Half of the first “pilgrim fathers” did not survive the first brutal winter—about fifty survived until spring. Local Indians, seeing the suffering of white people, helped the Europeans look for game and edible plants, and showed what kind of grain could be grown on the local, very problematic soil.

The harvest was bountiful. In the fall, at a harvest festival in 1621, the surviving colonists invited the leader and members of the Squanto Indian tribe, with whose care they survived in the new harsh conditions. The holiday and feast shared with the Indians became the first celebration of Thanksgiving, which is celebrated on the last Thursday of November, and was included in the number of US National Holidays. Then the tradition of celebration remained “for whites only.”

And the first American colony, Plymouth, grew up on the lands of the same tribe, which then almost completely died out from chicken pox introduced by Europeans. The Pequot Massacre, when residents of several Pequot villages were burned along with their houses, was also the work of Plymouth colonists. The Indians began to resist, but it was too late: even the most destructive raids, when dozens of settlements and cities were destroyed in New England, could not change anything. The liberated lands were part of New England, which later became the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Newly arrived Puritans from Great Britain settled in neighboring small towns and settlements and built their own. Between 1630 and 1643 New England received about 20 thousand people, almost 45 thousand moved south or went to the islands of Central America.

One of the popular comparisons used to describe America is melting pot(The authorship of this expression is attributed to various people, including the philosopher and writer R. W. Emerson and the authors of the collection “New Rome, or the United States of the World” C. Gepp and T. Pesce. However, it became widespread after the production of the play with the same name (Columbia Theatre, Washington, 1908), written by Israel Zangwill, British journalist and playwright.) Until 1775, this boiler was not yet very hot; The colonists of North America were not bound by a single religion, social equality, or ethnic homogeneity. Read about the "melting pot" of America in the article US Culture and Patriotism.

A third of Pennsylvania was already populated by German Lutherans, Anabaptist Mennonites, and other faiths and sects. Benjamin Franklin was terribly worried that they were not English. But their children all spoke English: among the ancestors of white Americans, most of them were Germans and English. Maryland welcomed English Catholics, French Huguenots spread throughout South Carolina. Delaware was preferred by the Swedes. Poles, Germans, and Italians settled in Virginia. Settlers often ended up in the New World under a so-called contract: someone richer paid for their transportation, but they had to work for it for four years on the spot. The resettlement of young women was paid for by bachelor men - most often with tobacco, at 120 pounds each. The contract could be resold and the signatory could be forced to work off the debts to another person. It was white slavery.

The life of the settlements was regulated by very harsh laws with severe punishments; Puritan religious institutions sometimes turned into wild cruelty: just remember the witch hunt in Salem. Two thirds of the settlers died on the way or in the first months after landing. Sometimes they could not withstand the oppression of the “masters” and went to undeveloped lands or Indian territories and settled there, and when they began to be pursued, they fought back or went even further. The border between developed and undeveloped territory continuously moved westward. Free invaders of land were called squatters or pioneers. This is how a farming civilization of courageous, cruel and mocking people was created, who did not tolerate attacks on their freedom, but did not recognize the right of other people, such as Indians, to it.

Criminals, voluntary and involuntary, murderers, prostitutes, beggars, counterfeiters were sent to America. At special auctions they could be bought for seven years of hard work. England, whose prisons were overcrowded, willingly sent prisoners of war from Scotland and Ireland there. The Irish had it doubly hard: the pioneer English settlers greeted them with hostility.

Europeans of America

In the USA there is German America, French America, Chinese America, Russian, Polish, Jewish America, etc. The largest, of course, is German America. Descendants of immigrants from Germany make up at least 17% of the population of the entire United States. There are especially many of them in Texas, California and Pennsylvania, although there are states - for example Ohio, Nebraska, both Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa - where the heirs of the Germans make up more than a third of the state's population. German America produced not only President Dwight Eisenhower, but also Generals John Pershing and Norman Schwarzkopf, as well as many entrepreneurs and inventors, including the Rockefeller family, beer magnates Anheuser and Bush, Donald Trump, William Boeing, Walter Chrysler and George Westinghouse. Only at the end of the 19th century. More than 100 thousand Volga Germans moved from the Russian Empire to America. At one time, the German language became so widespread here that America could have become a German-speaking country rather than an English-speaking country - then world history would most likely have developed in a completely different way.

