american colonization - with elves

On a world with two (or more) continents, one continent is inhabited by humans and the other one by elves. For reasons which will become obvious, I'm going to refer to them as "Europe" and "America", respectively, although I imagine it as a completely different world so I don't have to think about how much research it would take to place it in something approximating the real world.

A long time ago, even by elven standards, they were a normal society, but then they had a massive war over who would lead them, leading to widespread destruction of America and near-extinction of the elves themselves. The remaining elves, being mostly the elves who'd wanted to avoid war in the first place and even more put off the idea of politics by the war, unanimously decided to do away with it. No elf was going to give orders to anybody else ever again; they got rid of their government and laws and rebuilt their society drastically different than it was before. It's hard for the elves who were around before the War, because they have to completely relearn how to live, but the elves who are born after the War have no problem accepting it because it's the only thing they've experienced. The new society is based on lots and lots of politeness, because if you offend somebody there's no law saying they can't do whatever they want to you, and people tend to band together to stop those who abuse their freedom by hurting others needlessly.

Humans and elves have the same ability to use magic, but because elves live for so much longer than humans, thousands of years, they mastered its use earlier. After the War they practically rebuilt America from the ground up--it was a wasteland, and they made it into mostly a massive forest of gigantic trees, which most of their homes are situated in. They use magic all the time--you name it, they probably use magic to do it, because their society is so individualistic that it's hard to coordinate to do group tasks. In comparison, humans use very little magic. Everybody might know one spell, like firestarting or something useful like that, but everything above that level is only taught at the university level.

The "present" of this plot corresponds to when Europe began colonizing the Americas IRL. In this world, the Europeans come over, start settling in...and eventually (a few years or decades later, after the Europeans have started to settle in) an elf wanders over to find out what's going on, and the two cultures try to make sense of each other.

AAP by darklyndsea