Olmsted Brothers
The Olmsted Brothers company was an influential landscape architectural firm in the United States, established in 1898 by brothers John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. sons of the eminent landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. The Olmsted Brothers inherited the nation's first landscape architecture business from their father Frederick Law Olmsted; this firm was a successor to the earlier firm of Olmsted and Eliot after the death of their partner Charles Eliot in 1897. The two brothers were among the founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects and played an influential role in creating the National Park Service. Prior to their takeover of the firm, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. had worked as an apprentice under his father, helping to design projects such as Biltmore Estate and the World's Columbian Exposition before graduating from Harvard University. The firm employed nearly 60 staff at its peak in the early 1930s. Notable landscape architects in the firm included Percival Gallagher.
The last Olmsted family member in the firm, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. retired in 1949. The firm itself remained in operation, moving from Brookline in 1980 and continuing in Fremont, NH until 2000; this created one continuous firm from 1858-2000. "Fairsted" -- the firm's 100-year-old business headquarters and design office -- has been preserved as the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, located on 7 acres of landscaped grounds at 99 Warren St. Brookline, Massachusetts, it offers excellent insights into the practice of large-scale landscape engineering. The site houses an archive of the firm's designs, plant lists, photos for hundreds of projects; the Olmsted Brothers completed numerous high-profile projects, many of which remain popular to this day, including park systems, exposition grounds, hospitals, residential neighborhoods and state capitols. Notable commissions include the roadways in the Great Smoky Mountains and Acadia National Parks, Yosemite Valley, Atlanta's Piedmont Park, a residential neighborhood in Oak Bay, British Columbia, Canada: Uplands.
The Olmsted Brothers co-authored, with Harland Bartholomew, a 1930 report for the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce entitled "Parks and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region" encouraging the preservation of outdoor public space in southern California. The report was ignored by the city, but became an important urban planning reference. List of Olmsted works Olmsted His Essential Theory Olmsted Parks in Seattle -- A Snapshot History at HistoryLink.org Olmsted Associates: A Register of Its Records in the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division Olmsted Research Guide Online a search tool for Olmsted projects and archival records Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site preserved home and archives of Olmsted firm, National Park Service National Association for Olmsted Parks Filson Historical Society|accessdate=15 April 2015 In the Filson Archives: Olmsted Brothers, 420, 580, 848
California
California is a state in the Pacific Region of the United States. With 39.6 million residents, California is the most populous U. S. the third-largest by area. The state capital is Sacramento; the Greater Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nation's second and fifth most populous urban regions, with 18.7 million and 9.7 million residents respectively. Los Angeles is California's most populous city, the country's second most populous, after New York City. California has the nation's most populous county, Los Angeles County, its largest county by area, San Bernardino County; the City and County of San Francisco is both the country's second-most densely populated major city after New York City and the fifth-most densely populated county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. California's $3.0 trillion economy is larger than that of any other state, larger than those of Texas and Florida combined, the largest sub-national economy in the world. If it were a country, California would be the 5th largest economy in the world, the 36th most populous as of 2017.
The Greater Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nation's second- and third-largest urban economies, after the New York metropolitan area. The San Francisco Bay Area PSA had the nation's highest GDP per capita in 2017 among large PSAs, is home to three of the world's ten largest companies by market capitalization and four of the world's ten richest people. California is considered a global trendsetter in popular culture, innovation and politics, it is considered the origin of the American film industry, the hippie counterculture, fast food, the Internet, the personal computer, among others. The San Francisco Bay Area and the Greater Los Angeles Area are seen as global centers of the technology and entertainment industries, respectively. California has a diverse economy: 58% of the state's economy is centered on finance, real estate services and professional, scientific and technical business services. Although it accounts for only 1.5% of the state's economy, California's agriculture industry has the highest output of any U.
