British historian Paul Johnson begins his lengthy treatment of America’s history with a dedication “…to the people of America—strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.” A History of the American People is a survey of some of the forces and challenges that have shaped a people over the past four centuries. The following captures just a handful of Johnson’s most interesting snapshots of American life at various junctures along the nation’s journey.

The story of the American people needs to be nestled in a broader context of pan-European idealism and hunger for adventure. For many in Europe, the Old World was too small. For centuries prior to Columbus’ voyage, much of Europe had been looking eastward toward Jerusalem, looking to reclaim the Holy City and surrounding regions. Even centuries after the Crusades, the spirit of the crusader still animated the European imagination, and it was precisely this combination of big dreams and big greed that fueled exploration of the Americas.

The Portuguese were the first to begin venturing into uncharted waters. As early as 1415, they erected trading outposts in islands off North Africa’s coasts. The rise of Christian culture had all but obliterated slavery for centuries, but in the mid-1400s, the Portuguese reintroduced a slave system to supply the labor demanded in the archipelagos they’d begun colonizing. 

Slavery had been common in Africa, run by either local chieftains or Arab merchants, but Portuguese slavery was more pernicious. By the time Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, there was already a thriving human chattel trade. The Spanish, as the financiers of Columbus’ voyage, continued the work of charting the uncharted. Centuries of pushing the Muslim Moors out of Spain had instilled a callousness in the Spaniards, which they carried across the Atlantic and into their dealings with indigenous groups. When the English began their own ventures across the Atlantic, they generally viewed Spanish colonizing tactics with an admixture of admiration and distaste: appreciating their knack for swift, intelligent planning, while simultaneously being unnerved by their heavy-handed repression of indigenous groups.

The Portuguese soon followed the Spanish across the Atlantic. With the help of a papal decree, Spain and Portugal reached an arrangement that divvied up the Americas so that there was plenty of territory to be explored without any of it being contested. But those restrictions didn’t hold for other European nations—especially after the Protestant Reformation struck a serious blow to papal clout.

There was a “No Peace Beyond This Line” mentality for Euopeans going to the new world. It was like the rule of law was lifted after a vague, arbitrarily-drawn line somewhere in the Atlantic. Violence in the New World was taken for granted. It was the Wild West before the Wild West.

In the early 1500s, the French, Normans, and Basques began taking their fishing expertise to Newfoundland and other territories of modern-day Canada. Jacques Cartier famously sailed along the St. Lawrence River. French Huguenots settled a colony on an island off the coast of Rio de Janeiro until the Portuguese drove them out. The Huguenots also set up a colony in Northern Florida in 1562—which lasted until the Spanish explorers decimated the colony and set up their own in Saint Augustine, Florida.

It was this vacuum left by the French Huguenots that the English began to occupy, and it is to that time period when the English landed that we can date the true beginnings of the American people, first in Roanoke, North Carolina (a failed experiment), and then in Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement.

Politically, the young nation that had come to be known as the United States of America had added remarkable contributions to political discourse. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and many other treatises on governance were political hallmarks that had the world talking.

But many Europeans (and even some Americans) observed the dearth of American contributions to science, literature, and the arts in the early 1800s. This is perhaps uncharitable, given Benjamin Franklin’s creative innovations and discoveries, or the writings of Jonathan Edwards. At the same time, there was a lack of distinctly American intellectual currents. They largely fed on European cultural residue. Many Americans noticed this as well. In 1818, a Philadelphia newspaper published a piece comparing book production between America and Great Britain. At the time, America was releasing about 20 new books a year, compared to Britain's 500 to a 1000.

For decades after becoming a nation, American writers and intellectuals were still parroting the British in style and manner. Those Americans who did gain international attention were those who proved to be the best parrots, and those who cringed, along with the British, at what was considered America’s cultural deprivation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was the first American who took pains to break the European mold that had become a cage for many Americans. He was a Boston-born son of a Unitarian minister. Emerson walked away from his faith, but held on to the moral and religious impulses that were inseparable to American secular society. 

Emerson was the progenitor of the first American philosophical movement, known as Transcendentalism. It was an American version of neo-platonism, vague and at times incomprehensible. Many Americans didn’t really get it, but stood behind it, proud that there was intellectual ground being broken on American soil. Emerson became a phenomenon, making a name for himself less through his writings than through becoming an itinerant lecturer traveling around the country. Business owners would let their employees off early to go and listen to him speak. Emerson was not always accessible to the average citizen, but his anti-elitism resonated, and he had a knack for creating memorable aphorisms—many of which have become common parlance centuries later, like “hitch your wagon to a star.”

