the nickname 'crossroads of the Revolution'. On Christmas Eve 1776, George Washington crossed the frozen Delaware River with the Continental Army and, at dawn on December 26, surprised and defeated the Hessian mercenary troops at the Battle of Trenton.
That victory, followed shortly after by the one at Princeton, revived the morale of the independence cause at its most critical moment and is considered by many historians one of the most decisive of the war. The scene of the crossing, immortalized in the famous painting by Emanuel Leutze, became one of the great icons of the nation's founding. New Jersey was the third state to ratify the Constitution, on December 18, 1787.
New Jersey became one of the country's great industrial engines. In his Menlo Park laboratory, regarded as the world's first industrial research and development center, Thomas Edison perfected the incandescent lamp between 1876 and 1882, invented the phonograph —which earned him the nickname 'the Wizard of Menlo Park'— and laid the foundations of the electrical industry and of recorded sound. The city of Paterson, with its silk mills powered by the Passaic falls, was nicknamed 'Silk City' and became a symbol of the American Industrial Revolution.
Ports, refineries, chemical plants and shipyards drew waves of Italian, Irish, Jewish and other European immigrants. Its closeness to the great metropolises and a very dense network of roads and railroads made the state one of the most populated, industrialized and prosperous in the country, though also one of the most urbanized.
The nickname 'Garden State' is no accident: despite its intense urbanization, New Jersey keeps up a significant farm output of fruits and vegetables —tomatoes, blueberries, peaches— on its southern and central lands, which supply the markets of the big neighboring cities. The Pine Barrens, a vast forest of pines and wetlands, and the mountains of the northwest offer a natural counterpoint to the highways and refineries of the New York-Philadelphia corridor.
But the great tourist draw is its Atlantic shoreline, the famous 'Jersey Shore', with miles of beaches and lively wooden boardwalks that fill with life every summer in places such as Cape May, Wildwood or Asbury Park, the last of these tied to the musician Bruce Springsteen, a son of the state.
The emblematic city of New Jersey tourism is Atlantic City, whose famous seaside promenade, opened in the nineteenth century, was the country's first boardwalk and inspired the names of the squares on the Monopoly board game. After decades of splendor and later decline, in 1976 the state's voters approved by a narrow margin the legalization of casinos exclusively in Atlantic City, as a tool of urban renewal.
The first casino opened in 1978, the first legal one on the entire East Coast of the United States, and for years the city was transformed into the gambling capital of the Atlantic, the eastern rival of Las Vegas. Beaches, entertainment, Revolutionary history and the nearness of two of the country's largest metropolises make New Jersey a getaway destination as popular as it is surprisingly varied.
New Mexico is one of the regions of oldest and most continuous human occupation in the United States. Between the 9th and 13th centuries, the Ancestral Puebloan culture reached its height at Chaco Canyon, a complex of stone 'great houses' —such as Pueblo Bonito, with hundreds of rooms— that served as the ceremonial, astronomical and trading center of an entire civilization of the Southwest. Their descendants, the Pueblo peoples, still live today in millennia-old villages such as Taos, Acoma —the 'sky city', perched on a mesa for more than a thousand years— and Zuni.
Later the Navajo (Diné) and the Apache reached the region, peoples of Athabaskan origin who adapted to the desert and the mountains. The Navajo hold today the largest Indian reservation in the country, which extends into Arizona and Utah as well, and their culture, together with that of the Pueblo peoples, defines much of the deep identity of New Mexico.
The Spanish presence in New Mexico is a very early one. In 1598, Juan de Oñate arrived from the Valley of Mexico with some 500 colonists and soldiers and thousands of head of livestock, and founded the first permanent Spanish settlement in the region. In 1610, governor Pedro de Peralta moved the capital and established the villa of Santa Fe, at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountains: it is the oldest state capital in the United States, founded a decade before the Mayflower pilgrims reached Massachusetts.
For centuries the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro linked Mexico City with Santa Fe, carrying livestock, silver and missionaries along a route of more than 2,500 kilometers. On that backbone rose a colonial society of Hispanic and Indigenous roots that left a deep mark on the language, the adobe architecture, the religion and the cooking of all of northern New Mexico.
In 1680, worn down by forced labor, tribute and the repression of their beliefs, the Pueblo peoples as a whole rose in a rebellion coordinated by the religious leader Po'pay. The Pueblo Revolt of August 10, 1680 drove the Spanish out of New Mexico for twelve years, in the most successful Indigenous rebellion in the history of North America; the definitive reconquest was not completed until 1692-1696. That episode left a lasting mark on the balance between the region's cultures.
After Mexico's independence in 1821, New Mexico became part of the new country, and the Santa Fe Trail connected it with the American East. At the end of the war between Mexico and the United States, the territory passed into American hands in 1848. It was Old West country, with figures such as the outlaw Billy the Kid, and it became the 47th state of the Union in 1912, one of the last on the continental mainland to do so.
In the 20th century, New Mexico stepped squarely into world history. During the Second World War, the Manhattan Project set up in 1943 the secret laboratory of Los Alamos, on an isolated mesa in the north of the state, where a team led by J. Robert Oppenheimer designed the first atomic bombs. On July 16, 1945, in the Jornada del Muerto desert, near Alamogordo, the Trinity test was carried out: the first nuclear detonation in history, which opened the atomic age.
That scientific legacy endures: Los Alamos and the Sandia laboratories remain key centers of nuclear and technological research. The state combines that pioneering past with otherworldly landscapes, and its spotless, empty sky has also made it a land of observatories and of mysterious UFO legends, such as the famous Roswell incident of 1947.
New Mexico is famous for its light and its landscapes, which drew artists such as the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, in love with the deserts and the mountains around Abiquiú. Santa Fe and Taos are capitals of art and of adobe architecture, with a unique mix of Native, Hispanic and Anglo cultures that shows in their markets, churches and fairs. Albuquerque, the largest city, hosts every October the biggest hot-air balloon festival in the world, when hundreds of balloons color the desert sky at dawn.
Its landscapes run from the gypsum dunes of White Sands —of a blinding whiteness— to the deep Carlsbad Caverns, an imposing underground system declared a World Heritage Site and home to hundreds of thousands of bats. Desert, mountains, art and endless skies make the 'Land of Enchantment' one of the most singular and photogenic destinations in the American Southwest.
The territory of the present-day state of New York was the heart of the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee), a league of nations that around the 15th or 16th century brought together five peoples —Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca—, joined in the 18th century by the Tuscarora, to form the Six Nations. They lived in villages of 'longhouses', grew the 'three sisters' (corn, beans and squash) and controlled vast territories from the Hudson Valley to the Great Lakes.
Their Great Law of Peace, a sophisticated system of government based on council and consensus, has been pointed to by some historians as a possible influence on the federal ideas of the American founders. For generations the Iroquois were a diplomatic and military power of the first order, and the French and the English fought over their alliance.
In 1609, the English explorer Henry Hudson, in the service of the Netherlands, sailed up the river that today bears his name in search of a passage to Asia. The Dutch set up a fur trading post at Fort Nassau (near present-day Albany) and, in 1625, built Fort Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan; around it grew New Amsterdam, a cosmopolitan trading outpost of the colony of New Netherland. In 1664, an English fleet took the city with hardly any resistance and renamed it New York, in honor of the Duke of York.
As one of the thirteen colonies, New York was a key setting of the War of Independence, with decisive battles such as Saratoga in 1777, considered the turning point of the conflict. On July 26, 1788 it became the eleventh state to ratify the Constitution, and New York City was even the nation's first capital, where George Washington was sworn into office in 1789.
The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, driven by governor DeWitt Clinton, transformed the economy of the state and of the whole country. That waterway of almost 600 kilometers connected the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Hudson River, and made New York City the great commercial gateway of the United States. Along its course cities such as Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica and Albany, the state capital, flourished.
For more than six decades, between 1892 and 1954, more than twelve million immigrants entered the country through Ellis Island, in New York Bay, under the gaze of the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France unveiled in 1886. Italians, Irish, Eastern European Jews, Germans and people from half the world made New York the very symbol of the American dream and of the melting pot.
New York City is the most populous in the United States and one of the great world capitals of finance, culture, fashion and the arts. Wall Street, Broadway, Times Square, Central Park, Fifth Avenue, the museums and the skyscrapers of Manhattan —from the Empire State to the new World Trade Center— turned it into a global icon. It was also the setting of the attacks of September 11, 2001, whose wound and subsequent rebuilding marked the start of the 21st century.
