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The history of Mexico, a country in the southern portion of North America, covers a period of more than three millennia. First populated more than 13,000 years ago,〔("Oldest American skull found" ), CNN〕 the territory had complex indigenous civilizations before being conquered by the Spanish in the 16th century. One of the important aspects of Mesoamerican civilizations was their development of a form of writing, so that Mexico's written history stretches back hundreds of years before the arrival of the Spaniards in 1519. This era before the arrival of Europeans is called variously the prehispanic era or the precolumbian era. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan became the Spanish capital Mexico City, which was and remains the most populous city in Mexico. From 1521, the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire incorporated the region into the Spanish empire, with New Spain its colonial era name and Mexico City the center of colonial rule. It was built on the ruins of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and became the capital of New Spain. During the colonial era, Mexico's long-established Mesoamerican civilizations mixed with European culture. Perhaps nothing better represents this hybrid background than Mexico's languages: the country is both the most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world and home to the largest number of Native American language speakers in North America. For three centuries Mexico was part of the Spanish Empire, whose legacy is a country with a Spanish-speaking, Catholic and largely Western culture. After a protracted struggle (1810-1821) for independence, New Spain became the sovereign nation of Mexico, with the signing of the Treaty of Córdoba. A brief period of monarchy (1821–23), called the First Mexican Empire, was followed by the founding of the Republic of Mexico, established under a federal constitution in 1824. Legal racial categories were eliminated, abolishing the system of castas. Slavery was not abolished at independence in 1821 or with the constitution in 1824, but was eliminated in 1829. Mexico continues to be constituted as a federated republic, under the Mexican Constitution of 1917. The Age of Santa Anna is the period of the late 1820s to the early 1850s that was dominated by criollo military man turned president Antonio López de Santa Anna. In 1846, the Mexican American War was provoked by the United States, ending two years later with Mexico ceding almost half of its territory via the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the United States. Even though Santa Anna bore significant responsibility for the disastrous defeat, he returned to office. The Liberal Reform began with the overthrow of Santa Anna by Mexican liberals, ushering in La Reforma beginning in 1854. The Mexican Constitution of 1857 codified the principles of liberalism in law, especially separation of church and state, equality before the law, that included stripping corporate entities (the Catholic Church and indigenous communities) of special status. The Reform sparked a civil war between liberals defending the constitution and conservatives, who opposed it. The War of the Reform saw the defeat of the conservatives on the battlefield, but conservatives remained strong and took the opportunity to invite foreign intervention against the liberals in order to forward their own cause. The French Intervention is the period when France invaded Mexico (1861), nominally to collect on defaulted loans to the liberal government of Benito Juárez, but it went further and at the invitation of Mexican conservatives seeking to restore monarchy in Mexico set Maximilian I on the Mexican throne. The US was engaged in its own Civil War (1861–65), so did not attempt to block the foreign intervention. Abraham Lincoln consistently supported the Mexican liberals. At the end of the civil war in the US and the triumph of the Union forces, the US actively aided Mexican liberals against Maximilian's regime. France withdrew its support of Maximilian in 1867 and his monarchist rule collapsed in 1867 and Maximilian was executed. With the end of the Second Mexican Empire, the period often called the Restored Republic (1867-1876) brought back Benito Juárez as president. Following his death from a heart attack, Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada succeed him. He was overthrown by liberal military man Porfirio Diaz, who after consolidating power ushered in a period of stability and economic growth. The half-century of economic stagnation and political chaos following independence ended. The Porfiriate is the era when army hero Porfirio Díaz held power as president of Mexico almost continuously from 1876-1911. He promoted "order and progress" that saw the modernization of the economy and the flow of foreign investment to the country. The period is generally called the Porfiriato, which ended with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Under Díaz, Mexico's industry and infrastructure was modernized by a strong, stable but autocratic central government. Increased tax revenues and better administration brought dramatic improvements in public safety, public health, railways, mining, industry, foreign trade, and national finances. The Mexican Revolution is the chaotic period between 1910 and 1920 when Mexicans fought to determine future after the end of the Díaz era. Although little had been done for the nation's poor, the sparking forces of the Mexican Revolution were elites outside Díaz's inner circle, such as Francisco Madero, a member of one of the richest land owning families in Mexico, plus liberal intellectuals, and industrial labor activists. The fraudulent election of 1910 keeping 80-year-old Díaz in power brought opposition elements together, unleashing a 10-year civil war known as