Like children grabbing for cookies, the nations of Europe rushed to claim land in the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Britain all set up colonies.
A colony is a group of people who settle in a place far from their native land but who remain under the control of the country they left.
The Colonial America that gave birth to the United States of America was made up of 13 British colonies along the Atlantic Coast. The colonial period spanned 168 years, beginning in 1607 when the first permanent British settlement was founded in Jamestown, Virginia.
In the beginning, the colonists welcomed the aid of Britain. Eventually, however, they began to resent the control of a government that was thousands of miles away and was interested mainly in economic profit. Conflict between Britain and the colonists erupted into war in 1775. The war became the Revolutionary War, and as you no doubt know, the colonists won. After the war, they were no longer colonists but citizens of a new nation.
