Few continental stories are as complex, exciting and extraordinary. America’s. Whether before the arrival of the European conquerors or later, during the formation of the colonial empires that followed, America was always a vast land still in many respects devoid of any human presence. His story is pregnant with conquests as well as development and great civilizations.

So how do we understand the enormous historical burden of a country that was once cut off from the rest of the planet’s cultures and emerged overnight as the “New World”? Columbus’s voyages represent a clear before and after in the history of the American people, making it difficult to understand what America was before Europeans. Her no arrival continues to be one suppose The most interesting thing in history.

To make this easier to understand, EmperorTrigestar, a YouTube channel dedicated to exploring history through interactive maps, has two ten-minute-only videos that explain it visually. political evolution from America. The first, dedicated to North America, dates back to B.C. It begins in 700 BC with the emergence of the Mayan culture and the first Mexican city-states. And it moves forward from there.

It does this with a large number of disconnected dates. The videos help us understand the sea of ​​uncertainty in which our knowledge of prehistoric America navigates. While most of the findings come from archaeology, there is no evidence of written records for the vast majority of civilizations that emerged in the Americas thousands of years ago. Therefore dates are often approximate or general.

By 250, most of what we know today as Mexico had a variety of political organizations that were among the first civilizations on the continent. Its development is gradual. For the next five hundred years, the Mayans will coexist with the rest of the world a pleiad Number of peoples, such as the Toltecs, in the present territory around the Yucatan Peninsula and in southern Mexico.

This would not happen until the end of the millennium, when the first European contact with America is recorded (Vikings in Vinland), and not until the mid-15th century, when the main economic, political and military dominant power in North America emerged. Arrival of the Spanish: Aztecs. Although his existence as an independent political figure was brief, his legacy is immense: the Spanish conquest around 1520 evaporated his empire.

From here, events develop rapidly: by 1600, the Spanish Empire has conquered all of Mexico and Central America, entered northern South America, and is advancing into the current territory of the United States. By then some Mayan groups were still holding out within the viceroyalty, but colonialism was an unstoppable phenomenon: England, France, and the Netherlands stepped in in the following centuries.

Wars that determined the current order of North America they get excited. As a result of all this, and Anglo-Saxon supremacy over much of the continent, amid the disintegration of the dying Spanish Empire, the United States emerged in 1778 and other North American countries from 1800 onwards. . The Mexican Empire inherits a large portion of its territory by occupying part of California, Arizona, or Texas.

The 19th and 20th centuries confirm the current map of North America with small and singular sections of nations that no longer exist, such as Texas, Vermont, the Federal Republic of Central America, or the Confederate States.

one of them South America Its development in prehistoric years follows similar, albeit broader, paths: there is evidence of cultures as diverse as the Chavín, the Nazca, the Moche or the Tiwanaku Empire in the long years from 900 BC to 300 AD. Later, other Andean cultures would emerge, such as the Chimor or Wari Empire, as evidence of the continued political and social evolution of South America.

Starting from the 14th century, the Cuzco Empire emerges, the seed of the omnipotent and decisive. inca empire Later. The centuries before the arrival of the Spanish conquerors, especially from the 15th century onwards, document its unstoppable rise. By the time Pizarro reached the lands controlled by the Incas, the Incas had spread throughout the Andes Mountain Range into an area that would include parts of today’s Peru, Bolivia, and Chile.

Its legacy is as colossal as the Aztec, and its decline equally rapid. Diseases and post-conquest violence irreparably decimate indigenous populations, facilitating the arrival and subsequent control of Europeans. From then on, Spain began to control a huge territory connected to its holdings in North America, making it the largest Empire of its time.

At the beginning of the 14th century, the Spanish colonial territory stretched from Buenos Aires to what is now Mexico City, while Portugal controlled the Brazilian coast thanks to the Tordesillas. The brief union until Portuguese independence during the reign of Philip II divided the Americas into one practical monopoly Spanish Austrians. In the following centuries, Spain and Portugal would advance control of lands not yet colonized.

As in the north, what will precipitate events in an exciting way will be the definitive collapse of the Spanish Empire. The emergence of a large number of current states, heirs of some of the former colonial states, would be plagued with internal conflicts, unions that are unthinkable today, and wars of conquest against still indigenous peoples. By the end of the century there will be few border conflicts left to fight and South America will have taken its final shape.

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*An earlier version of this article was published in January 2019.