American history: 1565 - 1700

The first permanent European settlement in North America was at St Augustine on the northern Florida Atlantic coast, established by Spain in 1565. (St Augustine still boasts a massive fort and an 'Old Town' evoking the Spanish period, though the latter is as much a commercial response to tourism as a physical link with the past.) The English and French also made attempts at colonization before the end of the sixteenth century, but it was 1607 before the first permanent English settlement began at Jamestown in Virginia. And it was 1620 before the most famous of the early settlers - the Pilgrim Fathers - landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in what later became New England.

The first English settlements were at best precarious. Their survival through winters harsher than expected required extremes of human endurance, and the indigenous population was not universally welcoming. But survive they did, with a few sad exceptions, to prosper as the new environment was better understood. The leading European powers were soon struggling among themselves for the opportunities revealed by the experience of the early settlers. From its base in Mexico, Spain extended its influence up the California coast and well into the south-west. France was soon settling in Quebec, and challenging Spain in parts of the south. The Dutch colonized Manhattan Island in the 1620s, established New Amsterdam in what is now New York, and expressed their further aspirations in the name of New Netherlands. But it was from the small English footholds along the Atlantic coast that the new American nation was to emerge.

Dennis Welland (ed.): The United States. A Companion to American Studies; Methuen, London, 1974/1987, page 4 f.