S. state. California is bordered by Oregon to the north and Arizona to the east, the Mexican state of Baja California to the south; the state's diverse geography ranges from the Pacific Coast in the west to the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the east, from the redwood–Douglas fir forests in the northwest to the Mojave Desert in the southeast. The Central Valley, a major agricultural area, dominates the state's center. Although California is well-known for its warm Mediterranean climate, the large size of the state results in climates that vary from moist temperate rainforest in the north to arid desert in the interior, as well as snowy alpine in the mountains. Over time and wildfires have become more pervasive features. What is now California was first settled by various Native Californian tribes before being explored by a number of European expeditions during the 16th and 17th centuries; the Spanish Empire claimed it as part of Alta California in their New Spain colony. The area became a part of Mexico in 1821 following its successful war for independence but was ceded to the United States in 1848 after the Mexican–American War.
The western portion of Alta California was organized and admitted as the 31st state on September 9, 1850. The California Gold Rush starting in 1848 led to dramatic social and demographic changes, with large-scale emigration from the east and abroad with an accompanying economic boom; the word California referred to the Baja California Peninsula of Mexico. The name derived from the mythical island California in the fictional story of Queen Calafia, as recorded in a 1510 work The Adventures of Esplandián by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo; this work was the fifth in a popular Spanish chivalric romance series that began with Amadis de Gaula. Queen Calafia's kingdom was said to be a remote land rich in gold and pearls, inhabited by beautiful black women who wore gold armor and lived like Amazons, as well as griffins and other strange beasts. In the fictional paradise, the ruler Queen Calafia fought alongside Muslims and her name may have been chosen to echo the title of a Muslim leader, the Caliph. It's possible.
Know ye that at the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California close to that part of the Terrestrial Paradise, inhabited by black women without a single man among them, they lived in the manner of Amazons. They were robust of body with great virtue; the island itself is one of the wildest in the world on account of the craggy rocks. Shortened forms of the state's name include CA, Cal. Calif. and US-CA. Settled by successive waves of arrivals during the last 10,000 years, California was one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse areas in pre-Columbian North America. Various estimates of the native population range from 100,000 to 300,000; the Indigenous peoples of California included more than 70 distinct groups of Native Americans, ranging from large, settled populations living on the coast to groups in the interior. California groups were diverse in their political organization with bands, villages, on the resource-rich coasts, large chiefdoms, such as the Chumash and Salinan.
Trade, intermarriage a
Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.
Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. was an American landscape architect and city planner known for his wildlife conservation efforts. He had a lifetime commitment to national parks, worked on projects in Acadia, the Everglades and Yosemite National Park. Olmsted Point in Yosemite and Olmsted Island at Great Falls of the Potomac River in Maryland are named after him, he was the son of Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. and he and his brother John C. Olmsted created. Soon after his father's death, Olmsted stopped using the suffix "Jr." but anything attributed to Frederick Law Olmsted after about 1896 is the son's work. Olmsted was born on Staten Island, New York, the son of Frederick Law Olmsted and Mary Cleveland Perkins, half brother of John Charles Olmsted. After graduating from the Roxbury Latin School in 1890, he began his career as his famous father's apprentice, he worked early on two significant projects: the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the largest owned home in the United States—the George Vanderbilt estate in North Carolina, famously called the Biltmore Estate.
He entered Harvard College where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1894. He became a partner in his father's Brookline, Massachusetts landscape architecture firm in 1895. Shortly thereafter, his father retired. Olmsted and his half brother took over leadership of the firm. For the next half-century, the Olmsted brothers' firm completed thousands of landscape projects nationwide. In 1900 Olmsted returned to Harvard to teach, he established the school's first formal training program in landscape architecture. In 1901, he was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt as a member of the Senate Park Improvement Commission for the District of Columbia known as the McMillan Commission, he joined other notable personalities such as Daniel H. Burnham, Charles F. McKim and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, with a charge to "restore and develop the century-old plans of Major L'Enfant for Washington and to fit them to the conditions of today." In 1910, he was approached by the American Civic Association for advice on the creation of a new bureau of national parks.
