THE AMERICANPAGEANT 2 PART ONE FOUNDING THE NEW NATION ??? c. 33,000 B.C.?A.D. 1783 The European explorers who followed Christopher Columbus to North America in the sixteenth century had no notion of founding a new nation. Neither did the first European settlers who peopled the thirteen English colonies on the eastern shores of the continent in the sev- enteenth and eighteenth cen- turies. These original colonists may have fled poverty or religious persecution in the Old World, but they continued to view them- selves as Europeans, and as sub- jects of the English king. They regarded America as but the western rim of a transatlantic European world. Yet life in the New World made the colonists different from their European cousins, and eventually, during the American Revo-