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Waterways

Industry has been strengthened by the ease of movement in North America. Waterways, widely used by the Indians and early Europeans, are still important. In spite of the barriers of the Canadian Shield and the Appalachians, the routes up the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Hudson Strait, Chesapeake Bay, and the Gulf of Mexico permitted the swift development of coastal ports and allowed the continental interior to be opened up. The Mississippi-Ohio and the Great LakesSt. Lawrence waterways drew navigation into the heartland. Connecting these two systems, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, linking the Illinois River with Lake Michigan, and various Ohio River–Lake Erie canals provided a tremendous network, extended by the Erie Canal to the Mohawk-Hudson waterway and by the Intracoastal Waterway to river ports of the Gulf of Mexico. The St. Lawrence Seaway, which overcame the Lachine and International rapids and Niagara Falls, has made ocean ports of inland cities.

Railways

Railways soon offered the challenge of more direct and speedy access than the waterways. Developed principally from bases along the Atlantic Seaboard, they made the most of gaps through the Appalachians, debouched on the Great Lakes or Ohio River at Buffalo and Chicago and Pittsburgh, and pushed on to the Mississippi River at St. Louis and St. PaulMinneapolis, Minnesota. Other lines were then laid across the Great Plains, and, utilizing passes through the Cordilleras, the railways built terminals at San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Most of the Western railways were given large land grants to encourage immigrants to settle along them, while low promotional rates on long-haul traffic developed transcontinental trade. In Canada the transcontinental railways linked up the Maritime Provinces with the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes, and thence, from Montreal and Toronto, they crossed the shield to converge at Winnipeg; there, reinforced by large land grants, they fanned out across the prairies, to be drawn together by the Fraser River down to Vancouver.

Mexico overcame difficult grades in building a railway from Veracruz to Mexico City and added extensions north and south along the Gulf Coast, with lines into Monterrey and to Mérida. Eventually lines were pushed through the Sierra Madre Occidental at Guadalajara to the Pacific coast.

Railroads had a tremendous impact on urban development. Among the major railroad cities are New York City, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles in the United States and Montreal, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Vancouver in Canada. Mexico City dominates the network in Mexico. Railroads led to the rise of east-west over north-south lines and rapidly displaced most waterways, particularly the Mississippi. The main economic axis in the United States lies along the railway belt from New York to Chicago. Inadequate overall planning in major metropolitan regions has resulted in crucial transportation problems, however, and inner-city rapid-transit systems often have fared no better.

Roads

North America’s road network first began to offer serious competition to the railways after World War I. The U.S. government has since financed more than 300,000 miles (483,000 km) of transcontinental highways, including more than 40,000 miles (64,000 km) of limited-access multilane roads. In Canada the Trans-Canada Highway offers a coast-to-coast through route, while from Mexico the Pan-American Highway links the countries of Central America. These highways have enabled trucks to take over short-haul routes from railways, and the railways have concentrated on long-haul, low-cost routes. Truck and train, however, have been integrated in the “piggyback” containerized carriage. The automobile, meanwhile, has displaced commuter trains in many cities, and radial and ring routes have helped draw the cities far out into the countryside. The attendant problems of congestion and pollution have approached the critical stage in many cities.

Air transport

Air transport has taken most of the long-distance passenger traffic from the trains, and airfreight has cut into truck-freighting trade. Intense overall competition is thus a recurrent feature of North American transportation systems. Airways have tended to centre on the larger cities and to magnify their importance, although the rise of the “hub” system of air transport has helped to diversify air routes. Links with Europe and Asia make North America the chief crossways of air routes in the world. The United States alone accounts for some two-fifths of all the world’s passenger air traffic, and several of the chief airports in the world are in the United States, including those in Chicago, Dallas–Fort Worth, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Denver, San Francisco, New York City, Miami, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Montreal and Mexico City are also major air hubs.

