Entrance to the Hudson Highlands, near Newburgh.

Title

Entrance to the Hudson Highlands, near Newburgh.

Description

View showing the entrance to the Hudson Highlands, near Newburgh (New York) with sailing ships offshore.

ca. 1840

Artist

Bartlett (1809-1854)

William Henry Bartlett (1809 – 1854) was a British artist, best known for his numerous steel engravings. The finely detailed steel engravings Bartlett produced were published uncolored with a text by Nathaniel Parker Willis as American Scenery. Bartlett made sepia wash drawings the exact size to be engraved. His engraved views were widely copied by artists, but no signed oil painting by his hand is known. Engravings based on Bartlett's views were later used in his posthumous History of the United States of North America, continued by Bernard Bolingbroke Woodward and published around 1856.

Historical Description

The history of the United States covers developments in the territory of the United States from the founding of the first British colonies on the east coast of North America in the 17th century to the present. The colonies declared their independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1776. With the enactment of the Constitution in 1788, the previously sovereign individual states became part of a federal republic. With the westward expansion of the white settlers, which went hand in hand with the displacement of the native Indian population, more and more new territories were incorporated into the Union as federal states, the last being Alaska and the Hawaiian archipelago in 1959. The settlement of the North American continent began over 15,000 years ago. Siberian hunter-gatherers reached what is now Alaska via a land bridge that still existed at that time across the Bering Strait and advanced southward along the west coast and eastward from there. At the time of the "discovery" of the Americas by Europeans in 1492, an estimated 7 million Indians lived in diverse cultures on the North American continent north of Mexico. The opening up and settlement of the land by white colonists led to a demographic catastrophe over the next few centuries. The number of Native Americans decreased by about 90 percent within a hundred years of first contact with Europeans. For about a century after the "discovery" of the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492, the interest of the European powers (Spain, Portugal, England, and France) focused on South and Central America. It was not until 1524 that Giovanni da Verrazzano became the first European to explore the course of what is now the east coast of the United States in search of the Northwest Passage. The first expeditions into the interior and to the Pacific coast started from the Spaniards: from 1539 to 1542 Hernando de Soto explored the southeast, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado the southwest of today's United States, at the same time the navigator Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo reached the coast of California in 1542. These first voyages of discovery, however, did not herald gold or other riches, but rather forbidding, almost deserted landscapes, so that North America remained largely untouched by European colonization efforts for decades to come. Only the fishing grounds off Newfoundland, which is now Canadian, attracted European ships more frequently, but it was not until the upswing in the fur trade with the Indians that the first permanent trading posts were established here around 1600.[4] The first permanent European settlement on the territory of today's USA was the Spanish Fort San Augustín on the east coast of Florida, today's St. Augustine. However, it was not designed as a settlement colony, but as a military base to protect the sea route of Spanish galleys from Mexico to Europe from pirate attacks. English claims to North America were based on Giovanni Caboto's voyages of discovery (1497), but English colonization efforts did not get off the ground until 1580, spurred in particular by the writings of Richard Hakluyt and the explorations of Walter Raleigh. In contrast to its European rivals - especially France, and later also the Netherlands - England's motive from the outset was not only exploitation, but also the permanent settlement of North America. In 1585 and 1587, however, the first attempts to establish an English colony on Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North Carolina failed; the settlers left behind were killed by the Indians, died of hunger or disease. It was not until 1607 that England succeeded in establishing a permanent foothold with the founding of Jamestown, but even this success came at a high price: Of the 105 settlers, only 33 survived the first seven months. A second English colony, Sagadahoc in present-day Maine, had to be abandoned after barely a year in 1608. The next major immigration by the Puritan "Pilgrim Fathers" followed in 620. With the ship Mayflower they reached Cape Cod in today's Massachusetts and founded the colony of Plymouth.