With its five boroughs —Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island— and hundreds of languages spoken in its streets, the city concentrates a good part of the cultural life of the country. From the Harlem Renaissance to the hip hop born in the Bronx, by way of jazz and avant-garde art, New York has been a constant creative engine for more than a century.
The state of New York goes far beyond its great metropolis. To the northwest, Niagara Falls, on the border with Canada, is one of the most visited natural wonders on the planet, with its enormous horseshoe of water that draws millions of tourists every year. To the north rise the Adirondacks, with six million acres of protected mountains, lakes and forests, and Lake Placid, twice host of the Winter Olympic Games (1932 and 1980).
Further south, the Catskills, the wine country of the Finger Lakes and the Hudson Valley —dotted with historic mansions— offer rural escapes a short distance from the city. On Long Island, the Hamptons have become the fashionable beach resort of the East Coast elite. From the falls to the skyscrapers, few states pack in such a wide variety of landscapes and history.
Before the Europeans arrived, the present-day territory of North Carolina was home to many peoples: the Cherokee in the western mountains —the largest of them all—, and on the coast and inland nations such as the Tuscarora, the Croatoan, the Chowanoke and the Waccamaw. These peoples lived by farming, hunting and fishing in a territory that ran from the Appalachian summits to the sand islands of the shore.
North Carolina was the setting of the first English attempt to colonize America: the Roanoke colony, established in 1587 on the Outer Banks under the sponsorship of Walter Raleigh. There Virginia Dare was born, the first English colonist born on the continent. When a relief expedition returned in 1590, after the delay caused by the war with Spain, it found no trace of the colonists, only an abandoned settlement and the word 'CROATOAN' carved on a tree: so began the enduring mystery of the 'lost colony'.
Settled on a stable footing over the course of the 17th century, North Carolina was one of the thirteen colonies, with a farming economy based first on tobacco and later on cotton, grown on plantations sustained by the labor of enslaved people. Unlike its wealthier neighbors, it had a reputation as a more egalitarian society of small farmers, which earned it the historic nickname of 'a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit', in reference to Virginia and South Carolina.
On November 21, 1789 it became the twelfth state to ratify the Constitution. During the Civil War it joined the Confederacy and supplied an enormous number of soldiers, although its territory, more out of the way, saw fewer battles than other states of the Deep South.
In 1838, most of the Cherokee of the region were expelled by the federal government and deported on forced marches toward the Indian Territory of Oklahoma, in the tragic Trail of Tears, in which thousands of people died of hunger, cold and disease. The few who managed to hide in the mountains founded the Eastern Band of Cherokee, which to this day keeps its land and its culture in the west of the state.
North Carolina entered world history on December 17, 1903, when at Kitty Hawk, on the Outer Banks, the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flight in history. From that feat comes the state motto, 'First in Flight', which still appears on its license plates.
North Carolina offers an uncommon variety of landscapes. To the west, the Appalachian Mountains crown in the Great Smoky Mountains —the most visited national park in the country, shared with Tennessee— and in elegant Asheville, beside the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway. There stands the Biltmore, the largest private mansion in the United States, a French château-style palace built for George Vanderbilt between 1889 and 1895 and opened on Christmas Eve of that year. To the east, the Outer Banks unfold barrier islands, lighthouses such as the one at Cape Hatteras and wild beaches swept by the Atlantic.
That contrast between mountain and sea, together with the fiery Appalachian autumns and the musical tradition of bluegrass, makes the state a first-rate tourist destination within the American Southeast.
In the center of the state, the Research Triangle —the triangle formed by Raleigh (the capital), Durham and Chapel Hill, and their universities Duke, Carolina and NC State— is one of the country's great university, biotechnology and technology hubs. The Research Triangle Park, founded in 1959, is the largest research park in the United States and transformed the economy of a region once dominated by tobacco.
So North Carolina combines its deep Southern and agricultural tradition with a modern economy of innovation, banking —Charlotte is a major financial center, home of Bank of America— and services. From tobacco to software and from plantations to laboratories, the state sums up the transformation of the New South.
The plains and river valleys of present-day North Dakota were for centuries home to Indigenous peoples with two great ways of life. On the banks of the Missouri River lived the Mandan, the Hidatsa and the Arikara, settled farming peoples who inhabited large villages of earth lodges and grew corn, squash and beans, as well as trading on a large scale. On the more open prairies the Lakota (Sioux), the Cheyenne and other nomadic bison-hunting peoples held sway.
The Mandan and Hidatsa villages, set at a natural crossroads of trade routes, were centers of exchange visited by tribes from all over the region. That strategic position would make them, at the beginning of the 19th century, a decisive meeting point between the Indigenous world and the first American explorers.
The Lewis and Clark expedition, sent by President Thomas Jefferson after the Louisiana Purchase, went up the Missouri River in 1804 and spent the harsh winter of 1804-1805 next to the Mandan and Hidatsa villages, at Fort Mandan, near present-day Washburn. There they were joined by the young Shoshone interpreter Sacagawea, whose help would be essential to the success of the crossing to the Pacific. That winter in the lands of the future North Dakota is one of the most remembered chapters of the exploration of the West.
For decades the fur trade dominated the economy of the region, with posts such as Fort Union at the confluence of the Missouri and the Yellowstone. The arrival of the Northern Pacific railroad in the 1870s and 1880s opened the territory to a massive settlement known as the 'Dakota Boom'.
Among the settlers drawn by the prairies was a young New Yorker who would leave a deep mark: Theodore Roosevelt, the future president, who in the 1880s owned two cattle ranches near Medora —the Maltese Cross and the Elkhorn— and lived there for several years. Roosevelt would say afterwards that without that experience in the Dakota badlands he would never have reached the White House; his name today honors the state's only national park.
The 'Dakota Boom' and the railroad filled the territory with farmers who plowed the prairie to grow wheat. After a long political dispute with South Dakota over the location of the capital, both territories were admitted as separate states on November 2, 1889; North Dakota became the 39th state (or the 40th, since Benjamin Harrison signed the admissions without revealing the order). Wheat, barley and sunflowers are still pillars of its farming economy.
At the beginning of the 21st century, North Dakota went through a spectacular economic transformation thanks to oil. The development of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques made it possible to exploit the Bakken formation, in the northwest of the state, one of the largest crude reserves in the country. The Bakken 'boom', around the 2010s, catapulted North Dakota to second place among oil-producing states, behind only Texas.
That boom brought jobs, headlong growth and towns such as Williston that shot up almost overnight, but also the tensions typical of resource economies: housing shortages, pressure on services and environmental disputes, such as the one surrounding the Dakota Access pipeline and the protests at the Standing Rock reservation. Oil today lives alongside farming as the engine of the state.
North Dakota's great natural treasure is Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which protects a spectacular badlands landscape —hills eroded into bands of color by the Little Missouri River— and free-roaming herds of bison, wild horses and prairie dogs. It is one of the wildest and least crowded corners of the national park system.
The state also keeps a strong Scandinavian and German-Russian heritage, reflected in its food and its festivals, and historic sites such as Fort Union, the reconstructed settlement of Fort Mandan or the enormous Enchanted Highway of metal sculptures. With a small population and immense horizons, North Dakota embodies the tough, quiet character of the northern Great Plains.
Long before the Europeans arrived, the Ohio River valley was home to ancient mound-building Indigenous cultures. Between 800 BC and 100 BC the Adena culture flourished, followed by the Hopewell culture (roughly 100 BC to AD 400), which raised impressive ceremonial earthworks, geometric and remarkably precise, such as the Newark Earthworks and the Hopewell mounds, used as astronomical observatories and ritual sites. The famous Serpent Mound, a snake-shaped mound more than 400 meters long, is the largest effigy of its kind in the country.
Centuries later, the region was inhabited by peoples such as the Shawnee, the Miami, the Wyandot and the Delaware, who put up fierce resistance to the settlers' advance. Leaders such as the Shawnee Tecumseh tried to unite the Indigenous nations against American expansion in the early 19th century.
After independence, Ohio was part of the Northwest Territory, the first great organized expansion of the United States west of the Appalachians, governed by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which banned slavery in the region and set out the system for creating new states. Ohio was the first state formed out of that territory, admitted to the Union on March 1, 1803, as number 17.
Its privileged position —between the Ohio River to the south and Lake Erie to the north— and the building of canals linking the two basins turned it into a crossroads of trade and of migration westward. Cities such as Cincinnati, on the banks of the Ohio, grew into great pork-processing centers, which earned it the nickname 'Porkopolis'.
