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American historical geography offers an amazing trip through the corridors of time. It is a journey replete with mystery, adventure, and incredible good fortune. It also chronicles occasional obstacles, detours, and hardships.

Many questions remain unanswered in regard to the first Americans. About all that is known for certain is that they came from elsewhere and are primarily of Asiatic （Mongoloid¹） physical stock. For seven decades, archaeologists （scientists who study early peoples） believed that the Americas were settled by Asians whose pursuit of big-game animals drew them to this vast unsettled land. Supposedly, they wandered across Beringia, the Bering Strait “landbridge” that linked Siberia and present-day Alaska. This corridor was exposed by the drop in global sea level during the ice age. （Because so much ocean water was locked up on land in the form of glacial ice, sea level dropped an estimated 400 feet, or 122 meters.） On entering North America, these people supposedly passed through an ice-free corridor that formed between two huge masses of glacial ice. Finally, they reached the area of Clovis, New Mexico, where their unique projectile points, which date back about 13 000 years, were found.

Little is known about the first Europeans to set foot on what is now the United States. The first known European to reach the shores of the United States may have been Giovanni Caboto（known in English as John Cabot）. Although this is questioned by many, some scholars believe that he reached the coast of Maine in 1497. （Seven years would pass before Columbus made landfall on the continental landmass in 1504.） In 1524, the king of France sent Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano on a voyage to the New World in search of wealth and a route to Asia. Verrazzano reached the coast of present-day North Carolina and continued northward. He is believed to have been the first European to follow the coast of present-day New England. His epic voyage is memorialized by the spectacular Verrazano-Narrows Bridge that spans the mouth of the Hudson River in New York City. Surprisingly, the lure of finding a water route to Asia was so strong that more than a century passed before northwest Europeans began to settle the newly found land! Not until 1607 did the first north Europeans—the British at Jamestown, Virginia—begin to permanently settle the land.

Early European settlement in what is now the United States shows distinct regional differences in political and cultural dominance. These patterns resulted from the various economic （and, of course, political） emphases placed on the land and resources by the different European colonists. North Europeans first settled along the mid-Atlantic and New England coasts. There, they harvested timber （which was very scarce in Europe）, fished, and cleared land on which to settle and farm. Cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were established around protected harbors. They served as a doorway for trade between the new settlements and the homelands that lay across the Atlantic.

Inland, throughout the Great Lakes region and Mississippi Valley westward to the Rockies, French trappers pursued valuable fur-bearing animals, particularly beavers. Spaniardslay claim to an area that extended from Florida westward to the Pacific Coast and included much of the interior West. They sought to protect their Caribbean and Atlantic trade routes, expand their territory northward, discover gold, and convert native peoples to the Roman Catholic faith. The cultural influence of these early settlers is still evident in many Spanish, British, French, and other European language place names that dot the American landscape.

By the eighteenth century, the United States was on the brink of history’s greatest mass migration. During the next 250 years, 45 million Europeans migrated to America. They came for many reasons: Land was plentiful, and they were free to practice their religious, social, political, and other cultural beliefs without oppression. Many simply wanted to “reinvent”themselves in a new land that offered many attractive opportunities. Others, sadly, came unwillingly as slaves.

Popular usage of the term New England began with the publication of Captain John Smith’s Description of New England （1616）. Smith’s presence in the New World is most often associated with Virginia, but he also promoted the idea of fishing-based settlement along what is now the coast of Maine. Efforts to raise expeditions that would colonize New England centered in the West Country port of Plymouth, England. There Smith became associated with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, the principal organizer of the Virginia Company of Plymouth, which had obtained a charter to colonize that part of “Virginia” lying between the 38th and 45th parallels of latitude, roughly from Chesapeake Bay to Maine.

The English settlers who made the first permanent habitation in this zone were, of course, the Puritans. The sea-weary band who crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower ²and landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in decided not to travel south to where they had purchased land. They remained at Plymouth and drew up the Mayflower Compact as an instrument to guide their affairs, knowing that they had no legal right to the land they were settling. The first ten years of settlement in Massachusetts were marginal for the Puritan colonizers. In the tempo of activity increased, and its focus shifted from Plymouth to Massachusetts Bay, which had a better harbor and was surrounded by lands more suitable for settlement. In John Winthrop and a group of his fellow Puritans brought nearly two thousand new colonists to Massachusetts Bay, and they became the nucleus for the new city of Boston.