United States of America (CWTH)

The United States of America (also referred to as the United States, the U.S., the USA, or America ) is a federal constitutional republic comprising of fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty nine continental states and Washington DC, the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The states of Alaska and Vancouver are in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and the USSR to the west across the Bering Strait. The country also possesses several territories in the Carribean and Pacific.

Indigenous peoples of Asian origin have inhabited what is now the mainland United States for many thousands of years. This Native American Population was greatly reduced by disease and warfare after European contact. The United States was founded by thirteen British colonies located along the Atlantic Seaboard. On July 4, 1776, they issued the Declaration of Indpendence, which proclaimed their right to self determin and their establishment of a cooperative union. The rebellious states defeated the British Empire in the American Revolution. The current United States Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787; its ratification the following year made the states part of a single republic with a strong central government.

In the 19th century, the United States acquired land from France, Spain, the England, Mexico, and Russia and annexd the Republic of Texas. Disputes between the agrarian South and industrial North over state's rights and the expansion of the institution of slavers provoked the American Civil War of the 1860s. The North's victory prevented a permanent split of the country and led to the end of slavers in the United States. By the 1870s, the national economy was the world's largest. The Spanish-American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a military power. It emerged from World War II as the first nation with nuclear weapons and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. The Sovier-American War and WWIII left the United States scrambling to keep a role as a superpower.

Native American People
The Native Americans were the indigenous people of the area. It is theorized that they crossed a land bridge in the Bering Strait known as Beringia during the last Ice Age. It was home to many tribes, including the Sioux, Algonquins, and Inuits.

Colonization
In 1492, Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus, under contract to the Spanish crown, reached several Caribbean islands, making first contace with the indigenous people. On April 2, 1513, Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce dé Léon landed on what he called La Florida—the first documented European arrival on what would become the U.S. mainland. Spanish settlements in the region were followed by ones in the present-day southwestern United States that drew thousands through Mexico. French fur traders established outposts of New France around the Great Lakes; France eventually claimed much of the North American interior, down to the Gulf of Mexico. The first successful English settlements were the Virginia Colony and Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth colony in 1620. The 1628 chartering of the Massachusette's Bay Colony resulted in a wave of migration; by 1634, New England had been settled by some 10,000 Puritans. Between the late 1610s and the American Revolution, about 50,000 convicts were shipped to Britain's American colonies Beginning in 1614, the Dutch settled along the lower Hudson River including New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.

In 1674, the Dutch ceded their American territory to England; the province of New Netherland was renamed New York. Many new immigrants, especially to the South, were indentured servants—some two-thirds of all Virginia immigrants between 1630 and 1680. By the turn of the 18th century, African Slaves were becoming the primary source of bonded labor. With the 1729 division of the Carolinas and the 1732 colonization of Georgia, the thirteen British 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 rights of Englishmen and a sense of self-government stimulating support for republicanism. All legalized the African Slave Trade. With high birth rates, low death rates, and steady immigration, the colonial population grew rapidly. In the French and Indian War, British forces seized Canada from the French, but the population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans (popularly known as "American Indians"), who were being displaced, those thirteen colonies had a population of 2.6 million in 1770, about one-third that of Britain; nearly one in five Americans were black slaves. Though subject to high British Taxes, the American colonials had no representation in Parliament.

American Revolution
Tensions between American colonials and the British during the revolutionary period of the 1760s and early 1770s led to the American Revolutionary War, fought from 1775 through 1781. On June 14, 1775, the Continental Congress, convening in Philadelphia, established a Continental Army under the command of George Washington. Proclaiming that all men are created equal and endowed with certain Unalianable Rights," the Congress adopted the Declaration of Indpendence, drafted largely by Thomas Jefferson, on July 4, 1776. That date is now celebrated annually as America's Independence Day. In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a weak central government that operated until 1789 when the Constitution was drafted.

Expansion
The Americas expanded west of the Appalachins, buying, conquering, and settling new territory. During this time, the Native American people made considerable resistance, but were thwarted by the US. Also, the British had returned in 1812 and burned Washington DC. The capital was rebuilt, however.

Civil War
Tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over the relationship between the state and federal governments as well as violent conflict over the spread of slavery into new states. Abraham Lincoln, candidate of the largely antislavery Republican Party, was elected president in 1860. Before he took office, seven slave states declared their seccession—which the federal government maintained was illegal—and formed the Confederate States of America. With the Confederate attack upon Fort Sumter, the American Civil War began and four more slave states joined the Confederacy. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclimation in 1863 declared slaves in the Confederacy to be free. Following the Union victory in 1865, three amendments to the U.S. Constitution for the nearly four million African Americams who had been slaves, made then citizens, and granted them suffrage. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power.