In the second half of the 19th century, Ohio became one of the country's great industrial engines. Its closeness to coal and iron mines drove the growth of Cleveland, Youngstown, Canton and Akron: Cleveland's Otis Steel Company built one of the first open-hearth furnaces, and by 1892 Ohio was the second steelmaking state in the country, behind only Pennsylvania. Akron became the 'rubber capital of the world', home to Goodyear, Firestone and other great tire factories.
It was also a land of prodigious invention: in Dayton, the Wright brothers built and designed their first airplane before testing it in North Carolina, and figures such as Charles Kettering worked there. Cincinnati, Dayton and Columbus rounded out a diverse industrial fabric of machinery, chemicals and manufacturing.
Ohio gave the country seven presidents —Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley, Taft and Harding—, which earned it, along with Virginia, the nickname 'mother of presidents'. Its political weight and its diverse social makeup have also made it one of the most closely watched 'swing' states in every presidential election: for decades, whoever won Ohio won the White House.
The state also holds a prominent place in the conquest of space: out of Ohio came John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth and later a senator, and Neil Armstrong, born in Wapakoneta, the first human being to set foot on the Moon in 1969. Few states have contributed so much to the country's political life and to its space epic.
Cleveland, on the shore of Lake Erie, is home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a tribute to the genre that a radio announcer from the city, Alan Freed, helped popularize under that name in the 1950s. The state combines its big cities —Columbus, the capital and largest city, as well as a thriving university hub; Cincinnati; Cleveland— with vast farming country of corn and soybeans inland.
As an industrial state of the 'Rust Belt', Ohio lived through the harsh decline of many of its factories at the end of the 20th century, but it remains a first-rank manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and research center, with institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic. From the mystery of the Serpent Mound to the neon of rock, Ohio sums up much of the industrial and political history of the American heartland.
Oklahoma's modern history is marked by one of the greatest tragedies of American Indian policy. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the federal government expelled the so-called 'Five Civilized Tribes' —Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek (Muscogee) and Seminole— from their lands in the Southeast and deported them on forced marches to what was designated as 'Indian Territory', present-day Oklahoma. That exodus, known as the Trail of Tears, took the lives of thousands of people through hunger, cold and disease; among the Cherokee alone, some 4,000 are estimated to have died.
To those five nations were added, over the course of the 19th century, dozens of other peoples relocated from all over the country. That is why Oklahoma is today home to 39 recognized tribal nations and one of the largest Indigenous populations in the United States; the state's own name comes from the Choctaw words 'okla humma', meaning 'red people'.
In the closing decades of the 19th century, pressure from settlers and railroads led the government to open vast strips of Indian Territory to white settlement. On April 22, 1889, when the cavalry bugle sounded at noon, the first and most famous 'Land Run' began: some 50,000 participants rushed in on horseback and by wagon to claim plots across nearly two million acres, and in a single day cities such as Oklahoma City and Guthrie were born out of nothing.
Those chaotic land runs —there were several more in the following years— gave Oklahoma its nickname of 'Sooner State', after the 'sooners', those who slipped in ahead of the signal to claim the best ground. The improvised, frontier character of that settlement was stamped into the state's identity.
In 1901 oil was discovered near Tulsa, and a crude-oil rush transformed the territory's economy: numerous oil companies set up their offices in the city, which proclaimed itself the 'oil capital of the world'. On November 16, 1907, Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory joined together to form the 46th state of the Union.
That prosperity coexisted with extreme racial violence. In Tulsa the prosperous African American neighborhood of Greenwood flourished, nicknamed 'Black Wall Street'. On May 31 and June 1, 1921, white mobs attacked and razed the neighborhood in the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the worst episodes of racial violence in the country's history, with hundreds dead and thousands left homeless, silenced for decades.
In the 1930s, Oklahoma found itself at the center of the Dust Bowl, considered the worst human-made ecological disaster in the history of the United States. Years of intensive plowing of the prairie, followed by a prolonged drought, left the soil loose and at the mercy of the wind: enormous black dust storms buried farms and harvests. Combined with the economic collapse of the Great Depression, the disaster ruined thousands of families.
Hundreds of thousands of desperate farmers —the 'Okies'— abandoned the state and migrated toward California in search of work, an exodus immortalized by John Steinbeck in 'The Grapes of Wrath' and by the songs of Woody Guthrie, a son of Oklahoma. That collective wound deeply marked the state's memory and culture.
Oklahoma is today a unique crossroads of Native, cowboy and Southern cultures. Its enormous Indigenous population keeps languages, ceremonies and tribal governments alive, and cities such as Tahlequah are the capital of the Cherokee Nation. The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City and the legacy of figures such as the humorist Will Rogers, the state's Cherokee pride, celebrate the tradition of the West.
Recent memory is also marked by the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, the worst domestic terrorist attack in the country's history, remembered today in a sober and moving memorial. Between the prairies, the Ouachita and Wichita mountains, the artificial lakes and a music scene that runs from country to Tulsa rock, Oklahoma distills much of the soul of the American heartland.
Oregon was home to numerous Native peoples —Chinook, Nez Perce, Klamath, Umpqua, Coos and many more— who thrived thanks to the salmon of their rivers, to hunting and to the enormous wealth of their forests and their coast. On the lower Columbia River, the Chinook developed a complex society based on trade, and their language gave rise to 'Chinook Jargon', a lingua franca used throughout the Northwest.
The first European explorers sailed along the coast in the late 18th century, and in 1805 the Lewis and Clark expedition reached the mouth of the Columbia River, where it spent the winter at Fort Clatsop before setting out on the return journey. The wealth in furs later drew British and American companies, which established trading posts such as Fort Vancouver.
From the 1840s on, tens of thousands of settlers traveled the legendary Oregon Trail, a journey of some 3,200 kilometers from the Missouri River, in search of the fertile lands of the Willamette Valley. It was the largest voluntary overland migration in the country's history, and the deep ruts of its wagons are still visible along some stretches of prairie. The Methodist missionaries of Jason Lee had already founded the valley's first permanent settlement in 1834.
In 1843, the settlers gathered at Champoeg organized a provisional government, with laws inspired by those of Iowa, while the region remained disputed between Great Britain and the United States. That mass migration of pioneers tipped the balance definitively in the American favor: the Oregon Treaty of 1846 fixed the border with Canada at the 49th parallel.
Oregon was admitted as a state on February 14, 1859, the 33rd of the Union. Its economy was long based on timber —from its immense conifer forests, with species such as the Douglas fir—, on salmon fishing and on the fertile farming of the Willamette Valley, today also famous for its Pinot Noir wines. Portland, at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, grew into the state's great urban and port center.
Its founding had a curious origin: in 1845, its two owners, one from Maine and the other from Massachusetts, decided the city's name on a coin toss; Portland won. In the early 20th century, Oregon earned a pioneering reputation in direct democracy, with the 'Oregon System' of initiatives and referendums that inspired reforms across the country.
In the 20th century, Oregon forged a strong environmentalist and quality-of-life identity. It was among the first states to protect all its beaches as public property (the Beach Bill of 1967), to pass a pioneering container deposit and recycling law (the Bottle Bill of 1971) and to curb uncontrolled urban sprawl with growth boundaries around its cities. That green calling and its rainy climate fed an independent, artisanal and somewhat eccentric culture.
Portland became the symbol of that way of life: a city of craft breweries, coffee shops, bookstores, bicycles and an unofficial motto, 'Keep Portland Weird'. The state today combines that alternative urban culture with a powerful technology industry —the so-called 'Silicon Forest'— and the headquarters of Nike, born in Oregon.
Oregon unfolds landscapes of exceptional beauty. Its jewel is Crater Lake National Park, established by Theodore Roosevelt in 1902 as the fifth oldest in the country and the only one in Oregon: a lake of the most intense blue held in the caldera of Mount Mazama, which collapsed some 7,700 years ago, and the deepest in the United States at nearly 600 meters. The Oregon coast, with its lighthouses, cliffs and sea stacks such as Haystack Rock, is traveled along the scenic Highway 101 and is public along its entire length.
To the north, the Columbia River Gorge —shared with Washington— offers spectacular waterfalls such as Multnomah Falls and vertiginous viewpoints just minutes from Portland. Volcanoes such as Mount Hood, ancient forests, high deserts in the east and a wild coast make Oregon one of the most varied and photogenic states in the American West.
The territory, inhabited by the Lenape (Delaware), the Susquehannock and other peoples, was granted in 1681 by King Charles II of England to the Quaker William Penn, in payment of a debt the crown owed his father. Penn named the land Pennsylvania —'Penn's woods', in Latin— and conceived it as a 'holy experiment' based on religious freedom, tolerance and relatively peaceful and fair dealings with the Indigenous peoples, with whom he negotiated the purchase of land. Philadelphia, 'the city of brotherly love', was laid out as the first planned city in the colonies.
