United States of America (USA)

The United States of America, also known as the United States, the U.S., the U.S.A., the U.S. of A., The States and America, is a country in North America that extends from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and shares land borders with Canada and Mexico. The United States is a federal republic, with its capital in Washington, D.C.

At over 3.7 million square miles (over 9.5 million km²), the U.S. (including its non-contiguous and overseas states and territories) is the third or fourth largest country by total area, depending on whether China's figures include its disputed areas.

The present day continental United States has been inhabited for at least 15,000 years by indigenous tribes. With the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, the nation emerged as the world's sole remaining superpower, and today, the United States plays a major role in world affairs. Columbia remained a popular name for the United States until the early 20th century, when it fell into relative disuse;

The term "united States of America" was first used officially in the Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776. On November 15, 1777, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, the first of which stated "The Stile [sic] of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America.'" The name was originally proposed by Thomas Paine.

The adjectival and demonymic forms for the United States are American, although the use of this term has been disputed, as it can also refer to inhabitants of both North and South America.

Geography

The United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area, and the second largest by land area alone, after Russia. The state of Alaska also borders Canada, with the Pacific Ocean to its south and the Arctic Ocean to its north. The state of Hawaii occupies an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, southwest of the North American mainland.

Climate

Due to its large size and wide range of geographic features, the United States contains examples of nearly every global climate.

History

Native Americans

Before the European colonization of the Americas, a process that began at the end of the 15th century, the present-day continental U.S. was inhabited exclusively by various indigenous tribes, including Alaskan natives, who migrated to the continent over a period that may have begun 35,000 years ago and may have ended as recently as 11,000 years ago.

European colonization

The first confirmed European landing in the present-day United States was by Christopher Columbus, who visited Puerto Rico on November 19, 1493, during his second voyage.

The French colonized some of the northeastern portions, and the Spanish colonized most of the southern and western United States.

American Revolution

Tensions between American colonials and the British during the revolutionary period of the 1760s and 1770s led to open military conflict in 1775. In 1777, the Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, uniting the states under a weak federal government, which operated from 1781 until 1788, when enough states had ratified the United States Constitution.

Westward expansion

From 1803 to 1848, the size of the new nation nearly tripled as settlers (many embracing the concept of Manifest Destiny as an inevitable consequence of American exceptionalism) pushed beyond national boundaries even before the Louisiana Purchase.

Civil War

As new territories were being incorporated, the nation was divided over the issue of states' rights, the role of the federal government, and—by the 1820s—the expansion of slavery, which had been legal in all thirteen colonies but was rarer in the north, where it was abolished by 1804. The Northern states were opposed to the expansion of slavery whereas the Southern states saw the opposition as an attack on their way of life, since their economy was dependent on slave labor. The failure to permanently resolve these issues led to the Civil War, following the secession of many slave states in the South to form the Confederate States of America after the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln. The 1865 Union victory in the Civil War effectively ended slavery and settled the question of whether a state had the right to secede.

Reconstruction and industrialization

After the Civil War, an unprecedented influx of immigrants, who helped to provide labor for American industry and create diverse communities in undeveloped areas—together with high tariff protections, national infrastructure building, and national banking regulations—hastened the country's rise to international power. The growing power of the United States enabled it to acquire new territories, including the annexation of Puerto Rico after victory in the Spanish-American War, which marked the debut of the United States as a major world power.

World War I and II

At the start of the World War I in 1914, the United States remained neutral. In 1917, however, the United States joined the Allied Powers, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. After the war, the Senate did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles because of a fear that it would pull the United States into European affairs.

During most of the 1920s, the United States enjoyed a period of unbalanced prosperity as farm prices fell and industrial profits grew.

The nation did not fully recover until 1941, when the United States was driven to join the Allies against the Axis Powers after a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan. World War II was the costliest war in economic terms in American history, but it helped to pull the economy out of depression because the required production of military materiel provided much-needed jobs, and women entered the workforce in large numbers for the first time. During this war, scientists working for the United States federal government succeeded in producing nuclear weapons, making the United States the world's first nuclear power. Toward the end of World War II, after the end of World War II in Europe, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

Japan surrendered soon after, on 2 September 1945, which ended World War II.

Cold War and civil rights

After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union became superpowers in an era of ideological rivalry dubbed the Cold War. The United States promoted liberal democracy and capitalism, while the Soviet Union communism and a centrally planned economy.

