<p>I have a fairly easy question for all of you, and seeing as this is CC, it should be fairly easy to answer:</p>
<p>When was the place we now know as the United States first settled?</p>
<p>(This may seem like a dumb question right now, but you will see the point of my asking this soon.)</p>
<p>Is this one of those intellectual threads where we get to learn something?</p>
<p>I’ll bite :P</p>
<p>Okay, let’s see…I suck at history. Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in the year 1492??? I remember it rhymed.</p>
<p>But the vikings got there sooner. So umm…early 15th century? 14th?</p>
<p>Final answer: 1456</p>
<p>Easy question? This is one of the most fiercely debated topics in all of anthropology.</p>
<p>When the Native Americans crossed the Bering Straight into Alaska perhaps dozens of thousands of years ago?</p>
<p>“Settled” is arbitrary. Settle could mean when the Europeans first sailed West. Or it could mean the settlement of the Native Americans, who claim they are indigenous to this continent. It could also mean the migration of the Euroasians across the land bridge now known as the Bering Strait.</p>
<p>ThisCouldBeHeaven: Ok, fine, maybe, but going by the most well-supported of the pre-Clovis theories, the answer is clearly, “A long time before 1492” - which should be fairly easy, since I’m not looking for you to say “January 12, 16,502 B.C.!” or anything.</p>
<p>So anyway! Let’s talk about textbooks. How do you feel about your history textbooks? Were the biased? For example, did they exalt Kennedy’s supposed civil rights activism or portray Native Americans as nomadic hunter-gatherers?</p>
<p>But he’s asking for the “first” case of settlement, so there should be a definite answer (given an accurate history of the US).</p>
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<p>Well, Native Americans were certainly settled, no doubt about that. While we can’t pinpoint a date that they actually began creating settlements, we know it was long before European contact. And the latter are just the predecessors (according to most theories) of the former.</p>
<p>I’m not sure on the exact year. I just know that during the Ice Age a bridge was constructed that connected to what we know now to be America. People followed their food across the bridge and eventually were forced to settle once the bridge melted.</p>
<p>oh so your question meant:</p>
<p>When was the place we now know as the United States first settled ** by Europeans**?</p>
<p>^Nope. By anyone. So thousands or tens of thousands of years ago would be correct.</p>
<p>Of course, there are four mitochondrial haplotypes for Native Americans, so there could have been many, many entrances into the continent. It’s interesting to note that all of these haplotypes are also found among Asians.</p>
<p>But anyway, the main point of this was to spur a discussion on bias in textbooks. What do you guys think?</p>
<p>I personally liked by APUSH textbook (The American Nation by John A. Garraty). It avoided most of the major mistakes and misconceptions of other books, it wasn’t ridiculously patriotic to the point of self-censorship, and it focused on interpretations rather than facts while recognizing that our interpretations are tentative. We also supplemented it with Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, which, having been written by an anarcho-syndicalist-type guy, was pretty awesome.</p>
<p>the book “lies my teacher told me” says that the first explorers in america came from siberia to alaska sometime between 70,000 to 12,000 B.C.</p>
<p>^Good book - I have a copy in my room right now. While I disagree with a lot of it, I like it a lot, and it was one of the many inspirations for this thread. In fact, I lifted the idea mostly from that book.</p>
<p>waitttt?! the first settlement wasn’t at plymoth rock?!?! EVERYTHING I KNOW IS A LIE!</p>
<p>(I’m jking btw)</p>