The U.S. is a country of 50 states covering a vast swath of North America, with Alaska in the northwest and Hawaii extending the nation’s presence into the Pacific Ocean. Major Atlantic Coast cities are New York, a global finance and culture center, and capital Washington, DC. The Declaration of Independence was 1776, which makes the United States 246 years old in 2022. Midwestern metropolis Chicago is known for influential architecture and on the west coast, Los Angeles’ Hollywood is famed for filmmaking.
A country for less than two and a half centuries, the United States is a relatively new member of the global community, but its rapid growth since the 18th century is unparalleled. The early promise of the New World as a refuge and land of opportunity was realized dramatically in the 20th century with the emergence of the United States as a world power. With a total population exceeded only by those of China and India, the United States is also characterized by an extraordinary diversity in ethnic and racial ancestry. A steady stream of immigration, notably from the 1830s onward, formed a pool of foreign-born persons unmatched by any other nation; 60 million people immigrated to U.S. shores in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many were driven, seeking escape from political or economic hardship, while others were drawn, by a demand for workers, abundant natural resources, and expansive cheap land. Most arrived hoping to remake themselves in the New World.
Many Americans perceive social tension as the product of their society’s failure to extend the traditional dream of equality of opportunity to all people. Ideally, social, political, economic, and religious freedom would assure the like treatment of everyone, so that all could achieve goals in accord with their individual talents, if only they worked hard enough. This strongly held belief has united Americans throughout the centuries. The fact that some groups have not achieved full equality troubles citizens and policy-makers alike.
After decades of immigration and acculturation, many U.S. citizens can trace no discernible ethnic identity, describing themselves generically only as “American,” while others claim mixed identities. The 2000 U.S. census introduced a new category for those who identified themselves as a member of more than one race, and, of 281.4 million counted, 2.4 percent chose this multiracial classification. Ten years later, in the 2010 census, those figures had grown to 2.9 percent of 308.7 million.
From colonial times, African Americans arrived in large numbers as enslaved persons and lived primarily on plantations in the South. In 1790, enslaved and free Blacks together comprised about one-fifth of the U.S. population. As the nation split between Southern slave and Northern free states prior to the American Civil War, the Underground Railroad spirited thousands of escaped enslaved people from the South to the North. In the century following abolition, this migration pattern became more pronounced as some six million Blacks moved from rural areas of the South to northern and western cities between 1916 and 1970 during the so-called Great Migration. Onthe heels of this massive internal shift came new immigrants from Western Africa and the West Indies, principally Haiti, Jamaica
Asian Americans as a group have confounded earlier expectations that they would form an indigestible mass in American society. The Chinese, earliest to arrive (in large numbers from the mid-19th century, principally as labourers, notably on the transcontinental railroad), and the Japanese were long victims of racial discrimination. In 1924 the law barred further entries; those already in the United States had been ineligible for citizenship since the previous year. In 1942 thousands of Japanese, many born in the United States and therefore American citizens, were interned in relocation camps because their loyalty was suspect after the United States engaged Japan in World War II. Subsequently, anti-Asian prejudice largely dissolved, and Chinese and Japanese, along with others such as the Vietnamese and Taiwanese, have adjusted and advanced. Among generally more recent arrivals, many Koreans, Filipinos, and Asian Indians have quickly enjoyed economic success. Though enumerated separately by the U.S. census, Pacific Islanders, such as native Hawaiians, constitute a small minority but contribute to making Hawaii and California the states with the largest percentages of Asian Americans. Among the trends of Arab immigration in the 20th century were the arrival of Lebanese Christians in the first half of the century and Palestinian Muslims in the second half. Initially Arabs inhabited the East Coast, but by the end of the century there was a large settlement of Arabs in the greater Detroit area. Armenians, also from southwest Asia, arrived in large numbers in the early 20th century, eventually congregating largely in California, where, later in the century, Iranians were also concentrated. Some recent arrivals from the Middle East maintain national customs such as traditional dress.
Native Americans form an ethnic group only in a very general sense. In the East, centuries of coexistence with whites has led to some degree of intermarriage and assimilation and to various patterns of stable adjustment. In the West the hasty expansion of agricultural settlement crowded the Native Americans into reservations, where federal policy has vacillated between efforts at assimilation and the desire to preserve tribal cultural identity, with unhappy consequences. The Native American population has risen from its low point of 235,000 in 1900 to 2.5 million at the turn of the 21st century.
The reservations are often enclaves of deep poverty and social distress, although the many casinos operated on their land have created great wealth in some instances. The physical and social isolation of the reservation prompted many Native Americans to migrate to large cities, but, by the end of the 20th century, a modest repopulation occurred in rural counties of the Great Plains. In census numerations Native Americans are categorized with Alaskan natives, notably Aleuts and Eskimos. In the latter half of the 20th century, intertribal organizations were founded to give Native Americans a unified, national presence.
The U.S. government has never supported an established church, and the diversity of the population has discouraged any tendency toward uniformity in worship. As a result of this individualism, thousands of religious denominations thrive within the country. Only about one-sixth of religious adherents are not Christian, and, although Roman Catholicism is the largest single denomination (about one-fifth of the U.S. population), the many churches of Protestantism constitute the majority. Some are the products of native development—amongthem the Disciples of Christ (founded in the early 19th century), Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons; 1830), Seventh-day Adventists (officially established 1863), Jehovah’s Witnesses (1872),
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Immigration legislation began in earnest in the late 19th century, but it was not until after World War I that the era of mass immigration came to an abrupt end. The Immigration Act of 1924 established an annual quota (fixed in 1929 at 150,000) and established the national-origins system, which was to characterize immigration policy for the next 40 years. Under it, quotas were established for each country based on the number of persons of that national origin who were living in the United States in 1920. The quotas reduced drastically the flow of immigrants from southeastern Europe in favour of the countries of northwestern Europe. The quota system was abolished in 1965 in favour of a predominantly first-come, first-served policy. An annual ceiling of immigrant visas was established for nations outside the Western Hemisphere (170,000, with 20,000 allowed to any one nation) and for all persons from the Western Hemisphere (120,000).
The new policy radically changed the pattern of immigration. For the first time, non-Europeans formed the dominant immigrant group, with new arrivals from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. In the 1980s and ’90s immigration was further liberalized by granting amnesty to illegal aliens, raising admission limits, and creating a system for validating refugees. The plurality of immigrants, both legal and illegal, recently hail from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, though Asians form a significant percentage.
The United States is the world’s greatest economic power in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) and historically has been among the world’s highest-ranking countries in terms ofGDP per capita. With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States produces about one-fifth of the world’s economic output.
The sheer size of the U.S. economy makes it the most important single factor in global trade. Its exports represent more than one-tenth of the world total. The United States also influences the economies of the rest of the world because it is a significant source of investment capital. Just as direct investment, primarily by the British, was a major factor in 19th-century U.S. economic growth, so direct investment abroad by U.S. firms is a major factor in the economic well-being of Canada, Mexico, China, and many countries in Latin America, Europe, and Asia.
Speaker: Nancy Pelosi (Democratic Party) Trending
Capital: Washington, D.C.
Dialing code: +1
President: Joe Biden
Gross domestic product: 20.94 trillion USD (2020) World BankPopulation: 329.5 million (2020) World Bank
Unemployment rate: 3.6% (Mar 2022)