This initiated six years of correspondence, including this letter to the president of the Appalachian Mountain Club, January 19, 1912: The present situation in regard to the national parks is bad. They have been created one at a time by acts of Congress which have not defined at all the purposes for which the lands were to be set apart, nor provided any orderly or efficient means of safeguarding the parks... I have made at different times two suggestions, one of which was... a definition of the purposes for which the national parks and monuments are to be administered by the Bureau. His best contribution was of a few simple words that would guide conservation in America for generations to come and were preserved in the National Park Service Organic Act: To conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. Olmsted and his wife, Sarah Hall Sharples, whom he married on March 1911, had one child.
By 1920, his better-known projects included plans for metropolitan park systems and greenways across the country. In 1928, while working for the California State Park Commission, Olmsted completed a statewide survey of potential park lands that defined basic long-range goals and provided guidance for the acquisition and development of state parks. and was a founding member and president of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Under the leadership of John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. the Olmsted Brothers firm employed nearly 60 staff at its peak in the early 1930s. As the last surviving family member in the firm, Olmsted retired in 1949. A partial listing of Olmsted design projects in the nation's capital reads like a guide to National Park Service-managed sites: the National Mall, Jefferson Memorial, White House grounds, Rock Creek Park. Olmsted prepared the plan for Boston's metropolitan park system and a master plan for Cornell University, was involved in the planning of Forest Hills Gardens and Roland Park, Baltimore.
The Caracas Country Club is a beautiful urban rarity and is the most successful homage to the valley of Caracas' natural scenery, which thanks to this project survives there intact. The Caracas Country Club is today the only place in the city were one can see how the valley's original natural landscape was before the city was built; the transformation in the 1920s of the old haciendas Blandín, Lecuna, El Samán and La Granja turned a simple residential golf club's commission into a sensitive urban design and landscaping project that undoubtedly can be counted among the most notable American urbanisms of the Twentieth-century. He was a founding member of the American Society of Landscape Architects and involved in numerous planning and design organizations and commissions, including the U. S. Commission of Fine Arts, the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, the Baltimore Park Commission, the National Park Service Board of Advisers for Yosemite, the National Conference on City Planning, the American City Planning Institute, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy in Rome.
Olmsted received many awards and honors during his long career, among them the American Academy Gold Medal and the U. S. Department of the Interior Conservation Award. In his years, Olmsted worked for the protec
Tongva
The Tongva are Native Americans who inhabited the Los Angeles Basin and the Southern Channel Islands, an area covering 4,000 square miles. The Tongva are known as the Gabrieleño and Fernandeño, names derived from the Spanish missions built on their territory: Mission San Gabriel Arcángel and Mission San Fernando Rey de España. Along with the neighboring Chumash, the Tongva were the most powerful indigenous people to inhabit Southern California. At the time of European contact, they may have numbered 5,000 to 10,000. Many lines of evidence suggest that the Tongva are descended of Uto-Aztecan-speaking peoples from Nevada who moved southwest into coastal Southern California 3,500 years ago; these migrants either pushed out the Hokan-speaking peoples in the region. By 500 AD, the Tongva had come to occupy all the lands now associated with them. A hunter-gatherer society, the Tongva traded with neighboring peoples. Over time, scattered communities came to speak distinct dialects of the Tongva language, part of the Takic subgroup of the Uto-Aztecan language family.
There may have been five or more such dialects. The Tongva language became extinct in the twentieth century, but a reconstructed form continues to be spoken today. Initial Spanish exploration of the Los Angeles area occurred in 1542, but sustained contact with the Tongva came only after Mission San Gabriel Arcángel was constructed in 1771; this marked the beginning of an era of forced relocation and exposure to Old World diseases, leading to the rapid collapse of the Tongva population. At times the Tongva violently resisted Spanish rule, such as the 1785 rebellion led by the female chief Toypurina. In 1821, Mexico gained its independence from Spain and the government sold mission lands to ranchers, forcing the Tongva to culturally assimilate. Three decades California was ceded to the United States following the Mexican–American War; the US government signed treaties with the Tongva, promising 8.5 million acres of land for reservations, but these treaties were never ratified. By the turn of the 20th century, the Island Tongva had disappeared and the mainland communities were nearing extinction.
