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Alabama
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Site of the first Confederate capital in the proverbial "Heart of Dixie," Alabama is a traditionally agricultural state in the Southern mold. A continuing concerted drive toward greater economic diversification in the state began in the 1930s, after costly boll weevil infestations and other problems demonstrated that the state was relying too heavily on cotton. Today, Birmingham has become the South's largest iron and steel producing center, while the Redstone Arsenal and George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville have emerged as important research installations; in a single decade (1950-60), Huntsville's population more than quadrupled.@Mound Builders, who lived in the Alabama region in prehistoric times, were followed by a number of Indian tribes, including the Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Creeks. Spaniards Cabeza De Vaca and Hernando De Soto were among the region's early European explorers. The first permanent European settlement was made (1702) by Frenchmen at Fort Louis near present-day Mobile; it served as the capital of the Louisiana Territory until 1722. Other French settlements followed, but in 1763 France lost the region to the British.@After the American Revolution, England ceded to the United States all of the Alabama region except the southernmost British West Florida area that included Mobile; this region, together with East Florida, went to Spain.@In 1817, after a short period as part of the Territory of Mississippi, the region was organized as the Alabama Territory. Settlers spurred by the virtual ending of Indian troubles in the area helped the new territory's growth; statehood came in 1819. Slave-supported plantation farming, aided by the recent invention of the cotton gin, soon emerged as the main factor in the state's economy.@Alabama seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy in 1861; Montgomery was briefly the Confederate capital. The state suffered a great deal from both the Civil War and the harsh, chaotic Reconstruction.@In the middle of the twentieth century, there were spectacular and sometimes bloody confrontations between supporters and opponents of racial segregation. Martin Luther King, Jr., led opponents of segregation in a boycott of Montgomery buses in 1955-56, in the 1963 demonstrations in Birmingham, and in a march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. In 1978, a suspect in the 1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham was convicted. Democratic Governor George Wallace retired from politics in 1979 and was succeeded by Forrest James, a Democrat with no segregationist identity.
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Alaska
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Alaska is a land of great extremes:  first among the states in area, last in population.  One of the nation's biggest bargains (Alaska's purchase price was less than two cents an acre), it is potentially one of the richest states--particularly in view of the spectacular oil strikes in Prudhoe Bay off the state's frigid Arctic (or North) Slope.  Many believe that these strikes will fulfill the century-long promise of "The Last Frontier;" the find has been called "one of the largest petroleum accumulations known to the world today."@Captain Vitus Bering, a Dane who explored for Russia, is thought to have been the first white man to visit Alaska (1741), after passing close to it on an earlier voyage. At this time there were about 75,000 Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts in Alaska; some prehistoric campsites date back to the Ice Age.@Though several nations tried to get a foothold in the region, mainly for the trade in sea otter pelts it might support, Russia prevailed, establishing Alaska's first white settlement on Kodiak Island in 1784. By the 1850s, Russia, facing increased competition from Americans, British, and Canadians, plus a dwindling supply of fur-bearing animals, wanted to sell. In 1867, U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward agreed to buy--for $7.2 million--thereby becoming a target of ridicule. Many Americans dubbed Alaska "Seward's Folly" or "Seward's Icebox," considering it a frozen wasteland that was relatively valueless.@But gold was discovered (1896) at Klondike in neighboring Yukon Territory, and in Alaska itself at Nome (1899) and at Fairbanks (1902). Settlement was spurred as prospectors poured in and the economy was strengthened--but the lasting gains were few.@During World War II, the region's importance as a military outpost was dramatized when the Japanese briefly occupied some of the Aleutians--the war's only North American enemy occupation. Today, Alaska contains the Distant Early Warning system (DEW line) and other defense installations, including military bases. Roughly half the state's personal income is from government sources, and 97 percent of the land is Federally owned.@On Good Friday, March 27, 1964, an exceptionally powerful earthquake struck the south-central part of the state, killing 114 and causing property damage estimated at $750 million.@In 1971 Congress passed the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act to extinguish the nearly 100-year old claims of Alaska's 64,000 Eskimos, Indians and Aleuts by providing 40 million acres of land and approximately $925 million in compensation. An enrollment of eligible natives began in 1972.@Construction on the $4.5-billion Trans-Alaska pipeline project, first proposed in 1969 and delayed by legal suits brought by environmentalists finally began in 1974. In June 1977 oil began to flow from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean through the 799-mile, 48-inch hot-oil pipeline to the Gulf of Alaska port of Valdez.@On December 2, 1980, President Carter signed into law a bill designating over 104 million acres of Alaskan land as national parks, monuments and preserves. Among the new national parks created are Gates of the Arctic, Kenai Fjords, Kobuk Valley, Lake Clark and Wrangell-St. Elias. In certain areas oil, gas and mineral exploration and exploitation would be permitted.@On March 24, 1989, the country's worst oil spill occurred when the Exxon tanker Valdez ran aground at Prince William Sound, spilling eleven million tons of crude oil. The spill was devastating to the wildlife and pristine environment of the area, and necessitated a massive clean-up effort.
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Arizona
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Mummies and ancient human relics--such as baskets and cloth--have been found in a strikingly well-preserved condition in Arizona. Several Indian cultures lived there from about 25,000 to 10,000 B.C., and the ancestors of the modern Navajos (or Navahos) and Apaches lived in northern Arizona. One of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the country, the community of Oraibi was built sometime in the 1100s by Hopi Indians, over 5,000 of whom presently live on a reservation in northeast Arizona. The first white men were 16th-century Spanish explorers. Missions were established as early as 1692. The United States obtained (1848) most of the land from Mexico following the Mexican War; the rest was included in the Gadsden Purchase (1853).@Arizona was organized as a territory in 1863, with the capital at Prescott (1865-67), then Tucson (1867-77), Prescott again (1877-89), and finally at Phoenix. Over many years, various bloody conflicts raged in Arizona--between the whites and the Apaches, whose leaders included the fabled fighters Cochise and Geronimo, between Confederate and Union troops during the Civil War, between labor and management during violent strikes in the mining communities, and between cattlemen and sheepmen in the range wars that continued until the turn of the century. In 1912 Arizona became the last mainland state to join the Union.@Hopi and Navajo Indians of northeastern Arizona have been feuding for years over ownership of 1.8 million acres of desert plateau which acts as a buffer between the much smaller Hopi reservation and the Navajo nation which surrounds it. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the early 1960s that the two tribes should share the land equally. However, following congressional action, the tract was divided between the Hopi and the Navajo in April 1981.
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Arkansas
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The so-called Bluff Dwellers of about A.D. 500 are considered to have been the first inhabitants of the Arkansas region, followed by the culturally superior Mound Builders and, later, by Quapaw, Osage, and Caddo Indians.@The first Europeans to visit (1541) the area were Spanish explorers led by Hernando De Soto. Frenchmen arrived more than a century later: Marquette and Joliet exploring (1673) the land around the mouth of the Arkansas River, and La Salle claiming (1682) for France the Arkansas region and the rest of the Mississippi Valley. In 1686, Henri De Tonti, established Arkansas Post, the first permanent settlement. The United States obtained all of what is now Arkansas as part of the Louisiana Purchase (1803).@Much of the region's early history is shared with Louisiana, of which it was a part until 1812, when it was attached to the Territory of Missouri. Settlement was spurred by the cotton boom of 1818, and a year later Arkansas Territory, incorporating part of present-day Oklahoma, was created. The 1830s saw the emergence of the slavery-supported plantation system as the state's primary economic force. The virtual absence of Indian troubles encouraged immigration, and between 1830 and 1840 population tripled.@Statehood came (1836) at a time when the slavery issue was more and more seriously dividing the nation. In March 1861, the Arkansas convention voted to remain in the Union, but when President Lincoln asked for troops, the state refused and two months later decided to secede. Many relatively small battles were fought in the state, and from 1864-65 there existed two separate state governments: one at Little Rock controlled by the Union and a Confederate one at Washington, Arkansas. Recovery in the postwar period was slow in coming, and not helped by the violence-engendering struggle (1872-74) for the governorship between Republicans Elisha Baxter and Joseph Brooks, a struggle won by Baxter only after Presidential intervention.@In addition to a fine public school system, there is the Arkansas School for the Deaf, established about 1866 as the Arkansas Deaf-Mute Institute, and the Arkansas School for the Blind.  Arkansas Enterprises for the Blind opened in 1947 a rehabilitation center providing personal adjustment, pre-vocational and vocational training for the blind and visually impaired.  It has served persons from the fifty states and many foreign countries.@In 1966 the state made political history by electing a transplanted New Yorker, Winthrop Rockefeller, governor on the Republican ticket, climaxing a six-year effort on his part to build a two-party system in this traditionally Democratic state.
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California
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There were about 130,000 Indians living in the California region when Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese in Spanish employ, discovered it in 1542. English interest in the area began with Sir Francis Drake, who claimed (1579) it for Queen Elizabeth I, but the first permanent European settlement was made by Spaniards, who established 21 missions northward along the coast from San Diego (1769) to Sonoma (1823). In 1812, Russian fur-traders from Alaska came down and established Fort Ross on the state's northern coast, but they did not prevail. In 1822, after Mexico won its independence from Spain, California became a Mexican province, and its social, economic, and political life was centered around large cattle ranches. The first organized group of American settlers came to the region by land in 1841; the United States offered to buy the province, but Mexico refused to sell. U.S. forces occupied the area early in the Mexican War, with Mexico formally ceding its claims in 1848.@Less than two weeks before the treaty was signed, an event of massive importance occurred at John A. Sutter's sawmill near Coloma: the discovery of gold, which set off the famous Gold Rush of '49. In the following seven years, the region produced $450 million worth of gold, while the population jumped from about 15,000 to almost 300,000. This influx virtually secured American possession of the territory. San Francisco, for example, grew from an outpost to a great city, in a turbulent, often lawless, atmosphere. Vigilante groups filled the "law-and-order" gap until more stable government was established, beginning with admission of California into the Union as a free state, under terms of the Compromise of 1850. Meanwhile, California's mountain-walled isolation was rapidly ending: the telegraph reached the area in 1861, and eight years later direct rail connection was made with the rest of the country.@The late 19th and early 20th centuries were marked by continued population growth, soaring land values, and economic-rooted social tensions between American-born Californians, Mexican-Americans and Oriental immigrants. Manufacturing, especially the canning and packing of food, increased greatly; and Hollywood became the world motion picture capital.  Today, the state of California is ranked first in the nation in population, agriculture, manufacturing and motor vehicle ownership.@During the 1960s, California's migrant farm workers, mostly Mexican-Americans, were organized by the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (the union is now the United Farm Workers of America). The long and at times bitterly resisted struggle was led by Cesar Chavez.
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Colorado
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Colorado is part of the real Old West, not the West of romanticized Westerns. Ruthlessly competitive gold mining (starting in 1858) and silver mining (1875) and the decades-long wresting of crops from the arid land shaped Colorado and defined its character.@Cliff-dwelling Indians are believed to have built (c. A.D. 100) Colorado's first civilization in the Mesa Verde plateau, which lies in the southwest corner of the state; they carved irrigation ditches and built many-storied pueblos.@In the 1500s, Spanish explorers became the first Europeans to visit the region but, not finding gold, they did not stay. The United States got the eastern and central areas of Colorado as part of the Louisiana Purchase and the western part as a result of the Mexican War.@The gold rush of the late 1850s was followed by the Civil War. With fewer Federal troops in the area, the intense fighting between whites and the Arapaho and Cheyenne Indians posed the very real threat of general lawlessness.@The establishment (1861) of the Colorado Territory was a step toward unity and stability, and the advent of the railroads in the 1870s was another. "The Centennial State" entered the Union in 1876, the era in which the New York journalist Horace Greeley sponsored a Colorado farming colony and advised, "Go West, young man!"@The 1880s brought fiscal health and early growth as a state, but trouble and renewed bloodshed characterized the next decade.@Silver prices dropped badly after the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act (1893), and many great mines closed, leaving behind ghost towns with colorful names such as Cripple Creek and Eureka. Range warfare was rife, and bitter hassles took place over railway franchises. Long-simmering labor-management conflict came to a head in 1914 in a battle near Trinidad between striking coal miners and the militia in which innocent women and children were killed. Subsequent reforms included regular government inspection of mines.@The state's economy advanced sharply after both World Wars. In between were more years of struggle: the great Wall Street fiasco of 1929 was accompanied, in Colorado, by drought and high winds which created a disastrous dust bowl.@The U.S. Air Force Academy, founded in 1958, is located at Colorado Springs. In 1976 the academy admitted the first female cadets.
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Connecticut
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Connecticut, one of the smallest states in land area, is one of the most varied and most prosperous.@About 7,000 members of the Algonquian Indian family were living in Connecticut before the Europeans came; of these, the Pequot were most powerful. Uncas, chief of the Mohican branch of the Pequots, was immortalized by James Fenimore Cooper in "The Last of the Mohicans." Relations between the Indians and early settlers were mostly friendly, except for the brief Pequot War (1637) and the more serious King Philip's War (1675-76).@Dutch navigator Adriaen Block was the first European of record to visit the state (1614), sailing up the Connecticut River. In 1633, colonists from Holland set up a trading post (near present-day Hartford), but the Dutch lost control of the area to the English; Puritans from the Massachusetts Bay Colony established the first permanent settlement at the site of modern Windsor that same year, and another at Wethersfield in 1634. English settlements at Hartford and Saybrook began in 1635, and representatives of the three "River Towns" of Windsor, Wethersfield, and Hartford united to form the Connecticut Colony and adopt (1639) the "Fundamental Orders" that gave citizens the right to elect government officials and omitted the religious test for citizenship; the document thus anticipated the U.S. Constitution and is considered the world's first written constitution.@Meanwhile, a wholly new colony came into being with the establishment of New Haven (1638) and other communities in the southern part of Connecticut; called the New Haven Colony, it was more rigidly Puritan than the older colony. In 1662, the Connecticut Colony procured an unusually democratic royal charter resembling the "Fundamental Orders" and providing for the incorporation (1665) of the New Haven Colony, which strongly opposed absorption but reluctantly acquiesced under threat of an alternative take-over by New York. Sir Edmund Andros, who had been named British governor of New England by James II, demanded surrender of the colony's charter; he arrived in Hartford in 1687 to seize the document, but the townspeople are said to have hidden it in the legendary Charter Oak tree.@Connecticut patriots, including Nathan Hale and Governor Jonathan Trumbull, took on a leading role in the Revolutionary War, and the colony served as the Continental Army's major supply area. After the war Connecticut gave up its claims to all western land except the so-called "Western Reserve." Statehood dates from 1788, but boundary disputes with New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island persisted until the present borders were established in 1799. Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807 was highly unpopular in Connecticut, as it was elsewhere in New England. The state's contribution to the Union cause in the Civil War was exceptional; five times the quota of men volunteered.@Most early Connecticut colonists wrested their living from the land and made their own clothes and tools. Enterprising "Yankee peddlers" with horse and rig toured the nation, hawking well-turned wares. During and after the Civil War, better transportation and sharply increased immigration served to shift the economic focus from agriculture to industry. The state, sometimes called "The Arsenal of the Nation," became one of the most industrialized in the country. Its business pioneers included revolver inventor Samuel Colt, rubber magnate Charles Goodyear, and Eli Whitney, who innovated mass production of firearms and manufactured (1793) the cotton gin that proved a boon to the textile industry.
