Think of everything that has vanished. The great woolly megafauna that once grazed the plains of what is now Canada. The ice bridges that connected Asia to Alaska. The dozens of languages spoken by peoples whose names Europeans never recorded, whose cities were already ancient when Rome was young. North America is a continent where the most important chapters were written long before anyone thought to write them down, and that absence is the first thing to understand about this place.

The oldest story begins somewhere between forty thousand and a hundred thousand years ago, when the first people crossed from eastern Siberia into present-day Alaska. They followed herds of now-extinct animals along ice-free corridors between the great glaciers, or hugged the Pacific coast in primitive boats. By around fourteen thousand years ago, the ice was retreating, the climate was warming, and human communities were spreading across the entire length and breadth of the continent.

By eight thousand years before the common era, the climate had stabilised enough to allow populations to grow and settle. Agriculture was invented independently in two separate regions: the Eastern Woodlands and Mesoamerica. The peoples of the south domesticated maize, the crop that would eventually feed half the world, along with tomatoes and squash. From that agricultural foundation, genuinely complex civilisations arose.

The Maya built enormous stone pyramids, developed a sophisticated writing system, calculated a calendar of extraordinary precision, and worked out the concept of zero roughly five hundred years before the idea appeared in the Old World. Further north, in the American Southwest, the Hohokam and Ancestral Pueblo peoples had been farming with ditch irrigation for at least two thousand years before any European arrived. By the time Columbus set sail, North America held perhaps ten million people living in communities ranging from small family bands to the sprawling Aztec Empire.

The first Europeans to leave physical evidence of their presence were the Norse. Erik the Red, a Norse chieftain, founded a colony on Greenland in 985 CE. His son Leif Eriksson sailed further west around the year 1000 and reached the island of Newfoundland, which he called Vinland. The only confirmed Norse site outside Greenland is at L'Anse aux Meadows in what is now Newfoundland and Labrador. The Norse settlements were small and short-lived, and the voyages never became common knowledge in Europe.

For nearly five hundred years, Europe remained largely unaware of the Americas. Then, in 1492, an Italian sailor named Christopher Columbus, backed by the newly united Spanish crown under Isabella the First and Ferdinand the Second, sailed west from Europe and reached land in the Bahamas. The continent would never be the same.

Within decades, the Spanish had conquered the Aztec Empire and established the first permanent European settlement on the continental mainland at Veracruz in 1519, founded by the conquistador Hernán Cortés. England's John Cabot explored the Canadian coast in 1497. The French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed the St. Lawrence River in 1534. Spain, France, and England staked out vast claims, and the rivalry between them would shape the next three centuries of North American history.

European colonisation brought catastrophe for the indigenous peoples. Diseases against which native populations had no immunity swept through communities far ahead of the settlers themselves. The Spanish dispossessed entire peoples across Mexico and Central America. The French established Port Royal in 1604 and Quebec City in 1608, building a fur-trading empire that transformed indigenous economies and alliances. The English planted their first permanent settlement at Jamestown in 1607, followed by Plymouth in 1620. Plantation slavery took hold in the West Indies, and the Atlantic slave trade began to cast its long shadow across the hemisphere.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the contest for the continent was nearing a decision. The French and British fought a series of wars across North America, and the decisive moment came at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec City, where French forces were defeated and France surrendered most of her North American claims. The loss was a disaster for many indigenous nations in the east, who lost their most powerful ally against the expanding British colonies. A confederation of Great Lakes tribes fought back in what became known as Pontiac's Rebellion from 1763 to 1766, defending lands that had nominally been reserved for them, but the tide was already turning.

The American Revolution, which produced the United States of America in the 1770s and 1780s, reshaped the continent's political map. Those colonists who remained loyal to Britain fled north, laying the foundations of English-speaking Canada as a distinct community. To the south, Spain's grip on Mexico was loosening. In 1810, a priest named Miguel Hidalgo declared independence, igniting the Mexican War of Independence. By 1813, a congress led by José María Morelos had issued the first formal declaration of separation from Spain. Spain finally recognised Mexican independence in 1821.

The new United States expanded with extraordinary speed. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 nearly doubled the young nation's territory overnight. A Native confederacy under the leader Tecumseh fought from 1810 to 1811 to hold back the American advance into the Great Lakes, then allied with Britain during the War of 1812 to block American attempts to seize Canada. The effort failed; Tecumseh died in battle, and the expansion continued. Texas broke away from Mexico in 1836, joined the United States in 1845, and the resulting Mexican-American War of 1846 handed California and the entire Southwest to Washington.