The endonym Tongva was recorded by American ethnographer C. Hart Merriam in 1903 and has been adopted by scholars and descendants, although some prefer the endonym Kizh. Since 2006, there have been four organizations claiming to represent the Tongva Nation: the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe, known as the "hyphen" group from the hyphen in their name. Two of the groups are the result of a hostile split over the question of building an Indian casino. In 1994, the state of California recognized the Tongva "as the aboriginal tribe of the Los Angeles Basin," but no group representing the Tongva has attained recognition by the federal government. In 2008, more than 1,700 people claimed partial ancestry; the first record of an endonym for the Tongva people was Kizh, from 1846. Although subsequent authors equated this with the word for "house", Hale gives the word for house as kītç in a list where the language was called "Kīj", suggesting that the words were distinct; the term Kizh was used at that time to designate the language, the first comprehensive publication on the language used it.
In 1875, Yarrow indicated. He reported that the natives called themselves Tobikhar, meaning "settlers", spoke exclusively Spanish. In 1885, Hoffman referred to the natives as Tobikhar; the word Tongva was recorded by Merriam in 1903 from a single informant. Merriam could not pronounce the village name Toviscangna He ( abbreviated or spelled it Tong-vā; the name Tongva has become preferred as a self-designation since the 1990s, although either "Gabrieleño" or "Gabrielino" is part of every official name. The territory which in historical times was occupied by the kizh People of the willow houses had been inhabited for more than 10,000 years. A prehistoric milling area estimated to be 8,000 years old was discovered in 2006 at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains near Azusa, California; the find yielded arrowheads and stone slabs used to grind seeds as well as tools and implements, but no human or animal bones. The Chowigna site in Palos Verdes, excavated in the 1930s, dates back 7,100 years or more.
In 2007 and early 2008, over 174 ancient American Indian remains were unearthed by archaeologists at a development site of Brightwater Hearthside Homes in the Bolsa Chica Mesa area in Huntington Beach, California. This land was once shared by the Acjachemem tribes; the site was in legal limbo for years before Hearthside was given permission to start construction of over 300 homes. The Tongva and Acjachemem Indians are in dispute over the remains; as speakers of a language of the Uto-Aztecan family, the remote ancestors of the Tongva coalesced as a people in the Sonoran Desert, between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago. This was a center of that language family; the diversity within the Takic group is "moderately deep". The division of the Tongva-Serrano group into the separate Tongva and Serrano peoples is more recent, may have been influenced by
Spanish Empire
The Spanish Empire known as the Hispanic Monarchy and as the Catholic Monarchy, was one of the largest empires in history. From the late 15th century to the early 19th, Spain controlled a huge overseas territory in the New World and the Asian archipelago of the Philippines, what they called "The Indies", it included territories in Europe and Oceania. The Spanish Empire has been described as the first global empire in history, a description given to the Portuguese Empire, it was the world's most powerful empire during the 16th and first half of the 17th centuries, reaching its maximum extension in the 18th century. The Spanish Empire was the first empire to be called "the empire on which the sun never sets". Castile became the dominant kingdom in Iberia because of its jurisdiction over the overseas empire in the Americas and the Philippines; the structure of empire was established under the Spanish Hapsburgs and under the Spanish Bourbon monarchs, the empire was brought under greater crown control and increased its revenues from the Indies.