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Delaware
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Before the Europeans arrived, the Delaware region was inhabited by the Lenni-Lenape (later called Delaware) Indians, of Algonquian linguistic stock. Although others from Europe may have preceded him, explorer Henry Hudson is credited with Delaware's discovery (1609). A year later, Captain Samuel Argall of Virginia named Delaware Bay for his colony's governor, Thomas West, Baron De La Warr. Several countries vied for control of the state; Swedes made the first permanent settlement (1638) at Fort Christina (now Wilmington); but New Sweden, as the colony as a whole was called, gave way (1655) to Dutch forces led by New Netherland Governor Peter Stuyvesant. The English seized the colony in 1664, administering it under the Duke of York until 1682. It was then annexed to Pennsylvania as The Three Lower Counties. In 1704 it became semiautonomous, and fought in the American Revolution as a separate state. It later became (1787) the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.@Meanwhile, the Wilmington area developed into the hub of the flour-milling business and, in 1802, Eleuthere Irenee du Pont established a gunpowder mill on nearby Brandywine Creek that was the foundation of the state's enormous chemical industry. British ships shelled Lewes during the War of 1812, but there was little damage. Great tensions were created in Delaware by the advent of the Civil War, for it was a border state, condoning slavery but remaining loyal to the Union. Antiadministration and neutralist views were common; true secessionists were rare throughout the conflict.@In November 1978, Dover Air Force Base was the scene of the return of the 913 bodies from Jonestown, Guyana, after the mass murder-suicides there. The base's mortuary staff, plus military pathologists and graves registration experts from the Washington area, undertook the difficult task of identifying and embalming the corpses. Base personnel took on a more pleasant mission in early 1980, as they hosted the six U.S. diplomats spirited out of Iran by Canadian embassy officials in Tehran. The diplomats spent two days in seclusion at Dover before returning to their homes.
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District of Columbia
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Washington, D.C. is not only the capital of the United States but an important business and financial center, with over 1,800 professional and trade associations headquartered there. Since 1895, when Georgetown became part of Washington, it has been coextensive with the District of Columbia.@The District was established by Congress in 1790-91.  George Washington selected the exact site for the "Federal City," which was designed by Pierre L'Enfant and laid out by Andrew Ellicott. Maryland and Virginia ceded land for the District, and the capital moved there from Philadelphia in 1800. Thomas Jefferson was the first President to be inaugurated in Washington.@During the War of 1812, the city fell to the British, who burned the Capitol, White House, and other public buildings. During the Civil War, the city was threatened by Confederate forces.@The year 1878 marked the end of home rule for the district, with city officials thereafter being appointed by the President. Since 1961, however, when residents were given the right to vote in Presidential elections, Washingtonians have sought to increase local self-government and national political representation. Residents were allowed to elect their own school board in 1968, and full home rule followed in 1975. Under the Nixon Administration, the District of Columbia was granted non-voting representation in Congress, with Walter E. Fauntroy sworn in on April 19, 1971, as Washington's first Representative in nearly 100 years.@An amendment to the Constitution, treating the District of Columbia as a state for the purposes of representation in Congress and Presidential elections, was proposed in 1978, but died in 1985, having been ratified by only 16 of the needed 38 states.@Washington's Metro, the computerized subway which first opened in 1976, is one of the most advanced systems in the world. Lines have since been extended to National Airport and to the suburbs.
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Florida
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Indians are thought to have inhabited this region about 10,000 years ago. In 1513 Juan Ponce De Leon, a Spanish explorer said to be searching for the legendary Fountain of Youth, landed on the east coast and mistakenly thought his find was an island. He named it and claimed it for Spain. Except for an interlude of British rule (1763-1783), Spain kept a tenuous hold until 1819, when the United States bought the Spanish claim. Florida became a state in 1845, seceded from the Union in 1861, and was readmitted in 1868.@Florida's early development was severely hampered by two bloody and costly wars with the Seminole Indians, who were not defeated until 1842. Many never surrendered, but fled instead to the Everglades wilderness, became the core of a new tribe, and, eventually, were settled on reservations. In May 1970, the Seminoles were awarded $12,347,500 for land taken from them by U.S. military forces. The Indians estimate there are now 1,500 Seminoles in Florida and 3,500 in Oklahoma.@Among the fastest-growing states in the nation, Florida has risen in population from 2.8 million in 1950 to over 12.9 million in 1990. Land values and industry have grown proportionately, but rapid expansion has created such problems for the state as attempting to keep pace with the spiraling demand for new facilities.@Cape Canaveral (called Cape Kennedy from 1963 to 1973) was the launching site of most U.S. space vehicles, including the first manned vehicle to land on the moon (1969), the first orbiting laboratory (Skylab 1973), the first joint venture with the Soviet Union (1975), and first orbiting of the reusable space shuttle, the Columbia (1981). In 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in space minutes after take-off. The seven crew members died.@Tens of thousands of Cuban refugees journeyed in small boats from Mariel, Cuba, to Key West in May 1980. Many were then transferred to Eglin Air Force Base, near Fort Walton Beach in Florida's Panhandle region, before being sent to permanent settlement sites throughout the nation. Starting in 1980, large numbers of Haitian refugees have entered the state illegally.
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Georgia
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Mound Builders were the first known inhabitants of the Georgia region, followed in modern times by Creek and Cherokee Indians.  Spanish explorer De Soto is thought to have been the first European to visit (1540) the area, but British claims soon conflicted with those of Spain;  in 1733, English philanthropist James Oglethorpe led a group of his countrymen in launching the first permanent settlement at Savannah as an asylum for debtors.  England ended the Spanish threat in 1742, as forces under Oglethorpe defeated their rivals in the battle of Bloody Marsh.@The sale of rum and the introduction of Negro slaves into the region were at first outlawed, but by about 1750 new legislation ended these restrictions.  Many foreigners were among the early immigrants, soon followed by settlers mainly from Virginia and the Carolinas.@After the American Revolution, Georgia became a stronghold of slavery and cotton culture--fostered by the invention of the cotton gin, in 1793, by Eli Whitney, who was living near Savannah.  Georgia seceded in 1861, and suffered great damage in the Civil War.  The war ended slavery, but black Georgians suffered many disabilities until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.@Changes in social patterns are evident.  Public accommodations throughout the state were desegregated, in accordance with law, as were school systems, although residential housing patterns in many areas limit the amount of actual school integration.  As in many other parts of the country, Georgians expressed concern over busing pupils to achieve racial balance in schools.  In February, 1972, classroom boycotts to protest busing cut into school attendance in Augusta.  There were efforts to promote a statewide boycott, but they failed.@Georgia, the first state (1943) to grant 18-year-olds the right to vote, in 1973 lowered from 21 to 18 the legal age for adults.@Jimmy Carter, often hailed as one of the South's "new breed" of young progressive chief executives, was inaugurated as President of the United States in 1977, the first Southern president since the Civil War.
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Hawaii
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A melting pot of nationalities and racial groups, Hawaii was first settled by seagoing Polynesians, most likely from the Marquesas Islands, during the eighth century. The early Hawaiians, who practiced a religion that included human sacrifice and idolatry, developed a feudal form of government. Europe learned of the islands after British explorer Captain James Cook came upon them (1778); he named them the "Sandwich Islands" in honor of the Earl of Sandwich.@Local chieftain King Kamehameha I took control (1795) of the main islands--except Kauai and Niihau--after thirteen years of warfare with other aspirants. The other two islands accepted his rule in 1810.@Missionaries were active on the islands in the 1800s. In 1840, the Kingdom of Hawaii adopted its first constitution. The growth of the vital sugar and pineapple industries increased U.S. business and political involvement, leading to the establishment (1900) of Hawaii as a United States Territory following annexation (1898). The present population includes significant numbers of Polynesians, Chinese, Filipinos, and Japanese, as well as Caucasians.@The "date which will live in infamy"--Dec. 7, 1941--saw the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which drew the nation into World War II.@In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th state to join the Union.
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Idaho
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Indians are thought to have been living in the Idaho area 10,000 years ago. The region was acquired by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and explored two years later by Lewis and Clark, who crossed the Bitterroot Range and camped near the present site of Lewiston (founded 1861). Throughout the 1860s, Idaho experienced a gold rush that drew scores of prospectors but left a legacy of ghost towns. Mining, however, is still important; Idaho ranks first nationally in the production of silver, antimony, garnets, and cobalt.@In the 1870s, the growing white occupation of Indian lands--particularly for cattle ranging--led to a series of battles between U.S. forces and the Nez Perce, Bannock, and Sheepeater tribes. Idaho gained statehood in 1890.@During the 1890s, disputes between miners and mine owners often resulted in violence and bloodshed. In 1892, in the Coeur d'Alene area, unionized miners used dynamite and guns to fight nonunion men and mine owners. There was violence again in 1899. Governor Frank Steunenberg declared martial law then and called in Federal troops to restore order. Six years later, Steunenberg, no longer in office, was murdered by a member of the Western Federation of Miners; the confessed killer, defended by Clarence Darrow in a famous trial, was sentenced to life imprisonment.@Irrigation, which has been crucially important, was begun on a large scale under the Federal government's Carey Act (1894) and Reclamation Act (1902). By 1950, Idaho had more than 5,000 diversion dams, 360 reservoirs (with 5 million acre-feet of water capacity), and more than 15,000 miles of irrigation canals and ditches. In 1968, the Idaho Power Company completed Hells Canyon Dam in the Snake River Valley, which also includes Oxbow and Brownlee dams. In recent years thousands of acres of new land have been brought into cultivation on high desert plateaus in the Boise area, largely possible through increased water pumping efficiency. With the completion of the Snake River navigation project in 1975, Idaho now has water access to the Pacific Ocean.@In June 1976 the Teton dam burst in the eastern part of the state, causing an estimated one billion dollars damage. Loss of human life was relatively light, but thousands of acres of farmland were destroyed and much of the Idaho cattle industry was temporarily wiped out by floodwaters. Reports indicate the collapse was in part due to poor design.@The eruption of Mount St. Helens in the neighboring state of Washington dumped volcanic ash on northern Idaho in May 1980.
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Illinois
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Prehistoric Indians called Mound Builders lived in the Illinois region and left a legacy of more than 10,000 burial and temple mounds. Later inhabitants included a union of Indian tribes known as the "Illinois Confederacy." The Frenchmen Marquette and Joliet were the first Europeans of record (1673) to visit the region and, two years later, Marquette founded a mission at the Indian town of Kaskaskia, near the present site of Utica. The first permanent European settlement, founded (1699) by French priests of the Seminary of Foreign Missions, was at Cahokia. The territory was ceded by France to Britain in 1763. In 1779, during the Revolutionary War, the Commonwealth of Virginia set up the "County of Illinois." The area passed to the Northwest Territory in 1787. The first county, St. Clair, was established in 1790. Illinois became a territory in 1809 and entered the Union as a state in 1818.@Early landmarks in the state's history included the growing migration of eastern settlers following the opening (1825) of the Erie Canal; the Black Hawk War (1832), which virtually ended Indian troubles in the area; and the "Lincoln" years (1831-60), during which Abraham Lincoln rose from New Salem laborer to Springfield lawyer and president-elect. Lincoln's seven 1858 debates on the slavery issue with prominent Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, which were held in seven different Illinois towns, did not win him the Senate seat both men were seeking, but instead won him the national attention that led to his becoming the nation's Civil War President.@Illinois made great economic advances after the Civil War, despite such setbacks as the Chicago fire (October 1871) and a number of serious labor disputes, particularly the Haymarket Square Riot (1886) and the Pullman strike (1894).@Industry boomed during World War II, which also served to put the state into the vanguard of the Atomic Age: in 1942, at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi and other scientists set off the world's first controlled atomic reaction.
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Indiana
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The first inhabitants of the Indiana region were the prehistoric Mound Builders, followed by a number of Indian tribes, chiefly the Miamis. Many of the Indians came into the area from the east after losing their land to the white settlers. The first European of record to visit the region was Robert Cavelier, Sieur De La Salle, who made two explorations (1679, 1681) and paved the way for French fur-trading posts (in the 1720s) and the first European permanent settlement at Vincennes (fortified 1732). The English sharply challenged French control, however, and by the 1763 Treaty of Paris they gained dominance in the area; in 1774 the British government attached the territory to the province of Quebec.@During the American Revolution, George Rogers Clark and a small army financed by Virginia Governor Patrick Henry captured (1778) Vincennes from the British, lost it, and then in the following year recaptured it. Virginia relinquished (1784) its claim to the Northwest Territory, of which Indiana was the south central part; three years later, the Northwest Ordinance provided for the territory's government, the permanent exclusion of slavery, and basic individual rights. Indiana Territory was created as an entity separate from Ohio in 1800 and initially included the present states of Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, as well as parts of Michigan and Minnesota. After Michigan and Illinois became separate territories (1805, 1809), Indiana had almost the same boundaries as it has today. (The present boundaries were finally established when statehood was attained, in 1816.)@Indian troubles in the area were serious and persistent during the whole early period of white settlement. Anthony Wayne's victory at Fallen Timbers in Ohio (1794) brought peace, but it was short-lived. Governor William Henry Harrison, who played a primary role in Indiana's early development, purchased (1809) for the Federal Government nearly 3 million acres of Indian lands in southern Indiana; this outraged the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who led several tribes on the warpath. Troops led by Harrison won (1811) the Battle of Tippecanoe (near present-day Lafayette) and, during the War of 1812, defeated combined Indian and British forces in the Battle of the Thames, at Moraviantown, Ontario. Thus was British influence in the region ended, and the Indian threat virtually broken.@Indiana's famous "Hoosier" personality was forged in the first half of the 19th century, and its hallmarks were rustic simplicity, self-sufficient isolation, and an almost reflexive conservatism. Attempts were made, most notably at New Harmony (1814), to reorganize society fundamentally along idealistic lines; although the experiments failed, they were the basis for the eventual development in the state of enlightened social and legal institutions and practices. The Hoosier spirit has been immortalized by such authors as Edward Eggleston, James Whitcomb Riley, Booth Tarkington, and George Ade, as well as songwriter Paul Dresser ("On the Banks of the Wabash") and artist John T. McCutcheon, whose cartoon "Injun Summer" has become a classic of its kind. And although his themes were more universal, novelist Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy) was also a Hoosier, and the brother of Paul Dresser.@Internal strife, led by the pro-slavery Knights of the Golden Circle, marked the Civil War period in Indiana, which, however, largely supported the Union cause. Except for occasional raids, the state saw little action.@Indiana's first public port opened in 1970 on Lake Michigan near Portage after a prolonged battle between proponents of industrial expansion and environmentalists over destruction of the unique dunelands between Gary and Michigan City. A compromise produced the Dunes National Lakeshore.@In 1980, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the boundary between Indiana and Kentucky was the high-water mark of the Ohio River as it was in 1792--not, as Kentucky claimed, the contemporary high-water mark. The ruling made it impossible for Kentucky to sue to stop construction of a nuclear power plant at Marble Hill, Indiana, but Kentucky gained jurisdiction over some land on the Indiana side of the river.
