page_title: United States
section_title: Native Americans and European settlers
hierarchical_section_title: United States / History / Native Americans and European settlers
caption_attribution_description: The Cliff Palace guided tour is a must-do at Mesa Verde National Park. Although you can get a great view of Cliff Palace without taking the tour, the tour makes it so much better.
context_page_description: The United States of America is a federal republic of fifty states, a federal district, and several territories. It is commonly called the United States, the United States of America, and also sometimes just America.
  The country is mostly in North America. There are forty-eight states that border each other and Washington, D.C., the capital district. These states are between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. They are bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south.
  The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to its east and Russia to the west across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses some territories, or insular areas, in the Caribbean and Pacific.
  At 3.79 million square miles and with about 331 million people, the United States is the third or fourth-largest country by total area and third-largest by land area and by population.
  The United States is one of the world's most ethnically mixed and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries.
context_section_description: It is believed that the indigenous peoples of the continental United States, including the natives of Alaska, moved in from Asia. They began arriving twelve or forty thousand years ago, if not earlier. Some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture in the southeast, developed advanced farming, grand construction, and state-level communities. The native population of America decreased after Europeans arrived, and for different reasons, mostly sicknesses such as smallpox and measles.
  In 1492, Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus, under contract to the Spanish crown, reached some Caribbean islands, making the first contact with the native people. On April 2, 1513, Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León landed on what he called "La Florida"—the first recorded European coming on what would become the U.S. mainland. Spanish settlements in the area were followed by ones in the present-day southwestern United States that drew thousands through Mexico. French fur traders established outposts of New France around the Great Lakes; France eventually claimed much of the North American interior, down to the Gulf of Mexico. The first successful English settlements were the Colony of Virginia in Jamestown in 1607 and the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. The 1628 chartering of the Massachusetts Bay Colony resulted in a wave of relocation; by 1634, New England had been settled by some 10,000 Puritans. Between the late 1610s and the American Revolution, about 50,000 convicts were shipped to Britain's American colonies. Beginning in 1614, the Dutch settled along the lower Hudson River, including New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.
caption: An ancient palace built by the Anasazi people in Mesa Verde National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Colorado.
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