>The shared dream of settling the continent was real but - given that said continent was already occupied
I doubt you understand how large the US is if you think that. Most of it was empty. The union was already strongly formed before the genocide of the west got under way.
I think you might underestimate how much a single shared language helps mobility, doing business, spreading culture, etc. The fact that the EU embraces individual country identities will mean it will never be as cohesive as the US. If every state in the US spoke a different language, the US probably wouldn't have even made it past the size of the original colonies.
> I doubt you understand how large the US is if you think
> that. Most of it was empty. The union was already strongly > formed before the genocide of the west got under way.
According to the book 1491 (which is a great read, highly recommended), the population of the New World was much larger, and more more historic than we may be lead to imagine. Millions of Native Americans lived on the east coast alone. What may have did them in was disease (smallpox, etc) that desecrated the people before even the pilgrims came on the scene. What the first colonist may have seen was just all that was left of a epidemic.
(I also agree a genocide also happened in the West, from what survivors there were)
Huh, most of the continental U.S. was definitely not empty. It was all peopled. Unless you mean there were many miles between every settlement or something. But that's not really relevant.
The conflict between settlers and natives started pretty much right away (i.e. the early 1600s), long before there was any union.
>It was all peopled. Unless you mean there were many miles between every settlement or something. But that's not really relevant.
Of course it's relevant. If there are 1,000 miles between each settlement of a thousand people, that's fewer deaths than European countries inflicted on each other during WW2. The fact that you don't think numbers are relevant is baffling to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party
>The shared dream of settling the continent was real but - given that said continent was already occupied
I doubt you understand how large the US is if you think that. Most of it was empty. The union was already strongly formed before the genocide of the west got under way.
>Shared culture, language, religion? Language, mostly.
I think you might underestimate how much a single shared language helps mobility, doing business, spreading culture, etc. The fact that the EU embraces individual country identities will mean it will never be as cohesive as the US. If every state in the US spoke a different language, the US probably wouldn't have even made it past the size of the original colonies.