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The first documented use of the phrase "United States of America" is a letter from January 2, 1776. Stephen Moylan, a Continental Army aide to General George Washington, wrote to Joseph Reed, Washington's aide-de-camp, seeking to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the Revolutionary War effort.
The United States of America is a federal republic [1] consisting of 50 states, a federal district (Washington, D.C., the capital city of the United States), five major territories, and various minor islands. [2] [3] Both the states and the United States as a whole are each sovereign jurisdictions. [4]
The following table is a list of all 50 states and their respective dates of statehood. The first 13 became states in July 1776 upon agreeing to the United States Declaration of Independence, and each joined the first Union of states between 1777 and 1781, upon ratifying the Articles of Confederation, its first constitution. [6]
The United States of America is a federal republic of 50 states, a federal district and 14 territories.It is located mostly in central North America.The U.S. has three land borders, two with Canada and one with Mexico, and has sea borders with Cuba, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Bermuda and Russia, and is otherwise bounded by the Pacific Ocean, the Bering Sea, the Arctic Ocean and the ...
The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) [a] is the common government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, comprising 50 states, five major self-governing territories, several island possessions, and the federal district (national capital) of Washington, D.C ...
The president of the United States is the head of state and head of government of the United States, [1] indirectly elected to a four-year term via the Electoral College. [2] Under the U.S. Constitution, the officeholder leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces. [3]
Under federal law, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, [41] the number of first-generation immigrants living in the United States has increased, [42] from 9.6 million in 1970 to about 38 million in 2007. [43] Around a million people legally immigrated to the United States per year in the 1990s, up from 250,000 per year in the 1950s. [44]
The term "United States," when used in the geographic sense, refers to the contiguous United States (sometimes referred to as the Lower 48, including the District of Columbia not as a state), Alaska, Hawaii, the five insular territories of Puerto Rico, Northern Mariana Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and minor outlying possessions. [1]