That promise of tolerance drew an exceptionally diverse population: English Quakers, German Lutherans and Mennonites —the 'Pennsylvania Dutch', among them the Amish, who still keep their way of life without electricity or automobiles—, Scots-Irish and people from all over Europe, in one of the most plural societies of colonial America.
Philadelphia was the heart of the founding of the United States. There the First and Second Continental Congresses met, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, and the Constitution was drafted in 1787, both documents approved in Independence Hall, next to the famous Liberty Bell. The city was also the nation's capital between 1790 and 1800, while Washington D.C. was being built.
Pennsylvania was the second state to ratify the Constitution, on December 12, 1787, barely five days after Delaware. Its central role in the birth of the country, both for its ideas and for its institutions, made it the symbolic setting par excellence for the republic's founding ideals.
During the Civil War, Pennsylvania was the setting of the most important battle of the conflict. Between July 1 and 3, 1863, the Union and Confederate armies clashed in the fields of Gettysburg, in the south of the state, in the bloodiest combat of the entire war, which left more than 50,000 dead, wounded or missing. General Lee's defeat marked the turning point of the war and halted the Confederate invasion of the North.
Months later, in November 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address there, barely two hundred words that redefined the meaning of the war and of American democracy itself. The battlefield is today one of the most visited and most revered historic sites in the country.
Pennsylvania was the great industrial engine of the United States. In 1859, in Titusville, Edwin Drake drilled the first commercial oil well in history, launching the modern petroleum industry. But it was steel that defined the state: with abundant coal, iron and coke, Pittsburgh —the 'steel city'— became the country's steelmaking capital, seat of the empire of Andrew Carnegie, whose first great steel mill dates from 1873, and of the fortunes of magnates such as Henry Clay Frick.
Pittsburgh's steel and the coal of the anthracite mountains fueled the country's growth, its railroads and its skyscrapers, and drew millions of European immigrants who worked in the mines and the factories under brutal conditions, the setting of some of the greatest labor struggles in American history.
After the decline of heavy industry in the second half of the 20th century, which hit the Rust Belt hard, Pittsburgh carried out one of the most admired turnarounds in the country: from the pollution of steel it became a hub of technology, robotics, healthcare and education, with institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University. Philadelphia, for its part, remains a great historic, cultural, university and medical center.
Because of its demographic weight —it is one of the most populous states— and its diverse social makeup, Pennsylvania is one of the most decisive swing states in presidential elections, contested in every cycle. From the Amish to the robotics laboratories, and from the Liberty Bell to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania condenses centuries of American history within its territory.
The territory of present-day Rhode Island was home to the Narragansett and the Wampanoag, Algonquian peoples who dominated the bay. In 1636 the religious dissenter Roger Williams, expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his ideas, settled on land granted to him by the Narragansett at the head of the bay and founded Providence as a refuge of religious freedom and of separation between church and state, revolutionary principles for the time.
Williams proclaimed there 'liberty of conscience', and his colony became the first in the Western world to guarantee religious freedom in its founding charter. To that refuge of tolerance came Quakers, Jews —who raised in Newport the Touro Synagogue, the oldest still standing in the country— and the persecuted of every kind, drawn by what Williams called a 'lively experiment' in coexistence.
True to its independent character, Rhode Island was the first of the thirteen colonies to formally renounce allegiance to the British crown, on May 4, 1776, two months before the Declaration of Independence. Despite its tiny size, it played a prominent role in colonial maritime trade, including —with its bright side and many dark ones— the triangular trade in rum, slaves and molasses, in which its merchants took an active part.
Paradoxically, that same distrust of central power made it the last of the thirteen original states to ratify the Constitution, on May 29, 1790, and only after being threatened with having its exports taxed like those of a foreign nation. It is, to this day, the smallest state in the United States by area.
Rhode Island was the cradle of the American Industrial Revolution. In 1790 the English immigrant Samuel Slater, who had secretly memorized the designs of British textile machinery, founded in Pawtucket the country's first successful water-powered cotton spinning mill, Slater Mill. That mill, which began producing in 1793, launched the American factory system and earned Slater the nickname 'father of the American Industrial Revolution' —and that of 'Slater the traitor' in his native England.
Through the 19th century, the state's textile and jewelry industries drew waves of Irish, Italian, Portuguese and French Canadian immigrants, who transformed the society and culture of cities such as Providence, the capital, and Woonsocket. Jewelry and silverware made Providence an important manufacturing center.
Rhode Island is famous for its coastline and its great Narragansett Bay, dotted with islands and harbors. Its jewel is Newport, which at the end of the 19th century became the summer resort of the wealthiest elite in the country: the Vanderbilt, Astor and Widener families raised there lavish 'cottages' —in truth, genuine palaces— such as The Breakers and Marble House, open to visitors today and a dazzling testimony to the Gilded Age.
Newport is also the world capital of sailing —for decades the home of the America's Cup— and the setting of legendary jazz and folk festivals, such as the one in 1965 at which Bob Dylan switched to the electric guitar. Its beaches, its mansions and its clifftop seaside path (Cliff Walk) make it one of the most elegant destinations in New England.
Despite its small size, Rhode Island packs in a remarkable heritage. Providence, home of the prestigious Brown University and of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), one of the best art and design schools in the world, has reinvented itself as a lively cultural and culinary city, with events such as WaterFire that light up its rivers. Its historic center preserves one of the largest collections of colonial architecture in the country.
Between beaches, sailboats, gilded mansions and a history of pioneering tolerance, the 'Ocean State' shows that the smallest territory in the United States can hold a surprising concentration of history, beauty and culture. Its motto, 'Hope', sums up the spirit with which Roger Williams founded his refuge almost four centuries ago.
Colonized by the English from 1670, when the first settlers founded a settlement at the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper rivers, South Carolina developed a prosperous plantation economy in its coastal lowcountry. Rice —the so-called 'Carolina gold'— and indigo, crops that demanded an agricultural knowledge largely supplied by enslaved Africans, made the colony one of the richest in North America. Charleston, its great port, became one of the most opulent and refined cities in the colonies.
That prosperity rested on slavery on a large scale: Charleston was one of the main points of entry of the transatlantic slave trade, and across broad stretches of the coast the Black population came to far outnumber the white. South Carolina was one of the thirteen colonies and a signer of the Declaration of Independence; its delegates Charles Pinckney and John Rutledge influenced the drafting of the Constitution, adopted by the state in 1788.
On the islands and the coast of South Carolina (and of Georgia), the relative isolation of the plantations and the high concentration of African population allowed a singular African American culture to flourish: the Gullah-Geechee. From the fusion of various West African cultures with English was born the Gullah language, an English-based creole, along with distinctive traditions of music, cooking, craft —such as the celebrated sweetgrass baskets— and spirituality.
That inheritance, passed down over generations, survives today in the Sea Islands and is recognized as a national cultural corridor. Gullah culture is one of the purest expressions of African continuity in the United States and an essential part of the identity of the South Carolina lowcountry.
South Carolina was the most ardently pro-slavery state in the Union and the first to secede from it: its convention voted for secession on December 20, 1860, barely weeks after the election of Abraham Lincoln, opening the way to the formation of the Confederacy. The Civil War began literally on its soil: on April 12, 1861, Confederate batteries opened fire on the federal garrison at Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor, in the shot that started the bloodiest conflict in the country's history.
Four years of war ended in Confederate defeat. In 1865 the troops of General Sherman entered the state and the capital, Columbia, burned in a devastating fire. The abolition of slavery transformed at its root a society that had defended it more fervently than any other.
South Carolina was readmitted to the Union in 1868, and during Reconstruction it had one of the governments with the greatest African American participation in the South, which pushed through social and educational reforms amid heavy political upheaval. But the end of Reconstruction gave way to the segregationist Jim Crow laws, which for almost a century maintained the inequality and racial exclusion of the state's Black majority.
In the 20th century, the state was the setting of important episodes in the struggle for civil rights. The wound of that past surfaced again in 2015, when the murder of nine Black parishioners in a historic church in Charleston shocked the country and led, finally, to the removal of the Confederate flag from the state Capitol.
Today Charleston is one of the most beautiful historic cities in the United States, famous for its colonial and postwar architecture, the colored houses of Rainbow Row, its churches, its lowcountry cooking and its southern hospitality, a first-rank tourist magnet that year after year tops the lists of the best destinations in the country. The coast also offers very popular beach destinations such as Myrtle Beach, with its great boardwalk, and quiet Hilton Head.
