Indiana
Indiana is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Lake Michigan to the northwest, Michigan to the north and northeast, Ohio to the east, the Ohio River and Kentucky to the south and southeast, and the Wabash River and Illinois to the west. Nicknamed "the Hoosier State", Indiana is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 states. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis, and other cities include Fort Wayne, Evansville, South Bend, and Carmel. Indiana was admitted to the Union as the 19th state on December 11, 1816.
Indigenous resistance to American settlement was broken with their defeat in Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, and the collapse of Tecumseh's confederacy in 1813. The new settlers were primarily Americans of British ancestry from the eastern seaboard and the Upland South, and Germans. After the Civil War, in which the state fought for the Union, natural gas attracted heavy industry and new European immigrants to its northern counties. In the first half of the 20th century, northern and central sections experienced a boom in goods manufacture and automobile production. Southern Indiana remained largely rural. After the rise and fall of the Klan in the 1920s, the state swung politically from the Republican to Democratic Party in the New Deal 1930s. Today, with a decades-long record of returning Republican majorities, Indiana is counted a "red state".
Indiana has a diverse economy with a gross state product in 2023 of 404.3 billion. Indianapolis is at the center of the state's largest metropolitan area, with a population of over two million. The Fort Wayne metro area follows with a population of 645,000.
The state's largest city, Indianapolis, is home to professional sports teams, including the NFL's Indianapolis Colts, the NBA's Indiana Pacers, and the WNBA's Indiana Fever. The city also hosts several notable competitive events, such as the Indianapolis 500, held at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Etymology
Indiana's name means "Land of the Indians", or simply "Indian Land". It also stems from Indiana's territorial history. On May 7, 1800, the United States Congress passed legislation to divide the Northwest Territory into two areas and named the western section the Indiana Territory. In 1816, when Congress passed an Enabling Act to begin the process of establishing statehood for Indiana, a part of this territorial land became the geographic area for the new state.Formal use of the word Indiana dates from 1768, when a Philadelphia-based trading company gave its land claim in present-day West Virginia the name "Indiana" in honor of its previous owners, the Iroquois. Later, ownership of the claim was transferred to the Indiana Land Company, the first recorded use of the word Indiana. But the Virginia colony argued that it was the rightful owner of the land because it fell within its geographic boundaries. The U.S. Supreme Court denied the land company's right to the claim in 1798.
Hoosier
A native or resident of Indiana is known as a Hoosier. The etymology of this word is disputed, but the leading theory, advanced by the Indiana Historical Bureau and the Indiana Historical Society, has its origin in Virginia, Kentucky, the Carolinas, and Tennessee as a term for a backwoodsman, a rough countryman, or a country bumpkin.History
Indigenous inhabitants
The first inhabitants in what is now Indiana were the Paleo-Indians, who arrived about 8000 BC after the melting of the glaciers at the end of the Ice Age. Divided into small groups, the Paleo-Indians were nomads who hunted large game such as mastodons. They created stone tools made out of chert by chipping, knapping and flaking.The Archaic period between 5000 and 4000 BC saw the development of new ground-stone tools the building of earthwork mounds and middens, suggesting that settlements were becoming more permanent. The Woodland period began around 1500 BC marked by ceramics and pottery and the extended cultivation of plants eventually including crops such as corn and squash, and the development of long-term trade, notably by the Hopewell people.
The Mississippian culture emerged, lasting from 1000 AD until the 15th century, shortly before the arrival of Europeans. During this stage, people created large urban settlements designed according to their cosmology, with large mounds and plazas defining ceremonial and public spaces. The concentrated settlements depended on the agricultural surpluses. One such complex was the Angel Mounds. They had large public areas such as plazas and platform mounds, where leaders lived or conducted rituals. Mississippian civilization collapsed in Indiana during the mid-15th century for reasons that remain unclear.
The historic Native American tribes in the area at the time of European encounter spoke different languages of the Algonquian family. They included the Shawnee, Miami, and Illini. Refugee tribes from eastern regions, including the Delaware who settled in the White and Whitewater River Valleys, later joined them.
European exploration and sovereignty
In 1679, French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle was the first European to cross into Indiana after reaching present-day South Bend at the St. Joseph River. He was followed by French-Canadian fur traders exchanging blankets, jewelry, tools, whiskey and weapons with the Native Americans for skins.By 1702, Sieur Juchereau established the first trading post near Vincennes. In 1715, Sieur de Vincennes built Fort Miami at Kekionga, now Fort Wayne. In 1717, another Canadian, Picote de Beletre, built Fort Ouiatenon on the Wabash River, to try to control Native American trade routes from Lake Erie to the Mississippi River.
In 1732, Sieur de Vincennes built a second fur trading post at Vincennes. In a period of a few years, British colonists arrived from the East and contended with the Canadians for control of the lucrative fur trade. Fighting between the French and British colonists occurred throughout the 1750s.