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Iowa
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A civilization of Mound Builders--sedentary farmers who lived in permanent villages--predated the Indians in Iowa; the Effigy Mounds National Monument contains numerous examples of their building in bird, animal, and serpentine forms. The first Europeans to visit the region were Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet (1673); almost a century later (1788), the Indians allowed Julien Dubuque, a French-Canadian, to mine lead in the area of the city named for him. The United States obtained control of the state under the Louisiana Purchase (1803). Formation of Iowa Territory dates from 1838.@There was much fighting between white settlers and Indians of the area. A rich strip of land 50 miles wide along the Mississippi was won from the Sauk and Fox in 1832, after Black Hawk and his braves were defeated in battle. Other areas were taken from the Indians in 1836 and 1837. The Sioux ceded their claims in 1851, although an outlaw band of their numbers six years later killed 33 settlers in the Spirit Lake Massacre.@When Iowa became (1846) a state, its capital was at Iowa City; the more centrally located Des Moines became the capital in 1857. It was at this time, too, that the state's present boundaries were drawn up.@Iowa was strongly anti-slavery during the antebellum period and was a center for abolitionist activity. The state was staunchly pro-Union during the Civil War and provided a large number of troops for the Union cause.@From the beginning, the character of Iowa has been a paradoxical amalgam of free-thinking liberalism and close-to-the-vest conservatism. Education has long had a high priority in the state, resulting in the nation's lowest illiteracy rate. Iowa has 3 state-supported universities, over 30 private colleges and approximately 10 private junior colleges. In 1965 a system of 15 area community colleges and vocational-technical schools was established.
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Kansas
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A number of Indian tribes--including the Kansa, Wichita, Pawnee, and Comanche--were living in the Kansas region before the coming (1541) of the first European, Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez De Coronado; he and his men were seeking the gold of a land called Quivira and, finding none, departed without establishing settlements. La Salle's far-reaching land claims (1682) on behalf of France included the Kansas region but, although French fur traders dealt with area Indians in the years immediately following, the Indians retained actual possession of the land. France yielded its claim to West Louisiana (including Kansas) to Spain in 1763, and Spain retroceded it to France (1800), which three years later sold it in the Louisiana Purchase to the United States.@Lewis and Clark, Zebulon M. Pike, and Major Stephen H. Long made (1803-19) the first serious explorations of the area, but their reports were incomplete and such as to discourage immediate American settlement. Erroneously considered a part of the "Great American Desert," the Kansas region was primarily used (1825-42) as a resettlement area for uprooted Indian tribes.@With the establishment of the Santa Fe Trail (1821), which cut across the region diagonally from northeast to southwest, and the Oregon Trail (c. 1830), which traversed part of the northeastern region, the first permanent non-Indian settlements (Fort Leavenworth-1827, Fort Scott-1842, and Fort Riley-1853) were founded as outposts to protect travelers against Indian raids.@The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), repealing the slavery-prohibiting Missouri Compromise of 1821 in favor of "squatter sovereignty," thrust Kansas into a bloody tug-of-war between pro-slavery and antislavery forces who rushed into the territory and fought savagely for political control. This was the era of "Bleeding Kansas," which saw the free-state "Jayhawkers" (including famed abolitionist John Brown) pitted against the advocates of slavery; the Jayhawkers ultimately won out and, in 1861 Kansas entered the Union as a free state.@In the fall of 1979, a controversial Federal court order requiring the Wichita public schools to reassign thousands of pupils in order to improve racial balance was implemented with no serous incidents. However, a violent racial confrontation between blacks and the Wichita police, unrelated to the school reassignment order, took place on April 22, 1980.
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Kentucky
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Kentucky, renowned for the quality of its tobacco, whiskey, and racehorses, was the first state west of the Alleghenies to be settled by pioneers. A state of sometimes bizarre contrasts, Kentucky has the nation's gold reserves (at Fort Knox) and many fine farms and estates, yet much of its land has been devastated by reckless lumbering and strip-mining practices, and in some eastern areas chronic unemployment prevails. Two Kentuckians, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, were the opposing presidents in the Civil War.@Indians are thought to have lived in the forests of what is now western Kentucky as long as 15,000 years ago. Although other Europeans visited the region during the latter part of the 17th century, the first serious exploration of record was conducted (1750) by Dr. Thomas Walker, who passed through, and named, Cumberland Gap. About this time, a number of Indian tribes--including the Cherokee, Iroquois, and Shawnee--who were using the region as hunting grounds strongly resisted the advance of the white man. Daniel Boone explored eastern Kentucky (1767) and later spent two years in the Bluegrass Region. In 1773 he led a group of settlers into Kentucky, but Indians forced him out. James Harrod established (1774) the first permanent non-Indian settlement at Harrodsburg; in the following year Daniel Boone, acting as an agent for the Transylvania Company, returned to hack out the Wilderness Road and establish Boonesboro.@Indian raids were a continuing menace until General Anthony Wayne's victory in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in Ohio (1794) virtually ended them. Kentucky was originally a county of Virginia known as Fincastle before gaining statehood in 1792. The 1795 Pinckney's Treaty with Spain and the 1803 Louisiana Purchase made travel on the Mississippi more secure and aided development.@Kentucky's growth has been marked by conflict and violence. Kentuckians fought hard against the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), vigorously supported the War of 1812 and the Mexican War (1846-48), and, although neutral in the Civil War, supplied each side with thousands of troops. The slavery issue, a particularly contentious one for a slaveholding state containing many abolitionists, was officially resolved in 1865 with the adoption of the 13th Constitutional Amendment. Lesser conflicts included the Hatfield-McCoy wrangle (1882-96), troubles surrounding the assassination of Democratic gubernatorial candidate William Goebel (1900), the so-called Black Patch War (1904-09) between tobacco farmers and buyers, and frequent strife between mine owners and the United Mine Workers.@In response to the energy crisis forced in the early 1970s by the oil shortage and rising prices, coal mines were reopened, resulting in a drop in the state's unemployment. After two methane gas explosions which claimed 26 lives in 1976, a mine safety bill was passed.
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Louisiana
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Indians are thought to have lived in the northern part of the Louisiana region over 3,000 years ago.  Spanish explorer Cabeza De Vaca may have visited the area about 1530, and Hernando De Soto did so (1540-42).Approximately 12,000 Indians were then living in the region.@In 1682 Robert Cavelier, Sieur De La Salle, reached the mouth of the Mississippi and claimed all the land drained by it and its tributaries for King Louis XIV of France.@Permanent French settlement of the Louisiana region began (1699) with its founding as a royal colony and the establishment of a community near present-day Biloxi, Mississippi.  In 1717 the area was granted to a company headed by John Law, who initially centered his development in the region that is now Arkansas, but then moved south.  New Orleans was founded in 1718 and four years later became the capital.  Law's venture spurred immigration, but eventually failed.@French control of the region gave way (1762) to Spanish; France regained possession in 1800.  Three years later, Napoleon Bonaparte, seeking funds to support his European military activities, sold the land to the United States, as part of the vast Louisiana Purchase.  In 1804 the territory was divided at the state's present northern border:  the northern portion, now made up of other states, was at first called the District of Louisiana, then the Territory of Louisiana, and later Missouri Territory; the southern portion, originally the Territory of Orleans, became the present state of Louisiana.  The period between 1760 and 1790 was marked by an influx of French-speaking Acadians, or Cajuns, from what is now Nova Scotia, who settled mainly in the southern region.@In the early 19th century, the natives of Louisiana were a heterogeneous mixture of French, Spanish, Islenos from the Canary Islands, and Germans.  Although the Louisianians generally did not welcome the coming of the Americans, they did unite behind Andrew Jackson to defeat (1815) the British in the Battle of New Orleans at the end of the War of 1812.  The state, which entered the Union in 1812, was enlarged by the settlement of the West Florida Controversy, which had stemmed from conflicting Spanish and American land claims involving portions of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819 gave control of the disputed regions to the United States.@Early statehood was marked by the advent of the Mississippi steamboat trade and its attendant prosperity, and by the rise of plantation agriculture.  The Civil War and the Reconstruction period brought considerable hardship and chaos.  White rule was ultimately reestablished and farm tenancy and sharecropping replaced the plantation system.  The discovery of oil (1901) and natural gas (1916) greatly aided the state's economic recovery.@The 1927 Mississippi flood, which forced 300,000 people from their homes, remains the worst on record.  But the 1973 high water flooded nearly four million acres of Louisiana for months before the crisis ebbed away into the Gulf.  Enormous damage was averted by the levee system.@Huey P. Long, elected governor in 1927 and assassinated in 1935, remains the state's most renowned political figure.  His term as governor launched a political dynasty that continued even after he was killed.  As governor and later (1930) as U.S. senator, Long was an advocate of a "Share the Wealth" program that challenged powerful Louisiana oil interests.  He was responsible for much material progress but also was blamed for considerable political corruption.  His brother Earl served three terms as governor, and his son Russell was a United States senator.@In 1980 David C. Treen was inaugurated as Louisiana's first Republican governor in 103 years.
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Maine
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Maine may have been sighted by Norse explorer Leif Ericson as early as A.D. 1000, and English-employed Italian sea captain John Cabot is considered to have been the first European to reach the area, in 1498. Giovanni da Verrazano sailed along the coast in 1524. Thousands of Abnaki and Etchemin Indians were living there at the time. They peaceably coexisted with the earliest settlers but occasionally joined together to fight off raiding Iroquois. The legendary city of Norumbega, thought to have contained vast riches, drew adventurers up the Penobscot River, upon which the city was said to have been located. The Abnaki were greatly reduced in number by a smallpox epidemic which broke out at the time of the first English settlements. The French established a settlement on the St. Croix River in 1604, but the post was abandoned.@Maine lands were granted (1622) by the Council for New England (successor to the Plymouth Company) to two wealthy Englishmen, Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason. Gorgeana (now York) became (1641) the first chartered English city in the New World. After Gorges' death (1647), Maine was largely neglected. Its settlers came under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, which later bought (1677) the proprietary rights of Gorges' heirs for about $6,000. French efforts to control the region ended with the Treaty of Paris (1763), terminating the French and Indian Wars that had begun in 1689. Many coastal towns suffered French and Indian attacks during the long conflict.@Revolt against England was in the air in the 1760s because of taxes and restrictions. In 1774, Maine men followed Boston's example of a year earlier and burned a supply of British tea (York Tea Party). The first naval encounter of the American Revolution took place (June 1775) off Machias, as patriots captured the British ship Margaretta. Maine was the scene of a disastrous attempt to capture the British garrison at Castine on the Penobscot River in 1779. The eastern part of the state passed under British control during the War of 1812.@Maine stayed a part of Massachusetts until 1820, when it was admitted to the Union as a free state under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, thus balancing Missouri's admission as a slave state. A long-simmering boundary dispute with New Brunswick was settled by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842), which ended the bloodless Aroostook War.@Maine was the first state to outlaw (1851) alcohol, which remained illegal until 1934.
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Maryland
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Maryland has been called "America in Miniature" because, although small in area, it is uncommonly diverse and rich in history. Hills, valleys, rolling plains, swamps, and plateaus are all found there, and contrasting lifestyles abound: from tobacco farmers in the southern part of the state to the missile makers of the highly industrialized Baltimore area, where more than half of the state's population lives. It was from Maryland that Washington, D.C. received (1791) part of its land (the rest was ceded by Virginia); when the capital was threatened by Confederate forces, Maryland became the scene of much fighting, including one of the bloodiest Civil War battles of all: Antietam (1862). Earlier, during the War of 1812, Marylander Francis Scott Key, watching the British bombardment of Baltimore's Fort McHenry, was inspired to write "The Star-Spangled Banner."@Indians, mainly of the Algonquian family, were living in what is now Maryland before John Cabot, probably the region's first European explorer, sailed along the eastern coast in 1498. Virginian William Claiborne established the first settlement, a fur-trading post, on Kent Island.@The Maryland region was named for Henrietta Maria, queen consort of Charles I, who granted it (1632) to George Calvert, first Baron Baltimore. But Calvert died the same year, and his son Cecilius, second Baron Baltimore, was given the grant. He soon began developing the colony as both an income source and a religious haven for persecuted fellow Catholics. The Act of Toleration (1649) was passed in behalf of the Catholics, but when the Puritans gained control of the area they repealed this instrument (1654). A short civil war followed (1655), from which the Puritans emerged victors. In 1657 a compromise briefly restored the proprietorship to Lord Baltimore.@The English government eventually (1691) made Maryland a royal province. Commercial development proceeded rapidly in the next century, particularly in the Baltimore area. Indian troubles were infrequent and comparatively mild. Boundary quarrels with Pennsylvania were settled by the drawing of the Mason-Dixon Line (1767). Marylanders staged (1774) a Boston-style "tea party" in Annapolis, protesting British rule, and fought so well in the American Revolution that George Washington nicknamed Maryland "The Old Line State," in honor of its dependable "troops of the line." The state, which entered the Union in 1788, prospered early, thanks largely to the famous Baltimore clipper ships and the opening (1830) of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, first in the hemisphere to carry both passengers and freight.@During the Civil War, Maryland was a sharply divided slave state that remained loyal to the Union under great pressure; the state's inherited racial problems are compounded by such factors as inadequate urban housing and public apathy.@In 1975 Maryland's Governor Mandel and five associates were indicted by a Federal grand jury on charges of mail fraud and "racketeering" activity. The trial ended abruptly in 1976 with two separate cases of tampering. A second trial held in 1977 resulted in conviction, and Mandel was sentenced to four years in prison. The sentence was voided when the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals set aside his conviction on technical grounds on January 11, 1979, but, following a review, it was reinstated on July 20. Mandel entered prison on May 19, 1980. President Reagan commuted his sentence in 1981 and he was released on December 20. In a separate charge filed in January 1980, the state alleged that Governor and Mrs. Mandel, upon leaving the governor's mansion in 1977, had illegally removed such state property as furniture and liquor.
