UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic made up of fifty states, one federal
district, and several territories. The country is situated largely in the western hemisphere: its forty-eight
contiguous states and the District of Columbia (coextensive with Washington, the capital) lie in central
North America between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to
the south; the state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent with Canada to its east, and the state of
Hawaii is in the mid-Pacific. U.S. territories, or insular areas, are scattered around the Caribbean and
Pacific. At over 3.7 million square miles (over 9.6 million km²) and with more than 300 million people, the
United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and third largest by land area and
population. A liberal democracy, the U.S. is one of the world's most ethnically and socially diverse
nations. American society is the product of large-scale immigration and is home to a complex social
structure. Its national economy is the world's largest, with a nominal 2005 gross domestic product (GDP)
of more than $13 trillion.
The nation was founded by thirteen colonies of Great Britain located along the Atlantic seaboard.
Proclaiming themselves "states," they issued the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Britain,
defeated in the American Revolutionary War, recognized their sovereignty in 1783. A federal convention
adopted the current United States Constitution on September 17, 1787; its ratification the following year
made the states part of a single republic. Ten constitutional amendments composing the Bill of Rights
were ratified in 1791. The country greatly expanded throughout the nineteenth century, acquiring territory
from France, Spain, Mexico, and Russia, while annexing the Republic of Texas and the former Kingdom
of Hawaii. The American Civil War of the 1860s ended the slavery of millions of descendants of
kidnapped Africans. By the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was a great power. With its
development of nuclear weapons, the U.S. emerged from World War II as one of two global
superpowers, along with the Soviet Union. The Soviet collapse in 1991 left the United States as the
world's sole superpower. It remains a dominant economic, political, military, and cultural force in the
Western world and around the globe.
History
Native Americans and European
settlers
The indigenous peoples of the North
American territory that now constitutes the
United States mainland, including Alaska,
migrated from Asia. Primarily traversing the
Bering land bridge, they came over a period
that began as many as 35,000 years ago and
ended approximately 11,000 years ago.
Several indigenous communities in the pre-
Columbian era developed advanced
agriculture, grand architecture, and state-
level societies. European explorer
Christopher Columbus arrived at Puerto Rico
on November 19, 1493, making first contact
with the Native Americans. In the years that
followed, the majority of the Native American
population was killed by epidemics of
Eurasian diseases.
The Mayflower
Florida was home to the earliest European
colonies on the mainland; of these only St.
Augustine, founded in 1565, remains. French
fur traders set up small outposts called New
France near the Great Lakes. Later Spanish
settlements in the Southwestern United
States drew thousands through Mexico. The
first successful British settlements were the
Virginia Colony at Jamestown, Virginia in
1607, and the 1620 Pilgrims settlement at
Plymouth, Massachusetts. Between 1614, the
Netherlands settled parts of New York and
New Jersey, including New Amsterdam on
Manhattan Island. Sweden settled New
Sweden (in Delaware, New Jersey, and
Pennsylvania), which then passed to the
Dutch. Several colonies were used by the
British as penal settlements from the 1620s
until the American Revolution.
Independence and expansion
Tensions between American colonials and the
British during the revolutionary period of the
1760s and 1770s led to open warfare from
1775 through 1781. George Washington
commanded the Continental Army during the
American Revolutionary War as the Second
Continental Congress adopted the Declaration
of Independence on July 4, 1776. The
Congress created the Continental Army, but
was handicapped in its ability to fund it by lack
of authority to levy taxes; instead, it over-
printed paper money triggering hyperinflation.
During the conflict, some seventy thousand
loyalists to the British Crown fled the new
nation, with some fifty thousand United Empire
Loyalist refugees fleeing to Nova Scotia and
the new British holdings in Canada. Native
American loyalties were likewise divided;
Cherokees and several other peoples split into
factions fighting on both sides on the western
front.
In 1777, the Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, uniting the states under
a weak federal government, which operated until 1788. After the defeat of Great
Britain, dissatisfaction with the weak national government led to a constitutional
convention in 1787. By June 1788, enough states had ratified the United States
Constitution to establish the new government, which took office in 1789. The
Constitution, which strengthened the union and the federal government, is still the
supreme law of the land. Attitudes towards slavery shifted in this time, leading to a
clause in the Constitution ending the African slave trade. All Northern states
abolished slavery between 1780 and 1804, differentiating themselves from the
remaining slave states. Fighting with the Chickamauga loyalist faction of the
Cherokees began a cycle of Indian Wars with the fledgling U.S. government that
stretched to the end of the next century.
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. The expansion was tempered somewhat by the stalemate in the
War of 1812, but it was subsequently reinvigorated by victory in the Mexican-
American War in 1848, and the prospect of gold during the California Gold Rush
(1848-1849).