James Wreford Watson Wilbur Zelinsky
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Also called:
American Indian, Amerindian, Amerind, Indian, aboriginal American, or First Nation person

Native American, member of any of the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere, although the term often connotes only those groups whose original territories were in present-day Canada and the United States.

Pre-Columbian Americans used technology and material culture that included fire and the fire drill; the domesticated dog; stone implements of many kinds; the spear-thrower (atlatl), harpoon, and bow and arrow; and cordage, netting, basketry, and, in some places, pottery. Many Indigenous American groups were hunting and gathering cultures, while others were agricultural peoples. Indigenous American domesticated a variety of plants and animals, including corn (maize), beans, squash, potatoes and other tubers, turkeys, llamas, and alpacas, as well as a variety of semidomesticated species of nut- and seed-bearing plants. These and other resources were used to support communities ranging from small hamlets to cities such as Cahokia, with an estimated population of 10,000 to 20,000 individuals, and Teotihuacán, with some 125,000 to 200,000 residents.

At the dawn of the 16th century ce, as the European conquest of the Americas began, Indigenous peoples resided throughout the Western Hemisphere. They were soon decimated by the effects of epidemic disease, military conquest, and enslavement, and, as with other colonized peoples, they were subject to discriminatory political and legal policies well into the 20th, and even the 21st, century. Nonetheless, they have been among the most active and successful Native peoples in effecting political change and regaining their autonomy in areas such as education, land ownership, religious freedom, the law, and the revitalization of traditional culture.

Historically, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been usually recognized as constituting two broad cultural groupings, American Indians (a term now considered outdated) and Arctic peoples. American Indians are often further grouped by area of residence: Northern America (present-day United States and Canada), Middle America (present-day Mexico and Central America; sometimes called Mesoamerica), and South America. This article is a survey of the culture areas, prehistories, histories, and recent developments of the Indigenous peoples and cultures of the United States and Canada. Some of the terminology used in reference to Indigenous Americans is explained in Sidebar: Tribal Nomenclature: American Indian, Native American, and First Nation; Sidebar: The Difference Between a Tribe and a Band; and Sidebar: Native American Self-Names. An overview of all the Indigenous peoples of the Americas is presented in American Indian; discussions of various aspects of Indigenous American cultures may also be found in the articles pre-Columbian civilizations; Middle American Indian; South American Indian; Arctic: The people; American Indian languages; Native American religions; and Native American arts.

Native American culture areas

Comparative studies are an essential component of all scholarly analyses, whether the topic under study is human society, fine art, paleontology, or chemistry; the similarities and differences found in the entities under consideration help to organize and direct research programs and exegeses. The comparative study of cultures falls largely in the domain of anthropology, which often uses a typology known as the culture area approach to organize comparisons across cultures.

Tecumseh. Battle of the Thames, Ontario, Canada, and the death of Tecumseh. Col. Richard M. Johnson with the Kentucky volunteers on left battle with Tecumseh and his Native troops. Native American Shawnee chief. North American indian. (See Notes)
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The culture area approach was delineated at the turn of the 20th century and continued to frame discussions of peoples and cultures into the 21st century. A culture area is a geographic region where certain cultural traits have generally co-occurred; for instance, in North America between the 16th and 19th centuries, the Northwest Coast culture area was characterized by traits such as salmon fishing, woodworking, large villages or towns, and hierarchical social organization.

The specific number of culture areas delineated for Native America has been somewhat variable because regions are sometimes subdivided or conjoined. The 10 culture areas discussed below are among the most commonly used—the Arctic, the Subarctic, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Plains, the Southwest, the Great Basin, California, the Northwest Coast, and the Plateau. Notably, some scholars prefer to combine the Northeast and Southeast into one Eastern Woodlands culture area or the Plateau and Great Basin into a single Intermontane culture area. Each section below considers the location, climate, environment, languages, peoples, and common cultural characteristics of the area before it was heavily colonized. Prehistoric and post-Columbian Native American cultures are discussed in subsequent sections of this article. A discussion of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas as a whole is found in Indigenous American.

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