Civilizations: United States

Overview
The United States of America was the direct result of the American revolutionary war that ending with the Treaty of Paris, which gave the United States independence from Great Britain.

By the late 1800's, the states had become divided into the north and the south. Competing nationalisms, preservation of the Union, political turmoil, the legality of slavery, were just a few of the many disagreements which led the divided states into one the bloodiest wars ever to take place on America's soil: the Civil War. It began on April 12, 1861, when Confederates opened fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, and lasted until May 26, 1865, when the last Confederate army surrendered. The Civil War had over 600,000 casualties, yet it brought freedom to over 4 million slaves and reunited the States once more.

In 1914, war broke out in Europe. The United States remain neutral, but due to events such as the sinking of a British passenger liner, the Lusitania, which ended the lives of more than a thousand civilians, including 128 Americans, and a proposed alliance with Mexico to help regain land from the United States, the Americans declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. With the involvement of the United States and the military might of the Allied forces, the war ended in 1918 with the Treaty of Versailles.

As the Second World War broke out, the Americans began sending large amounts of supplies for the Allied cause, but once more, remained neutral until the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. The American forces brought their attention to the war in Europe, and with Operation Overlord (better known as D-Day) Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, bringing about the fall of the Nazi regime and the end of the war in Europe.

With the war in Europe at an end, the United States turned their full attention to the Japanese threat. American forces slowly began taking control of the Japanese controlled island of the Pacific, taking key islands such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Countless US soldiers had already perished in the Pacific War, and without an end to the war in sight, the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and shortly after, on Nagasaki. Soon after, the Japanese surrendered on August 14, 1945.

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