The state combines that historical heritage with a modern industrial economy: BMW factories near Spartanburg, Boeing plants in Charleston and a thriving container port. From the rice plantations to the assembly lines, and from the Gullah baskets to the Atlantic beaches, South Carolina offers a deep immersion in the heart of the American South.
South Dakota is the heart of the Lakota (Sioux) nation, for whom the Black Hills (Paha Sapa, 'the black hills') are sacred land, the spiritual center of their world. Bison hunters of the Great Plains and skilled riders since the arrival of the horse, the Lakota, together with the Dakota and the Nakota, dominated a vast territory for generations. Their leaders —Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse— led some of the greatest resistance to American expansion.
The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 recognized Lakota ownership of the Black Hills and of a vast Great Sioux Reservation. It was one of the few times the government formally recognized Native territory; the agreement, however, would soon be broken by the greed for gold.
In 1874 a military expedition led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer confirmed the existence of gold in the Black Hills. The news set off an avalanche of miners that openly violated the 1868 treaty and gave rise to lawless towns such as Deadwood, scene of the death of the gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok. The invasion triggered the Great Sioux Wars: in 1876, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse won their greatest victory by wiping out Custer's regiment at Little Bighorn (already in Montana).
But the army's response was relentless. Lakota resistance was broken, and the tragedy culminated on December 29, 1890 with the Wounded Knee Massacre, in which federal troops killed some 150 to 300 Sioux, most of them unarmed, among them women and children. That episode, two weeks after the killing of Sitting Bull, marked the bloody end of the Indian Wars.
Settlement by farmers and ranchers, driven by the railroad and the Homestead Act, filled the prairies of the eastern part of the territory in the so-called 'Dakota Boom', while the west remained a land of large cattle ranches. After a long political dispute with North Dakota, both territories were admitted as separate states on November 2, 1889; President Benjamin Harrison signed the two admissions with the papers covered so as not to reveal which came first, so that South Dakota is, in alphabetical order, state number 40.
Its economy rests on agriculture —corn, wheat, soybeans, sunflowers— and livestock, along with a tourism of growing importance tied to its landscapes and monuments. The Native reservations, among them Pine Ridge and Rosebud, still occupy a significant part of the state and contain some of the poorest communities in the country.
South Dakota is home to one of the most famous monuments in the world: Mount Rushmore, where the faces of four presidents —Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt— were carved between 1927 and 1941 into the granite of the Black Hills, under the direction of Gutzon Borglum. The memorial was dedicated by President Calvin Coolidge and has become a national icon that draws millions of visitors each year.
Its location, however, is deeply contentious: the Black Hills remain territory disputed between the government and the Sioux nation, to which they were promised in 1868 and from which they were taken in 1877. In response, not far from Rushmore, the colossal Crazy Horse Memorial has been under carving since 1948; still unfinished, it honors the Lakota leader and will be, when it is completed, the largest sculpture in the world.
The state also offers some of the most awe-inspiring landscapes of the Great Plains. Badlands National Park protects an eroded maze of hills, spires and gullies striped in bands of color, an almost lunar landscape rich in fossils and in bison. Neighboring Custer State Park, in the Black Hills, holds one of the largest free-roaming bison herds in the country, along with scenic roads such as the Needles Highway.
The region combines nature, history and pop culture: the town of Wall, with its famous 'Wall Drug', the caves of Wind Cave and Jewel Cave, and the Sturgis motorcycle rally, which each summer brings together hundreds of thousands of bikers. Between colossal monuments, sacred Lakota land and endless horizons, South Dakota is a singular destination in the heart of the West.
Tennessee was the heart of Cherokee territory, one of the most advanced Native peoples of the Southeast, as well as home to the Chickasaw in the west and to ancient mound builders. Among the Cherokees stood out Sequoyah, the only man known in history to have devised a complete writing system on his own: his syllabary, finished around 1821, gave the Cherokee nation a written language, newspapers and a remarkable level of literacy.
It was frontier land, settled by pioneers who crossed the Appalachians by routes such as the Wilderness Road, among them legendary figures such as Davy Crockett —born on the banks of Limestone Creek— and John Sevier. After the short-lived 'State of Franklin', Tennessee became the 16th state of the Union on June 1, 1796, and earned the nickname 'Volunteer State' for the great number of volunteers it contributed to the country's wars.
Tragedy marked the Native history of the state. Despite the development of their written language, their schools and their government, and even a favorable ruling by the Supreme Court, most of the Cherokees were expelled from the region in 1838 and deported on forced marches toward the Indian Territory of Oklahoma. That exodus, the Trail of Tears, cost thousands of lives through hunger, cold and disease, and remains one of the darkest episodes of American Indian policy.
The dispossession of the Cherokee lands opened eastern Tennessee to mass settlement. The memory of that people and of their expulsion survives in historic sites and in the Eastern Band that managed to remain in the mountains of neighboring North Carolina.
A southern, slaveholding state, Tennessee joined the Confederacy —it was the last to secede from the Union— and became one of the main battlegrounds of the Civil War, with bloody engagements such as Shiloh (April 1862), at the time the bloodiest battle of the war, Stones River, Chattanooga and Franklin. After the Confederate defeat, it was the first state to rejoin the Union, in 1866.
A century later, Tennessee was again at the center of national history. In Memphis, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel while supporting a strike by Black sanitation workers. His death shook the country and the civil rights movement; the motel is today the National Civil Rights Museum.
No state has given as much to the popular music of the United States as Tennessee. In Memphis, on the banks of the Mississippi, were born the blues of Beale Street —with W. C. Handy as its pioneer— and, in the studios of Sun Records, rock and roll: there Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins recorded for the first time. Elvis lived in the city, and his mansion Graceland is today one of the most visited places of pilgrimage in the country. The Stax label also made Memphis a capital of soul.
Nashville, the state capital, is 'Music City', cradle and mecca of country: home of the historic Grand Ole Opry, of the Country Music Hall of Fame and of the record industry that has turned the genre into a worldwide phenomenon. From blues to rock, from soul to country, Tennessee is the soundtrack of America.
To the east, Tennessee rises into the Appalachian Mountains and offers Great Smoky Mountains National Park, shared with North Carolina: the most visited national park in the United States, famous for its extraordinary biodiversity, its misty forests, its waterfalls and its rich heritage of the old mountain settlers. Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge —the latter with the Dollywood theme park, of the singer Dolly Parton, a daughter of the state— are its bustling gateways.
Between the Mississippi to the west, the central bourbon plateaus of neighboring Kentucky and the mountains of the east, Tennessee combines nature, music and history with a hospitality that has made it one of the most endearing and most visited states in the South. Its Tennessee whiskey, led by Jack Daniel's of Lynchburg, rounds out its rich cultural heritage.
The vast territory of Texas was the domain of very diverse peoples: the Comanche —fearsome horsemen who for more than a century controlled the plains of the centre and west in what historians call the 'Comanchería'—, the Lipan Apache, the Caddo of the east —settled farmers whose word 'tejas' ('friends') gave the state its name— and the Karankawa of the coast. The Spanish colonized the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, founding missions such as those of San Antonio, among them San Antonio de Valero, which would go down in history as the Alamo.
After Mexico's independence in 1821, the Mexican government encouraged the arrival of Anglo-American settlers —the 'Texians'—, led by empresarios such as Stephen F. Austin. They soon outnumbered the Hispanic population (the Tejanos) and came into growing conflict with the Mexican authorities over such matters as slavery, religion and Santa Anna's centralist government.
In 1836, the Texan settlers rose up against Mexico. For thirteen days in February and March, some 200 defenders —among them William Travis, Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie— held out against the siege by Santa Anna's army at the mission of the Alamo, in San Antonio, until every one of them fell. The heroic and tragic defence became a founding myth. Weeks later, to the cry of 'Remember the Alamo!', General Sam Houston surprised and defeated Santa Anna at the battle of San Jacinto, on April 21, 1836, in barely eighteen minutes, and captured the Mexican dictator himself.
With the Treaties of Velasco, Texas won its independence. For almost ten years it was a sovereign republic —the 'Lone Star'—, with its own presidents (Houston and later Lamar), currency, flag and embassies in Europe, until its annexation by the United States on December 29, 1845 as the 28th state, an act that precipitated the war between the United States and Mexico.
Texas joined the Confederacy in the War of Secession, and after the defeat it went through a harsh Reconstruction. In the following decades the state lived the golden age of cattle: enormous herds of longhorn were driven by the vaqueros (cowboys) from the Texan ranches to the railheads of Kansas, along routes such as the Chisholm Trail. Those legendary drives forged the image of the cowboy that would become a universal symbol of the United States.
