Contra dance in the United States started as a form of social dancing brought by English colonists to North America, particularly those who settled New England.  Country dance in England can be traced back centuries, but the form called contra dance had a circuitous route from the British Isles to what was later the United States: English country dances which had been popular in the mid- to late-1500s and throughout the 1600s became popular in France.  Reintroduced to England as contredanses in the late 17th century, those who settled the American colonies brought this dance tradition with them, and reimagined this country dances or "contradances" as they became known.

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Contra dances flourished in the early United States well into the 18th century, firmly establishing its role as a community social event in many parts of New England, Appalachia, and other parts of the country.  By the middle of the 19th century however, with the advent of ballroom dances like the waltz and the polka, contra dances started to go out of style, especially in urban areas, and country dancing was kept alive in the village, church, and grange halls of American small towns and rural communities.

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Contra dance and American folk dance traditions received a notable boost from the industrialist and auto magnate Henry Ford, who saw contra dance as an antidote to the ills of modernity emblematized in jazz music and swing dancing.  Bringing his friend and dance teacher Benjamin Lovett to Dearborn, Michigan in the 1920s, Ford and Lovett created a dance program which included contras.

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By the 1940s and 50s, contra dancing was limited to the northeastern North America: areas of the eastern Midwest, New England, and parts of eastern Canada.  Figures like Ralph Page and Ted Sannella maintained the tradition in places like Vermont and Massachusetts; along with caller and choreographer Gene Hubert, these men also began writing new dances, sometimes in new formations or borrowing figures from English country dance.

The explosion of historical, cultural, and ethnomusicological research in American folk traditions, as well as the counter-cultural interest in traditional ways of life that marked the 1960s and 1970s saw a resurgence in contra dance's popularity.  Country dances were now being danced by new generations of dancers, spreading to places as far as the Pacific coast.

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In recent years, two notable shifts in contra dance culture have also occurred.  In the 1970s through the 1990s, communities of gay and lesbian dance groups sprang up in places like Boston, Massachusetts and Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Eschewing the traditional contra dance gender roles of "gents" and "ladies," as both men and women were now dancing both roles, these groups spearheaded the movement toward "gender-free" contra dancing, in which contra dance roles are characterized by position (the person on the left or the person on the right when a couple is lined up) rather than by gender.  In subsequent years, this led to a proliferation of gender-neutral terms, like "larks" (for the left or traditional gents' role) and "ravens" (for the right or traditional ladies' role), which are now increasingly becoming the norm, due to both increasingly inclusive communities as well as experienced dancers of any gender regularly dancing both roles.

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The second shift has been the cross-pollination of other dance and music forms into contra dance.  Musicians are still composing new tunes, and contemporary contra dance bands are adapting popular music to fit contra dance music forms.  Movements and flourishes from dance styles like swing, waltz, blues, and tango are increasingly finding their way into dancers' repertoires to enhance their dance experiences.  "Crossover contra" or "techno contra" is also rising in popularity, in which contra dances are danced to techno, hip-hop, or club-style popular music.  Contra DJs create special mixes of recorded music that pair well with specific dances, much the same way contra dance bands work with callers to match their sets or series of tunes with particular kinds of dances.