The crown's authority in The Indies was enlarged by the papal grant of powers of patronage, giving it power in the religious sphere. An important element in the formation of Spain's empire was the dynastic union between Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, known as the Catholic Monarchs, which initiated political and social cohesion but not political unification. Iberian kingdoms retained their political identities, with particular administration and juridical configurations. Although the power of the Spanish sovereign as monarch varied from one territory to another, the monarch acted as such in a unitary manner over all the ruler's territories through a system of councils: the unity did not mean uniformity. In 1580, when Philip II of Spain succeeded to the throne of Portugal, he established the Council of Portugal, which oversaw Portugal and its empire and "preserv its own laws and monetary system, united only in sharing a common sovereign." The Iberian Union remained in place until in 1640, when Portugal overthrew Hapsburg rule and reestablished independence under the House of Braganza.
Under Philip II, rather than the Hapsburg empire, was identified as the most powerful nation in the world eclipsing France and England. Furthermore, despite attacks from other European states, Spain retained its position of dominance with apparent ease; the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis confirmed the inheritance of Philip II in Italy. Spain's claims to Naples and Sicily in southern Italy dated back to the Aragonese presence in the 15th century. Following the peace reached in 1559, there would be no Neapolitan revolts against Spanish rule until 1647; the Duchy of Milan formally remained part of the Holy Roman Empire but the title of Duke of Milan was given to the King of Spain. The death of the Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566 and the naval victory over the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 gave Spain a claim to be the greatest power not just in Europe but in the world; the Spanish Empire in the Americas was formed after conquering large stretches of land, beginning with Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean Islands.
In the early 16th century, it conquered and incorporated the Aztec and Inca Empires, retaining indigenous elites loyal to the Spanish crown and converts to Christianity as intermediaries between their communities and royal government. After a short period of delegation of authority by the crown in the Americas, the crown asserted control over those territories and established the Council of the Indies to oversee rule there; some scholars consider the initial period of the Spanish conquest as marking the most egregious case of genocide in the history of mankind. The death toll may have reached some 70 million indigenous people in this period. However, other scholars believe the vast majority of indigenous deaths were due to the low immunological capacity of native populations to resist exogenous diseases. Many native tribes and their cultures were wiped out by the Spanish conquest and disease epidemics; the structure of governance of its overseas empire was reformed in the late 18th century by the Bourbon monarchs.
Although the crown attempted to keep its empire a closed economic system under Hapsburg rule, Spain was unable to supply the Indies with sufficient consumer goods to meet demand, so that foreign merchants from Genoa, England and The Netherlands dominated the trade, with silver from the mines of Peru and Mexico flowing to other parts of Europe. The merchant guild of Seville served as middlemen in the trade; the crown's trade monopoly was broken early in the seventeenth century, with the crown colluding with the merchant guild for fiscal reasons in circumventing the closed system. Spain was unable to defend the territories it claimed in the Americas, with the Dutch, the English, the French taking Caribbean islands, using them to engage in contraband trade with the Spanish populace in the Indies. In the seventeenth century, the diversion of silver revenue to pay for European consumer goods and the rising costs of defense of its empire meant that "tangible benefits of America to Spain were dwindling...at a moment when the costs of empire were climbing sharply."The Bourbon monarchy attempted to expand the possibilities for trade within the empire, by allowing commerce between all ports in the empire, took other measures to revive economic activity to the benefit of Spain.
The Bourbons had inherited "an empire invaded by
Port of Los Angeles
The Port of Los Angeles called America's Port, is a port complex that occupies 7,500 acres of land and water along 43 miles of waterfront and adjoins the separate Port of Long Beach. The port is located in San Pedro Bay in the San Pedro and Wilmington neighborhoods of Los Angeles 20 miles south of downtown. A department of the City of Los Angeles, the Port of Los Angeles supports employment for 517,000 people throughout the LA County Region and 1.6 million worldwide. The cargo coming into the port represents 20% of all cargo coming into the United States; the Port's Channel Depth is 53 feet. The port has 27 cargo terminals, 86 container cranes, 8 container terminals, 113 miles of on-dock rail; the LA Port imports furniture, electronics, automobile parts, plastics. The Port exports wastepaper and animal feed, scrap metal and soybeans; the port's major trading partners are China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Vietnam. For public safety, the Port of Los Angeles utilizes the Los Angeles Port Police for police service in the port and to its local communities, the Los Angeles Fire Department to provide fire and EMS services to the port and its local communities, the U.
