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The Office of Insular Affairs (OIA) is a unit of the United States Department of the Interior that oversees federal administration of several United States insular areas.It is the successor to the Bureau of Insular Affairs of the War Department, which administered certain territories from 1902 to 1939, and the Office of Territorial Affairs (formerly the Division of Territories and Island ...
Territories of the United States are sub-national administrative divisions and dependent territories overseen by the federal government of the United States. The American territories differ from the U.S. states and Indian reservations as they are not sovereign entities.
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 exception is the "incorporated and unorganized" (see below) United States Territory of Palmyra Island, the legal remnant of the former United States Territory of Hawaii since 1959, [7] in which the local government and civil administration were assigned by the Secretary of the Interior to the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2001. [8]
In the law of the United States, an insular area is a U.S.-associated jurisdiction that is not part of a U.S. state or the District of Columbia.This includes fourteen U.S. territories administered under U.S. sovereignty, as well as three sovereign states each with a Compact of Free Association with the United States.
As a result of the Insular Cases, the U.S. Attorney General issued an opinion in 1915 stating that the insular areas were unincorporated territories of the United States. In 1939, the bureau was replaced by the Division of Territories and Island Possessions in the Department of the Interior . [ 1 ]
The United States is composed of states, possessions, territories, and a federal district, each with varying numbers of subdivisions. The principal administrative division of a country is sometimes called the "first-level (or first-order) administrative division" or "first administrative level". Its next subdivision might be called "second ...
The territory of the United States may be divided into three classes of non-overlapping top-level political divisions: the 50 States, the federal district, District of Columbia, and a variety of insular areas. There are other political divisions overlapping with or subordinate to the above, for example: counties.