United States of America (AMPU)

The United States of America (also known as the United States or US) is a federal presidential constitutional republic, comprising of most of North America, various Pacific and Caribbean Islands and.

American Revolution (1775-1784)
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The American Revolutionary War, also known as the American Independence War or American Revolution, was a long lasting war starting in April of 1775 and ending in November of 1783. It initially saw the 13 original colonies, Nova Scotia and Quebec being pitted against Great Britain - the Americans found support from the French and Spanish after showing potential. Following the American capture of the Bahamas, many Bahamians began to give support to the American cause. American forces also managed to capture other British Caribbean islands such as Bermuda. The war officially concluded in November of 1784, but was truly over in the mainland in 1783, following the completion of American campaigns to capture Britain's remaining Caribbean colonies.

The Treaty of Paris established British recognition of American sovereignty. The US was also given territory east of the Mississippi, south of Rupert's Land and north of Florida.

Territorial expansion
The constitution criminalized the slave trade in its ratification in 1789. However, the Madison Compromise established a system by which former slave owners would be compensated in land on the frontier, leading to huge plantations being cultivated across the Western territories. These plantations functionally exercised a form of serfdom as cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and cheap labor was essential to its profitable cultivation. As such, where slavery created a race based class system, the Madison Compromise created a much more typical class system.

Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of confrontations with European settlers and several Indian nations. The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation's area. The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened US nationalism, while consolidating control over the northern portion of North America. A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819. The expansion was aided by steam power, when steamboats began traveling along America's large water systems, which were connected by new canals, such as the Erie and the I&M; then, even faster railroads began their stretch across the nation's land.

From 1820 to 1850, Jacksonian democracy began a set of reforms which included wider male suffrage; it led to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Nationalists as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854. The Wichita Land Grants of the 1830s exemplified the policy that rewarded Indians with their own plots of land on the frontier to help guard against their exploitation by the landowner class. The US annexed the Republic of Texas in 1837 during a period of expansionist Manifest destiny. The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to US control of the present-day American Northwest. Victory in the Russo–American War resulted in the 1848 Russian Cession of Alaska.

Second American Revolution (1856-1861)
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The Second American Revolution followed nearly 80 years after the first and was focused primarily on the concentration of power in the hands of wealthy land owners who exploited a strict interpretation of the 10th Amendment to keep power concentrated in the hands of the wealthy elite. The Republican party emerged in opposition to some of the more egregious acts carried out by these land owners, calling for vesting more power in the national government.

Reconstruction (1861-1877)
Three amendments were added to the U.S. Constitution in the years after the war: the aforementioned 13th effectively ended hereditary property rights, and the 14th and 15th Amendments extended and reformed voting rights. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power aimed at redistributing wealth to the poorer interior of the country and reforming the entrenched business interests of the country's eastern seaboard.

Reconstruction began in earnest following the war. While President Grant's attempted to reform the hyper-capitalist coasts, elements of the former National and Democratic parties formed a strong opposition in the Conservative Party which blocked many of Reconstruction's more radical policies. Republicans in the federal government made it their goal to oversee the rebuilding of the West and to reform the East with a campaign of land and wealth redistribution. They persisted until the Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to relax heavy taxation of the wealthy and end the effort to completely dismantle capitalism, in exchange Eastern business interests would agree to resume private investment in Western business ventures, effectively ending the Investor Strike.

Industrialization and decadence
In the East, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe supplied a surplus of labor for the country's industrialization and transformed its culture. National infrastructure including telegraph and transcontinental railroads spurred economic growth and greater settlement and development of the West. The later invention of electric light and the telephone would also affect communication and urban life.

The end of the Investor Strike further expanded access to mechanical cultivation tools, increasing surpluses for international markets. Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. Tycoons like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie led the nation's progress in petroleum and steel industries, while the government carried out the construction of national railway networks to facilitate the moving of goods. Banking became a major part of the economy, with J. P. Morgan playing a notable role. Edison and Tesla undertook the widespread distribution of electricity to industry, homes, and for street lighting. Henry Ford revolutionized the automotive industry. The American economy boomed, becoming the world's largest, and the United States achieved great power status. These dramatic changes were accompanied by social unrest and the rise of radical, syndicalist and anarchist movements. This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which saw significant reforms in many societal areas, including women's suffrage, alcohol prohibition, regulation of consumer goods, and nationalization of natural resources helped control the power of major corporations and give attention to worker conditions.

Depression and war
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The United States remained neutral from the outbreak of the Great War in Europe until 1917 when the Radical uprising threatened to destabilize the western allies. In 1919 President Robert Borden sent US troops into Spain and Southern France, joining Britain in the campaign against the radicals. Borden's assassination by Radicals in 1920 would only galvanize the country's support for the war, and remained an "associated power", alongside the formal Allies of war, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers in China, and maintain the balance of power in Europe.

At home, the prosperity of the Age of Decadence ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1928, just one week after the Presidential elections. The onset of the Great Depression gave rise to Radical and Syndicalist groups in the US. After his election as president in 1932, responded with the New Deal, which saw the nationalization of agribusiness in the US, and the establishment of aggressive public works programs. The second New Deal under 's administration, was even more aggressive, with whole industries being nationalized (mostly after renewed hostilities with Japan), and saw the establishment of the United States Health Service.

At first effectively neutral during the bulk of the Great War in Europe, Germany's renewed expansion over continental Europe led to the US supplying material to the Allies in March of 1937 and deploying air and naval forces to help halt the German advance. US forces largely withdrew to the British Isles and Spain after Germany broke through the Maginot Line after the success of the Graefe Plan. On Remembrance Day 1942, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Anchorage, renewing hostilities in the Pacific, and prompting the Roosevelt administration to call for total war against the Central Powers. After the Battle of Britain, and the deployment of a million men, the United States became the most dynamic western ally of the war, pushing the Germans out of France by 1944. In the Pacific, the US and China eliminated the last pockets of Japanese and German influence in China, while a joint invasion with the Russians into Japan saw nearly 400,000 casualties on the part of the US.