Between 1830–1880, up to 40 million American Bison, commonly called Buffalo, were
slaughtered for skins and meat, and to aid railway expansion. The expansion of the
railways reduced transit times for both goods and people, made westward expansion
less arduous for the pioneers, and increased conflicts with the Native Americans
regarding the land and its uses. The loss of the bison, a primary resource for the
plains Indians, added to the pressures on native cultures and individuals for survival
Civil War and Reconstruction
As new territories were being incorporated, the
nation was divided on the issue of states'
rights, the role of the federal government, and
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 resolve these issues led to
the American 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. The event was a
major turning point in American history and
resulted in an increase in federal power.
The end of the war was marked by the Abraham
Lincoln assassination and Radical Republican
attempts to assimilate the South. Their
Reconstruction policies ended in the late 1870s
as Jim Crow laws began to disenfranchise the
newly freed slaves. In the North, urbanization
and an unprecedented influx of immigrants
hastened the country's industrialization.
Immigrants helped to provide labor for American
industry and create diverse communities in
undeveloped areas while high tariff protections,
national infrastructure building and national
banking regulations encouraged industrial
growth. The growing power of the United States
enabled it to acquire new territories, including
the annexation of Puerto Rico and the
Philippines after victory in the Spanish-American
War, which marked the debut of the United
States as a major world power. Abraham Lincoln
World Wars and The Great Depression
At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the
United States remained neutral. American
sympathies favored the British and French,
although many citizens, mostly Irish and
German, were opposed to intervention. In 1917,
however, the United States joined the Triple
Entente, 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. Instead, the country continued
to pursue its policy of unilateralism that
bordered at times on isolationism.
During most of the 1920s, the United States
enjoyed a period of unbalanced prosperity as
farm profits fell while industrial profits grew. A
rise in debt and an inflated stock market
culmination in a crash in 1929, combined with
the Dust Bowl, triggered the Great Depression.
After his election as President in 1932, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt launched his New Deal
policies increasing government intervention in
the economy in response to the Great
Depression. The nation would not fully recover
from the economic depression until its industrial
mobilization related to entering World War II.
On December 7, 1941 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 had
a greater economic cost than any in
American history, but it helped to pull the
economy out of depression by providing
much-needed jobs and putting many
women to work for the first time. After
achieving victory in Europe, the United
States developed the first nuclear
weapons and used them on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki in August 1945 to avoid a
dangerous land-invasion. The Surrender
of Japan followed on September 2, 1945,
ending the war.
Language and religion
Language
Although the United States has no official language at the federal level, English is the
de facto national language. In 2003, about 215 million, or 82 percent of the population
aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. Spanish, spoken by over 10%
of the population at home, is the only other language used at home by more than 1%
of the population. Knowledge of English is required of immigrants seeking
naturalization. Spanish is the second most spoken language and the most widely
taught foreign language Some Americans advocate making English the official
language, which is the law in twenty-five states. Hawaiian is granted official status in
Hawaii by the Constitution of Hawaii Several insular territories also grant official
recognition to their native languages: Samoan and Chamorro are recognized by
Samoa and Guam, respectively; Carolinian and Chamorro are recognized by the
Northern Mariana Islands, and Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico. In the
states of New Mexico and Louisiana there is no official language. However, New
Mexico issues government documents in both Spanish and English, and Louisiana
legally recognizes the French language.
Religion
The United States government keeps no official
register of Americans' religious status. However,
in a private survey conducted in 2001 and
mentioned in the Census Bureau's Statistical
Abstract of the United States, 76.7 percent of
American adults identified themselves as
Christian; about 52 percent of adults described
themselves as members of various Protestant
denominations. Roman Catholics, at 24.5 percent,
were the most populous individual denomination.
Other faiths in America include Judaism (1.4
percent), Islam (0.5 percent), Buddhism (0.5
percent), Hinduism (0.4 percent) and Unitarian
Universalism (0.3 percent). About 14.2 percent of
respondents described themselves as having no
religion. Although the total U.S. population grew
by 18.5 percent between 1990 and 2001, 13
religious groups declined in absolute numbers,
while 20 groups more than doubled in number.
Culture
The United States is a culturally diverse nation,
home to a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions,
and values. The culture held in common by the
majority of Americans is referred to as "mainstream
American culture," a Western culture largely
derived from the traditions of Western European
migrants, beginning with the early English and
Dutch settlers. German, Scottish, and Irish cultures
have also been very influential. Certain Native
American traditions and many cultural
characteristics of enslaved West Africans were
absorbed into the American mainstream. Westward
expansion brought close contact with the culture of
Mexico, and large-scale immigration in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from
Southern and Eastern Europe introduced many
new cultural elements. More recent immigration
from Asia and especially Latin America has had
broad impact. The resulting mix of cultures may be
characterized as a homogeneous melting pot or as
a pluralistic salad bowl in which immigrants and
their descendants retain distinctive cultural
characteristics.
While American culture maintains the myth that
the U.S. is a classless society, economists and
sociologists have identified cultural differences
between the country's social classes, affecting
socialization, language, and values. The
American middle and professional class has
been the source of many contemporary social
trends such as feminism, environmentalism,
and multiculturalism. Americans' self-images,
social viewpoints, and cultural expectations are
associated with their occupations to an
unusually close degree. While Americans tend
to greatly value socioeconomic achievement,
being ordinary or average is generally seen as
a positive attribute. Women, formerly limited to
domestic roles, now mostly work outside the
home and receive a majority of bachelor's
degrees. The changing role of women has also
changed the American family. In 2005, no
household arrangement defined more than 30
percent of households; married childless
couples were most common, at 28 percent.