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Massachusetts
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Today a key New England state, Massachusetts was also one of the most important of the 13 Colonies. It was at Plymouth in 1620 that the Pilgrims landed. And the Boston Massacre (1770) and Tea Party (1773) were major, irreversible steps on the road to the American War of Independence, which began at Lexington and Concord in 1775. Statehood dates from 1788.@Norsemen including Leif Ericson may have visited the region about A.D. 1000, but this remains more conjecture than fact. In 1602 English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold landed on Cuttyhunk Island in the Elizabeth chain and gave Cape Cod its name, and Captain John Smith explored the coast in 1614. Oddly enough, the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth six years later, after a brief stop at what is now Provincetown, was purely accidental; the Mayflower's destination was a point south of the Hudson River, but a severe storm diverted the ship north. Because this area was beyond the bounds of the sponsoring company in London, a provisional instrument of government called the "Mayflower Compact" was drawn up. Designed to serve until more permanent institutions could be established, this covenant of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as the settlement was called, formed the foundation of American democracy. But it was not originally a very democratic democracy, because while the Puritans insisted on religious freedom for themselves, they denied it to others, and some they banished from the colony. Roger Williams and the Reverend Thomas Hooker were exiled in 1636, and settled in Rhode Island and Connecticut respectively. Puritan oppression climaxed with the Salem witch trials at the end of the seventeenth century; about 20 persons accused of witchcraft were put to death.@Indian troubles began with an engagement with the Pequot Indians in 1637. In 1675-76, settlers and Wampanoag Indians, led by Metacom, who was known as King Philip, battled in "King Philip's War," which the colonists won at great expense. At various times from 1689 to 1763, the colonists fought against the French and their Indian allies, and ultimately prevailed. Soon after, they began resisting the royal tax laws, setting the stage for general revolt. In 1775 General George Washington arrived in Cambridge to assume command of the Continental Army. A year later, he routed the redcoats from Boston in the war's first major American victory. Then the scene of battle shifted to New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.@The American Revolution was followed in Massachusetts by hard times. There came a business depression, and friction between the legislature and farmers, many of whom suffered foreclosures for debts and taxes; an insurrection (1786-87) led by former army captain Daniel Shays became known as Shays' Rebellion. But prosperity gradually returned, only to fade away again as Jefferson's 1807 Embargo Act, intended to keep the country from involvement in European wars, seriously hurt the state's sea-oriented economy. As it happened, the precaution was a failure: war came anyway in 1812, and Massachusetts turned to manufacturing for its principal livelihood.@Over the years, steady influxes of immigrants provided a plentiful source of labor, and workers were often exploited. Labor unions fought hard for recognition, and there were strikes, 																						occasionally marked by violence as in the 1912 textile strike at Lawrence. Governor Calvin Coolidge gained national prominence when he broke a policemen's strike in Boston in 1919.
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Michigan
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Several Indian tribes were living in the Michigan region when the first European, Etienne Brule of France, arrived (1618). Other Frenchmen, including Marquette, Joliet, and La Salle, followed, and the first permanent settlement was established (1668) at Sault Sainte Marie. By 1700 there were French missions, fur-trading posts, and forts on both peninsulas; Fort Pontchartrain (founded 1701) was to become the city of Detroit. But the French were more interested in the lucrative pelt trade than in extensive development of the territory; while Mackinac Island became a busy trading center, most of the rest of the region remained sparsely settled and vulnerable to attack by the British, who gained possession in 1763. The Indians in the area, who had lived in peace with the French, detested the British and tried to drive them out, but eventually they joined with them to fight the Americans in the American Revolution and in the War of 1812.@Michigan, initially part of the Northwest Territory and then of Indiana Territory, was made a separate territory in 1805, with Detroit as its capital (succeeded by Lansing in 1847). Statehood was delayed by a boundary dispute with Ohio and Southern opposition to forming another free state. Compromises broke the impasse, as Michigan's admission (1837) was offset by that of slave state Arkansas, while Ohio was given the disputed land in return for awarding to Michigan the Upper Peninsula, which had been a part of the Territory of Wisconsin.@Michigan's development as a state was rapid, and a number of important roads, rail lines, and canals were soon built--including the vital Soo Ship Canal at Sault Sainte Marie (completed 1855), which allows ships to travel between Lakes Huron and Superior; these new routes spurred the state's mining industry. In the political sphere, the Republican party was founded in 1854 at Jackson, and abolitionist sentiment was strong throughout the state which contributed 100,000 troops to the Union cause during the Civil War. @The United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), now the nation's third-largest union with over 1.3 million members, got its start in the famed "Sit-Down Strikes" of the 1930s with workers refusing to leave auto plants until their fledgling union was recognized as bargaining agent. UAW international headquarters are in Detroit.
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Minnesota
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The first inhabitants of the Minnesota region are thought to date from about 20,000 years ago. Norsemen may have visited in the 14th century, but the first Europeans of record to do so were the French fur traders and missionaries, beginning with Radisson and Groseilliers (1659-61) and including La Salle, Marquette and Joliet, and Daniel Greysolon--Sieur Du Lhut, or Duluth--who claimed (1679) the region for King Louis XIV.@Principal Indian tribes in the region at the time were the Sioux in the west and south and the Ojibwa in the heavily wooded northern section; the two groups, often at war with one another, were generally friendly to the French, who built up a vast pelt-marketing empire but ultimately lost it (1763) to the British.@Serious American development began after the War of 1812, with the powerful American Fur Company leading the way. Eastern Minnesota at this time was still part of the Northwest Territory, while the western region had been acquired (1803) as part of the Louisiana Purchase. A short-lived Spanish claim to the region (dating from 1762) was never effectively enforced. The year 1819 saw the building of Fort St. Anthony (later called Fort Snelling), and in 1832 Henry R. Schoolcraft discovered the source of the Mississippi at Lake Itasca. Six years later, Pierre Parrant settled on the site of present-day St. Paul.@In 1849 the Minnesota region--which in whole or part had been successively a portion of the French, English, and Spanish empires, the Northwest Territory, and seven U.S. territories--was made a territory in its own right. A comprehensive Indian treaty (1851) and statehood (1858) both spurred settlement, which was not deterred by a brief, ill-fated Sioux uprising in 1862.@In the 1890s, the mining of the high-grade iron ore of the Mesabi Ranges became a major industry. As the rich Mesabi mines dwindled after World War II, iron companies began to mine a low-grade ore called taconite, which abounds in Minnesota, and to extract high-grade iron pellets from it. Extraction leaves useless tailings, which contain asbestos and other dangerous substances.@Tailings caused a near-crisis in the city of Silver Bay. In 1975, the Reserve Mining Company, one of Silver Bay's largest employers, was ordered by a Federal court to stop dumping tailings into Lake Superior. At first, the company claimed that it would have to go out of business, thus ruining Silver Bay's economy. Eventually, a compromise allowed the company a "reasonable time" to change. In 1980, the company opened a land dump, linked to its plant by a slurry system, and ended dumping in the lake. The case concluded in April 1982 when the Federal court accepted an agreement by Reserve Mining to pay Silver Bay, Two Harbors, Beaver Bay and Duluth $1,840,000 for filtering lake water.@Declining production in the great steel-making centers, brought on by decreased demand and foreign competition, has resulted in serious cutbacks in Mesabi iron ore mining.
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Mississippi
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Mississippi was inhabited by the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Natchez and Yazoo Indians before De Soto explored it for Spain in 1540. French explorers La Salle, Iberville and Bienville came later.@The French ceded Mississippi to the British under the treaty of Paris in 1763, but the Spanish claimed it along with West Florida in 1781. Spanish influence virtually ended in 1798 when Mississippi flew the United States flag as a territory of the new republic.@The early settlement of the state was handicapped by conflicting land claims, Indian troubles and the Yazoo Land Fraud in which Georgia, claiming the region, sold lots to speculators. Georgia finally ceded its claim to the Federal Government in 1802 and the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 insured free access to the Mississippi River. Mississippi became a state in 1817.@By the time the Civil War began, Mississippi was among the wealthiest states in the nation. Property assessments totaled $509 million in 1860. By 1880 property assessments had fallen to $110 million. Not until 1920 did assessments reach the pre-Civil War level.@Most black people were effectively disfranchised until the passage of the Federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.@Attacks on segregation brought turbulence. Two persons were killed in rioting at the University of Mississippi; NAACP leader Medgar Evers was shot to death in an ambush at his Jackson home in 1963; and three civil rights workers were killed in 1964 near Philadelphia, Miss. However, the state joined the FBI in a massive crackdown on the Ku Klux Klan group behind much of the trouble, and tensions then eased.@Massive public school desegregation came later and Mississippi experienced less trouble than Northern and Eastern states under similar orders. Mississippi experienced some campus unrest as the 1960s closed and two persons were shot to death in a riot at Jackson State College in 1970.
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Missouri
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The Mound Builders, the earliest known inhabitants of the Missouri region, predated the Osage and Missouri Indians, who were living there when the first European explorers--Frenchmen Marquette and Joliet--visited (1673). France's claim to the entire Mississippi Valley, including what is now Missouri, was based on La Salle's travels in 1682. In the following years, French fur trading posts were established along the river, and the working of the lead mines was begun. Established about 1735, Ste. Genevieve was the first permanent white settlement.@Having met defeat in the French and Indian Wars, France secretly yielded (1762) to Spain all its territory west of the Mississippi; even so, Frenchmen Laclede and Chouteau founded St. Louis two years later. Napoleon regained (1800) possession of the region for France, then sold it three years later as part of the Louisiana Purchase. A year later, in 1804, President Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark westward up the Missouri River on the famous expedition that tied the United States together as a continental nation. The area was briefly a district of the Territory of Indiana, but was made a separate territory in 1805, comprising at that time all U.S. land west of the Mississippi and north of 33 degrees north latitude and therefore including the future state of Missouri.@The question of admitting Missouri to the Union became bound up, in Congress, with the volatile slavery issue. Bitter controversy was arduously resolved by the Missouri Compromise (1820), which provided for the admission of Missouri (1821) as a slave state and Maine as a free one, while banning slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36 degrees 30 feet North. Missouri was at this time the nation's western frontier, and fur trading was still its foremost economic pursuit. The state's six northwestern counties were added by the Platte Purchase (1837). An unusual boundary dispute between Missouri and Illinois was settled early in 1970, giving Illinois the site of Old Kaskaskia, the state's original capital, now an island as a result of shifts by the Mississippi River. Illinois received Kaskaskia and Beaver islands, and Missouri, Cottonwoods and Roth islands.@The years preceding the Civil War were marked by growing prosperity in an increasingly tense political climate. The town of Independence became the starting point of the much-traveled Santa Fe and Oregon Trails, while St. Louis prospered as a thriving inland port. St. Joseph was the eastern starting point of the briefly active (1860-61) Pony Express. But bitter Missouri-Kansas border wars over the slavery issue had begun, and although Missouri voted (February 1861) not to secede from the Union, Missourians were sharply divided in their allegiances, supplying both sides with troops.
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Montana
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Arapaho, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Crow, Atsina, Bannock, Kalispel, Kutenai, and Shoshoni Indians were living in the region before the arrival of the first Europeans, who were probably fur trappers of the Hudson Bay Company or the Northwest Company. In 1805, Lewis and Clark explored the area on their journeys to and from the Pacific Coat. The American Fur Company, in 1829 and 1846, built two of Montana's earliest non-Indian settlements: Forts Union and Benton.@The major Indian wars (1867-77) included the famous 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, popularly known as "Custer's Last Stand," in which Cheyennes and Sioux killed General Custer and more than 200 of his men. But the Indians' moment of glory was something of a brief one, for in 1877, when Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce warriors surrendered to Federal troops near the Canadian border, Indian resistance in Montana virtually ended. Today, the state has some 37,000 Indians, almost all of whom live on seven reservations.@The United States obtained most of Montana as part of the Louisiana Purchase (1803). The remaining northwestern section passed into U.S. hands following the 1846 treaty with England. Montana was originally part of the Territory of Idaho, created in 1863; Montana Territory came into being in 1864. Statehood came in 1889.@Much of Montana's early history was bound up with mining, which is still a leading industry: oil, coal, copper, and sand and gravel are important products. The capital of Helena was originally a mining camp called Last Chance Gulch. The Anaconda Company, a copper mining company in Butte ("the richest hill on earth"), grew to become a giant conglomerate in its day, with railroad, journalism, banking, and other interests.@Another of Montana's major occupations, ranching, came into its own in 1866 when a cattleman by the name of Nelson Story drove his herd of a thousand longhorn from Texas to Montana, setting an example that many others soon followed. The coming of the railroad in 1883 was another impetus. But the severe winter of 1886-87 spelled disaster; thousands of cattle perished in subzero blizzards. Although the industry eventually recovered, for a long time profit margins were narrow. Ranching is economically important: the state has over three times as many cattle (including calves) and almost as many sheep as it has people.@In May 1980, volcanic ash from the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington fell thickly in six counties in western Montana. Streets became impassable, and schools and businesses were closed.
