Please reflect on what you learned this semester.

This course began with a very interesting revelation for me. I was not aware that humans had inhabited the western hemisphere for over 10,000 years. Most of the history lessons I was taught as a child growing up in Southern California were centered on the arrival of Spanish conquistadors along the California coast. My interest was immediately sparked with Lesson 1 and I was very excited to see how the course would proceed. I learned that the early North and Central American cultures of Paleo-Indians were big game hunters. Following the extinction of mammoths and other big game prey, the native people were able to adapt to environmental and social fluctuations and developed a hunter-gatherer culture. Native Americans had thriving communities with highly sophisticated political, economic and social systems that emerged and were practiced. The Spanish were the first Europeans to actively pursue exploiting the New World. European explorer nations of Spain, Britain, France and Holland were looking for a western route to Asia. Instead they discovered the Americas and found unlimited fertile lands and natural resources, and they competed fiercely for domination of the Americas. Many persons of European descent came to settle in the New World for varied reasons, i.e. religious freedom, land ownership, opportunity for a better life.

When American colonist decided to fight for independence from Britain, they probably had no idea that this would lead to the formation a democratic government unlike any seen previously in modern history. The founding document, the Constitution of the United States of America has become a model for democratic republics all over the world. After the Revolutionary War, the United States of America would have another encounter with the British military in the War of 1812. The