The United States of America is many things. It is the world's most powerful country, and one of its largest. It is a history of political revolution and social progress, as well as a legacy of slavery and genocide. In one sense, mapping the United States should be a simple matter of displaying borders and geography. But America is a complex nation with a long and fascinating history that could never be captured in a single frame. Here's a glance at America's past and present, in 70 maps.
Table of Contents
1. The original Americans
2. Europeans come to America
3. The conquest of North America
4. Slavery and the Civil War
5. Becoming the United States
6. American Diversity
7. The civil rights struggle
8. America as global power
9. America today
The original Americans
Commission for Environmental Cooperation
Ecoregions of North America
The vast size and ecological diversity of the North American continent, the third largest on Earth, has played a central role in determining how it was settled and developed over millennia. This map shows how North America's geography, climate, and wildlife have produced its different ecoregions, coded by color, from the wooded plains of the Northeast to the enormous semi-arid prairies at the continent's center to the plateau deserts of the Southwest. So much of America's history has been about movement — centuries of migration and settlement and, finally, agglomeration — and geography and ecology have greatly influenced how that played out.
New Scientist
First human migration to the Americas
Humans are relative newcomers to the Americas: the rest of the world had been settled for tens of thousands of years, perhaps longer, when the first migrants crossed from Asia into the New World. Many arrived by walking, very slowly over many generations, up to the northeast extreme of Asia and then crossing a land bridge, since submerged by ocean, that reached to Alaska. However, newer research shows that there may have been a second route: fantastically brave Polynesians who crossed the South Pacific in canoes, bringing tools, chickens, and certain plants with them.
The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society
Economic activity in pre-Columbus North America
The history of North America before European contact is recorded spottily; if there was an ancient American Marco Polo who traveled across the continent recording observations about life across societies, his or her work was lost in the European invasions. But what we do know still tells an interesting story.
This map, for example, shows the basic economics of pre-Columbus America. The agricultural communities, in purple, tended to be more settled and more densely populated, because agriculture requires fixed infrastructure but can also support more people. Settlement also requires a certain degree of politics: social hierarchies, divisions of labor, ownership, and diplomacy between communities. Hunting-based economies, by contrast, could afford to be more nomadic and informally organized.
Ishwar
The native peoples and languages of North America
North America before Columbus didn't have nation-states of the sort that we know today (with some possible exceptions, such as the Aztec Empire), but it did have nations of a sort: peoples who shared common cultural traits, especially language. This map shows the major language families and their spread: dark green, for example, shows the Muskogean-speakers (Chickasaw, Choctaw, and others) clustered in the Southeast. The Pacific and Gulf coasts are divided by numerous tribes, each covering small swaths of land, whereas the sprawl of the Central Plains shows how certain groups came to dominate huge areas.
United States Geological Survey
What the US might look like now if Europeans hadn't come
It's impossible to say what North America would look like today if Columbus had never arrived, but this map of Native American tribal, cultural, and linguistic areas is a thought-provoking approximation. Colors represent language groups, whereas lines demarcate the different tribal groups and their areas of control. What if those groups had had a chance to form modern nation-states of their own? Had Europeans not colonized North America, this map and its unfamiliar shapes hint at what today's sovereign Native American countries and states might look like.
Europeans come to America
The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society
European exploration of North America
Christopher Columbus sailed west from Spain in 1492, sponsored by the Spanish government, which hoped to find an overseas trade route to southeast Asia. Instead, Columbus landed in the Bahamas, in a part of the world most Europeans had no idea existed.
This event set off a century-long race among Europe's major powers to explore and claim the continent (Portugal promised, in a treaty with Spain, to focus instead on Africa and Asia). This development was purely about economics, but which explorer happened to land where ultimately shaped centuries of history: Spanish-explored areas became Spanish-controlled, whereas French explorers' journeys through the Saint Lawrence River, Lake Ontario, and the Mississippi River meant that Quebec and the Mississippi Delta would become French colonial territory.
Bill Rankin
Where place names come from in the Americas
This map breaks out the language of origin for each US or Mexican state, Canadian province, and Central/South American nation. The East Coast is dominated by English names, most taken from various British monarchs (the Carolinas are named in honor of Charles I, Virginia for Elizabeth I, etc.), cities and regions (York, Hampshire, Jersey), or other figures (William Penn). Also, unsurprisingly, the West Coast has a number of Spanish names, and there are a handful of French ones (Maine, Vermont, Louisiana).