The perception that the United States was losing the space race spurred government efforts to raise proficiency in mathematics and science in schools and led to President John F. Kennedy's call for the United States to land "a man on the moon" by the end of the 1960s, which was realized in 1969. At the same time, discrimination across the United States, especially in the South, was increasingly challenged by a growing civil-rights movement headed by prominent African Americans such as Martin Luther King, Jr., which led to the abolition of the Jim Crow laws in the South.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States continued to intervene in overseas military conflicts such as the Gulf War.

September 11, 2001 and the War on Terrorism

On September 11, 2001, 19 al-Qaeda operatives hijacked four commercial airplanes and flew two planes into the World Trade Center towers, one plane into The Pentagon; In response, the United States government under President George W.

In the 2002 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush labeled North Korea, Iraq, and Iran "the axis of evil," and stated that these countries "constitute a grave threat to the security of the U.S. and its allies." Beginning later that year, the Bush administration began to press for regime change in the rogue state of Iraq. resolutions and Saddam Hussein rejecting demands to surrender, the United States and its allies invaded Iraq in March of 2003.

Government and politics

The United States is the longest-surviving extant constitutional republic, with the oldest wholly written constitution in the world. There are three levels of government: federal, state, and local. In some states, judicial posts are filled by popular election rather than executive appointment.

The federal government comprises three branches, which are designed to check and balance one another's powers:

The United States Congress is a bicameral legislature. House seats are apportioned among the states according to population every tenth year. Each state is guaranteed at least one representative: currently, seven states have one each; California, the most populous state, has 53. Each state has two senators, elected at large to six-year terms;

Under the country's federal system, the relationship between the state and national governments is complex; under U.S. law, states are considered sovereign entities. White established that states do not have the right to secede, and, under the Constitution, they are not allowed to conduct foreign policy. Federal law overrides state law in the areas in which the federal government is empowered to act; All powers not granted to the federal government in the Constitution are left to the states or the people themselves.

The United States Constitution is the supreme legal document in the American system, and serves as a social contract between the people of the United States and their government. All laws and procedures of both state and federal governments are subject to review, and any law ruled to violate the Constitution by the judicial branch is overturned. It can be amended by a variety of methods, all of which require the approval of an overwhelming majority of the states. The Constitution also guarantees to every State "a Republican Form of Government".

Foreign relations and military

The United States has vast economic, political, and military influence on a global scale, which makes its foreign policy a subject of great interest and discussion around the world. However, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Sudan do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States. The United States is a founding member of the United Nations (with a permanent seat on the Security Council), among many other international organizations.

In 1949, in an effort to contain communism during the Cold War, the United States, Canada, and ten Western European nations formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, a mutual-defense alliance in which they have since been joined by 14 other European states—including Turkey, which straddles the Eurasian border, and some former Soviet states. In an example of realpolitik, the United States also established diplomatic relations with Communist countries that were antagonistic to the Soviet Union, like the People's Republic of China during the Sino-Soviet split. Recently, the foreign policy of the United States has focused on combating terrorism as well as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The United States has a long-standing tradition of civilian control over military affairs.

The military of the United States comprises 1.4 million personnel on active duty, along with several hundred thousand each in the Reserves and the National Guard. The United States is considered to have the most powerful military in the world, partly because of the size of its defense budget; Military technology maintains a close relationship with the civilian economy and has contributed to general technological and economic development of the United States, and often, via technology transfer, other countries as well.

Administrative divisions

The conterminous, or contiguous, forty-eight states—all the states but Alaska and Hawaii—are also called the continental United States. Some include Alaska in the "continental" states, because, although it is separated from the "lower forty-eight" by Canada, it is part of the North American mainland. Hawaii, the fiftieth state, occupies an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean.

The United States also holds several other territories, districts, and possessions, notably the federal district of the District of Columbia—which contains the nation's capital city, Washington—and several overseas insular areas, the most significant of which are American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands. The United States Minor Outlying Islands consist of uninhabited islands and atolls in the Pacific and Caribbean Sea. In addition, since 1898, the United States Navy has leased an extensive naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Former U.S. possessions include the Panama Canal Zone, which was a U.S. territory from 1903 until 1979. Additionally, the Philippine Islands were American territory from 1898 until 1935, when the United States established the Commonwealth of the Philippines as a transition between territorial status and full Philippine independence, which occurred in 1946. Because it was part of the United States at the time of World War II, the Philippines is the only independent nation with a memorial pillar at the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC.