Neither demographics nor economics nor politics supported the Confederacy’s war-making. In terms of population, the Union held an overwhelming majority. In the 11 of 15 slave-holding states that joined the Confederacy, there were 5.5 million whites and 3.5 million slaves in the South as the war began. This was paltry compared to the Union’s population of 19 million scattered across 19 states. That number was even higher if you included the four slave-owning border states. For every free male of fighting age in the Confederate states, there were four in the Union.

From an economic standpoint, the Union was far better positioned than the Confederacy. The far more industrial North had 10 times as many factories as the South. They also had 15 times as much iron, almost 40 times as much coal, twice as much corn, 400 times as much wheat, and three times as much wealth.

Politically, the Confederates made a mess of things, domestically and abroad. Global opinion heavily favored the Union over the South. Lincoln held the moral high ground, as far as the world was concerned. His efforts to free the slaves and preserve the Union embodied two of the strongest impulses in nineteenth century thinking: liberalism and nationalism.

The Confederacy did little to curry international goodwill or even strengthen economic connections the rebels desperately needed. The South had a smug confidence in the bet it had taken, that cotton was king. This was the only resource in which the South outflanked the Union (24 to one), and they were convinced it would leave the North bereft. But their cotton exports proved less indispensable to the rest of the world than they anticipated. Great Britain had been one of America’s biggest buyers, but they were beginning to get their cotton from Egypt and India. When they did begin to import US cotton again, Great Britain bought from the North, which had systematically pilfered cotton from Confederate ships through blockades. Even though these blockades hurt Great Britain’s factory production and left hundreds of thousands unemployed, British workers felt a sense of solidarity with the American slaves and wished for their freedom—even if it meant their unemployment.

Ironically, the very emphasis on state’s rights that the Confederacy was fighting for proved instrumental in their undoing. States wanted their own militias and wanted control over those militias. Soldiers didn’t want to fight under generals from other states. There was no central organ that could effectively coordinate troop movement or ensure cooperation. Southerners proved more loyal to their states than to the Confederacy. And so the South ended up repeating an earlier chapter of American history, in which the nation was a collection of states loosely affiliated with one another, but without a strong unifying national government. Unfortunately for the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis lacked the wisdom, patience, and aplomb that had helped President Washington navigate such contentiousness effectively decades earlier.

Civil wars usually end when one side runs out of money. The American Civil War was no exception. Even when Davis finally appointed a competent Treasurer in 1864, it was too late to rectify years of financial malfeasance. Inflation rates skyrocketed. The South eventually stopped trading in paper money and instituted a barter system to continue functioning as an economy. Even the Confederate government began to rely on produce as currency.

After a wave of lackluster politicians in the late 1800s, Americans looked elsewhere for sources of inspiration. By then, Americans were aware they were citizens of the world’s wealthiest country. The fires of industry were spreading across the nation, and increasingly, the American people looked with admiration upon the charismatic, risk-taking tycoons who’d created that industrial infrastructure. 

 Andrew Carnegie was perhaps the clearest embodiment of the American ideal to make lots of money and give lots of money away. Carnegie’s origins were humble: a Scottish immigrant living in a Pennsylvania slum, working 12-hour days in a factory for $1.50 a week. He eventually got a job with Western Union and worked his way up to the role of superintendent of Pittsburgh. 

He discovered the magic of the free market when he got his first check for his holdings in the telegraph industry. He began to invest in railroads and oil. As a young adult, his investments were earning him far more than his salary. He decided to stop working for an employer and become his own boss. Steel seemed the most promising industry to bet on. He didn’t want to be a pioneer, but he was more than happy to learn from other pioneers’ mistakes. When he entered the steel industry, steel was a metal that signaled opulence; by the end of his career, steel was commonplace, inexpensive material.

The railway companies bought massive amounts of steel to continue laying tracks across the continent. Then, skyscrapers began to pierce the cityscapes in major metropolitan areas, and the construction companies opted for steel because Carnegie had managed to produce it so inexpensively. 

Carnegie wasn’t without critics. He’d been called the greediest little man God had ever created. But Carnegie himself despised the idolizing of money and profits. He wrote in a note dated 1868 that, while every man will inevitably have an idol, there’s no idol more pernicious than stockpiling money. The improvement of the human condition through the creation of wealth was Carnegie’s chief aspiration, more than raw profit for its own sake.

Carnegie seems to have put his money where his mouth was. Over his lifetime, he spent over $350 million founding, funding, and endowing concert halls, libraries, and research institutes that remain in operation today. He had a keen interest in promoting science, the humanities, and the arts. His money funded the construction of 2,800 public libraries across the country. Carnegie never entered political life, but he had a greater impact on American life than any president from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt.

A strange and admirable paradox runs through much of America’s history: the lack of attention to formal rank, coexisting with deep respect for those who have set themselves apart through politics, intellect, life experience, or moral virtue. Any man or woman keenly sensed that it was right to shake the hand of anyone—be they pauper or president. It was among American’s best qualities. 