But the plurality of states have names rooted in one or another American Indian language. The problem is that the states claiming the names were often nowhere near where the tribes whose words they'd taken lived. Radical Cartography's Bill Carter explains, "Places like 'Mississippi' (Algonquin for 'large river') and 'Wyoming' (Lenape for a grassy area) were moved thousands of miles by European settlers."
World History: Patterns of Interaction
How economics and trade shaped the new world
When Europeans ended 10,000 years of separation between the western and eastern hemispheres, they did much more than settle and conquer; they permanently and fundamentally altered the ecosystems of both the old and new worlds. They brought plants from Europe, Africa, and Asia to the Americas, such as rice, wheat, and citrus, as well as domesticated animals such as horses. And they brought American plants back: potatoes, corn, tomatoes, tobacco, and so on. Known as the Columbian Exchange, this process transformed agriculture and food, and thus economics and culture, on both sides of the Atlantic.
The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society
Immigration from England
The 1607 settlement at Jamestown and the 1620 landing of the Mayflower were just the initial steps in British colonization of North America. As this map shows, just as many people came later to Bermuda and to various Caribbean islands. Indeed, the slave-dependent sugar industry of Barbados was perhaps more economically important to Britain than anything in New England. The inset map here also shows the English origins of places settled in what is now Massachusetts.
The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society
The first European colonies, as of 1660
This map shows the very early stages of European colonization, in the mid-1600s. Even 170 years after Columbus' arrival, Europeans had established permanent settlements on very little of North America. Yet these initial settlements established the contours of later empires and nations. French colonists encamped along the Saint Lawrence River, a major trading hub that later became Quebec, and the Spanish had an outpost in present-day Florida. English and Dutch settlers — the latter of whom founded New Amsterdam at what is now New York City — established what would eventually become formal British colonies, and then later the United States.
The conquest of North America
Esemono
The political division of North America since 1750
This animated map shows the changes to North America's colonial and post-colonial borders from 1750 to the present. There are some interesting nuggets to pull out, such as the tiny transfer of land between Nebraska and the Dakota Territory in 1882, or the fact that it took until 1949 for Newfoundland to join Canada. There's also an interesting US-Mexico border dispute that was resolved during the Nixon administration.
Pearson Longman
The major Revolutionary War battles
The most salient fact about the Revolutionary War is not that the colonists won, but that the British Empire, at that point the most powerful country in the world, lost. That looked, at first, unlikely: Admiral William Howe, invading from England in 1776, captured New York City and New Jersey.
But Howe got greedy. Rather than marching north to link up with British troops coming south from Quebec — the idea was to seal off New England, then divide and conquer — Howe attacked the rebel capital of Philadelphia to the south. The British forces, divided, suffered a humiliating defeat in Saratoga in 1777.
This convinced France, which had been quietly funding the Americans to weaken the British, that the colonists might actually win. France declared war against the British in 1778, as did Spain in 1779; the American colonies were just one front in a global war in which the British had no allies and several strong enemies. It launched a last-ditch invasion at Georgia in 1780 but, when that failed, the war was over.
University of Maine
The French and Indian War
In Europe, the Seven Years' War was more or less pointless, with no side gaining any land at its conclusion. But the territorial repercussions were much more serious in North America. In the 1763 Treaty of Paris, which concluded the war, France not only lost New France to Britain — including all of the future US between the Mississippi and the 13 colonies, as well as all of French Canada — but also ceded the Louisiana territory to Spain. Napoleon would seize back Louisiana and sell it to the US in 1803, but New France was lost forever.
Sam B. Hillard/Sunisup
Theft of Native Americans' land
This map looks at the conquest of North America from the other perspective: that of the people being forced off of their land. It begins by showing Native Americans' land in 1794, demarcated by tribe and marked in green. In 1795, the US and Spain signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo, carving up much of the continent between them. What followed was a century of catastrophes for Native Americans as their land was taken piece by piece. By the time the US passed the Dawes Act in 1887, effectively abolishing tribal self-governance and forcing assimilation, there was very little left.