In addition to the actual states and territories of the United States, there are also nations which are associated states of the U.S. The Federated States of Micronesia (since 1986), Palau (since 1994), and the Marshall Islands (since 1986) are associated with the United States under what is known as the Compact of Free Association, giving the states international sovereignty and ultimate control over their territory. However, the governments of those areas have agreed to allow the United States to provide defense and financial assistance. The freely associated states are all dependent on U.S. financial assistance to meet both government operational and capital needs. The freely associated states also actively participate in all Office of Insular Affairs technical assistance activities. Together with the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, each of these associated states were once part of the U.S.-administered UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, which existed from 1947 until 1986 in the case of the Marshall Islands, the Northern Marianas, and the Federated States of Micronesia;

Environment

The U.S. has over 17,000 identified native plant and tree species, including 5,000 just in California (which is home to the tallest, the most massive, and the oldest trees in the world).

Economy

The economic history of the United States is a story of economic growth that began with marginally successful colonial economies and progressed to the largest industrial economy in the world in the 20th and early 21st century.

The economic system of the United States can be described as a capitalist mixed economy, in which corporations, other private firms, and individuals make most microeconomic decisions, and governments prefer to take a smaller role in the domestic economy, although the combined role of all levels of government is relatively large, at 36% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The largest sector in the United States economy is services, which employs roughly three quarters of the work force.

While the per capita income of the United States is among the highest in the world, the wealth is comparatively concentrated. Some analysts have found that social mobility in the United States is low relative to other OECD states, specifically compared to Western Europe, Scandinavia and Canada. Public education in the United States is funded mainly by local property taxes supplemented by state revenues. This frequently results in a wide difference in funding between poor districts or poor states and more affluent jurisdictions.

Innovation

The United States is an influential country in scientific and technological research and the production of innovative technological products. The National Institutes of Health, a focal point for biomedical research in the United States, has contributed to the completion of the Human Genome Project.

Transport

The automobile industry developed earlier and more rapidly in the United States than in most other countries.

Mass transit systems exist in large cities, such as New York, which operates one of the busiest subway systems in the world.

Several major seaports are in the United States;

Demographics

On October 17, 2006 at 7:46 a.m. EST, the United States' population stood at an estimated 300,000,000, with an annual growth rate of about 0.59%. These white Americans are mostly European Americans—the descendants of European immigrants to the United States—along with some non-Europeans counted as white in government nomenclature (those with origins in the original peoples of the Middle East and North Africa).

Current demographic trends include the immigration of Hispanics from Latin America into the Southwest, a region that is home to about 60% of the 35 million Hispanics in the United States.

Crime in the United States is characterised by relatively high levels of gun violence and homicide, compared to other developed countries. Levels of property crime and other types of crime in the United States are comparable to other developed countries.

Largest cities

The United States has dozens of major cities, which play an important role in U.S. culture, heritage, and economy.

Indigenous peoples

The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 gave United States citizenship to Native Americans, in part because of an interest by many to see them merged with the American mainstream, and also because of the heroic service of many Native American veterans in the First World War.

According to the 2003 census estimates, there are 2,786,652 Native Americans in the United States.

Language

Although the United States has no official language, English is the de facto national language. Some Americans advocate making English the official language, which is the law in twenty-seven states. Three states also grant official status to other languages alongside English: French in Louisiana, Hawaiian in Hawaii, and Spanish in New Mexico.

Religion

The United States government keeps no official register of Americans' religious status.

Education

Education in the United States has been a state or local, not federal, responsibility. Students are generally obliged to attend school starting with kindergarten, and ending with the 12th grade, which is normally completed at age 18, but many states may allow students to drop out as early as age 16. Public universities receive funding from the federal and state governments, as well as from other sources, but most students still have to pay student loans after graduation.

There are many competitive institutions of higher education in the United States, both private and public. The United States has 168 universities in the world's top 500, 17 of which are in the top 20.

The United States ranks 24th out of 29 surveyed countries in the reading and science literacy as well as mathematical abilities of its high school students when compared with other developed nations. The United States also has a low literacy rate compared to other developed countries, with a reading literacy rate at 86 - 98% of the population over age 15.

Health

The World Health Organization ranks the United States' health level 72nd among the world's nations. Overall statistics provided by the CIA World Factbook indicate that the United States had a higher infant mortality rate and slightly lower life expectancy than other post-industrial western nations such as Sweden, Germany or France. Health insurance in the United States is traditionally a benefit of some kinds of employment. Medical bills are the most common reason for personal bankruptcy in the United States.

