United States of America (Discovery and Facts)

United States (Discovery and Facts)

Preview –(click to reach directly on below options)

1.  Amazing America (Basic Introduction)

2.  History in Brief

3.  Long Story of USA
4.  Etymology (Naming America)

            5.  Geography

Amazing America

United States, also known as United States of America (USA). USA is the most developed country located in North America; it is a federal republic of 50 states.

Besides the states in the main territory USA also includes the state of Alaska, and the island of Hawaii. The states of USA are bounded by Canada in north, by Pacific Ocean in west, and by the Gulf of Mexico and Mexico in south. The United States is the fourth largest country in the world in terms of area (after Russia, Canada, and China) and is slightly smaller than the entire continent of Europe. The national capital of USA is Washington.

 USA is spreaded over an area of 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km²), with a population over 327 million people the U.S. is the third most populous country. The most populous city in USA is New York. 

The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy. The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), and other international organizations.

 The United States is a highly developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for approximately a quarter of global GDP.

History in Brief

The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast.

 Following the French and Indian War, numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, and the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776. 

The war ended with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. 

The United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, and gradually admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848.

During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.

 By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, and its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power. 

The United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U.S. Moon landing.

 The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.

 The U.S. economy is largely post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value.

 Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U.S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country.

Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank very high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity. The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.

 

The Real Story: Who Discovered America

Americans celebrate the Columbus Day on October 10 every year. This day is marked as an annual holiday in remembrance of the day of October 12, 1492, when the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus officially set foot in the Americas, and claimed the land for Spain.

 It has been a national holiday in the United States since 1937.

It is commonly said that "Columbus discovered America." It would be more accurate, to say that he introduced the Americas to Western Europe during his four voyages to the region between 1492 and 1502. 

It's also safe to say that he paved the way for the massive influx of western Europeans that would ultimately form several new nations including the United States, Canada and Mexico.

But to say he "discovered" America is a bit of a misnomer because there were plenty of people already here when he arrived.

                                       see facts about america here

Before Columbus?

So who were the people who really deserve to be called the first Americans? According to Michael Bawaya, the editor of the magazine American Archaeology. 

The Americans came from Asia probably "no later than about 15,000 years ago." He said they walked across the Bering land bridge. Fifteen-thousand years ago, ocean levels were much lower and the land between the continents was hundreds of kilometers wide.

The area would have looked much like the land on Alaska's Seward Peninsula does today: treeless, arid tundra. But despite its relative inhospitality, life abounded there. According to the U.S. National Park Service, "the land bridge played a vital role in the spread of plant and animal life between the continents. Many species of animals - the woolly mammoth, mastodon, scimitar cat, Arctic camel, brown bear, moose, muskox, and horse — to name a few — moved from one continent to the other across the Bering land bridge. Birds, fish, and marine mammals established migration patterns that continue to this day."

And archaeologists say that humans followed, in a never-ending hunt for food, water and shelter. Once here, humans dispersed all across North and eventually Central and South America. Up until the 1970s, these first Americans had a name: Clovis peoples.

 They get their name from an ancient settlement discovered near Clovis, New Mexico, dated to over 11,000 years ago. And DNA suggests they are the direct ancestors of nearly 80 percent of all indigenous people in the Americas.

But there's more. 

Today, it's widely believed that before the Clovis people, there were others, and as Bawaya says, "they haven't really been identified." But there are remnants of them in places as far-flung as the U.S. states of Texas and Virginia, and as far south as Peru and Chile. We call them, for lack of a better name, Pre Clovis people.

 And to make things more complicated, recent discoveries are threatening to push back the arrival of humans in North America even further back in time. Perhaps as far back as 20,000 years or more. But the science on this is far from settled.

Back to the Europeans

So for now, the Clovis and the Pre-Clovis peoples, disappeared long ago but still existent in the genetic code of nearly all native Americans, deserves the credit for discovering America. But those people arrived on the western coast. What about arrivals from the east? Was Columbus the first European to glimpse the untamed, verdant paradise that America must have been centuries ago?

With the British colonization of Georgia in 1732, the13 colonies that would become the United States of America were established. All had local governments with elections open to most free men, with a growing devotion to the ancient right of Englishman and a sense of self-government stimulating support for republicanism. 

With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grew rapidly. Relatively small Native American populations were eclipsed. 

During the Seven years War (in the United States, known as the French and Indian War), British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies.

 Excluding the Native Americans, who were being conquered and displaced, the 13 British colonies had a population of over 2.1 million in 1770, about one-third that of Britain.

In 1774, the Spanish Navy ship Santiago, under Juan Pérez, entered and anchored in an inlet of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, in present-day British Columbia. Although the Spanish did not land, natives paddled to the ship to trade furs for abalone shells from California.

 At the time, the Spanish were able to monopolize the trade between Asia and North America, granting limited licenses to the Portuguese.

 When the Russians began establishing a growing fur trading system in Alaska, the Spanish began to challenge the Russians, with Pérez's voyage being the first of many to the Pacific Northwest.

Etymology

The Americas are believed to be named after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.

In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespuccis. 

The first documentary evidence of the term "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army,  Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort.

 The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.

The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'". 

The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence. 

This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.

The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms are the "U.S.", the "USA", and "America".