Slavery and the Civil War
Ellis & Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
The trans-Atlantic Slave trade
About 12.5 million Africans were sent on slave voyages to the Americas, Europe, or elsewhere in Africa; due to the horrifically high mortality rates involved, only 10.7 million disembarked. The vast majority landed at sugar plantations in the Caribbean or Brazil; only about 388,747 disembarked in mainland North America.
But the United States' slave population grew, unlike those in the Caribbean and Latin America. "In the antebellum period, US slaves showed a natural population growth of some 25 percent per decade," according to the University of Liverpool's Michael Tadman. "In sharp contrast, Caribbean and Brazilian slaves commonly suffered rates of natural decrease of 20 percent per decade." The result was an ever-increasing slave population in the US, magnifying the institution's importance and the political power of slaveowners.
Golbez
The evolution of slavery in the United States
The fight over slavery in the United States began even before independence, as constitutional framers clashed over whether or how to reconcile the world's most barbaric practice with the idealistic new nation. Though abolitionists lost, states such as Pennsylvania and New Hampshire ended slavery almost immediately after independence. But the divide became more than just political, as slavery developed into a sort of cultural institution upon which southern whites depended for their economic livelihood and their identity. As America expanded westward, both pro- and anti-slavery factions tried to claim new territories as their own. The cultural and political divide deeply polarized the nation, leading inexorably to war.
James McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction
Concentration of slaves in the US
The swift growth in the slave population during the antebellum period helped fuel the institution's spread. States outside the original colonies — particularly in the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama) — developed significant slave industries. Existing slave centers, particularly South Carolina, saw the practice grow.
This would eventually influence the politics of secession. As Princeton's James McPherson notes in Battle Cry of Freedom, slaves constituted 47 percent of the population in the first states to secede (South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Texas), where 37 percent of white families owned slaves. By contrast, slaves were only 24 percent of the population in the upper South (Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri) and only 20 percent of white families in those states owned slaves. The states of the upper South initially declined to secede, though all but Missouri ultimately joined the Confederacy in the aftermath of the Battle of Fort Sumter.
Tilden76/Wikimedia
The crucial 1860 election
US politics in the 1850s were dominated by slavery. The Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision, which forced western territories to allow slavery, only intensified debate over the issue. Members of the new, anti-slavery Republican Party, such as ex-Rep. Abraham Lincoln, warned that the Court could force slavery on the North next unless the practice was ended outright.
In 1860, the Republicans nominated Lincoln for president in a four-way race. The Democrats split on regional lines, with pro-slavery Southern Democrats nominating John C. Breckinridge, and compromise-minded northern Democrats picking Stephen A. Douglas. John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party, which advocated for the status quo and against secession, was also a major contender.
Lincoln won with 40 percent of the vote, without carrying a single southern state. Southerners, feeling they were no longer represented by the GOP-dominated government and that their way of life was under threat from Lincoln's abolitionism, almost immediately began to secede. (Note: South Carolina is grey because its presidential electors were chosen by state legislators, not popular vote.)
calicojellyfish
When states seceded in the years before the Civil War
On December 20, 1960, South Carolina became the first southern state to secede in reaction to Abraham Lincoln's victory. It was explicit that Lincoln's anti-slavery views, and those of many in the North, were the primary motivation for separation. The declaration of secession stated, "A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery."
Before Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Texas followed suit. While the "Upper South" had initially rejected secession, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia flipped after the Confederate raid on Fort Sumter on April 12.
EmperorTigerstar
The Civil War
There are, very broadly speaking, two stages you can see in this time-lapse map of the war. From the war's 1861 start until July 1863, it was defined by southern Confederate victories that halted Union invasions designed to end the war by capturing Richmond. Confederate General Robert E. Lee even invaded the north, threatening mid-Atlantic cities with the aim of strengthening the northern anti-war movement such that it might unseat Lincoln in the 1984 election and end the war.
In July 1863, however, two things happened: Lee's northern assault was defeated at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Union troops captured a crucial confederate stronghold at Vicksburg, Mississippi. It was the turning point in the war, the end of Lee's northern invasion and the beginning of the Union's divide-and-conquer strategy, which culminated in General William Sherman's devastating 1864 "march to the sea" across Georgia.
