How America accidentally became the most powerful country in history
For the first 100 years after Europeans reached the New World, nobody wanted North America. Spain took the gold and silver of Mexico and Peru. Portugal took Brazil. The French and Dutch chased furs. North America was considered cold, empty and useless. The land that would become the United States was basically the leftover nobody fought hard for.
What happened next was not destiny. It was a chain of accidents, gambles and lucky breaks.
Columbus was looking for Asia and bumped into the wrong continent. The 13 colonies were a mismatched group of religious refugees, debtors and merchants who spent most of their early history arguing with each other. Independence itself was a long shot, won partly because France wanted to embarrass Britain.
Then came the breaks. Napoleon needed cash for his European wars and sold Louisiana for about 3 cents an acre, doubling the country overnight. Settlers stumbled onto gold in California right after the US took it from Mexico. Russia sold Alaska for almost nothing and it turned out to be packed with gold and oil. The Civil War nearly destroyed the whole experiment, but the Union survived and came out industrialized.
By the time the canals were built, the railroads connected the coasts and two World Wars wrecked every rival, America was the last big economy standing. A country nobody believed in ended up running the world.