S. Coast Guard for water way security at the port, Homeland Security to protect federal land at the port, the Los Angeles County Lifeguards to provide lifeguard services for open water outside the harbor while Los Angeles City Recreation & Parks Department lifeguards patrol the inner Cabrillo Beach. In 1542, Juan Rodriquez Cabrillo discovered the "Bay of Smokes." The south-facing San Pedro Bay was a shallow mudflat, too soft to support a wharf. Visiting ships had two choices: stay far out at anchor and have their goods and passengers ferried to shore, or beach themselves; that sticky process is described in Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., a crew member on an 1834 voyage that visited San Pedro Bay. Phineas Banning improved shipping when he dredged the channel to Wilmington in 1871 to a depth of 10 feet; the port handled 50,000 tons of shipping that year. Banning owned a stagecoach line with routes connecting San Pedro to Salt Lake City and Yuma, in 1868 he built a railroad to connect San Pedro Bay to Los Angeles, the first in the area.
After Banning's death in 1885, his sons pursued their interests in promoting the port, which handled 500,000 tons of shipping in that year. The Southern Pacific Railroad and Collis P. Huntington wanted to create Port Los Angeles at Santa Monica and built the Long Wharf there in 1893. However, the Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis and U. S. Senator Stephen White pushed for federal support of the Port of Los Angeles at San Pedro Bay; the Free Harbor Fight was settled when San Pedro was endorsed in 1897 by a commission headed by Rear Admiral John C. Walker. With U. S. government support, breakwater construction began in 1899, the area was annexed to Los Angeles in 1909. The Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners was founded in 1907. In 1912 the Southern Pacific Railroad completed its first major wharf at the port. During the 1920s, the port surpassed San Francisco as the West Coast's busiest seaport. In the early 1930s, a massive expansion of the port was undertaken with the construction of a breakwater three miles out and over two miles in length.
In addition to the construction of this outer breakwater, an inner breakwater was built off Terminal Island with docks for seagoing ships and smaller docks built at Long Beach. It was this improved harbor. During World War II, the port was used for shipbuilding, employing more than 90,000 people. In 1959, Matson Navigation Company's Hawaiian Merchant delivered 20 containers to the port, beginning the port's shift to containerization; the opening of the Vincent Thomas Bridge in 1963 improved access to Terminal Island and allowed increased traffic and further expansion of the port. In 1985, the port handled one million containers in a year for the first time. In 2000, the Pier 400 Dredging and Landfill Program, the largest such project in America, was completed. By 2013, more than half a million containers were moving through the Port every month. Since 2018, the SpaceX BFR, designed for human missions to Mars, is being produced in a factory at the port; the port district is an independent, self-supporting department of the government of the City of Los Angeles.
The port is under the control of a five-member Board of Harbor Commissioners appointed by the mayor and approved by the city council, is administered by an executive director. The port maintains the highest rating attainable for self-funded ports; the port has about a dozen pilots, including two chiefs. Pilots have specialized knowledge of San Pedro Bay, they meet the ships waiting to enter the harbor and provide advice as the vessel is steered through the congested waterway to the dock. The port's container volume was 9.3 million twenty-foot equivalent units in calendar year 2017, a 5.5% increase over 2016's record-breaking year of 8.8 million TEU. It's the most cargo moved annually by a Western Hemisphere port; the port is the busiest port in the United States by container volume, the 19th-busiest container port in the world, the 10th-busiest worldwide when combined with the neighboring Port of Long Beach. The port is the number-one freight gateway in the United States when ranked by the value of shipments passing through it.
