As asked, your question covers a great deal of potential ground (dissertation length a a minimum!) The first thing you will need to do is to narrow your focus a bit. If we start by considering the early American settlers, you are looking at two different groups of colonists. The Massachusetts colonies were established by a group of religious separatists (Puritans). The social force that most shaped their contribution to America cam in the realm of religion (and ultimately fostered a religious divide as they became prosperous in the new world and moved away from their church to form splinter churches). Another important contribution that cam from this group is the fact that they were writers, mostly of diaries and journals, but they wrote! William Bradford's "Of Plymouth Plantation" is an extended journal that forms the basis for all early American history textbooks that we still read today.The other early colonists, the Virginia colonists, came here looking for land and economic opportunities that did not exist for them in the "old world" so their motivations were entirely different.
Regardless of where they came from, however, the colonists were driven to control their own lives because they were escaping from a government (the monarchy) that they felt was too repressive. The Puritans sought religious freedom, the Virginians sought economic possibilities that did not exist under te crown. Both groups were driven by a search for identity that was not controlled for them but by them.
The intereseting thing here, however, is that in spite of the noble reasons for coming to the new world (freedom) these new Americans turned right around and created a new group of repressed individuals - first by repressing and isolating the Native Americans and then through the slave trade.
I think the best way to approach this is to first look at the forces themselves. The major social force would be religion, the major economic force would be a desire to achieve the "American Dream" and a political force would be to escape monarchy and the formation of a representative democracy.
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