the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). The conflict was not a unified one, but took place mainly in Mexico's north with organized armies of movement under leaders such as Pancho Villa and Alvaro Obregón and in the center of Mexico, particularly the state of Morelos with guerrilla peasants fighting under the leadership of Emiliano Zapata. The war killed a tenth of the nation's population and drove many northern Mexicans across the U.S. border to escape the fighting. The Revolution ended the system of large landed estates, or haciendas that had originated with the Spanish Conquest. A new legal framework was established in the Constitution of 1917, which reversed the principle established under Porfirio Díaz that gave absolute property rights to individuals. Article 27 of the Constitution, empowered the State to expropriate owners and gave the State subsoil rights, which had been the principle during the colonial era. Organized labor's contribution to the revolution was recognized in Article 123, guaranteeing labor unions' rights. In Article 3, the State strengthened its anticlerical measures to control the power of the Roman Catholic Church. Northern revolutionary generals Alvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles each served a four-year presidential term following the end of the military conflict in 1920. The assassination of president-elect Obregón in 1928 led to a crisis on succession, solved by the creation of a party structure in 1929. The post-revolutionary era is generally marked by political peace whereby conflicts are not resolved by violence. This new period has been marked by changes in policy and amendments to the 1917 Mexican Constitution to allow for neoliberal economic policies. Following the formation in 1929 of the precursor to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), this single party controlled national and state politics after 1929, and nationalized the oil industry in the 1930s. Following World War II, where Mexico had been a strong ally of the United States and had benefited significantly by supplying metals to build war materiel as well as guest farm workers, who freed U.S. American men to fight in the two front war. Mexico emerged from World War II with wealth and political stability and unleashed a major period of economic growth, often called the Mexican Miracle. It was organized around the principles of import substitution industrialization, with the creation of many state-owned industrial enterprises. The population grew rapidly and became more urbanized while many others moved to the United States. A new era began in Mexico following the fraudulent 1988 presidential elections. The Institutional Revolutionary Party barely won the presidential election, and President Carlos Salinas de Gortari began implementing sweeping neoliberal reforms in Mexico. These reforms required the amendment of the constitution, especially curtailing the power of the Mexican state to regulate foreign business enterprises, but also lifted the suppression of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico. Mexico's economy was further integrated with that of U.S. and also Canada after the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA agreement began lowering trade barriers in 1994. Seven decades of PRI rule ended in the year 2000 with the election of Vicente Fox of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). His successor, Felipe Calderón, also of the PAN, embarked of a war on drug mafias in Mexico, which has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. In the face of extremely violent drug wars, the PRI returned to power in 2012, promising that it had reformed itself. ==Pre-Columbian Mexico== (詳細はMesoamerica. The civilizations that rose and declined over millennia were characterized by:〔Ida Altman, Sarah Cline, and Javier Pescador, ''The Early History of Greater Mexico'', Pearson 2003: pp. 9-14.〕 # significant urban settlements; # monumental architecture such as temples, palaces, and other monumental architecture, such as the ball court; # the division of society into religious, political, and political elites (such as warriors and merchants) and commoners who pursued subsistence agriculture; # transfer of tribute and rending of labor from commoners to elites; # reliance on agriculture often supplemented by hunting and fishing and the complete absence of a pastoral (herding) economy, since there were no domesticated herd animals prior to the arrival of the Europeans; # trade networks and markets. It is remarkable that so many civilizations arose in a region with no major navigable rivers, no beasts of burden, and difficult terrain that impeded the movement of people and goods. Indigenous civilizations developed complex ritual and solar calendars, a significant understanding of astronomy and developed forms of written communication in the form of glyphs, clear testimony to their advanced level of sophistication. The history of Mexico prior to the Spanish conquest is known through the work of archaeologists, epigraphers, and ethnohistorians (scholars who study indigenous history, usually from the indigenous point of view), who analyze Mesoamerican indigenous manuscripts, particularly Aztec codices, Mayan codices, and Mixtec codices. Accounts written by the Spanish at the time of their conquest (the ''conquistadores'') and by indigenous chroniclers of the post-conquest period constitute the principal source of information regarding Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. While relatively few pictorial manuscripts (or codices) of the Mixtec and Aztec cultures of the Post-Classic period survive, progress has been made in the area of Maya archaeology and epigraphy. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of Mexico」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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