The United States of America (USA), often shortened to the United States (U.S.) or even just America, is a federal republic of 50 states and a district in north America situated between Canada and Mexico, except for Alaska (north of the other states, between Canada and Russia) and Hawaii (an island in the Pacific Ocean). The U.S also has various non-state ‘territories’ in the Pacific and Caribbean.

Facts: The U.S is the world’s fourth-largest country by total area (after Russia, Canada and China) and with 319 million inhabitants the third most populated (after China and India). It’s one of the most ethnically diverse, multicultural nations in the world due to long-term, large-scale immigration from many different countries into the cultural ‘melting pot’ of the United States.

History: Paleo-Indians (nomadic people from the late Ice Age) emigrated from Eurasia to what is now the U.S. mainland across an ice-bridge that connected Russia to Alaska around 15,000 years ago. The ice bridge melted and the nomadic settlers spread out and developed across the entire continent of the Americas with relatively little contact with the outside world for thousands of years until European colonisation began in earnest in the late 15th Century, bringing destruction (initially via smallpox and measles, later through warfare) to those by-now-indigenous peoples who came to be regarded as Native Americans.

Levels of contact, violence and trade between European settlers and Native Americans varied widely from region to region, different tribes forming different attitudes to the invaders. The Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch all attempted to colonise but the modern United States as we know them today grew out of 13 British colonies on the East Coast, established in the 17th and 18th Centuries by Protestant Christians attempting to make a new life for themselves free from religious oppression.

Farming and agricultural settlements were established on the east coast of America with immigrant workers streaming into the country, first as indentured servants from Europe and later, shamefully, as trafficked slaves from Africa. Far from home, disputes between Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolution. On the 4th of July 1776, delegates from the 13 colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence and severed themselves from British rule. The country’s constitution was adopted in 1787, George Washington became the first U.S President in 1789, and the first ten amendments to the constitution (the Bill of Rights) were ratified in 1791 to guarantee fundamental civil rights and freedoms for U.S citizens.

Emboldened, the newly independent Americans embarked on vigorous western territorial expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, displacing and slaughtering Native American tribes, acquiring new territories (Louisiana from the French, Florida from the Spanish), and adding new states to the Union as they went. By 1848, victory in the Mexican-American War brought California into the fold and the U.S now spanned coast to coast. Surviving Native Americans were gradually re-homed on self-governing reservations away from white Europeans.

Meanwhile, the emotive issue of slave labour continued to rumble. The international slave trade had been criminalised by the federal government in a law drafted by third President Thomas Jefferson in 1808 but this law proved impossible to enforce within individual states, particularly the new southern states which were in the midst of a profitable cotton crop boom reliant on slave labour. Divisions began to grown between the ‘free’ states and slave states. When Abraham Lincoln was elected the sixteenth President in 1860, seven southern slave states (later joined by four more) withdrew from the United States to form the Confederate States of America. The American Civil War followed from 1861-1865, at first fought over preserving the Union and later, following Lincoln’s famous ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ in 1863, fought over the issue of abolishing slavery in America outright. The northern states (the Union) won the Civil War and around four million former African-American slaves were granted U.S citizenship and promised voting rights, although segregation and violent discrimination against black Americans remained rife.

Through the 19th Century, the rapid construction of railroads aided movement of goods and people. Domestic electricity and the invention of the telephone changed the way Americans – and the wider world – lived. By the start of the 20th Century, America’s industrialised economy was roaring. U.S reach had expanded beyond the mainland with territory established in the Pacific. Having initially declared neutrality during World War I, the U.S entered that vast conflict late in the day, helping turn the tide of victory in favour of the Allies and embedding their status as a new global military power.

The world continued to change. Radio allowed for mass communication, television and cinema followed suit. America was on the front foot in this new – somehow smaller – post-war world, pushing its values of freedom and democracy as well as its dedication to entertainment and consumerism. But the good times couldn’t last – over-production caused the Wall Street Crash of 1929 which led to the Great Depression, mass bankruptcies, mass unemployment and (together with the horrendous dust storms of the 1930s) mass migration within the country as people moved to the cities looking for work.

Due to these problems at home, the U.S was again reluctant to become involved on the international stage, and again remained neutral at the onset of World War II. This neutrality ended following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in Hawaii and the U.S helped the Allies (principally Britain, France, Russia & China) win World War II after developing the most destructive bombs ever created (nuclear weapons) and dropping them on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to Japan’s immediate surrender. America now found its international status to be one of ‘global superpower’ and, together with the other Allied Powers, established the United Nations (based in the U.S) to maintain a new peace and global order, with the five ‘winners’ of World War II becoming the permanent members of the U.N Security Council.

The decades after World War II saw a power struggle between the U.S (representing the ideology of capitalism) and the Soviet Union (representing the ideology of communism) for political influence in the post-war world. The U.S gathered military allies within the NATO organisation and the Soviets did the same with their Warsaw Pact allies. Many feared a third World War eventually fought with nuclear weapons to be an inevitability, potentially leading to the end of human life. This ‘Cold War’ between the U.S and the U.S.S.R (meaning they never directly fought – see Adventure 6) led to the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, the waging of ideological ‘proxy wars’ in places like Korea and Vietnam, and the technological ‘space race’ to be the first country to put a man on the moon. The eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant America had ‘won’ the Cold War and the U.S was now the world’s only superpower.