In less than the last two centuries, about 6 million Italians moved to the United States, and 80% of them came from the southern regions of Italy, primarily from Sicily. The Italians had a tremendous influence on America, which was not limited to the popularity of Italian restaurants. Today, almost 18 million Americans (6% of the country's population) have Italian roots and consider themselves heirs of Italian settlers. Rudolph Giuliani, Vince Lombardi and Madonna, Lady Gaga, Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, Dean Martin and Tony Bennett, Susan Sarandon, Nicolas Cage and Danny DeVito, John Travolta, Al Pacino and Liza Minnelli, Francis Ford Coppola and Marisa Tomei. You can recall the famous Italian mafia in the United States, with which Russians are familiar from “The Godfather” and “The Soprano Family.” Today there are two Italians sitting on the US Supreme Court. Immigrants from Italy strengthened a large group of adherents of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, which partly made it possible for John Kennedy to become president, although he himself was a descendant of Irish settlers. Kennedy still remains the only Catholic president in the country's history.

The Irish component of today's American life is difficult to miss for anyone who has spent even a short time in the United States. Irish bars, names, music and elements of everyday life are deeply ingrained in American everyday life. Almost 12% of the country's population list themselves as heirs of Irish settlers in the census. Seven of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence were Irish. Twenty-two American presidents were of the same blood - from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama, whose ancestry on his mother’s side includes Irish ancestors, and besides them, father and son Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Harry Truman... By the way, the Irish-American landowner Charles Lynch at the end of the 18th century. went down in history as the “godfather” of unconventional execution, which is still called lynching. Of the three hundred and thirty-two languages ​​surveyed as being spoken in the United States, Irish now ranks sixty-sixth only because many native speakers have adapted to American English. The Irish also joined the ranks of Catholics, although a small part of them, along with Scottish settlers from Great Britain, became Protestants.

About 10 million Americans, that is, more than 3% of the country's population, are of Polish origin. Although the first Poles arrived in the United States at the beginning of the 17th century, the bulk of settlers fled here at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. from the Russian Empire, as well as from the Austrian and German occupations. Among them there were many Jews and Ukrainians. As a result, "Polish Americans" became the largest group of Slavic emigrants from Eastern Europe. In 2000, about 700 thousand people in the United States named Polish rather than English as their native language. Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Casimir Pulacki became American heroes during the struggle for independence, and statues were erected to both of them in Washington. General Pulatsky generally went down in the history of the country as the “father of the American cavalry.” US Poles are Catholics and play a large role in local religious movements, and there is even a Polish Museum of America in Chicago.

Of the famous representatives of the Polish people, every educated American knows Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was National Security Advisor from 1977-1981. President Jimmy Carter, Ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Lisa Kudrow from the series "Friends", actors Paul Newman, Natalie Portman, William Shatner, artist Max Weber, film producers Samuel Goldwyn and the Warner brothers, director Stanley Kubrick , singer Eminem. However, for some reason, it was the Poles who in America became the characters in jokes about stupid, narrow-minded and poorly educated people. They are, in fact, the American equivalent of the Chukchi from Russian jokes. If you tell an American any joke about the Chukchi - replacing, of course, the word “Chukchi” with the word “Eskimo” - he will not understand what the point is. If the word “Chukchi” is replaced with the word “Pole”, then the American will laugh the same way as a Russian at a joke about the Chukchi. I have not been able to find out why this happened in America. The main version told to me is that at one time many poorly educated and naive Polish peasants emigrated to America, who began to symbolize a kind of local “Chukchi”. I don’t know about education, but, as it seemed to me, no one ever considered the Poles naive, except perhaps Ivan Susanin.

Despite the outward hostility that the French often demonstrate towards Americans, the reality of America is that about 12 million people in the country consider themselves French, and almost 2 million speak French at home. In Louisiana, about half a million people speak Creole, which is based on a simplified version of French. Quite a few people moved to the United States from the French part of Canada.