The Library of Congress/American Memory
The Anaconda Plan
Winfield Scott was 74 years old and had been in the Army for 53 years when the Civil War broke out. He was in nowhere near good enough health to lead an army to battle, and would resign later that year, leaving George McClellan and then Ulysses S. Grant to lead the Union Army for the duration of the war. But in May, a little over a month after Fort Sumter, he devised the plan that would — in very altered form — lead to victory.
Derided as "the Anaconda Plan" by its opponents, Scott's plan involved blockading the Confederacy along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, and then launching a campaign down the Mississippi River to divide the South. Sure enough, the North's blockade grew more effective over time and imposed significant pressure on the South, and Grant's victory in the Vicksburg campaign secured the Mississippi for the Union and marked a major turning point in the war. While his strategy proved prescient, Scott's promise that it would bring about a relatively bloodless end to the war was sadly not fulfilled.
Becoming the United States
NationalAtlas.gov
US territorial evolution
European settlers and homesteaders had been moving west from the Atlantic coasts since first arriving. But shortly after independence, that expansion grew from piecemeal settlements to national policy.
That policy, however, was not always as coherent and deliberate as the lore of Manifest Destiny implies. For example, when American agents traveled to Paris to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon Bonaparte, they initially sought only New Orleans, then one of the largest and richest cities in North America, but the cash-strapped Bonaparte sold half a billion acres to fund his expanding wars in Europe.
Further expansions came in part due to the collapse of the Spanish Empire and the efforts of pro-slavery legislators to incorporate new slaveholding territories.
Nikater
The Trail of Tears
The largest act of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the United States government began in 1830, when Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law, which gave him the power to negotiate the removal of Native American tribes in the South to land west of the Mississippi. Of course, those negotiations were corrupt and rife with coercion. Take, for example, the removal of the Cherokee, which was conducted via a treaty never approved by leaders of the Cherokee nation and resulted in, according to a missionary doctor who accompanied the Cherokee during removal, about 4,000 deaths, or one fifth of the Cherokee population. Later scholarship suggested the numbers could be even higher than that.
Kaidor/Wikipedia
The Mexican-American War
Upon independence in 1821, Mexico gained vast but largely unincorporated and uncontrolled Spanish-claimed lands from present-day Texas to northern California. American settler communities were growing in those areas; by 1829 they outnumbered Spanish speakers in Mexico's Texas territory. A minor uprising by those American settlers in 1835 eventually led to a full-fledged war of independence. The settlers won, establishing the Texas Republic, which they voluntarily merged with the United States in 1845.
But Mexico and the US still disputed Texas' borders, and President James K. Polk wanted even more westward land to expand slavery. He also had designs on Mexico's California territory, already home to a number of American settlers. War began in 1846 over the disputed Texas territory, but quickly expanded to much of Mexico. A hardline Mexican general took power and fought to the bitter end, culminating in the US invading Mexico City and seizing a third of Mexico's territory, including what is now California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
Pearson Education
Settling the West
This is both a map and a chart, each of which demonstrates a crucial fact about the development of America's immigrant population. The map makes clear that while the Upper Midwest, the Rocky Mountains region, and Northeastern cities were major immigrant destinations, immigrants generally steered clear of the South, which lacked the opportunities for industrial employment that the rest of the country offered. The chart shows that this wave of immigration came to a sudden halt in 1914. We tend to forget this now, but with some exceptions (like the US anti-Chinese policy) immigration was fairly open between Western nations before World War I. The outbreak of war ended the open borders era, and while almost all the nations of Europe maintain open borders with each other, the US remains restrictionist.
