HSBC Country Guides

The country was inhabited by Native Americans for thousands of years before Christopher Columbus discovered the so-called New World in 1492, and subsequent exploration and settlement by the Spanish, British, French and Dutch began.
From the mid-17th century through the mid-18th century, the American colonies developed.
In 1774, following the Boston Tea Party to protest British taxation policies, King George III of England closed the city port. This event, and other efforts to control the US colonies by the English monarchy, culminated in the outbreak of the American Revolution and the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
The Treaty of Paris in 1783 recognized the US as an independent country. In 1789, the US Constitution went into effect. A landmark legal document for the Western world, it established three independent branches of government and created a system of checks-and-balances between the different branches.
In the following decades, the fledgling US expanded westward by a variety of means, and by 1850, the country extended from coast to coast and from Canada to present-day Mexico.
The Civil War, 1861–1865, began after several Southern states, collectively calling themselves the Confederate States of America, declared they were a separate nation. The war ended with the states reunited and the abolition of slavery. However, the harsh Reconstruction period that followed fostered continuing animosity and violence.
From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, waves of immigrants from Asia and Europe came to the US.
In 1917, the US joined the Allied forces in World War I (1914–1918). After the War, there was a period of exuberance and excess, known as The Roaring ’20s, which culminated in October 1929, with the stock market crash. This signalled the beginning of the Great Depression, which lasted through most of the next decade.
As World War II (1939–1945) raged in Europe and Asia, the US pursued an isolationist agenda until December 1941, when the US declared war on Japan after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. A few days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the US.
On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered, and on September 2, the Japanese surrendered after the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The treaties that ended World War II authorized the occupation of Germany and Japan by the US. This began a worldwide period of rebuilding that would change alliances and reshape the world.
In 1948, there was the beginning of a new kind of war— the Cold War— between Capitalism and Communism, epitomized by the rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union. The Korean and Vietnam Wars were consequences of this struggle.
The 1960s and early 1970s was a time of upheaval with the Civil Rights Movement and anti-Vietnam War movement. One of the most critical events of the Civil Rights Movement was the 1963 March on Washington. In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Bill that declared discrimination based on race illegal.
In July of 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first person to step onto the moon’s surface.
As a result of terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the US began a global War on Terrorism, which included the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq.
In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated many of the Gulf states.
In August 2008, Hurricane Ike devastated Galveston, Texas.