The port's top trading partners in 2016 were: China/Hong Kong Japan Vietnam South Korea Tai
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans known as American Indians, Indigenous Americans and other terms, are the indigenous peoples of the United States, except Hawaii. There are over 500 federally recognized tribes within the US, about half of which are associated with Indian reservations; the term "American Indian" excludes Native Hawaiians and some Alaska Natives, while Native Americans are American Indians, plus Alaska Natives of all ethnicities. Native Hawaiians are not counted as Native Americans by the US Census, instead being included in the Census grouping of "Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander"; the ancestors of modern Native Americans arrived in what is now the United States at least 15,000 years ago much earlier, from Asia via Beringia. A vast variety of peoples and cultures subsequently developed. Native Americans were affected by the European colonization of the Americas, which began in 1492, their population declined precipitously due to introduced diseases as well as warfare, territorial confiscation and slavery.
After the founding of the United States, many Native American peoples were subjected to warfare and one-sided treaties, they continued to suffer from discriminatory government policies into the 20th century. Since the 1960s, Native American self-determination movements have resulted in changes to the lives of Native Americans, though there are still many contemporary issues faced by Native Americans. Today, there are over five million Native Americans in the United States, 78% of whom live outside reservations; when the United States was created, established Native American tribes were considered semi-independent nations, as they lived in communities separate from British settlers. The federal government signed treaties at a government-to-government level until the Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 ended recognition of independent native nations, started treating them as "domestic dependent nations" subject to federal law; this law did preserve the rights and privileges agreed to under the treaties, including a large degree of tribal sovereignty.
For this reason, many Native American reservations are still independent of state law and actions of tribal citizens on these reservations are subject only to tribal courts and federal law. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted U. S. citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States. This emptied the "Indians not taxed" category established by the United States Constitution, allowed natives to vote in state and federal elections, extended the Fourteenth Amendment protections granted to people "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. However, some states continued to deny Native Americans voting rights for several decades. Bill of Rights protections do not apply to tribal governments, except for those mandated by the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968. Since the end of the 15th century, the migration of Europeans to the Americas has led to centuries of population and agricultural transfer and adjustment between Old and New World societies, a process known as the Columbian exchange.
As most Native American groups had preserved their histories by oral traditions and artwork, the first written sources of the conflict were written by Europeans. Ethnographers classify the indigenous peoples of North America into ten geographical regions with shared cultural traits, called cultural areas; some scholars combine the Plateau and Great Basin regions into the Intermontane West, some separate Prairie peoples from Great Plains peoples, while some separate Great Lakes tribes from the Northeastern Woodlands. The ten cultural areas are as follows: Arctic, including Aleut and Yupik peoples Subarctic Northeastern Woodlands Southeastern Woodlands Great Plains Great Basin Northwest Plateau Northwest Coast California Southwest At the time of the first contact, the indigenous cultures were quite different from those of the proto-industrial and Christian immigrants; some Northeastern and Southwestern cultures, in particular, were matrilineal and operated on a more collective basis than that with which Europeans were familiar.
The majority of Indigenous American tribes maintained their hunting grounds and agricultural lands for use of the entire tribe. Europeans at that time had patriarchal cultures and had developed concepts of individual property rights with respect to land that were different; the differences in cultures between the established Native Americans and immigrant Europeans, as well as shifting alliances among different nations in times of war, caused extensive political tension, ethnic violence, social disruption. Before the European settlement of what is now the United States, Native Americans suffered high fatalities from contact with new European diseases, to which they had not yet acquired immunity. Smallpox epidemics are thought to have caused the greatest loss of life for indigenous populations. William M Denevan, noted author and Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said on this subject in his essay "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492".
Old World diseases were the primary killer. In many regions the tropical lowlands, populations fell by 90 percent or more in the first century after the contact. "Estimates of the pre-Columbian population of what today constitutes the U. S. vary ranging from William M Denevan's 3.8 million in his 1992 w
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