Department of Commerce
The mean population center over time
Yes, the 1800s were the age of westward expansion, but the trend never really stopped. One way the Census Bureau measures geographic shifts is by measuring the US's "mean center of population" — that is, "the place where an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly" if all Americans weighed exactly the same. As of 2010, that point was near the village of Plato, Missouri. But the point's westward and southward trajectory doesn't necessarily mean that lots of Americans are packing up and moving west and south, although that was an early trend. Rather, it often means that the populations of the West and South have grown faster than the Northeast and Midwest. That includes people moving, but also shifts in birth rates and immigration. — Danielle Kurtzleben
Census Bureau
The Dust Bowl
Most of the devastation wrought by the Great Depression doesn't lend itself easily to maps, but the Dust Bowl does. This map shows changes in population by county from 1930 to 1940. You'll notice two clear trends: the Plains states shrank dramatically, while the West Coast grew. The combination of wind erosion and draught made it nearly impossible for thousands of families to make a living farming, prompting a mass migration to California — just like their fictional counterpart, The Grapes of Wrath's Joad family. According to a 2009 study by Harvard economic historian Richard Hornbeck, only 14-28 percent of the damage done by the Dust Bowl to farmland values has been reversed since then.
Census Bureau
Great Migration
The Dust Bowl occurred in between two other transformative migrations: the first and second Great Migrations, in which millions of African Americans moved from the South to cities in the North, Midwest, and West Coast, spurred both by the brutality of Jim Crow and the southern sharecropping economy and by the economic opportunities offered by cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Los Angeles. The vast cultural, political, and economic impact of the Great Migrations is difficult to overstate. "It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched," Isabel Wilkerson writes in The Warmth of Other Suns, her masterful history of the migrations. "It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s."
Michael Seigel/Rutgers, published by Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
How migration spread the blues
One concrete cultural product of the Great Migration was the development of Northern blues. Blues music originated in the Mississippi Delta, but was developed significantly by northern performers like Chicago's Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, Detroit's John Lee Hooker, and Los Angeles' T-Bone Walker. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The Great Migrations contributed to the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, to the emergence of New York City's jazz scene, and — principally through Motown in Detroit — the development of soul.
Public Roads Administraion
Interstate highway system
This map of the nation's interstates was made in 1957, just a year after construction of the interstate system was authorized by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. Initially designed in part to move military convoys in case of a foreign invasion (the project was originally named "Interstate and Defense Highways"), it became a massive infrastructure project with significant economic and cultural impacts. The highways increased interstate trade and tourism. They also made long-distance commuting more viable, enabling suburbanization — and the cultural homogenization that came with it.
American diversity
Roke
Every presidential election since 1856
Since 1856, every American presidential election but one featured the Democratic and Republican nominees as its top two contenders. (The exception is 1912, in which Republican incumbent William Taft placed third after Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Progressive Party candidate Teddy Roosevelt.)
As this map shows, until very recently Republicans were the party of the North and Democrats the party of the South. That makes sense: Republicans were the party of the Union and Reconstruction, whereas Democrats were avid advocates of slavery and segregation, making the South a natural power base.
But after Democrats' embrace of civil rights at the 1948 convention, and especially after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the parties' power bases began to flip. It was a slow process: Democrats were winning Tennessee and Louisiana as late as 1996, and Republicans won Vermont as late as 1988.
Pew Research Center
Sources of immigration over time and largest group per state in 2010
Mexico is, of course, America's largest source of immigrants today. But as late as 1990, many states still counted Germany as their largest source. German-Americans have been more or less fully assimilated, and identification as German-American — rather than just white — is increasingly rare, but this time-lapse map emphasizes just how recently first-generation German immigrants were a major demographic group in the US.
Census Bureau
American ancestry by county
Here's another way to illustrate the scale of German immigration to the US. While the data is 15 years old, the basic point conveyed here — that in the Midwest and Plains, pluralities in most counties claim German ancestry — stands. The map also serves to illustrate the "Black Belt," the region of the South with the largest concentration of African Americans, as well as large Italian- and Irish-American communities in the Northeast. You can also see the trend in Appalachia and other parts of the South, where people tend to simply identify their ancestry as "American."
Rural Assistance Center
Indigenous population density
This map of indigenous population density today shows the effects not just of the initial disease-driven depopulation of North America in the wake of European settlement in the 15th-18th centuries, but the long effort of the US government in the 19th century to remove Native Americans from their homes and place them in reservations of its choosing. The Cherokees of Georgia are gone, having been forced to relocate to eastern Oklahoma. A handful of counties in the upper Plains states, Arizona, and New Mexico have large or majority native populations. Alaska Natives are still a majority in a number of counties. But in most of the country — especially in the South, Midwest, and Northeast — Native Americans make up a vanishingly small percentage of the population.
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