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Nebraska
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Judging by stone tool and weapon remnants that have been unearthed, the first inhabitants of Nebraska arrived between 10,000 and 25,000 years ago. In the early 1700s, Spanish and French explorers found, among others, the Omaha and Oto Indians living peacefully along the region's rivers. The buffalo-hunting Pawnee, however, battled other tribes--especially the Sioux--but were generally friendly to whites. The Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne Indians constituted the white settlers' principal resistance, waging a losing battle to keep their hunting grounds.@The United States gained possession of the area with the Louisiana Purchase (1803). Pioneers going west along the Oregon Trail, which followed the Platte Valley, stimulated trading and settlement; many early Nebraskans earned a living supplying food, lodging, and fresh mounts. Scotts Bluff National Monument and Chimney Rock National Historic Site are landmarks along the Trail. Statehood came in 1867.@Early times were very hard for settlers. There was bitter, protracted conflict between them and the cattlemen, who wanted the land for their herds. (This struggle was not fully resolved until the 1904 Kinkaid Act gave over the last of the state's open range land to the homesteaders.) And there were harsh blows from nature: blizzards, locust infestations, and droughts. Homestead National Monument near Beatrice commemorates the pioneer spirit of the 19th-century farmers who settled the Great Plains region.@World War I brought prosperity, but hard times returned: depression and drought hit the state simultaneously. Overextended farmers faced foreclosure. Violence was averted by the enactment of a series of farm mortgage moratorium acts; New Deal legislation also helped. In 1937, the Nebraska legislature was reorganized into a "one house" (unicameral) system, under which state senators are elected on a nonpartisan basis.@Border disputes with Iowa have plagued Nebraska ever since the Missouri River was made the dividing line (1867). Through the years, the river's shifting has transferred parcels of land from one state to the other.
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Nevada
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Indians are thought to have inhabited the Nevada region between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. In more recent times, the Shoshoni, Washo, Northern Paiute, and other tribes lived there.@In 1775 a Spanish missionary named Francisco Garces passed through what is now Nevada on his way to the West Coast. In the early 1800s, trappers searched the area for new fur sources. John C. Fremont and Kit Carson explored (1843-45) the Great Basin and Sierra Nevada.@The United States obtained (1848) the region, following the Mexican War, and the first permanent settlement (1851) was a Mormon trading post called Mormon Station (now Genoa). Amid the conflicting pressures of the Civil War, Nevada was made a state (1864), although the territory did not meet the population requirement.@In 1859 the discovery of the Comstock (silver and gold) Lode, near what became Virginia City, brought an influx of both settlers and adventurers. During the next 20 years, the lode yielded more than $300 million of mineral wealth which helped the Union to win the Civil War and was the basis of many American fortunes. Today Nevada is the nation's leading producer of barite and mercury.@The Federal Government owns 87% of the land in Nevada. The first Federal irrigation project anywhere was the Newlands Irrigation Project, completed in 1907, which helped west central Nevada's agriculture. Another Federal irrigation project--the Southern Nevada Project--was completed in 1971. In the early 1950s, the Federal Government began to test nuclear devices on Federal land in the Nevada desert.@As the 1970s drew to a close, Nevadans became increasingly annoyed by the limitation which Federal ownership of so much land was putting on agriculture, commercial, and residential growth. Moreover, in 1979, reports that nuclear testing may have caused a high rate of cancer in areas near the test site led to a storm of protest. In July 1979, the Nevada legislature declared the state to be owner of 49,000,000 acres of Federal land--apparently in order to facilitate judicial review of Federal policies. Three months later, officials of Nevada and of other Western states met at Reno to discuss common problems.
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New Hampshire
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About 5,000 Indians were living in the New Hampshire region before the Europeans came. The various tribes coexisted peacefully but often banded together to fight the Iroquois. The first explorers in the area are thought to have been Captain Martin Pring (1603), Samuel De Champlain (1605), and Captain John Smith (1614). Permanent settlement began in 1623, when David Thomson established Little Harbour, now in the town of Rye. Captain John Mason, who had a hand in the founding (1630) of Portsmouth, gave New Hampshire its name. Though the state was once part of Massachusetts, it became a separate royal colony in 1679; the two states had the same governor from 1699 to 1741. New Hampshire established an independent government (1776), one designed to be only temporary but which in fact operated until 1784, when the present constitution was adopted. New Hampshire was the ninth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution (1788), and the one that made that document legal.@Complicated boundary disputes with all its neighbors have marked New Hampshire's history. Royal orders eventually defined the Massachusetts (17411 and New York (1764) boundaries, while the state's northern border was set by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842), which established the international line between the United States and Canada. But not until a 1934 U.S. Supreme Court ruling was the Vermont boundary decided. A border dispute with Maine over 2,400 acres of coastal waters that began in 1974 was resolved in 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court awarded the bulk of the disputed territory to Maine.@New Hampshire today functions as an exceptionally democratic entity, with the state's 222 towns (nicknamed "little republics") using the traditional town meeting to provide a forum for all voters. The state, which for decades had a sometimes disputed reputation as a political bellwether, has been relieved of its position as the first to hold a presidential primary by Puerto Rico, which in 1980 held its first such election.@Nuclear power remains controversial in New Hampshire. In 1976 construction began on a nuclear power plant in the environmentally sensitive seacoast area at Seabrook. Anti-nuclear power forces from all over New England focused on the issue, and in May 1977, a mass occupation of the construction site resulted in the arrest of 1,414 demonstrators by authorities. In October 1979 and again in May 1980, protestors renewed attempts to occupy the site, but their repeated assaults were repelled by state troopers and National Guardsmen armed with nightsticks and high-pressure water hoses. Some injuries were reported.
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New Jersey
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New Jersey's importance is disproportionate to its modest size. Strategically located, amid many rich markets, the state has extraordinary transportation facilities and a correspondingly large volume of interstate traffic: railway trackage, highways, tunnels, and bridges abound. The nation's most densely populated state, it is a manufacturing giant with limited but valuable farming and fishing industries.@Before the coming of the Europeans, the region was inhabited by Lenni-Lenape (later called Delaware) Indians of the Algonquian group. The area's early colonial history is bound up with that of New York (then New Netherland), of which it was a part. With the passing of power from Dutch to English hands (1664), New Jersey began to emerge as a more distinct entity. Proprietorship of lands between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers was granted by James II to Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, who then offered territory to settlers in return for sworn allegiance to the king and payment of quitrent (fixed rent). Berkeley eventually sold (1676) his land share to a group of Quakers, who then agreed with Carteret to divide the region into East and West Jersey, the line running southeastward from the Delaware River near the Water Gap to the Atlantic Ocean near Little Egg Harbor. Carteret owned East Jersey--about three-eighths of the total area--until his death (1680), while West Jersey became the nation's first Quaker settlement. Control of both Jerseys eventually reverted to England which governed it jointly with New York from 1702 to 1738, when Lewis Morris was made governor of New Jersey alone.@The region remained turbulent for many years. A decade of virtual lawlessness began in 1745, ended only by the advent of the French and Indian War of the mid-1750s, which served to unify New Jerseyans against a common enemy. Because of its location between New York City and Philadelphia, New Jersey was the scene of many important battles of the American Revolution. In 1783 Princeton served briefly as the nation's capital. Statehood dates from 1787.@After the Revolution, many scientific breakthroughs took place in the state, and the country's first model factory town was founded in 1791 at the site of the present Paterson, under the auspices of Alexander Hamilton's Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures. (A few years later, Hamilton was killed in Weehawken in a notorious duel with Aaron Burr.)@The state was sharply divided by the Civil War. Most New Jerseyans accepted the ending of slavery, but many businessmen were against the war because of the profitable Southern market. When peace came, the state's population and economy continued their rapid growth, interrupted by the Panic of 1873. Powerful special-interest groups grasped undue political control, bringing a counterwave of reform under Governor Woodrow Wilson, who was elected in 1910. But after Wilson left in 1913 to become president, much of the impetus toward reform in the state withered away.@In 1976 New Jersey passed a constitutional amendment authorizing the establishment of gambling casinos in Atlantic City as a means of rejuvenating the ailing resort and rebuilding the tourist industry in general. The first casino opened in May 1978 and has proved successful. Since then additional casinos have opened and others are being constructed. Though the casinos have attracted thousands of new visitors to the resort, there have been complaints that organized crime figures have penetrated the city.
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New Mexico
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New Mexico is a land of great contrast. It is rich in history yet in the forefront of the Atomic Era--the world's first A-bomb, produced at Los Alamos, was exploded (1945) at Trinity Site near Alamogordo. Three major cultures intermingle--Spanish, Indian, and Anglo-American--and within each is a variety of types and subcultures.@Indians are thought to have lived in this region between 20,000 and 25,000 years ago. In 1980, a total of 104,000 Indians--mainly Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo--were to be found in New Mexico, living much as their ancestors had, despite a few modern trappings. Within the state is the country's largest Indian reservation (more than 16 million acres), which is inhabited by Navajos. At Gallup each August is held the colorful Inter-tribal Indian Ceremonial.@Francisco Vasquez De Coronado, in search of the fabled "Seven Cities of Cibola," explored (1540-42) the region that became New Mexico, but found no treasure. In 1598 the first Spanish colony was established at the Pueblo of San Juan De Los Caballeros. Santa Fe was founded in 1610 and made provincial capital. Roman Catholic missionaries set up schools in the region. Subjected to harsh treatment and forbidden to worship their gods, the Pueblo Indians revolted in 1680; Spain regained control in 1692. Mexico governed from 1821 until the United States took possession via the 1848 Mexican treaty and the 1853 Gadsden Purchase. Vital to early-day commerce, the Santa Fe Trail between New Mexico and Missouri was opened in 1821; today, east of Santa Fe, the Trail is still in use as U.S. 85.@The surrender (1886) of Geronimo terminated the Apache Wars and marked the virtual end of area Indian troubles. During the 1880s, the mining and ranching industries boomed. Ne Mexico entered the Union in 1912.@The increased demand for domestic energy and the pattern of growth it shares with other states of the sunbelt have brought problems as well as prosperity. School systems are overcrowded and there is a housing shortage in some places. Urban sprawl is spreading around Grants, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, intensifying the contrast between the relatively low economic level of the rural areas and the prosperity of some cities and mining communities. As a result, political power, which has been in the hands of agricultural interests (ranching is still the state's chief industry), is shifting to represent newcomers from out of state and the growing Mexican-American population.@In February 1980 a prison revolt at the New Mexico state penitentiary left more than 30 inmates dead and about 90 prisoners and guards injured. During the 36-hour siege, convicts turned on one another, torturing and killing suspected informers. The worst U.S. prison riot since that at Attica, New York, nine years before, it focused national attention on the explosive atmosphere in many of the nation's prisons.
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New York
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New York is a state of superlatives, ideally located and richly endowed. In many respects, it is a nerve center of the nation, a major marketplace, and a national leader in manufacturing, finance, fashion, art, and communications. Second to California in population, New York is the region that George Washington foresaw as a "seat of empire"--hence its nickname, the Empire State. New York City, the nation's largest city, was the first U.S. capital (1789-90), and Washington was first inaugurated (1789) there.@Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazano is thought to have discovered New York by entering New York Bay in 1524. In 1609 Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the employ of the Dutch, sailed up the river bearing his name and the same year Samuel De Champlain discovered what is now Lake Champlain. The Dutch West India Company began (1624) settlement of the region, then called New Netherland, at Fort Orange (now Albany). Soon after, Governor Peter Minuit is said to have bought Manhattan Island from the Indians for trinkets worth about $24.@Indian troubles, misgovernment, and other woes hindered the colony's development. As a countermeasure, the Dutch began (1629) the "patroon" (landholder's) system that tended to concentrate economic and governmental power in the hands of a few. Squabbling broke out among the patroons, other settlers, and the home company, and Minuit was recalled (1631) for granting the patroons undue privileges. He then entered the service of Sweden; its colony (New Sweden), along the Delaware River south of Dutch interests, was viewed by the Dutch as a territorial threat. Minuit's successors--Wouter Van Twiller and Willem Kieft--were failures, but Peter Stuyvesant for a time did better. In 1655 he captured New Sweden for the Dutch and reorganized New Amsterdam (now New York City). Stuyvesant was a strict Calvinist whose tactics often provoked resentment.@Meanwhile, English penetration of Long Island and the southeastern part of what is now the mainland state was steadily progressing. In the north and west of the state, Canadian French allied themselves with the Huron Indians, but met with hostility from the Iroquois. Comprised of five tribes confederated about 1570, the Iroquois greatly influenced the struggle for control of the region between France and England that ensued after the Dutch surrender (1664) of the land to the British. New Netherland thus became the colonies New York and New Jersey, granted by King Charles II to his brother, the Duke of York (later James II). The Dutch recaptured New York in 1673, but had to yield it again a year later.@The period was marked by the development of English governmental institutions, amid a welter of conflicts and confrontations. A popular legislative assembly was formed in 1683, after years of struggle by townspeople wanting a meaningful voice in their government; but two years later the assembly was dissolved by James II. In 1686 the king sought to combine New York, New Jersey, and the New England colonies under the vice-regal authority of governor general Edmund Andros, but Andros was very unpopular, and when the king was dethroned in England in 1688, Andros was forced out of power by irate citizens. New York City merchant Jacob Leisler, hoping to foster more democratic government, then seized control, but was soon replaced by a royal governor and executed.@New York played a major role in the French and Indian Wars (1689-1763) in which France was helped by Algonquian Indians, while the Iroquois aided the English. The region also saw much action in the American Revolution and the War of 1812. (Statehood dates from 1788.) With the opening of the Erie Canal (1825), which linked the Hudson and the Great Lakes, the state entered an era of great prosperity, reinforced a few years later by the massive industrial demands of the Civil War. The state contributed more men (nearly 500,000), supplies, and money to the Union cause than any other.@The postwar period was marked by continued industrialization, large-scale immigration, and a corrupt political climate that often led to ineffective reform pressures: it was the notorious era of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. The most successful reform efforts were those made between World Wars I and II.@In 1978, residents of the Love Canal area in Niagara Falls learned they were living on top of a chemical time-bomb. Leakage from toxic wastes dumped 30 years before by the Hooker Chemical Corp., forced 239 families to evacuate the area. In May 1980, the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that 30 percent of Love Canal residents suffered from chromosome damage linked to higher incidences of miscarriages, birth defects and cancer. However, in 1981 New York State health officials reported that cancer rates were no higher among Love Canal residents than among other Niagara Falls residents. A federal report in 1982 stated that that area was again habitable following cleanup.
