History
See also: Hispanic Heritage Sites (U.S. National Park Service)Spanish was the language spoken by the first permanent European settlers in North America. Spanish arrived in the territory of the contemporary United States with Ponce de León in 1513. In 1565, the Spaniards, by way of Juan Ponce de León, founded St. Augustine, Florida, and as of the early 1800s, it became the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States. The oldest city in all of the U.S. territory, as of 1898, is San Juan, capital of Puerto Rico, where Juan Ponce De León was its first governor and from where he left towards Florida seeking the fountain of youth, gold and slaves.
Historically, the Spanish-speaking population increased because of territorial annexation of lands claimed earlier by the Spanish empire and by wars with Mexico and by land purchases, while modern factors continue increasing the size of this population.
Read more about this topic: Spanish Language In The United States
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)