 Colloquial names are the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States". "Columbia", a name popular in poetry and songs of the late 18th century, derives its origin from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia", many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.

The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865.

The singular form—e.g., "the United States is"—became popular after the end of the American Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States".

 The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.

A citizen of the United States is an "American". "United States", "American" and "U.S." refer to the country adjectivally ("American values", "U.S. forces"). In English, the word "American" rarely refers to topics or subjects not directly connected with the United States.

Geography

The eastern United States has a varied topography. A broad, flat coastal plainlies along the Atlantic and Gulf shores from Mexico border to New York City, and includes the Florida peninsula.

 This broad coastal plain and barriers islands make up the widest and longest beaches in the United States, much of it composed of soft, white sands. The Florida keys are a string of coral  islands that reach the southernmost city on the United States mainland . Areas further inland feature rolling hills, mountains, and a diverse collection of temperate and subtropical moist and wet forests.

 Parts of interior Florida and South Carolina are also home to sand-hill communities. The Alpachian mountains  form a line of low mountains separating the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Basin. 

 The five Great Lakes are located in the north-central portion of the country, four of them forming part of the border withCanada, only Lake Michigan situated entirely within United States. 

The southeast United States, generally stretching from the Ohio River on south, includes a variety of warm temperate and subtropical moist and wet forests, as well as warm temperate and subtropical dry forests nearer the Great Plains in the west of the region. 

West of the Appalachians lies the lush Mississippi River basin and two large eastern tributaries, the Ohio River and theTennessee River. The Ohio and Tennessee Valleys and the Midwest consist largely of rolling hills, interior highlands and small mountains, jungly marsh and swampland near the Ohio River, and productive farmland, stretching south to the Gulf Coast. The Midwest also has a vast amount of cave systems.

The Great Plains lie west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains. A large portion of the country's agricultural products are grown in the Great Plains. Before their general conversion to farmland, the Great Plains were noted for their extensive grasslands, from tallgrass prairie in the eastern plains to shortgrass steppe in the western High Plains. 

Elevation rises gradually from less than a few hundred feet near the Mississippi River to more than a mile high in the High Plains. The generally low relief of the plains is broken in several places, most notably in the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains, which form the U.S. Interior Highlands, the only major mountainous region between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachian Mountains.

The Great Plains come to an abrupt end at the Rocky Mountains. The Rocky Mountains form a large portion of the Western U.S., entering from Canada and stretching nearly toMexico. The Rocky Mountain region is the highest region of the United States by average elevation. 

The Rocky Mountains generally contain fairly mild slopes and wider peaks compared to some of the other great mountain ranges, with a few exceptions (such as the Teton Mountains in Wyoming and the Sawatch Range in Colorado). 

The highest peaks of the Rockies are found in Colorado, the tallest peak being Mount Elbert at 14,440 ft (4,400 m). In addition, instead of being one generally continuous and solid mountain range, it is broken up into a number of smaller, intermittent mountain ranges, forming a large series of basins and valleys.

West of the Rocky Mountains lies the Intermontane Plateaus (also known as theIntermountain West), a large, arid desert lying between the Rockies and the Cascadesand Sierra Nevada ranges. The large southern portion, known as the Great Basin, consists of salt flats, drainage basins, and many small north-south mountain ranges. 

The Southwest is predominantly a low-lying desert region. A portion known as theColorado Plateau, centered around the Four Corners region, is considered to have some of the most spectacular scenery in the world. It is accentuated in such national parks asGrand Canyon, Arches, Mesa Verde and Bryce Canyon, among others.

 Other smaller Intermontane areas include the Columbia Plateau covering eastern Washington, western Idaho and northeast Oregon and the Snake River Plain in Southern Idaho.

The Grand Canyon from Moran Point. The Grand Canyon is among the most famous locations in the country.

The Intermontane Plateaus come to an end at the Cascade Range and the Sierra Nevada. The Cascades consist of largely intermittent, volcanic mountains, many rising prominently from the surrounding landscape.

 The Sierra Nevada, further south, is a high, rugged, and dense mountain range. It contains the highest point in the contiguous 48 states, Mount Whitney (14,505 ft or 4,421 m). It is located at the boundary between California's Inyo and Tulare counties, just 84.6 mi or 136.2 km west-northwest of the lowest point in North America at the Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park at 279 ft or 85 m below sea level.

These areas contain some spectacular scenery as well, as evidenced by such national parks as Yosemite andMount Rainier. 

West of the Cascades and Sierra Nevada is a series of valleys, such as the Central Valley inCalifornia and the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Along the coast is a series of low mountain ranges known as thePacific Coast Ranges.

Alaska contains some of the most dramatic and untapped scenery in the country. Tall, prominent mountain ranges rise up sharply from broad, flat tundra plains. On the islands off the south and southwest coast are manyvolcanoes. 

Hawaii, far to the south of Alaska in the Pacific Ocean, is a chain of tropical, volcanic islands, popular as a tourist destination for many from East Asia and the mainland United States.

The territories of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands encompass a number of tropical isles in the northeasternCaribbean Sea. In the Pacific Ocean the territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands occupy the limestone and volcanic isles of the Mariana archipelago, and American Samoa (the only populated US territory in the southern hemisphere) encompasses volcanic peaks and coral atolls in the eastern part of the Samoan Islandschain.

visit or sites for more updates