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North Carolina
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One of the 13 Colonies and the Southeast's foremost industrial state, North Carolina presents an unusual amalgam of tradition and progress. The first sustained airplane flight, by Orville and Wilbur Wright, took place (1903) near Kitty Hawk. Today, the state boasts of its famous "Research Triangle" at the University of North Carolina, Duke University, and North Carolina State University; the schools use their pooled resources to assist industry.@Much of North Carolina's early history is shared with South Carolina, of which it was a part until 1712. Highlights of this period include Sir Walter Raleigh's unsuccessful attempts (1585, 1587) to establish a colony on Roanoke Island. Although it lasted only about a year, Raleigh's initial settlement was the first English colony in the New World; when all members of his second settlement (1587-?) disappeared, it came to be called the "Lost Colony"; among the missing was Virginia Dare, first child of English parentage born in America.@Among the region's problems were Culpeper's Rebellion (1677), involving colonists angered by the English Navigation Acts; and the Cary Rebellion (1708), brought about by Quakers and other dissenters who refused to support the established Anglican church. In 1705, French Huguenots from Virginia established North Carolina's first permanent settlement at Bath.@Growth in the Carolinas was slow. Swamps and dense forests made land communication difficult, and there were serious Indian troubles, especially during the Tuscarora War (1711-13). Pirates, too, were a hindrance, often menacing the colony's seabound trade; the slaying (1718) of the infamous "Blackbeard" (Edward Teach) in a battle near Ocracoke Island eased the problem. From 1712 to 1729, the proprietors appointed separate governors to administer North and South Carolina. A bitter North Carolina-Virginia boundary dispute was settled in 1728. Dissatisfied with the proprietary system, England eventually made (1729) the region a royal colony, a move that marked a period of progress in which farming and industry expanded as the population rose.@North Carolina contributed troops and materials to help England in its various colonial wars, while a persistent east-west sectionalism began to develop; this rift was caused by sharp differences in geography, politics, economics, and religion. Indian troubles were virtually ended in 1761 by a treaty with the Cherokees, but their final removal from the area did not begin until 1835. In 1768 irate back-country farmers, protesting taxes they considered excessive, organized the short-lived Regulator Movement for reform. The insurgents were eventually suppressed (1771) at Alamance by the provincial militia.@During the American Revolution, there was relatively little fighting on the state's soil, but many North Carolinians saw action elsewhere. In 1779 North Carolina annexed an area of present-day Tennessee settled by the Watauga Association, which lay immediately beyond North Carolina's present border. North Carolina administered the region until 1784, when it ceded its claim to the United States. The "Watauga" settlers then established the independent state of Franklin. Failing to gain official recognition, the new state's territory was again absorbed in 1789 by North Carolina, which later that same year ceded it once more to the Federal government; North Carolina's statehood dates from that year.@From 1815 to 1835, North Carolina languished in backwardness and apathy, and came to be called the "Rip Van Winkle State"; this period was followed until 1860 by one of progress, which saw a resurgence of political democracy and a lessening of unproductive sectionalism.@Despite the presence of considerable pro-Union and antislavery sentiment, North Carolina joined the Confederacy after the Civil War began. During the conflict, the port of Wilmington became a haven for Confederate blockade-runners. In the postwar period, Reconstruction was followed by the return of white supremacy and a suffrage amendment (1900) that again disenfranchised the Negro.@The U.S. Supreme Court, in an historic ruling in the spring of 1971, upheld U.S. District Judge James B. McMillan's ruling that busing was a legitimate tool to use in ending racial segregation. The decision was applied to several school districts and by the fall, few racially identifiable schools remained in the state.@A conflict between extremist groups in Greensboro resulted in the deaths of five persons in November 1979. The slayings occurred at an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally sponsored by the Workers' Viewpoint Organization (WVO), a left-wing group also known as the Communist Workers party, U.S.A. As the protest rally began in a black area of Greensboro, Klansmen and American Nazi party members appeared and taunted the demonstrators. The two groups fought with each other and exchanged gunfire resulting in the deaths. Police arrested 15 Klansmen and American Nazis for allegedly killing five of the anti-Klan group; some were indicted for murder or felonious rioting in December. On November 17, 1980, a trial jury in Greensboro acquitted the six defendants of the charges.
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North Dakota
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North Dakota's pre-statehood history is shared with that of South Dakota. Various Sioux tribes inhabited the land. The first Europeans to explore the area were the Sieur De la Verendrye and sons who visited in 1738, four years before their travels in South Dakota. First settlement attempts were made (1812) at Pembina by Scottish and Irish families. After statehood (1889) separated it from its sister state, North Dakota experienced a spurt in population, growing from about 191,000 in 1890 to more than 577,000 in only 20 years. Immigrants from Norway, Germany, Russia and other parts of Europe poured into the state by the thousands.@The Nonpartisan League was founded in 1915 by farmers who advocated state involvement in the storage and processing of grain to break the power of out-of-state interests, increased funds for rural schools, and tax incentives to improve farms. The legislature which took office in 1919 was controlled by persons elected with the League's support; they enacted the League's educational and tax programs, and established a state-owned bank, a state-owned flour mill, and a state-owned grain elevator.@The $9 million Omega, the first North-American all-weather navigation system permitting any ship or aircraft with a proper receiver to determine its exact position was completed near Lamoure in 1973.
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Ohio
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A leading industrial state and the first to be carved out of the Northwest Territory, Ohio enjoys a variety of important natural resources and a strategic location near many rich markets. It is among the most populous of states, and only Virginia has produced more U.S. Presidents than Ohio, which claims eight.@Early Amerindian peoples are thought to have lived in the Ohio region between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago, followed by the Adena and Hopewell Mound Builders (c. 800 B.C.--A.D. 1300).@Algonquian and Iroquois Indians were living in the region when the first Europeans arrived. Robert Cavelier, Sieur De La Salle, passed through about 1670, providing a basis for French claims to the region that were sharply contested by the British, who claimed all the territory extending westward from their colonies. Victory in the French and Indian Wars (1689-1763) gave England the upper hand until the American Revolution. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia land claims in the area were resolved by the Northwest Ordinance (1787). A band of New Englanders led by General Rufus Putnam established (1788) the first permanent white settlement at Marietta. Early settlers were beset by serious Indian troubles that were largely ended after troops under General Anthony Wayne won (1794) the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near present-day Toledo. The Division Act of 1800 created the Indiana Territory out of the western part of the region, then still called the Northwest Territory. In 1803, Ohio entered the Union. A border dispute with the Territory of Michigan gave rise (1835) to the "Toledo War" but, before any actual fighting broke out, Congress awarded the area--about 520 square miles along Lake Erie--to Ohio. At present another land controversy between the two states--over a 200-square-mile area beneath Lake Erie that is rich in oil and natural gas--remains to be resolved. The state's southern boundary, the Ohio River, has been receding gradually north- and westward for centuries. Fortunately for Ohio, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in January 1980 that the boundary is to remain fixed at its original position regardless of the river's shifting course.@Ohio was in the forefront of events leading to the Civil War. The abolition movement began at St. Clairsville, and many Ohioans helped slaves escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad. Although there was relatively little actual fighting on its soil, Ohio contributed heavily to the Union cause. In the postwar period the state rapidly emerged as an industrial power while retaining its agricultural status. In the years just prior to the turn of the century, big business became inordinately involved in Ohio politics, causing discontent among the less well-off. Labor troubles developed that culminated in Jacob S. Coxey's march on Washington, D.C. (1894) and a voting shift toward reform candidates. More recent troubles of this nature include major strikes during the mid-1930s, 1949, and 1959.@Tourism, aided by a surge in new highway construction, has developed into a valuable revenue-producer, now bringing in over $3 billion a year. Attractions include numerous state park and recreation areas, prehistoric Indian mounds, and historic sites such as Commodore Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial at Put-in-Bay on Lake Erie, which commemorates his vital victory there during the War of 1812. Annual events include the All-American Soap Box Derby, held in Akron each summer.
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Oklahoma
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Oil-rich Oklahoma, the nation's Indian Territory in the early 19th century, has the largest Indian population of any state, more that 250,000 in the 1990 Census.@Many tribes of buffalo-hunting Indians roamed the Oklahoma region before the coming of the first European, Spanish explorer Coronado, who crossed (1541) what is today the Oklahoma panhandle. All the area except it came under U.S. sovereignty via the Louisiana Purchase (1803), and a year later that part of the purchase north of present-day Louisiana was made the District of Louisiana, governed as part of Indiana Territory. The district became in turn the Territory of Louisiana (1805) and the Missouri Territory (1812).@In 1819, Arkansas Territory, including the present state of Oklahoma, was formed from a part of Missouri Territory. A few years later, the U.S. Government designated part of the region Indian Territory and used it for the forcible resettlement of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole), who had been living in relatively close contact with white men of the southeastern states for more than 100 years. Some of these Indians pursued farming in the traditional Southern mold, even maintaining slaves. When the Civil War erupted, the Indians were caught up in it, fighting on both sides and suffering invasions from both Confederate and Union forces.@After the war, the five tribes were punished collectively for those Indians who had supported the Confederacy; the western part of the Indian Territory was taken from them, and much of it was assigned to other tribes in the country that the government wanted resettled. White encroachments, led by Kansas-bound Texas cattlemen, soon followed despite laws and Indian treaties; a number of cattle trails, including the famed Chisholm Trail, were forged across the state. The first railroad across the region (built 1870-72) brought still more white settlers. The influx was legalized when a large strip of land was opened for settlement on April 22, 1889. Some of the settlers who entered before the proper time were called "sooners," giving rise to Oklahoma's nickname, the Sooner State.@The western section of present-day Oklahoma was made Oklahoma Territory in 1890, and for a time the Oklahoma and Indian (the "twin") Territories existed side by side. The Indians wanted separate admission to the Union, as the state of Sequoyah, but in 1907 the territories were merged and admitted as a single state.
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Oregon
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Chinook, Tillamook, Clackama, and Multnomah Indians were among the Oregon Country's earliest known inhabitants. Spanish seamen, sailing from Mexico to the Philippines, are thought to have been the first Europeans to sight the Oregon coast, in the 1500s and 1600s. Captain Cook, seeking the Northwest Passage to the Atlantic, charted some of the coastline in 1778. The Columbia River was discovered in 1792, and the Lewis and Clark expedition passed through the region in 1805.@The nineteenth century was marked by the conflict of British and American claims to the area that were eventually resolved by treaty in 1846. Two years later, Oregon became a territory, which until 1853 also included present-day Washington. Statehood came in 1859. In 1860 the discovery of gold in what is now Idaho turned Portland into a vital trade center for the Pacific Northwest. Transcontinental rail service came to Oregon in 1883.@In the early part of the 20th century, a series of reform measures were enacted in what came to be known as the Oregon System; this system, designed to make government more responsive to those governed, featured a referendum amendment, a direct primary, and a recall provision. Oregon women were given the vote in 1912.@The state also has developed a broad program for improving the environment and has given its Department of Environmental Quality the power to enforce the regulations. In addition, Oregon has adopted a Scenic Waterways plan for state ownership of land along many rivers in the state as well as a law for public ownership of the ocean beaches. Oregon was a pioneer in outlawing throwaway beverage containers and fluorocarbon aerosol cans. One of the first states to abolish criminal penalties for the possession of small amounts of marijuana, Oregon in 1979 legalized the sale of marijuana for legitimate medical purposes.@The great eruption of Mount St. Helens volcano in neighboring Washington on May 18, 1980, had little effect on Oregon, but the lesser eruption of May 24 sprayed dust and ash over parts of northern Oregon, damaging crops and making roads impassable.
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Pennsylvania
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Called the "Keystone State" because of its central location among the 13 Colonies, Pennsylvania is today an important economic center and a rich repository of Americana. The first oil well in the world was drilled (1859) near Titusville. Throughout the fertile, well-fared southeast countryside can be seen the highly decorated barns of the Pennsylvania Dutch.@Pittsburgh was the home (1920) of the first radio broadcasting station, and the first electric computer was built (1945) in Philadelphia; these cities, along with Erie, provide the state with three fine ports. Philadelphia is the dominantly large city of the eastern region (as Pittsburgh is of the western).@The state's early history is shared in large part with neighboring Delaware, which it once contained. Swedes made the first permanent settlement (1643) in the Pennsylvania region at Tinicum Island in the Schuylkill River, but Swedish rule soon gave way (1655) to Dutch. The English supplanted the Dutch in 1664, as King Charles II put the region under the control of his brother James, Duke of York. In 1681, the king granted the region to Quaker William Penn, naming it after Penn's father, an admiral in the Royal Navy to whom the king was indebted. Penn's era, which lasted until his death in 1718 (except for a brief interruption during 1692-94), was an enlightened and fruitful one.@The so-called Charter of Privileges (1701) gave Pennsylvania the most liberal of colonial governments, and there shortly followed a cultural flowering as well. Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia published "The Pennsylvania Gazette" (1729-1766) and the "Poor Richard's Almanack" (1732-1757), in addition to pursuing his interests in politics and science. The nation's first magazine, "The American Magazine," or "A Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies," was established (1741) in Philadelphia. Penn's notably fair-minded dealings with the Indians, including his famous treaty, kept the region free of the usual frontier bloodshed. But Penn's successors--especially his son Thomas, who took over in 1746--lacked his vision and conciliatory gifts, and troubles with the French and Indians lasted from 1754 until the suppression of Pontiac's Rebellion in 1763.@Pennsylvania was involved at various times in boundary disputes with four other colonies: Maryland, Virginia, Connecticut, and New York. The most bitter wrangle was the one with Connecticut over the Wyoming Valley, which gave rise to the Pennamite Wars (1769-71 and 1784).  The northwestern "Erie triangle" was bought first from the Indians, and later from the Federal Government, following a 1789 agreement with New York setting the northern border at the 42nd parallel; the parcel was purchased to secure an Erie port for the colony. The establishment of the Mason-Dixon line (1767) settled Pennsylvania's differences with Maryland and Virginia.@After the American Revolution, in which Pennsylvania played a central role, settlement increased in the western region and in the upper Susquehanna Valley. The country's first paved road, the Philadelphia-Lancaster Turnpike, was completed in 1794. In 1811, a Robert Fulton steamboat was launched at Pittsburgh and became the first to traverse the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The Schuylkill Canal, one of the nations first long canals (completed 1825), connected Philadelphia and Reading.@The state strongly supported the Union in the Civil War; only New York contributed more troops.@On March 28, 1979, a reactor cooling system at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant south of Harrisburg malfunctioned in the nation's worst nuclear accident in history. The possibility of a core meltdown or an explosion of the hydrogen gas bubble that had formed in the overheated reactor posed a real threat to nearby residents. Although neither catastrophe occurred, some 144,000 people were evacuated at a cost of $18 million.@A second accident at Three Mile Island took place in February 1980 when about 1,000 gallons of radioactive water leaked into an auxiliary building. Small amounts of radioactivity were released into the atmosphere and 11 workers were evacuated during the 90-minute crisis, but no health injury was reported.