Culture

The culture of the United States began as the culture of its first English colonists. Descendants of enslaved West Africans preserved some cultural traditions from West Africa in the early United States.

An important component of American culture is the American Dream: the idea that, through hard work, courage, and self-determination, regardless of social class, a person can gain a better life.

Cuisine

American cuisine uses Native American ingredients such as turkey, potatoes, corn, and squash, which have become integral parts of American culture. However, many foods now enjoyed worldwide either originated in the United States or were altered by American chefs.

Visual arts

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries American art took most of its cues from Europe. The 1913 Armory show in New York City, an exhibition which brought European modernist artists' work to the U.S., both shocked the public and influenced artmaking in the United States for the remainder of the twentieth century. This encouraged American artists to find a personal voice, and a modernist movement, responding to American civilization, emerged in the United States. Following the conclusion of the Second World War, a shift occured with the decline of Paris as the world's art center and the emergence of New York as the center of contemporary fine art for the U.S. and the world. Since the late 19th century, popular recorded music from the United States has become increasingly known across the world, such that some forms of American popular music are heard almost everywhere.

Cinema

The birth of cinema, as well as its development, largely took place in the United States. Other genres that originated in the United States and spread worldwide include the comic book and Disney's animated films.

Sports

Sports are a national pastime, and playing sports, especially American football, baseball, and basketball, is very popular at the high school level. The United States is among the most influential countries in shaping three popular board-based recreational sports: surfboarding, skateboarding, and snowboarding. Eight Olympiads have taken place in the United States; in medals won, the United States ranks third all-time in the Winter Games, with 218 (78 gold, 81 silver, and 59 bronze), and first in the Summer Games, with 2,321 (943 gold, 736 silver, and 642 bronze).

Further reading

Directories

Government

Overviews

History

Maps

Immigration

Other

Navigation

Sovereign Countries
Antigua and Barbuda • Bahamas • Barbados • Belize • Canada • Costa Rica • Cuba • Dominica • Dominican Republic • El Salvador • Grenada • Guatemala • Haiti • Honduras • Jamaica • Mexico • Nicaragua • Panama • Saint Kitts and Nevis • Saint Lucia • Saint Vincent and the Grenadines • Trinidad and Tobago • United States

Dependencies
Denmark: Greenland • France: Guadeloupe ∙ Martinique ∙ Saint-Pierre and Miquelon • Netherlands: Aruba ∙ Netherlands Antilles •
UK: Anguilla ∙ Bermuda ∙ British Virgin Islands ∙ Cayman Islands ∙ Montserrat ∙ Turks and Caicos Islands •
U.S.: Puerto Rico ∙ U.S. Virgin Islands

Permanent Members: China • France • Russia • United Kingdom • United States

Term ending 31 December 2006: Argentina • Denmark • Greece • Japan • Tanzania

 Canada ·  France ·  Germany ·  Italy ·  Japan ·  Russia ·  United Kingdom ·  United States

Eurasia-Africa: Benin • Cameroon • Cape Verde • Côte d'Ivoire • Equatorial Guinea • France • Gabon • Gambia • Ghana • Gibraltar • Guernsey • Guinea • Guinea-Bissau • Ireland • Isle of Man • Jersey • Liberia • Mauritania • Morocco • Nigeria • Portugal • São Tomé and Príncipe • Senegal • Sierra Leone • Spain • Togo • United Kingdom • Western Sahara

Americas: Aruba • Bahamas • Belize • Bermuda • Brazil • Colombia • Canada • Cayman Islands • Costa Rica • Cuba • France (French Guiana • Saint-Pierre and Miquelon) • Guyana • Haiti • Honduras • Mexico • Montserrat • Netherlands Antilles • Nicaragua • Panama • Saint Kitts and Nevis • Suriname • Trinidad and Tobago • Turks and Caicos Islands • United States • Venezuela

North-west approaches: Greenland • Iceland

Americas: Canada • Colombia • Costa Rica • Ecuador • El Salvador • Guatemala • Honduras • Mexico • Nicaragua • Panama • United States

Eurasia-Oceania: Brunei • Cambodia • Mainland China • Guam • Hong Kong • Indonesia • Japan • Kiribati • North Korea • South Korea • Macau • Malaysia • Marshall Islands • Micronesia • Northern Mariana Islands • Palau • Philippines • Russia • Singapore • Taiwan • Thailand • Vietnam

Between: none (Hawaii: a state of the United States)