The extension of marital rights to homosexual
persons is an issue of debate, with more liberal
states permitting civil unions and
Massachusetts recently having legalized same-
sex marriage
Literature and the arts
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
American art and literature took most of its cues from
Europe. Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar
Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a
distinctive American literary voice by the middle of
the nineteenth century. Mark Twain and poet Walt
Whitman were major figures in the century's second
half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her
lifetime, would be recognized as America's other
essential poet. Later American writers have been
much honored: U.S. citizens have won the Nobel
Prize in Literature eleven times, most recently Toni
Morrison in 1993. Ernest Hemingway, the 1954
Nobel laureate, is often named as one of the most
influential writers of the twentieth century. The "great
American novel" is a label sometimes given to a
celebrated book regarded as capturing fundamental
aspects of the national experience and character.
The term has been used to describe such works as
Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and F. Scott
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925). Popular Ernest Hemingway
literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled
crime fiction developed in the United States.
The other classical arts did not establish distinctive
American expressions until the twentieth century,
though the Hudson River School was an important
visual art movement in the mid-nineteenth century.
The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an
exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the
public and transformed the U.S. visual art scene.
American painters and sculptors, like their
European counterparts, began experimenting with
new styles and displaying a more individualistic
sensibility. Georgia O'Keefe and Marsden Hartley
were among the first leading artists to demonstrate
this development. Major artistic movements such
as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollack
and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy
Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in
the United States. The tide of modernism and then
post-modernism also brought American architects
such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and
Frank Gehry to the top of their field. Though largely
overlooked at the time, Charles Ives's work of the
1910s established him as the first major U.S.
composer in the classical tradition; other
experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John
Cage created an identifiably American approach to
classical composition. Choreographers George
Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Martha Graham
were among the leading figures of twentieth-
century dance. The U.S. has long been at the fore
in the relatively modern artistic medium of Knives by Andy Warhol
photography, with major practitioners such as
Alfred Steiglitz, Edward Steichen, Ansel Adams,
and many others.
Popular media
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the
power of photography to capture motion. In 1894,
the world's first commercial motion picture
exhibition was given in New York City, using the
Kinetoscope commissioned by Thomas Edison.
The first commercial screening of a projected film
came the following year, also in New York, and the
U.S. was in the forefront of the development of
sound film in the following decades. Since the
early twentieth century, the U.S. film industry has
largely been based in and around Hollywood,
California. The major film studios of Hollywood are
the primary source of the most commercially
successful movies in the world, such as Star Wars
(1977) and Titanic (1997). American screen actors
like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood have become
iconic figures, while producer/entrepreneur Walt
Disney was a leader in both animated film and
movie merchandising. Director Orson Welles's
Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited in critics'
polls as the greatest film of all time. The products
of American cinema and other mass media now
appear in nearly every nation
Americans are the heaviest television viewers in the world, averaging
twenty-eight hours a week in front of their screens!!!
Capital
WASHINGTON
Washington, D.C. is the capital city of the
United States of America. "D.C." is an
abbreviation for the District of Columbia,
the federal district coextensive with the city
of Washington. The city is named after
George Washington, military leader of the
American Revolution and the first
President of the United States.
The city is commonly referred to as D.C.,
the District, or simply Washington.
Historically, it was called the Federal City
or Washington City. To avoid confusion
with the state of Washington, located in
the Pacific Northwest, the city is often
called simply D.C.. To locals, the entire
metropolitan area, including suburbs, is
"Washington," while the city proper is "D.C.
The centers of all three branches of the U.S.
federal government are in the District. It also
serves as the headquarters for the World Bank,
the International Monetary Fund, the
Organization of American States, the Inter-
American Development Bank, and other national
and international institutions. Washington is the
frequent location of large political demonstrations
and protests, particularly on the National Mall.
Furthermore, Washington is a popular destination
for tourists, the site of numerous national
landmarks and monuments. It is a major
American cultural center, with a number of
important museums, galleries, performing arts
centers and institutions, and native music
scenes.
The District of Columbia and the city of
Washington are governed by a single municipal
government, and for most practical purposes, are
considered to be the same entity. This has not
always been the case. Until 1871, when
Georgetown ceased to be a separate city, there
were multiple jurisdictions within the
District.[Although there is a municipal
government and a mayor, Congress has the
supreme authority over the city and district,
which results in citizens having less self-
governance than residents of the states. In
addition to lacking full self-governance, the
residents of the District also lack voting
representation in Congress, despite being
required to pay federal income tax.
The Star-Spangled Banner
Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines on the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! O long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wiped out their foul footstep's pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave
THANK YOU
FOR YOUR ATTENTION
Joanna Kamińska