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Rhode Island
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Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano is thought to have been the first European to visit (1524) the region. The Dutch navigator Adriaen Block explored there in 1614. In 1636, Roger Williams, looking for a place where "persons distressed for conscience" could go, left Puritan-controlled Massachusetts and founded Providence, the state's first settlement. Two years later Williams organized the country's first Baptist congregation.@Despite harsh, costly combat with the Indians in King Philip's War (1675-76), the region prospered, thanks in large measure to the "triangular trade"--vessels carried rum from Newport to West Africa, African slaves to the West Indies, and West Indies molasses back to Newport, where it was made into rum. Later, Rhode Island renounced slavery, prohibiting (1774) the importation of slaves; it also strongly backed the Union in the Civil War. The economic gap left by the decline of the triangular trade was soon filled by the rapid growth of manufacturing, spurred by Samuel Slater's pioneering work in mechanized textile production and by a heavy influx of French Canadian, Italian, Portuguese and Polish immigrants who provided an ample labor pool.@From its beginnings, Rhode Island has been famous for its insistence on political and religious freedom, attracting oppressed and refuge-seeking settlers, and the state's rebellious, iconoclastic character streak soon became evident. In 1769, Newport rebels scuttled the British revenue ship Liberty and, three years later, in protest to British trade and navigation laws, a group of Providence men burned the English ship Gaspee to the water's edge in Narragansett Bay where it had run aground. The colony was the first of the original 13 to declare independence from England. Rhode Island was the last of the original 13 states to ratify (1790) the Constitution.@Rhode Island also balked at Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807, and in the War of 1812 it refused to allow its militia to serve outside its borders. Thomas Wilson Dorr and other Rhode Islanders made an abortive revolution in 1842 ("Dorr's Rebellion"), which nonetheless effected a small measure of legislative reform.@In 1976, Newport was the first port of welcome for the spectacular fleet of Tall Ships, which sailed from locations throughout the world to commemorate the bicentennial of the United States. The flotilla assembled was one of the largest ever.
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South Carolina
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Giovanni da Verrazano is thought to have been the first to explore (1524) the coast of the region that later became North and South Carolina; an initial Spanish settlement (1526) at Winyah Bay suffered a malaria outbreak and did not endure.@The first English settlement in present-day South Carolina was made (1670) at Albemarle Point on the Ashley River, but poor conditions drove settlers to the site of Charleston (originally Charles Town). There grew the core of a prosperous though ultimately unstable economy based on the slave-supported cultivation of rice and indigo. Although North and South Carolina were officially a single province, they had separate governors until 1691; from that year until 1712, a sole governor was based at Charleston while his deputy governed North Carolina. After 1712, North and South Carolina were governed independently again, and in 1729 they officially became separate royal provinces; the boundary between them was not defined, however, until 1815.@South Carolina, in the years before the American Revolution, progressed economically despite wars with the Spanish and French, and with pirates and Indians; there was a revolt against proprietary rule in 1719, and a slave uprising in 1739. An influx of Germans, Swiss, and Scots-Irish--from abroad and from neighboring states--helped settle the uplands and the lower middle country. Social and economic differences between the small-scale farmers of the up country and the plantation lords of the low country gave rise to regional disputes, culminating in the Regulator Movement for up country reforms. Statehood dates from 1788.@The early part of the 19th century in South Carolina was marked by a decline in agriculture and an increasingly contentious dialogue between the state and the Federal government on the issue of states' rights. South Carolina's Nullification Act (1832) declared a new, higher U.S. tariff act null and void; the immediate issue was resolved (1833) by compromise, but the larger question of the division of power between nation and state remained. A leading national figure of the period was South Carolina's Senator John C. Calhoun, who defended not only the values and rights of his own state, but of the South as a whole. After South Carolina led the way to secession (1860), Confederate artillery fire on Federal troops at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor started (April 12, 1861) the Civil War.@During the conflict, there was much fighting along the state's coast, and a Union blockade of Charleston Harbor crippled the economy. In 1865, troops led by General William T. Sherman marched across the state, destroying many plantations and burning Columbia. Reconstruction brought a measure of material recovery, but there was also much waste and political corruption. White supremacy and Negro disenfranchisement soon returned.@In 1979 the nation's only commercial nuclear waste disposal facility in operation was at Barnwell, S.C. To prevent the state from becoming a national nuclear dumping ground, Gov. Richard Riley in October ordered a severe reduction in the amount of out-of-state nuclear waste to be processed at Barnwell. In 1981 the Reagan Administration rejected a plan for federal acquisition of the Barnwell plant. In October 1981, President Reagan lifted a ban placed on commercial reprocessing of used nuclear fuel that had been imposed by President Carter in 1977. The Barnwell facility will provide this service.
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South Dakota
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Early inhabitants were the Mound Builders, dating from about 1200. Living there after 1600 were the Arikara Indians, an advanced agricultural people, eventually forced out by the more warlike Sioux, or Dakota, Indians. South Dakota and southwestern North Dakota were part of the vast territory claimed (1682) for France by Robert Cavelier, Sieur De La Salle, but Frenchmen did not actually visit the region until 1742-43, when the brothers Francois and Louis Joseph Verendrye made explorations and planted a lead plate at the site of what is now Pierre. The area was ceded to Spain in 1762, and toward the end of the century it became part of the St. Louis fur-trading empire. Napoleon Bonaparte reclaimed (1800) the territory for France, but three years later sold it to the United States, as part of the Louisiana Purchase.@The Lewis and Clark Expedition explored the region which is now the Dakotas in 1804 and 1806. Fort Pierre, the first non-Indian settlement (1817), became a major fur-trading center, and in 1831 the first steamboat on the upper Missouri began operations.@Dakota Territory--comprising both Dakotas and parts of Montana and Wyoming--was created in 1861. In 1868, the Sioux--their way of life disrupted by the decline of the buffalo herds--made a treaty with the U.S., accepting a food subsidy and a reservation which included the Black Hills. But the discovery of gold in the Black Hills caused non-Indian prospectors to pour in. Open war broke out between the Sioux and the prospectors. The Sioux agreed in 1876 to abandon the Black Hills, after the government threatened to cut off their food supply. Rough mining towns grew up, and population soared from about 98,000 (1880) to nearly 350,000 (1890). North and South Dakota were admitted to the Union on November 2, 1889.The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation was the focus of recurring violence in the early 1970s. Wounded Knee, the site of a massacre of Indians in 1890, was the scene of a 71-day takeover by members of the militant American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1973. There were also numerous incidents on the reservation, including the shooting deaths of two FBI agents in 1975, for each of which a member of AIM was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1977. On June 13, 1979, the U.S. Court of Claims ruled that the removal of the Sioux from the Black Hills in 1876 had violated the tribe's constitutional rights as well as its treaty rights. The Federal Government was ordered to pay the Sioux $17,500,000 for the loss of the Black Hills--and to pay it with interest because of the constitutional violation. The total was estimated to be about $100,000,000--the largest award ever made to a U.S. Indian tribe. The government appealed to the Supreme Court but lost the review on June 30, 1980. Militant Sioux occupied Black Hills campsites on April 4, 1981, near Rapid City.
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Tennessee
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The first state to be created out of national territory, Tennessee came to be called the Volunteer State because of its readiness to furnish troops in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War.@Indians similar to the Mound Builders are thought to have been the early inhabitants of the Tennessee region. The Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Shawnee were among the tribes living there when the first Europeans, led by De Soto, arrived in 1540. De Soto was soon followed by countryman Juan Pardo, but the Spaniards were seeking gold and did not settle. A long period of French-British contention over the land was foreshadowed by the arrival in the same year (1673) of Marquette and Joliet, and Englishmen James Needham and Gabriel Arthur. In 1682, La Salle and his party paused in their exploration of the Mississippi Valley and built Fort Prudhomme at the mouth of the Hatchie River.@Spurred by reports of scouts such as Daniel Boone, a steady stream of settlers from Virginia and the Carolinas soon began to enter the region. French influence waned, and by 1763 the British were in control, despite strong resistance from the Cherokees. Between 1772 and 1790 several abortive attempts were made by settlers to establish self-government and achieve statehood.@In 1790 Congress organized the region into the "Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio," commonly called the Southwest Territory. Tennessee entered the Union in 1796.@Tennessee began life as a state with what Jefferson called the nation's "least imperfect and most republican" constitution. By 1800, immigration had swelled the population to 100,000, and the coming of steam and rail transportation did much to develop the state's economy. When the Cherokees and the Chickasaws were forced to move west in the late 1830s, another, smaller wave of immigration ensued. Politically, the new state's dominant figure was Andrew Jackson, who served as a U.S. representative and senator from Tennessee before becoming (1829) president.@Although a slaveholding state, Tennessee was at first pro-Union in the years before the Civil War, but after Fort Sumter a referendum was held and two-thirds of the people backed secession (1861). Tennessee was the last Confederate state to secede, and the first to be readmitted.@The Reconstruction Era triggered a strong reaction that included the founding (1866) of the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski and the adoption (1870) of a new constitution limiting Negro suffrage via a poll tax. On the farms, a tenancy system replaced the plantations, and the state's crippled economy turned toward increased industrialization for new life. In 1878, the worst yellow-fever epidemic in U.S. history hit Memphis, killing thousands.@In 1973, six years after the repeal of the ban on the teaching of the theory of evolution, a new version was enacted. It requires that equal emphasis be given to Genesis in the classroom as well as other theories of man's origin. The original law resulted in the 1925 trial of biology teacher John Scopes in the little town of Dayton, Tenn. The trial pitted Clarence Darrow for the defense against special prosecutor William Jennings Bryan.@Lamar Alexander replaced Governor Ray Blanton on January 17, 1979 (three days before the appointed inauguration day), to stop further convicted criminals from being granted executive clemency. Blanton's clemency grants were in question because of their possible link to a Federal probe of his administration's alleged clemency-for-sale scandal. On April 10, the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals upheld 52 grants of clemency allowed by Blanton the day before he left office. Six persons (Blanton not among them) were indicted in connection with the pardon sales. Following conviction by a federal jury on charges of selling state liquor licenses during his administration, Blanton was sentenced to three years in prison and fined $11,000 on August 14, 1981.
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Texas
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Second largest of the states and third most populous, Texas is a fiercely independent land of awesome expanses and great natural resources. While keeping pace technologically, it can also claim a richly varied heritage, having flown the flags of six nations: Spain, France, Mexico, the Repubic of Texas, the Confederate States of America, and the United States.@Indians inhabited what is now Texas about 20,000 years before the coming of the Europeans. Spaniards (including Cabeza De Vaca and Francisco Vasquez Coronado) visited the region in the 16th and 17th centuries, settling (1682) at Ysleta (near present-day El Paso). Spain increased its settlement efforts after French explorer Robert Cavelier, Sieur De La Salle, established (1685) a short-lived colony near Matagorda Bay. The first Spanish mission, San Francisco De los Tejas, was founded in 1690 and others soon followed, but generally Spain's efforts to exploit the region's wealth and convert the Indians were not very successful. After the Louisiana Purchase (1803) gave the United States a common border with Texas, Americans began challenging Spanish rule there.@Moses Austin secured (1821) a grant from local authorities permitting him, as an empresario, to bring in American settlers; when he died that same year, his son, Stephen F. Austin, established the first permanent Anglo-American settlement at San Felipe De Astin. Often called the "Father of Texas," Austin brought approximately 8,000 colonists to the region. Other empresarios brought hundreds more, and during the next 15 years the total approached 30,000. Preoccupied with its birth as an independent republic (1824), Mexico was not effective in curbing what it saw as a growing encroachment on its territory, despite an 1830 law restricting immigration, and the establishment of customs stations and a military force in Texas.@The Anglo-Americans were moved to action when Antonio Lopez De Santa Anna set up (1835) a Mexican dictatorship in Texas; the Texans then proclaimed (1836) a provisional government at Washington-on-the-Brazos and turned command of the revolutionary army over to Sam Houston. Santa Anna and his men quickly gained the upper hand in the struggle, recapturing San Antonio, which had initially fallen to the Texans; the Mexican victory came despite the famous heroic defense of the Alamo by greatly outnumbered Texans (including Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie). After more than 300 Texas prisoners were shot at Goliad, Houston rallied his still relatively small army and, with a surprise attack, won (April 21, 1836) the Battle of San Jacinto, ending the war and bringing to birth the Independent Republic of Texas.@Under its famed Lone Star flag, Texas remained independent for nearly a decade, with Houston serving as president. The country was beset by many grave problems, including Indian and Mexican raids and a money shortage. The issue of annexation by the United States, which most Texans favored, arose early. Slavery, condoned in Texas, made the issue highly controversial: the Southern states favored annexation, while the Northern ones opposed it. Annexation, which came in 1845, precipitated the Mexican War (1846-48).@Settlers, drawn by inexpensive land, came to Texas in great numbers in the pre-Civil War period. Partly because of its slave-holding status but more importantly because of states' rights views, the state sided with the Confederacy, seceding in 1861. Texas saw little action during the war, but contributed 50,000 troops and much materiel to the Southern cause. The state suffered much during the excesses of Reconstruction.@The development of modern Texas was spurred by the growth of the cattle industry, the coming of the railroad, and the discovery, among others before it, of the spectacular Spindletop oil field (1901) near Beaumont. The state's vast petroleum resources spurred the growth of a huge chemical industry. After World War II, Texas became a leader in the aircraft and electronic industries. Texas today, while enjoying great growth, faces serious challenges, such as ways to irrigate with surface water its dry western areas where shrinking underground supplies now help to grow vast crops.@Texas shrimp fishermen, together with the Ku Klux Klan, were enjoined by a Federal District Court judge in May 1981 from intimidating Vietnamese refugee fishermen at Galveston Bay. The American fishermen had complained of unfair competition from the Vietnamese and feared that the bay would be overfished. Witnesses at the trial testified that native shrimpers and the Klan had threatened Vietnamese fishermen and burned three of their boats.@The U.S. Supreme Court in June 1982, declared invalid a Texas law that allowed local districts to bar the children of illegal aliens from school or to charge them tuition. It is estimated that five percent of the state's population are illegal aliens, mostly Mexican.