Texan culture was woven from Mexican, Southern and Western threads: out of that mixture came Tex-Mex cooking, the music and a proud, outsized identity. The King Ranch, one of the largest in the world, and the figure of the rancher symbolize that era in which land and cattle were the state's chief wealth.
On January 10, 1901, the Lucas well at Spindletop, near Beaumont, erupted and threw oil more than 45 metres into the air for nine days, producing more crude in a single day than all the other wells in the world combined. That gusher opened the era of Texan oil and turned a rural, agricultural state into a world energy power. Great companies were born, cities such as Houston shot up and 'black gold' redefined the Texan economy.
Oil and gas made Texas an economic giant. Houston proclaimed itself the 'energy capital of the world', home to more oil company offices than any other city, and also developed a huge petrochemical complex and the largest medical centre on the planet, the Texas Medical Center.
In 1961, NASA established in Houston the Manned Spacecraft Center —today the Johnson Space Center—, home of mission control for American space flights: from there came the famous line 'Houston, we have a problem', and to it spoke the Apollo astronauts who walked on the Moon. The word 'Houston' was, in fact, the first spoken by a human being on the lunar surface.
Today Texas is the second largest and second most populous state in the country, with an economy that rivals those of entire nations. Its big cities combine tradition and innovation: Houston, cosmopolitan and energetic; San Antonio, with the Alamo and its lively River Walk; Dallas and Fort Worth, between skyscrapers and rodeos; and creative Austin, capital of the state, of technology and of live music. True to the local motto, everything is bigger in Texas.
Thousands of years before the first European arrived, the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin that today make up Utah were inhabited by hunter-gatherers and, later, by settled farmers. Between the year 1 and 1300 AD two great traditions flourished: the Ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi) in the southeast and the Fremont culture in the centre and north, who grew maize, beans and squash, built adobe dwellings and granaries in the cliffs and left one of the richest legacies of rock art in North America. Panels such as Newspaper Rock, the Great Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon or the petroglyphs of Nine Mile Canyon still cover the sandstone walls with human figures, bighorn sheep and enigmatic spirals.
By the thirteenth century, a long period of drought led to the abandonment of those settlements. In their place the peoples whom the settlers would find centuries later took hold: the Utes (who gave the state its name) in the mountains and valleys of the centre and east; the Southern Paiutes; the Goshutes in the arid deserts of the west; the Shoshone in the north; and the Navajo (Diné) and Hopi in the far southeast. They were mobile peoples, adapted to an extremely harsh territory, who after the arrival of the Spanish horse became skilled riders and traders.
The name 'Utah' derives precisely from the Ute, often interpreted as 'people of the mountains'. Today the state still holds several reservations —among them the Uintah and Ouray, one of the largest in the country— and the Navajo Nation stretches across the southeastern corner, around Monument Valley.
The first European record of the region came in 1776, when the Franciscan friars Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, in search of an overland route between Santa Fe and the missions of California, crossed central Utah and described the valley of Utah Lake and its inhabitants. They founded nothing, but they opened the way for what would later be the Old Spanish Trail, the trade route that linked New Mexico with Los Angeles skirting the south of the present-day state.
During the 1820s and 1830s, Utah was the country of the 'mountain men', the beaver trappers who roamed the Rockies. Jim Bridger is considered the first European American to see the Great Salt Lake, around 1824-25; on tasting its salt water he came to believe he had reached an arm of the Pacific Ocean. The trappers' annual rendezvous, the expeditions of John C. Frémont —who mapped and named much of the Great Basin in the 1840s— and the passage of wagon trains heading for California (including the ill-fated Donner-Reed party, which crossed the salt desert in 1846) gradually drew the map of a territory still Mexican and almost empty of settlers.
The modern history of Utah begins on July 24, 1847, when Brigham Young, leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, looked out over the valley of the Great Salt Lake from the mouth of Emigration Canyon and —according to tradition— declared: 'This is the place, drive on'. The Mormons were fleeing the religious persecution that had driven them out of Illinois and Missouri, and were looking for a remote refuge where they could practise their faith. That day is still commemorated as Pioneer Day, the most important holiday in the state.
In a desert, salty valley, the settlers immediately applied a system of community irrigation that diverted water from the canyons to water the fields: a feat that made agriculture flourish where it seemed impossible and that became a model for the settlement of the whole arid West. Under Young's iron direction, Salt Lake City was laid out around the future Temple, and settlers were sent to found hundreds of towns across Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona and even California.
In 1849 the pioneers proposed creating an enormous state of their own called Deseret —a word from the Book of Mormon meaning 'honeybee', a symbol of industry that still appears on the state flag. Congress rejected it and in 1850 established in its place the Utah Territory, much smaller and with Brigham Young as its first governor.
Coexistence between a territory run by the Church and the federal government was tense. In 1857-58 the so-called Utah War broke out, when President James Buchanan sent troops to impose a non-Mormon governor; the conflict ended without any great battle, but in its climate of fear came the Mountain Meadows Massacre (September 1857), in which a local militia murdered some 120 emigrants from an Arkansas wagon train, one of the darkest episodes in the state's history. In parallel, the Black Hawk War (1865-1872) set settlers against Utes over land and resources.
On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, north of the Great Salt Lake, the Golden Spike was driven that joined the tracks of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific: the first transcontinental railroad in the United States was born, and Utah was connected to both coasts. The train brought with it miners, traders and non-Mormon outsiders, and set off a mining boom: silver made Park City one of the richest towns in the West, while the open-pit copper mine of Bingham Canyon —today one of the largest human excavations on the planet— grew into an industrial giant.
For decades, the greatest obstacle to Utah becoming a state was the practice of polygamy by the Mormon Church. The federal government passed ever harsher laws —culminating in the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887—, which jailed hundreds of men, confiscated Church property and stripped the vote from polygamists and even from the women of Utah (who had been among the first in the country to vote, in 1870).
In 1890, Church president Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto, which officially put an end to new plural marriages. The gesture opened the door to reconciliation with Washington: the Mormons joined the national parties and, after approving a constitution that banned polygamy and guaranteed women's suffrage, Utah was admitted as the 45th state of the Union on January 4, 1896, with Salt Lake City as its capital.
The twentieth century turned Utah from an agrarian and mining society into a modern, diversified state. Tourism discovered its incomparable landscapes: the red sandstone canyons of the south were protected as the 'Mighty Five', the five national parks that are today its great magnet —Zion (1919), Bryce Canyon (1928), Arches, Capitol Reef and Canyonlands—, along with monuments such as Monument Valley, on Navajo land. The Great Salt Lake, the Bonneville salt flats (where land speed records are broken) and the Wasatch mountains, with 'the greatest snow on Earth', complete a unique geography.
That legendary snow led Salt Lake City and Park City to host the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, a milestone that modernized the state's infrastructure and projected its image to the world; facilities such as the Utah Olympic Park are still in use, and the city was chosen to host again in 2034.
In recent decades, Utah has become one of the fastest-growing states in the country, with a powerful technology hub nicknamed 'Silicon Slopes' around Salt Lake City and Provo, a young population and a thriving economy. At the same time it faces serious environmental challenges, especially the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake through drought and water use, one of the great debates in the state today.
The territory that is today Vermont —from the French 'les verts monts', 'the green mountains'— was for thousands of years home to the Abenaki, Algonquian-speaking peoples who lived by hunting, fishing and seasonal farming in the valleys of Lake Champlain and the inland rivers. The French explorer Samuel de Champlain travelled through the region in 1609 and gave his name to the great lake that today separates Vermont from New York.
In the colonial period, the area was a frontier land disputed between the French and the English, and later between the colonies of New York and New Hampshire, which each claimed jurisdiction over it and handed out the same lands to rival settlers. That struggle forged the combative, independent character of the first inhabitants, who banded together in militias such as Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys.
In the middle of the Revolution, Vermont followed a singular path. On January 15, 1777, delegates from some thirty towns met and declared independence from the jurisdictions of New York, New Hampshire and the British crown, creating the Vermont Republic, a de facto sovereign state that would last fourteen years.
Its constitution of July 1777 was historic: it made Vermont the first territory of what would become the United States to abolish adult slavery by law —men became free at 21 and women at 18—, the first prohibition of its kind in the New World. That constitution also established male suffrage without a property requirement, a remarkable democratic advance for the time.
