The Complete Idiot's Guide to the World of Harry Potter

Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History by Alan Axelrod Who’s on First? (50,000 B.C.-A.D. 1500S) In This Chapter Where the “first Americans” came from The Mayas, Incas, and Aztecs The Anasazi, Mound Builders, and Pueblos Leif Eriksson, first European in America Look at a map that shows the north Pacific Ocean. You’ll find the Bering Sea, an arm of the Pacific bounded on the east by Alaska, on the south by the Aleutian Islands, and on the west by Siberia and the Kamchatka Peninsula. Near the north end of the Bering Sea is the Bering Strait, which, lying between Alaska and Siberia, connects the Bering Sea with the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean. At its narrowest, the strait is only 55 miles across, the shortest distance between the continents of North America and Asia. Fifty-five miles in icy cold water is a long swim, but not much of an ocean voyage. Historians believe that once upon a time, there wasn’t even that 55 miles of water between the continents. A Stroll Across the Bering Sea Several times during what paleontologists call the Quaternary Period—that’s their name for the last two million years—a “land bridge” emerged in the Bering and Chukchi Seas as the sea level dropped due to the expansion of the ice cap surrounding the North Pole ...»