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Utah
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Archaeological findings (1968) in the Great Basin at Hogup Cave, 75 miles northwest of Salt Lake City, show that there was continuous Indian habitation in the area from 6400 B.C. to A.D. 1600. An even older human habitation, Danger Cave near Wendover, was excavated a decade ago and dates to 9000 B.C. Some doubt exists as to whether or not Spanish explorers visited the region in 1540 when they explored the Grand Canyon, but it has been established that in 1776 two Spanish Franciscan friars--Silvestre Velez De Escalante and Francisco Atanasio Dominguez--did explore the area. They recommended colonization, but Spain was apparently not interested. Between 1811 and 1840 British and American fur trappers hunted their prey there.@Permanent occupation of the territory was begun in 1847 by the persecuted Mormons--members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--who had emigrated from New York via Missouri, Ohio, and Illinois to Utah in search of "a secluded gathering place for Zion." From the time of its founding (1847) Salt Lake City has been the world headquarters of the L.D.S. church.@The Utah region at that time belonged to Mexico, but after the Mexican War (1846-48), it became the property of the United States. At least 70 percent of the state's area is still federally owned and administered, and about ten percent of the people work for Federal agencies.@Two Indian wars were fought: the Walker War (1853-54) and the Black Hawk War (1865-68), involving a number of tribes but principally the Utes, who were eventually placed on a reservation in the Uinta basin.@As early as 1849 Utah asked to be admitted to the Union, but Congress refused--mainly because the Mormon practice of polygamy was frowned upon.@The dismissal of the Mormon leader, Brigham Young, as territorial governor led to the "Utah" or "Mormon" War (1857-58). Federal troops were dispatched to the area, but there was more bad feeling than actual fighting. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the troops were recalled and peace reigned, although there remained a residue of bitterness between the Mormon stronghold and the "outside" world which time has gradually erased. Utah finally entered the Union in 1896.
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Vermont
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The French explorer Samuel De Champlain was most likely the first European to visit the region, discovering (1609) the lake now bearing his name. The British established (1724) the first permanent settlement at Fort Dummer (near present-day Brattleboro), and the English assumed control at the end of the French and Indian War (1763). Beginning in the mid-1700s New Hampshire and New York made conflicting claims on the region, and violence erupted when Ethan Allen and his "Green Mountain Boys" resisted New York officers who sought to take possession of the territory.@These differences were soon overshadowed by the American Revolution, in which the Vermonters played an important part, including the capture of Fort Ticonderoga and Crown Point. In 1777, Vermont proclaimed its independence, drawing up the first state constitution that outlawed slavery and established universal manhood suffrage without property qualifications. Land disputes continued, but were finally ended (1791) when Vermont paid New York a $30,000 claims settlement and was admitted to the Union, the first state to be added to the original 13.@The Embargo Act of 1807 and the War of 1812 were unpopular with Vermonters, who relied heavily on trade with Canada. But involvement in the war was unavoidable. Invasion by the British from Canada was averted when Americans, led by Captain Thomas Macdonough, gained a vital naval victory on Lake Champlain in 1814. Two years later, disastrous frosts ruined the state's crops, and thousands of farmers went west; immigration, which had been significant, fell sharply and never regained its former level.@Abolition was popular in the state, which strongly supported Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election. Vermont's casualties in the Civil War, as a proportion of the male population, were among the heaviest of any Northern state.@Historically a Republican state, Vermont has increasingly become a state in which the two parties are in close balance. The first Democratic governor was elected in 1962 and served until 1968. A second Democrat was elected for two terms beginning in 1972. The Republicans recaptured the governor's chair in 1976, 1978 and 1980, although in 1976 they lost control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the early 19th century. The House seat was regained by the GOP with the 1978 elections. The first Democratic U.S. Senator in the state's history was elected in 1974.
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Virginia
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Virginia, home of the first English settlement in North America (Jamestown, 1607), is a state particularly rich in American history. A Virginian, Richard Henry Lee, introduced (June 7, 1776) the motion for separation of the 13 Colonies from England; Virginian Thomas Jefferson was the main author of the Declaration of Independence; and Virginian George Washington led the way to victory in the American Revolution. Eight U.S. Presidents were Virginians, including four of the first five: Washington (1st), Jefferson (3rd), James Madison (4th), and James Monroe (5th); the latter three, in office 24 consecutive years, made up the so-called "Virginia Dynasty." Famed Chief Justice John Marshall was also a Virginian.@The state, which is named for Elizabeth I ("The Virgin Queen"), has acquired several nicknames including "The Mother of States," because all or part of eight other states were formed from western territory it once claimed: West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. In the American Revolution, General Charles Cornwallis's surrender (1781) to Washington at Yorktown virtually ended hostilities. During the Civil War, Virginia was the central battleground. Among the major battles fought within it were First and Second Bull Run (Manassas), Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Petersburg, and Richmond; Confederate General Robert E. Lee, another Virginian, surrendered at Appomattox (April 9, 1865).@Indians of three major language groups (Algonquian, Siouan, and Iroquoian) were living in the region when the first British arrived, about 25 years after an unsuccessful settlement by Spanish Jesuits. English settlement proceeded despite great hardship, mainly through the efforts of such men as Captain John Smith and Thomas West, Baron De La Warr, Virginia's first governor. The House of Burgesses, first legislative body in the New World, convened (1619) at Jamestown, and five years later Virginia became England's first royal colony. The importation of Negroes, first as indentured servants and later as slaves, was begun. The production and exportation of tobacco, which was first cultivated (1612) by John Rolfe, spurred the colony's growth, and the plantation became the earliest social unit. Rolfe's marriage (1614) to Pocahontas helped induce a brief period of peace with the Indians, but there were massacres in 1622 and 1644, and not until Lord Dunmore's War (1774) did Indian troubles decrease.@At the time of Sir William Berkeley's governorship (1641-52, 1660-77), the colony was thriving, with freeholders and merchants controlling the government. Hard times came (1660) with the Restoration's Navigation Acts, which stipulated the exclusive use of English ships and ports for the tobacco trade, causing initial transport bottlenecks, price drops, and widespread discontent. This unrest was aggravated by Berkeley's increasingly unpopular practices (including a slacking of vigilance against the Indians), and an abortive revolt (Bacon's Rebellion, 1676) was mounted; when Berkeley harshly overreacted, England recalled him.@Inflamed by such orators as Patrick Henry ("Give me liberty or give me death!"), Virginians in the 18th century traveled a path of inevitable revolt and, after Washington's final military victory had decided the issue, they provided the first Federal leadership. In 1788 Virginia ratified the Constitution and relinquished all its western land claims except Kentucky and West Virginia (Kentucky became an independent state in 1792, as did West Virginia in 1863; two counties were added to the latter state in 1866). Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861 and was readmitted in 1870.@A new constitution was drafted (1902) that imposed a poll tax, virtually disenfranchising Blacks, but state and Federal court decisions in the 1960s held the poll tax unconstitutional as a requisite for voting, and a new state constitution approved by voters in1970 eliminated the tax.@Virginia undertook "massive resistance" to public school desegregation after the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation ruling, and a few schools were temporarily closed to avoid integration. During the 1960s and 1970s racial tensions have sharply declined. Tension was renewed, however, when federal courts issued orders for massive busing of pupils, climaxed by the decision of a U.S. District Judge ordering the consolidation of the school systems of Richmond and two adjacent, mostly white counties. That order later was overturned.
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Washington
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A part of the Oregon country claimed by both Britain and the United States in the 1830s, Washington became U.S. territory by a compromise treaty with Britain in 1846. It became a state in 1889.@The period after World War I was one of discontent and strife in the labor field. There were many disputes, especially between businessmen and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); violence erupted at Centralia. During World War II, the state's sizable Japanese-American population suffered discrimination and disruption; over 15,000 people were displaced eastward.@In 1979, Gov. Dixy Lee Ray closed a nuclear waste dump near Hanford, accusing users of carelessness in shipments. The dump was reopened after Gov. Ray made an agreement with the governors of the other two states with similar dumps--Richard Riley of South Carolina and Robert List of Nevada--to require dump users to certify that each shipment met all Federal and state standards.@In March 1980, Mount St. Helens, a volcano which had been dormant since 1857, began to rumble and to spew out smoke and ash. Tremors and thunderstorms followed, and Gov. Ray ordered the area five miles around the mountain evacuated. An eruption on May 18 blew 1,300 feet off the mountain, spewed volcanic ash throughout western Washington and into Idaho and Montana, sent streams of mud through low-lying areas, overturned 2,500 acres of timber, and killed 60 people. The ash disabled vehicles and closed hundreds of miles of highways. A stream of mud moved slowly down the Toutle River, and Spirit Lake filled up with mud and ash and was cut in half by a dam of debris. Steam and ash continued out of the mountain; the ground rumbled; an eruption on May 24 blew 200 feet off the mountain, spreading more ash and mud. On the night of June 12-13, a third major eruption sent pebbles of pumice the size of marbles into the air; pebble fallout forced the evacuation of the entire town of Cougar.@On July 22, after almost six weeks of silence, and following a series of increasingly frequent earthquakes, Mount St. Helens spewed forth ash three times within a two-hour period. This trio of eruptions resulted in the lava dome being completely blown apart and a new, glowing inner crater being revealed. The volcano continued intermittent activity throughout 1981 and into 1982.@In April 1982, Governor John Spellman rejected an application to allow the Northern Tier Pipeline Company to build an oil unloading terminal at Port Angeles and a pipeline under Puget Sound. The pipeline would have transported Alaskan oil to the Midwest.
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West Virginia
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West Virginia's early history is largely shared with Virginia, of which it was a part until Virginia joined the Confederacy in 1861; the western counties then adopted their own government and sided with the Union; statehood dates from 1863. Two counties were added to the state in 1866.@Indians known as Mound Builders were the region's earliest inhabitants, but they were gone long before the advent of the Europeans in the 1670s. Several Indian tribes, however, continued to use the area as hunting grounds. Welsh, Scots-Irish, and Germans may have lived in the region before him, but credit is often given to Morgan Morgan for having established (1731) the first known permanent settlement on Mill Creek in the eastern panhandle. In 1742 coal was discovered on the Coal River, an event that was a major determinant of West Virginia's destiny. The Indians' hold on the region virtually ended in 1774, but fighting erupted three years later and continued until 1794.@When the state broke away from Virginia, many West Virginians, including General Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson, remained loyal to the mother state. A famous long-running (1882-96) feud between the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky resulted in many killings and involved the governors of those states in an acrimonious rift.@Industrial expansion marked the late 19th and early 20th centuries, despite serious labor disputes, especially those in the coal mining industry. Not until the 1930s were the mines unionized and working conditions appreciably improved.@A public employee strike for union recognition in 1968 resulted in mass dismissals of state highway workers. The coal mines were shut down 45 days in late 1971 as the United Mine Workers negotiated a new contract. Wildcat strikes have erupted in the mines over such issues as safety and health benefits. Some 25,000 coal miners stayed off the job for three weeks in early 1974 in a protest over gas rationing measures at the height of the fuel crisis.@In the early 1980's, the coal industry came under attack by labor activists charging that priority is given to production and profits over the health of miners, and by environmentalists who charge the state's land is being destroyed for the benefit of out-of-state interests.
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Wisconsin
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Frenchman Jean Nicolet was the first European to explore the Wisconsin region, landing (1634) at Green Bay in search of a fur-trading fortune and the legendary "Northwest Passage" to the Orient. At the time, Ottawa, Huron, and other Indians from the east were forcing indigenous Indians (including the Winnebago) westward, and only the Menominees were settled there. The arrival of Nicolet and other Frenchmen soon after established France's claim to the region, held until 1763, when the British gained possession.@After the American Revolution, England ceded (1783) the region to the United States, but the British retained actual control until after the War of 1812. A part of the Northwest Territory until 1800, the Wisconsin region became, successively, a part of the territories of Indiana (1800-09), Illinois (1809-18), and Michigan (1818-36). When it was made a separate territory in 1836, Wisconsin included its present area in addition to parts of Iowa, Minnesota, and sections of North and South Dakota east of the Missouri and White Earth Rivers. In 1838, the territory west of the Mississippi was organized as the Territory of Iowa, Wisconsin retaining its present area and a northward extension to Lake of the Woods in what is now Minnesota. A decade later, Wisconsin entered the Union.@Wisconsin's Indian troubles reached a climax in the Black Hawk War (1832), which virtually ended the Indian threat in the area and caused a settlement boom. There followed a substantial influx of immigrants--especially Germans, Irish, English, and Welsh. Liberal leaders, like Carl Schurz, settled in Wisconsin and added to the intellectual development of the state. In 1871, Wisconsin was hit by the great Peshtigo forest fire, the worst natural disaster in its history, which killed more than 1,000 persons and destroyed more than $5 million worth of property. An extensive reforestation program is part of Wisconsin's far-reaching conservation efforts.@Wisconsin is the home of three major league sports teams. The Green Bay Packers have won the NFL championship eleven times and the Milwaukee Bucks became the NBA champions in 1971. Major league baseball returned to the state in 1970 when the Seattle club of the American League became the Milwaukee Brewers.
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Wyoming
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John Colter, a fur-trapper and a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-06), is the first European known to have entered the state; in 1807 he explored the Yellowstone area and brought back news of its geysers and hot springs.@By 1850, pioneers were "going west" via three famous trails, all of which passed through Wyoming:  the California, Mormon (to Utah), and Oregon (to the Pacific Northwest).  Meanwhile, the Plains Indians, their homeland challenged, grew increasingly hostile, raiding wagon trains and defying accompanying troops.  These problems climaxed in 1865-66, then tapered off.@The Union Pacific Railroad was built (1867-68) across southern Wyoming, following the coal deposits and bringing in laborers to work the mines. The scant farmland caused many homesteaders to bypass Wyoming, leaving it open for cattlemen, who enjoyed bonanza days from 1865 to 1887.@Rustlers, declining market prices, and the severe winter of 1886-87 in which one-sixth of the herds starved all helped to curtail the cattle industry's dominance. About this time, sheep raising began to increase, leading to conflict between sheepmen and cattlemen over grazing rights.@In 1869, Wyoming, the "Equality State," became the first state to grant voting rights to women.
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