The French minority in the United States is less visible because many of its members identify with the Creole and Cajun (in Louisiana) ethnic groups rather than with France proper. The number of French-Americans increased dramatically following America's purchase of Louisiana from France in 1803 (not to be confused with the current US state of Louisiana). By this purchase America acquired, in whole or in part, fifteen of its present states and two Canadian provinces. Today, New Hampshire is the only state where people with French ancestry make up more than a quarter of the population, with the largest numbers living in California, Louisiana and Massachusetts. Most French-Americans are Catholics.

During the development of American territory, the French language was no less widespread than English and German, and in many places it was the main language of the pioneers. Anyone who has traveled around the USA knows that the country is covered with French names - the states of Arkansas, Louisiana and Delaware, Maine and Illinois, Oregon and Wisconsin... Warren Buffett, Louis Chevrolet, King Gillette, the Dupont family, Jessica Alba, brothers have French roots Baldwin, Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Jim Carrey, the Duvall acting family, Matt LeBlanc from Friends, Patrick Swayze... French blood flowed and flows in the veins of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, presidents Franklin Roosevelt and William Taft, writer Jack Kerouac, etc. .

Among the first to move to the territory of what is now the United States were immigrants from Spain. Their presence has been recorded since 1565. However, most Spanish-speaking immigrants to the United States came from Latin America, especially Mexico and Puerto Rico. Today they are the largest ethnic group in the United States among speakers of Romance languages. It is believed that there are more than 24 million people. Spanish was the first language spoken by European settlers, but then English began to take over. Today, Spanish is the second main language of the United States, second in prevalence to English but ahead of any other language spoken in the country.

There is no need to talk about the influence of Spanish culture on American culture. Spanish (and Latin American) cuisine, traditions, holidays, customs and way of life, without exaggeration, have become one of the foundations of American life. That Americans have long been associated with cowboys, which began in medieval Spain, speaks for itself. The largest numbers of Hispanic minorities live in the states of California, New York, Texas and Florida, but Spanish-language names densely cover the map of the country. These are, for example, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Nevada, thousands and thousands of names of towns and settlements, rivers and hills, nature reserves and mountain ranges. As for the list of Americans with Spanish roots who have entered the history and culture of the United States, it is very long. These include actors from Salma Hayek and Cameron Diaz to Martin and Charlie Sheen, and musicians from Julio Iglesias and Kurt Cobain to Jerry Garcia and Gloria Estefan, politicians and writers, religious leaders and athletes.

Another ethnic group that was among the first to appear in America were the Dutch. History records the date of the founding of the first Dutch settlement in the New World - 1613. Today, about 6 million Americans consider themselves descendants of Dutch settlers. Most live in Michigan, Montana, Ohio, California and Minnesota.

Of course, I did not set out to describe in this book the history of the development of America by the Dutch and the relations of the new state with the Netherlands, but I note that it was the Dutch who first began to celebrate the independence of the United States in 1776 and taught other Americans to salute their national flag. The story of the 1626 purchase of the Manhattan peninsula for $24 has been told many times, but New York City's boroughs still retain their Dutch names. Many words passed from the same language into American English, including the word “Yankee”. Some American philologists convincingly prove that it was from the old Dutch language that the definite article came to English the, as well as many necessary words - “house”, “street”, “book”, “pen”, etc. The Dutch community plays a large role in the life of the Reformed Church of America and a number of other religious associations.

Three American presidents had Dutch roots, and one of them, Martin van Buuren, the eighth President of the United States, was a real Dutchman. By the way, he turned out to be the only president of the country for whom English was a second language, that is, a non-native language. Before this, Van Buren also served as the eighth vice president and tenth secretary of state of the United States. US history includes many "Dutch Americans", for example, Willem de Kooning, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, the Vanderbilt family, Christina Aguilera, Marlon Brando, Clint Eastwood, Henry and Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Springsteen, Dick van Dyke, director CIA General David Petraeus, Thomas Edison, Walter Cronkite, Anderson Cooper and many others. For some reason, in America there is a popular tradition of making the Dutch the heroes of many films - thus, as a result, they are present in both “Titanic” and “The Simpsons”.