After fourteen years as an independent republic —with its own currency, its postal service and its government—, Vermont finally settled its territorial disputes with New York through a financial compensation. In 1791 it joined the Union as the 14th state, the first to be added after the original thirteen colonies, and as a free state as well, to balance the recent admission of Kentucky as a slave state.
Its own constitution and its tradition of town meetings, in which neighbours decide the town's affairs directly, made Vermont a benchmark of participatory democracy. That civic and independent inheritance is still a distinctive trait of the state's political character.
Vermont's economy was traditionally agricultural: dairy farms, livestock and, above all, the production of maple syrup, of which it is the largest producer in the United States. Every spring, the sap of the sugar maples is boiled down to make syrup in a process —'sugaring'— that is part of the state's identity. Very rural and thinly populated, the state cultivated a reputation for political independence and for care of the landscape and the environment.
That identity shows in its ban on billboards along the roads —it is one of the few states that does not allow advertising on its highways—, in its strong civic tradition and in iconic products such as Ben & Jerry's ice cream, born in Burlington, its largest city, beside Lake Champlain. Vermont has also been a pioneer in progressive and environmental policies.
Vermont is famous for its picture-postcard landscapes: towns with white-steepled churches, red barns, covered wooden bridges and the Green Mountains that give it its name. In autumn, the foliage explodes into reds, oranges and golds —one of the most spectacular displays in the world— and draws crowds of tourists, the 'leaf peepers', who drive its country roads during the peak of colour.
In winter, its mountains fill with snow and ski resorts such as Stowe —at the foot of Mount Mansfield, the highest summit in the state— and Killington are among the best in the east of the country. From maple syrup to skiing, and from its farms to its quiet life, Vermont offers the most idyllic, green and bucolic version of New England.
Virginia was the cradle of English America. In May 1607, the Virginia Company established at Jamestown the first permanent English settlement on the continent, on the lands of the powerful Powhatan confederacy. The colony came close to disappearing during its first, hungry years, and survived thanks to the leadership of Captain John Smith, to the fragile peace sealed by the marriage of the settler John Rolfe to Pocahontas, daughter of Chief Powhatan, and above all to the cultivation of tobacco, which Rolfe turned into an enormously profitable export.
Tobacco defined the economy and society of Virginia, both built on large plantations. In August 1619 the first enslaved Africans in English America arrived at Point Comfort, the beginning of an institution that would mark the country's history for centuries. That same year the House of Burgesses met at Jamestown, the first representative assembly in the colonies.
Virginia was the richest and most populous of the thirteen colonies, with an aristocracy of tobacco planters that would give the country a good share of its founders. Revolutionary ideas took shape within it: it was a Virginian, Patrick Henry, who declared 'Give me liberty or give me death!', and another, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence.
The colony also gave the military and political leadership of the Revolution George Washington, commander in chief of the Continental Army. Williamsburg, the elegant colonial capital, was for decades the political and intellectual centre of Virginia and is today a living museum that recreates eighteenth-century life.
Virginia was the 'mother of presidents': four of the nation's first five leaders were born there —Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe— and, in all, eight presidents, more than any other state. Independence was sealed on its soil: in October 1781, the British surrender of General Cornwallis at the siege of Yorktown brought the War of Independence to a practical end.
Less than a century later, Virginia was the great stage of the War of Secession. Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy, and some of the most decisive battles of the conflict were fought in its fields, until the final surrender of General Robert E. Lee to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox, in April 1865, which ended the war. Nearby Arlington holds the great national cemetery and the Pentagon.
After the war, Virginia lived through Reconstruction and then the segregationist Jim Crow laws. In the twentieth century it was the stage of the 'massive resistance' against the school integration ordered by the Supreme Court in the 1950s, one of the harshest chapters of the struggle over civil rights in the South. Emblematic too was the case of Loving v. Virginia (1967), which struck down the ban on interracial marriage throughout the country.
Today Virginia combines that dense history with a modern economy: the north of the state, next to Washington D.C., is an enormous hub of technology, defence and data —a good part of the world's traffic passes through its internet centres—, while Chesapeake Bay is home to the largest naval base in the world, at Norfolk.
Western Virginia rises into the Appalachian mountains: Shenandoah National Park, with its panoramic Skyline Drive winding along the Blue Ridge Mountains, protects forests, waterfalls and overlooks a short distance from the nation's capital, and is especially celebrated in autumn. To the east, the Historic Triangle —Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown— sums up, within a few kilometres, the origin and the birth of the nation, from the first settlement to independence.
Between the mountains of the west, the beaches and Chesapeake Bay to the east, and the dense network of historic sites and battlefields that runs across it, Virginia is one of the states with the greatest symbolic and historical weight in the United States, and a first-rate destination for understanding the founding of the country.
The Pacific Northwest was home to rich Indigenous cultures —Duwamish, Coast Salish, Makah, Chinook, Quinault and many more— that prospered thanks to the abundance of salmon, the wood of the red cedar and the generosity of the sea. They developed complex societies with hierarchies, ceremonies such as the potlatch and an extraordinary art that carved the celebrated totem poles and canoes. The regularity of the salmon runs allowed them a settled and prosperous life, uncommon among hunting peoples.
Spanish and British explorers travelled the coast at the end of the 18th century —Captain George Vancouver charted Puget Sound in 1792—, and both the city of Seattle (after Chief Seattle of the Duwamish) and the state (after the first president, George Washington, the only state to bear the name of a president) took their names from that meeting of worlds.
For decades, the whole northwest —the so-called 'Oregon Country'— was territory disputed between Great Britain and the United States, with a commercial presence of both powers through companies such as the Hudson's Bay Company. Missionaries like Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, who settled in 1836 near present-day Walla Walla, and the pioneers who arrived along the Oregon Trail gradually consolidated the American presence.
The Oregon Treaty of 1846 fixed the border with Canada at the 49th parallel and left what is now the state of Washington in American territory, first as part of the Oregon Territory and from 1853 as a Washington Territory of its own. Settlement pressed hard on the Indigenous nations, which were confined to reservations after various conflicts.
Washington's economy was built on logging —from its immense coniferous forests—, on fishing and, after the arrival of the railroad in the 1880s, on trade. Washington was admitted as a state on November 11, 1889, the 42nd of the Union. The great dams on the Columbia River, above all the colossal Grand Coulee Dam, finished in 1941 and at the time the largest concrete structure in the world, brought cheap hydroelectric power and turned the arid east of the state into an orchard of apples, wheat and wine thanks to irrigation.
That contrast between the wet, green west and the dry, agricultural east defines the economic geography of Washington. The Klondike gold rush, at the end of the 19th century, also made Seattle the great supply port for prospectors bound for Alaska, setting off its growth.
In the 20th century, Seattle became the cradle of industrial and technological giants. The Boeing Company, founded in 1916, made the state a world aerospace power and its largest employer for generations, with enormous aircraft factories. In 1979, Microsoft moved its headquarters to the Seattle region, and in 1994 Amazon was born in the city: both companies turned Washington into one of the great technology hubs on the planet.
Seattle is also the homeland of Starbucks —born at Pike Place Market in 1971— and the cradle of the grunge of the nineties, with bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam that defined a decade of world music. That combination of aviation, software, coffee and music made the state a global cultural and economic reference point.
Washington is a state of spectacular natural contrasts. To the west rises the imposing volcano Mount Rainier (4,392 m), the highest summit in the state, protected in the country's second-oldest national park (1899) and crowned by the largest glacier system in the 48 contiguous states. Olympic National Park protects temperate rainforests such as the Hoh —among the wettest in the country—, wild coasts and snowy mountains, while the North Cascades displays some of the most rugged peaks in the United States.
Seattle, on Puget Sound, is the great metropolis of the northwest, with its Space Needle inherited from the 1962 World's Fair, its Pike Place Market and a vibrant cultural scene. The Columbia River Gorge, San Juan Island and its orcas, and life outdoors round out the profile of a state famous for its nature, its coffee and its innovation.
The steep mountains of what is today West Virginia were for centuries a hunting ground and a route for peoples such as the Shawnee, the Cherokee and the Mingo, who moved through the Appalachian valleys without large permanent settlements in the highest areas. The abrupt geography, of ridges and deep valleys, kept the region relatively isolated and hard to settle.
Through the 18th century, Scots-Irish and German pioneers crossed the Appalachians and settled in the valleys, forging a society of small mountain farmers, very different from that of the great slave plantations of eastern Virginia. That geographical, economic and social difference between the mountains of the west and the lowlands of the east would shape the region's destiny.
The mountainous terrain of western Virginia did not favor large plantations, so its inhabitants had few and small farms and hardly owned any enslaved people. When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861 to join the Confederacy, many people in the west disagreed and decided to remain loyal to the United States. Gathered at the Wheeling Convention, they in turn broke away from Virginia and formed their own state.
