Let’s begin at the beginning. But where is that exactly? The history of North America doesn’t begin in 1492 when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. It begins millennia before then when the first humans settled this great continent. Who were those first settlers—the people we now call Native Americans? How did they get to America and what sorts of lives did they build for themselves when they got here? Why did the Europeans come searching for a new world in 1492? What were Columbus and his patrons, the King and Queen of Spain, hoping to find on the other side of the Atlantic? And what sort of colonies and empires did the Spanish (and, soon after, the French) build on this continent and in the Caribbean when their ships finally hit land?
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