The 1960s was a period in America’s history where that paradox began to unravel. It became trendy to replace deference to authority with cynicism. The media displayed the urge to overturn long-standing hierarchies with unmatched eagerness. With the advent of television in many homes came an added weight given to TV personalities. The locus of influence shifted from executives and owners of news companies, to the people in front of the camera.

It was a gradual creep over the course of the decade, but over time, it was the journalists, TV personalities, writers, and editors who wielded the greatest power to shape public opinion. As the vast majority of working journalists were liberal, the shift in influence was seismic, carrying not just political, but cultural ramifications. Nothing else did more to untether the United States from its traditional bearings.

Throughout the United States’ history, the standing president hands over the reigns of power to the president-elect at the inauguration. In the case of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the process more closely resembled a tribal takeover and the imposition of a cultural climate. What most people don’t realize is the extent to which the Kennedy family groomed JFK for the presidency—or the extremes resorted to in order to keep the plan on track.

 John F. Kennedy came from a wealthy Boston-Irish family. His father, Joe Kennedy, had mastered the art of not just making money, but also of converting wealth into political clout. During the Great Depression, he had managed to ingratiate himself with FDR, and purchased an ambassador position through him. Joe had been grooming his son “Jack” for the presidency long before his 1960 bid. Joe’s financial decisions all orbited around the central goal of getting his son into power. It motivated the family’s move from Boston to New York in search of more lucrative opportunities, including, but not limited to, shipping, Hollywood, black market liquor, and so on. Joe made friends in high and low places, from the owners and writers of major news outlets to mob bosses. There was nothing that money and manipulation couldn’t solve, as far as Joe was concerned. Jack seemed to have very little say over his own destiny and contented himself to await paternal fiats. Even the decision to marry Jackie Kennedy was an arrangement reached by Joe and Jackie. Jackie was a selection based on public relations more than romantic interest. JFK conceded his own passivity in a wry remark, “I guess Dad has decided he’s going to be the ventriloquist, so that leaves me the role of dummy.” 

Joe Kennedy used every connection he had to promote the JFK brand and airbrush any blemishes that could hinder the path to presidency. For example, Joe moved heaven and earth to keep JFK’s health issues a secret, including an amphetamine addiction he’d developed in his attempts to cope with severe back pain. 

Jack didn’t write his own thesis at school. A collection of journalists and academics took the shoddy draft they were given and turned it into a thesis that gained Jack tremendous literary attention when it was converted into a book. Joe’s connections with newspapers and publishing houses made it easy to land a book deal and promote it. Just to make sure it became a bestseller, the Kennedy family secretly purchased and stashed over 30,000 copies of the book. JFK became a bestselling author yet again through a similar process years later. This time he won a Pulitzer for a book his father had convinced others to write. Joe quashed any accusations that Jack hadn’t written his own book with threats of lawsuits. Or, more surreptitiously, Joe would have the FBI investigate the accuser. 

JFK’s father also meticulously orchestrated Jack’s military service, a career that was short-lived and far from exemplary. His father used his connections to get Jack an officer post, a medal for bravery, and a withdrawal from the navy when father began worrying about his son’s safety.

Joe Kennedy was not against leaning on mafia ties to get Jack the presidency, either. He worked out deals with the godfather of Chicago, Sam Giancana. This has been confirmed by FBI documents and recorded footage. Mafia money bought votes in key states, and Joe guaranteed he’d help the mob in any federal investigations. After the election, Giancana bragged to his mistress (who was also one of JFK’s mistresses) that JFK never would have been elected president without his help.

The public’s perception of JFK as an intellectual, literary genius and military hero was a result of decades of careful branding. It was also a sham. JFK rose through the political ranks (from Congressman to Senator to president) by simply following a path paved by his father’s deep wallet, vast web of connections, and shrewd directives.

JFK’s election marked significant cultural changes in the United States. For one, he was the first Catholic to be elected president. In a country thoroughly Protestant in its origins and orientation, the Kennedys worried that their Catholicism would be an impediment. A Cardinal from Boston (a personal friend of the Kennedys) would later admit that he and Joe Kennedy had determined which Protestant pastors to award donations in return for minimizing religious differences. JFK’s election also served to illustrate the power of new media  like television. The Kennedy-Nixon debates were the first presidential debates to be televised, and JFK’s father used connections to the increasingly powerful TV personalities to, quite literally, put his son in the best possible light. Everything from camera angles and room temperatures were considered to make JFK seem likable, suave, and youth-friendly, while depicting Nixon as a sweaty, dodgy used car salesman.

Amidst the ebbs and flows over the past 400 years, the world continues to have its eye on the people of America and the young nation they constitute. Despite its failures and shortcomings, American has retained a buoyant, problem-solving spirit and remains humanity’s best hope for a bright future.