On June 20, 1863, by proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln, West Virginia was admitted to the Union as the 35th state. It is the only state in the country created by splitting off from a Confederate state during the war, a singular origin that defines its identity and its sometimes tense relationship with its neighbor to the east.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the population of West Virginia grew strongly, drawn by the opportunities of coal and timber. The rich deposits in the mountains made coal mining the state's dominant industry, supplying fuel to the country's industry and railroads for generations. Thousands of European immigrants and African Americans from the South came to work in the mines.
That wealth was extracted at an enormous human cost. The extremely harsh conditions and the abuses of the mining companies set off some of the most violent labor struggles in American history, such as the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, the largest armed uprising in the country since the Civil War, in which thousands of miners faced the company forces over the right to unionize. Coal gave the state wealth and hardship in equal measure.
West Virginia is an almost entirely mountainous state, with some of the wildest and most beautiful landscapes in the Appalachians. Its jewel is the New River Gorge, a deep canyon carved by one of the oldest rivers in the world, protected since 2020 as the country's most recent national park. Across it stretches the New River Gorge Bridge, for years the largest single-span steel arch bridge in the world, with a span of 924 meters, the setting each autumn for a famous base jumping festival.
The rapids of the New River and the Gauley make the state one of the meccas of whitewater rafting in the United States, while the Monongahela National Forest and the Allegheny Mountains offer hiking, skiing and untamed nature. The rivers and the summits are today a tourist engine that seeks to take over from declining coal.
Few states have an identity so bound to their landscape. John Denver's song 'Take Me Home, Country Roads', with its line 'Almost heaven, West Virginia', became an unofficial anthem that sums up the pride its people take in their 'almost heavenly mountains'. The state's Appalachian culture —its bluegrass and old-time music, its crafts, its cooking and its strong sense of community— is one of the most distinctive in the country.
With a largely rural population and an economy battered by the decline of coal, West Virginia faces serious challenges, but it preserves a natural and human heritage of enormous richness. From the mine wars to the rapids of the New River, and from the Appalachian valleys to the country roads of the song, the mountain state keeps a tough, unmistakable personality.
Wisconsin was home to numerous native peoples: the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), the Menominee, the Ojibwe, the Potawatomi, the Sauk and the Fox, among others, who lived from hunting, from fishing in the Great Lakes and from growing wild rice in their wetlands. When the first Europeans arrived in the 17th century, the region was densely inhabited by a dozen different nations.
The French were the first explorers: Jean Nicolet set foot in Green Bay in 1634, and traders such as Radisson and Des Groseilliers established a lucrative fur trade with the tribes. For more than a century, beaver pelts flowed from the Ojibwe, the Menominee and other peoples, through French posts at La Pointe and Green Bay, toward the markets of Montreal and London.
After passing into British and then American hands, Wisconsin formed part of the Northwest Territory. In the southwest, the discovery of rich lead deposits drew the first settlers in numbers: by 1829, more than 4,000 miners were working around Mineral Point. Many sheltered in the very tunnels they dug, which earned them the nickname 'badgers', destined to become the symbol and the byname of the state, the 'Badger State'.
Wisconsin was admitted to the Union on May 29, 1848, as the 30th state. Its new constitution and its social makeup placed it from the outset on the antislavery side; in fact, in Ripon, Wisconsin, one of the first founding meetings of the Republican Party, born in opposition to the expansion of slavery, was held in 1854.
Wisconsin received strong European immigration, above all of Germans —already the second largest group by 1850— and of Scandinavians, who left a deep mark on its culture, its food, its architecture and its politics. Those settlers, after the decline of wheat growing, redirected agriculture toward dairy farming: by 1899 more than 90% of the state's farms had cows, and by 1915 Wisconsin was producing more butter and cheese than any other state, earning the title of 'America's Dairyland', which its inhabitants take pride in as 'cheeseheads'.
Milwaukee, the largest city, became the beer capital of the United States: four of the country's largest breweries —Miller, Pabst, Blatz and Schlitz— were founded there by German immigrants. Beer, cheese and sausages are an inseparable part of the state's identity.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Wisconsin was the cradle of the American progressive movement. Under the leadership of governor and senator Robert 'Fighting Bob' La Follette, the state became a laboratory of reforms: direct primary elections, regulation of the railroads and of big business, income tax, pioneering labor laws and close collaboration between the government and the university, known as the 'Wisconsin Idea'.
Those reforms made Wisconsin a national model of good government and advanced social policy for decades. That civic tradition, joined to the communal heritage of its immigrants, forged a participatory political culture that set the state apart in the Midwest.
Wisconsin is a state of water and forest: more than 15,000 lakes, the shoreline of two Great Lakes —Michigan and Superior— and extensive northern forests make it a paradise for fishing, boating, hunting and outdoor life in every season. The Apostle Islands, on Lake Superior, with their sea caves frozen in winter, and the cliffs of Door County are among its great natural attractions.
Milwaukee combines its industrial and brewing heritage with festivals such as Summerfest —one of the largest in the world—, a renewed lakefront and the Calatrava art museum, while Madison, the capital, is a lively university city on the shores of its lakes. Cradle of figures such as the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and home to a devotion to its football team, the Green Bay Packers, Wisconsin combines nature, tradition and hospitality.
Wyoming was the territory of peoples such as the Shoshone, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Lakota (Sioux) and the Crow, bison hunters who dominated the Great Plains in the east and the valleys of the Rocky Mountains in the west. They lived from the bison, of which they used everything, and from the arrival of the horse they became skilled riders and warriors who ranged over vast territories following the herds.
At the beginning of the 19th century, trappers and explorers such as John Colter —probably the first European American to see the geysers of Yellowstone, around 1807— travelled the region. Through its valleys ran pioneer routes such as the Oregon Trail, the California Trail and the Mormon Trail, which crossed the state by way of South Pass on the road west, leaving their mark on the region's history.
The construction of the Union Pacific transcontinental railroad in the 1860s sped up the settlement of the south of the territory and gave rise to cities such as Cheyenne and Laramie, while at the same time provoking wars with the Indigenous nations, which were confined to reservations such as Wind River, shared by Shoshone and Arapaho. Wyoming was organized as a territory in 1868.
With the defeat of the Sioux, northern Wyoming opened up to cattle raising: the state's economy was built on the great ranches —with their cowboys, their rodeos and their land wars between big ranchers and small settlers, such as the celebrated Johnson County War of 1892— and on the coal mining that fed the railroad. Its capital, Cheyenne, hosts every year the largest outdoor rodeo in the world, Frontier Days, heir to that era.
Wyoming holds a pioneering place in the history of civil rights: in 1869, while still a territory, its legislature became the first government in the world to grant women the right to vote by law. Governor John Campbell signed the women's suffrage act on December 10, 1869, and in 1870 Louisa Swain, of Laramie, became the first woman in the country to vote in a general election.
When Wyoming applied for statehood, it kept the women's vote in its constitution despite pressure from Congress to remove it. Admitted as the 44th state on July 10, 1890, it was the first state in the Union with full women's suffrage, which is where its nickname 'Equality State' comes from. It was also the first to have an elected woman governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross, in 1925.
Wyoming holds Yellowstone National Park, the first in the world, created by Congress in 1872 with the revolutionary idea of preserving a wild territory for everyone's enjoyment. It is a vast ecosystem sitting on an active supervolcano, with the greatest concentration of geysers on the planet —headed by the famous Old Faithful—, hot springs of impossible colors such as the Grand Prismatic Spring, canyons, waterfalls and an extraordinary wildlife of bison, grizzly bears, wolves, elk and pronghorn.
The creation of Yellowstone inaugurated the very concept of the national park, which would later spread across the world. Every year, millions of visitors travel through its geysers, meadows and forests, in one of the greatest wildlife sanctuaries of the planet's temperate zone.
Next to Yellowstone, Grand Teton National Park displays one of the most photographed mountain ranges on the planet: the sharp peaks of the Teton Range, which rise abruptly, with no foothills, more than 2,000 meters above the Jackson Hole valley, reflected in glacial lakes such as Jenny and Jackson. That granite wall is one of the quintessential images of the American West.
That combination of unique geology, wildlife and high mountain landscapes makes northwestern Wyoming one of the great tourist and adventure destinations in North America. With fewer than 600,000 inhabitants, Wyoming is the least populated state in the country, a place of immense horizons, clean skies and open spaces that keeps the spirit of the Old West as few others do.