The world kept changing and the American people remained on the front foot: after a long struggle for equality, women voting and working became the norm; the African-American civil rights movement confronted segregation, discrimination and racism head-on and demanded change (a major milestone in America’s self-healing process was reached when Barack Obama became the first African-American to be elected President in 2008); a ‘sexual revolution’ took place from the 1960s onward, embedding more liberal attitudes towards sexual behaviour, pre-marital sex and alternative sexual lifestyles. Technologically, mobile communication became the norm and the internet developed – allowing access to information for its citizens as never before.

As the world’s one remaining superpower, however, the U.S also came to be seen as the world’s policeman – and an overbearing one at that, following unwelcome incursions into the politics of the Middle East. The rock heard around the world was thrown at that policeman on September 11, 2001 when Al-Qaeda Islamist terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City, killing nearly 3,000 people. America’s response to this terrorist attack was the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’, which continues to this day and is so ill-defined as to have no tangible end point.

The good: In the early-21st Century, the U.S remains the world’s foremost economic and military power, a prominent political and cultural force, a leader in scientific research and technological innovations and a beacon of representative democracy at federal, state and local level. The upper, U.S federal, level of government has three branches: a legislative branch (consisting of two houses, Congress and the Senate) that make federal law, control the budget and can declare wars; an executive branch (the President) which holds a veto and appoints the Cabinet; and a judicial branch (the Supreme Court and other federal courts) which interpret laws and overturn those they find to be unconstitutional. These three branches of government are kept strictly separate to ensure fairness and lack of corruption. Since the 19th Century, U.S politics have centred around two major political parties: the centre-left liberal Democrat Party (community-focused, tend to favour universal health care, gun control, stem-cell research, same-sex marriage, abortion rights, environmental protection) and the centre-right conservative Republican Party (focused on creating opportunities for individuals and businesses, tend to favour smaller government, lower taxes, markets freedom, less regulation). The U.S remains a global political heavyweight, a key member of the G8 and G20 groups, and hosts the headquarters of the United Nations in New York City.

The bad: Although the U.S has the largest economy in the world in terms of nominal GDP and the highest average household income, wealth inequality and income inequality between U.S citizens is vast. The wealthiest 1% of Americans take home 20% of all income, the wealthiest 10% possess 72% of all household wealth, and the lowest-earning 50% of Americans possess just 2% of household wealth. Committed capitalists argue that there’s nothing wrong with this scenario and that it provides the backbone for ‘the American Dream’ – the impetus to succeed coupled with the opportunity to do so driving a work ethic and productivity that leads to social mobility and material success. Detractors would argue that the reality of unchecked capitalism is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, creating an unbalanced concentration of wealth and a huge disparity between the life-experience of its citizens – a disparity which, as it widens, becomes effectively embedded from birth, the needy forever being left to want in poverty. Despite its wealth, the U.S also has one of the least extensive welfare systems in the developed world, an extraordinarily high rate of homicide and gun violence, and the highest incarceration rate and total prison population in the world. Coupled with an underdeveloped healthcare system in comparison with other wealthy nations, the U.S has one of the lowest life-expectancy rates for developed countries – lower even than some developing countries – which has all combined to create the impression of it being a hard country, one that provides high ladders for its citizens to climb but an insufficient safety net should they fall.

The future: Despite its influence, the genuine nobility of its founding principles and the massive popularity of its cultural output, fairly or unfairly America isn’t well-liked (and following recent foreign policy blunders is at times outright detested) internationally. Americans tend to be known (and disparaged) abroad for proudly proclaiming the U.S.A to be the greatest country on the planet, but step back and look and the bigger picture and it’s easy to understand how one could be swept up in such a wave of nationalism. After essentially only coming into existence at the eleventh hour, the U.S is the last empire standing in a post-colonial world. No one likes a cocky winner – and America has at times undoubtedly been that. At its worst, yes, America can be an arrogant, unfeeling bully but – at its best – it’s vital to remember that the world’s most important country is still a place where citizens, through hard work, can pursue their dreams and ambitions (whatever they may be) with a freedom unthinkable elsewhere: free education, a free press, freedom of employment, freedom of religion, freedom of speech. Many of us may take these freedoms for granted. We never should. Nor should we take for granted the fact that these freedoms are woven into the very fabric of America’s constitution. It will be what the U.S does next with the extraordinary power it has inherited and extraordinary influence it has created for itself that will define its place in world history across generations and centuries to come.

END

So…..lots of potential directions to go from here. I don’t think I’ve made so many onward links from an adventure topic since Islam, and I guess that makes sense – Islam and the United States are the two tallest flags flying from fortresses at either end of the global village in the early-21st Century. Finding a way to reconcile the ideals of both will be one of the key challenges we must overcome on this World Peace Adventure of ours.

To learn more about the dominant 20th and 21st century culture of purchase and acquisition as a means towards achieving the ‘good life’, jump to Adventure 98: Consumerism – content to follow

To learn more about the informed concerns outsiders can hold about the United States, as well as the ill-informed prejudices against it, jump to Adventure 99: Criticism of United States/ Anti-Americanism – content to follow

To learn more about the noble principles on which the U.S was founded and the history of democratic representation for the people dating back to Ancient Greece, jump to Adventure 100: Democracy – content to follow

To learn more about the past and present practices of countries exerting their influence over others using military or other means, jump to Adventure 101: Imperialism – content to follow

To learn more about the political ideology of a country being governed by the people as opposed to a king or queen, jump to Adventure 102: Republicanism – content to follow

To learn more about what causes people to strongly identify themselves with the country they were born in – to the extent of becoming dismissive or hostile towards those who were not, jump to Adventure 103: Nationalism – content to follow

To learn more about the controversial international military response that the U.S launched following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, jump to Adventure 104: War on Terror – content to follow