The Native American tribes of Indiana sided with the French Canadians during the French and Indian War. With British victory in 1763, the French were forced to cede to the British crown all their lands in North America east of the Mississippi River and north and west of the colonies.
Tribal resistance continued with Pontiac's Rebellion and the capture of forts Ouiatenon and Miami. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 designated the land west of the Appalachians as an Indian Reserve, and excluded British colonists from the area, which the Crown called "Indian Territory". The measure was one of the first significant areas of dispute between Britain and the colonies and would become a contributing factor leading to the American Revolution.
In 1775, the American Revolutionary War began as the colonists sought self-government and independence from the British. The majority of the fighting took place near the East Coast, but the Patriot military officer George Rogers Clark called for an army to help fight the British in the west. Clark's army won significant battles and took over Vincennes and Fort Sackville on February 25, 1779.
During the war, Clark managed to cut off British troops, who were attacking the eastern colonists from the west. His success is often credited for changing the course of the American Revolutionary War. At the end of the war, through the Treaty of Paris, the British crown ceded their claims to the land south of the Great Lakes to the newly formed United States, including Native American lands.
The frontier
In 1787, the U.S. defined the Northwest Territory which included the area of present-day Indiana. In 1800, Congress separated Ohio from the Northwest Territory, designating the rest of the land as the Indiana Territory. President Thomas Jefferson chose William Henry Harrison as the governor of the territory, and Vincennes was established as the capital. After the Michigan Territory was separated and the Illinois Territory was formed, Indiana was reduced to its current size and geography.Starting with the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, Native American titles to Indiana lands were extinguished by usurpation, purchase, or war and treaty. About half the state was acquired in the Treaty of St. Mary's from the Miami in 1818. Purchases were not complete until the Treaty of Mississinewas again with the Miami in 1826 acquired the last of the reserved Native American lands in the northeast.
By 1810, only two counties in the extreme southeast, Clark and Dearborn, had been organized by European settlers. Land titles issued out of Cincinnati were sparse. Settler migration was chiefly via flatboat on the Ohio River westerly, and by wagon trails up the Wabash/White River Valleys and Whitewater River Valleys.
After working to maintain peaceful coexistence with the United States, the Shawnee tribal chief Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, "the Shawnee Prophet", encouraged other indigenous tribes in the territory to reject European influences, stop drinking alcohol, and resist further encroachment. Tensions rose and the U.S. authorized Harrison to launch a preemptive expedition against Tecumseh's Confederacy; the U.S. gained victory at the Battle of Tippecanoe on November 7, 1811.
In the War of 1812, the British, who had been assisted by Tecumseh in the capture of Detroit, proposed creating of an Indian barrier state to ensure the security of Upper Canada. But after Tecumseh was killed in 1813 at the Battle of the Thames, resistance to United States control ended in the region. Most Native American tribes in the state were later removed to west of the Mississippi River in the 1820s and 1830s after being forced to accept the "purchase" of their lands.
Statehood and settlement
, a town in the far southern part of Indiana, was named the second capital of the Indiana Territory in May 1813 in order to decrease the threat of Native American raids following the Battle of Tippecanoe. Two years later, a petition for statehood was approved by the territorial general assembly and sent to Congress. An Enabling Act was passed to provide an election of delegates to write a constitution for Indiana. On June 10, 1816, delegates assembled at Corydon to write a state constitution, which was completed in 19 days. Jonathan Jennings was elected the fledgling state's first governor in August 1816. President James Madison approved Indiana's admission into the union as the nineteenth state on December 11, 1816. In 1825, the state capital was moved from Corydon to Indianapolis.Many European immigrants went west to settle in Indiana in the early 19th century. The largest immigrant group to settle in Indiana were Germans, as well as many immigrants from Ireland and England. Americans who were primarily ethnically English migrated from the Northern Tier of New York and New England, as well as from the mid-Atlantic state of Pennsylvania. The arrival of steamboats on the Ohio River in 1811, and the National Road at Richmond in 1829, greatly facilitated settlement of northern and western Indiana.
Following statehood, the new government worked to transform Indiana from a frontier into a developed, well-populated, and thriving state, beginning significant demographic and economic changes. In 1836, the state's founders initiated a program, the Indiana Mammoth Internal Improvement Act, that led to the construction of roads, canals, railroads and state-funded public schools. The plans bankrupted the state and were a financial disaster, but increased land and produce value more than fourfold. In response to the crisis and in order to avert another, in 1851, a second constitution was adopted, which prohibited public debt. At the same time, however, it included a mandate for a "uniform system of common schools, equally open to all and free of tuition."
In a reaction against an influx of free people of color and emancipated slaves who had been expelled from slave states, Article 13 of the new constitution sought to bar their further immigration into Indiana and proposed their resettlement in Liberia. Citing the newly passed Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Indiana Supreme Court struck down the article in 1866, and it was removed by amendment in 1881. Nevertheless, numerous communities and counties implemented practices to exclude African Americans. These jurisdictions, known as "sundown towns", were prevalent during the 1890s.