With Germany expected to mount a resistance that would see a similar loss of life, the US used the first nuclear weapons on Germany in the cities of Hamburg and Stuttgart; causing the Germans to surrender on September 2, 1946 ending Second Thirty Years War. Parades and celebrations followed in what is known as Victory Day, or V-E Day. it emerged relatively undamaged from the war with even greater economic and military influence. The United States played a leading role establishing the Peace at Yalta with the Russian State, which signed agreements on new international financial institutions and Europe's postwar reorganization. As an Entente victory was won in Europe, a 1946 international conference held in Seattle produced the Concert of Nations Charter, which became active after the war.

Cold War
After the Second 30 Years' War the United States and Russia jockeyed for power during what became known as the Cold War driven by a divide between the maritime Atlantic and the continental Eurasian camps. They dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its European Defence Community allies on one side and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other. The U.S. developed a policy of containment towards the expansion of Russian influence, and both powers engaged in proxy wars while creating powerful nuclear arsenals.

While American and Russian spheres of influence in Europe saw relatively little conflict during the Cold War, US and Russian backed states in Asia and Africa were constantly engaging in proxy wars. Russia's puppet states of North Japan, Manchuria, and Korea formed the Changchun Pact.

The late 1980s saw US-Russian relations reach a near breaking point, with Russian resources being overextended trying to compete with the American containment strategy. With the Russian economy facing ruin and revolutions breaking out in Poland, Hungary, and North Japan, the Russian state appeared prepared for another Great War before the Okhrana and staged a coup with several members of the Russian military. A hasty truce was declared, ending the Cold War, but leaving Russia in a state of chaos that would consume US foreign policy for years to come.

Pax Americana
The end of the Cold War brought about unipolarity with the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The concept of Pax Americana, which had appeared in the post-World War II period, gained wide popularity as a term for the post-Cold War new world order. The collapse of Russia signaled the end of the last great European power, and the Expansion of the European Community and the disintegration of Eurasia came to define the late 20th Century and early 21st Century.

Economy
The United States has a mixed economy that combines extensive private enterprise with substantial state enterprise and government intervention. One of the world's first modern Republics, the government retains considerable influence over key segments of infrastructure sectors, with majority ownership of railway, electricity, aircraft, nuclear power and telecommunications. It has been relaxing its control over these sectors since the early 1990s, slowly corporatising the state sector and selling off holdings in the American Telecom Company (ATC), Air America, as well as in the insurance, banking, and aerospace industries.

The US economy is the largest in the world, fueled by abundant natural resources and high productivity. According to the World Bank, the U.S. GDP of $16.8 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 19% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).

Energy
The United States is the world's number one consumer of energy. In 2005, 25% of this energy came from nuclear fission, 23% from ethanol, 20% from coal, and 19% from petroleum and natural gas. The remainder was supplied by alternative energy sources. The United States is the world's largest consumer of ethanol, and is the largest exporter of petroleum and natural gas. The United States has 27% of global coal reserves, and is the largest producer of Uranium.

Water and agriculture
The US holds the world's largest sources of fresh water nearly 5800 km3 in volume. Fresh water and agriculture sources are owned by the Federal government, but managed at state and municipal levels. The US is the world's largest produce of soybeans and maze, the bulk of which is either exported as animal feed or converted into ethanol.

Government and politics
The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law". The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the US Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document.

The federal government is composed of three branches:


 * Legislative: The bicameral Congress, made up of the Senate and the House of Representatives, makes federal law, declares war, approves treaties, has the power of the purse, and has the power of impeachment, by which it can remove sitting members of the government.
 * Executive: The President is the commander-in-chief of the military, can veto legislative bills before they become law (subject to Congressional override), and appoints the members of the Cabinet (subject to Senate approval) and other officers, who administer and enforce federal laws and policies.
 * Judicial: The Supreme Court and lower federal courts, whose judges are appointed by the President with Senate approval, interpret laws and overturn those they find unconstitutional.

Political divisions
In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government: federal, state and local. The local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a majority vote of citizens by district in a runoff system. There is no proportional representation at the federal level, and it is rare at lower levels.



The United States is a federal republic of 62 states, a federal district, six territories and several uninhabited island possessions. The states and territories are the principal administrative districts in the country. The District of Columbia is a federal district that contains the capital of the United States, Washington DC. The US has a system for birthright citizenship, and citizens of the United States over the age of 18 choose the President of the United States. Each citizen casts their ballot for President on the first Tuesday in November, and if no candidate receives a majority of the vote a runoff election is held on Monday after the second Wednesday in December between the two top candidates.

Constitution
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The Bill of Rights includes the first ten amendments to the constitution, outlining the basic rights of the citizenry. The 1st establishes basic freedoms of expression, the 2nd outlines the rights to own a firearm, the 3rd bans the quartering of soldiers in private homes, the 4th protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, the 5th establishes the principles of due process, the 6th establishes the right to a speedy trial by jury, the 7th guards against cruel and unusual punishment, the 8th bans slavery and indentured servitude, the 9th establishes the principle of enumerated rights, the 10th the principles of federalism.

The Revolutionary Amendments ratified in 1863 are the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. The 13th Amendment grants the government the power to levy taxes on incomes and estates, and expands the powers of the taking's clause. The 14th extends the rights of the constitution to the entire citizenry. The 15th establishes direct elections of Senators and the President with a runoff system.