In the beginning Think of a big, beautiful. cmpty land with mountains. forests. lakes. animals, and fish. but no people. Th was Amenca 16.000 years ago. Around that time, the first people probably arrived in Alaska from Asia. They travelled south and became the Native Americans of North America and the Maya, Aztecs, Inca and other peoples of Central and South America. The Inuit Eskimo s) came to Canada and the Arctic the same way But there are only a few of these peoples in America today. In the sixteenth century Europeans started to come to America. and soon after that, they brought slaves from Africa to work for them. Large numbers of immigrants continued to arrive from all over the world until the middle of the twentieth century The empty land was now full of purple, speaking different languages and with different ideas. There are just three countries now in North America Canada. Mexico and the USA but there were nearly several more. And the 300 million people who live in the fifty states of the United States are not all the same. About 67 per cent are white. 13 per cent Hispanic (Spanish-speaking. 13 per cent black, 4 per cent Asian and just 1 per cent Native American. Most of them speak English. but it is not the same English as people speak in Bri and many Americans speak Spanish as their first language. So how was the USA born? How did it grow? What kind of country is it now? This book will try answer those questions, and many more.