United States: Nat Geo Kids

GEOGRAPHY : The United States of America is the world's third

largest country in size and nearly the third largest in terms of
population. Located in North America, the country is bordered
on the west by the Pacific Ocean and to the east by the Atlantic
Ocean. Along the northern border is Canada and the southern
border is Mexico. There are 50 states and the District of
Columbia. More than twice the size of the European Union, the
United States has high mountains in the West and a vast central
plain. The lowest point in the country is in Death Valley which is at
-282 feet (-86 meters) and the highest peak is Denali (Mt.
McKinley) at 20,320 feet (6,198 meters).

PEOPLE & CULTURE : Throughout its history, the United States

has been a nation of immigrants. The population is diverse with
people from all over the world seeking refuge and a better way
of life. The country is divided into six regions: New England, the
mid-Atlantic, the South, the Midwest, the Southwest, and the
West. European settlers came to New England in search of
religious freedom. These states are Connecticut, Maine,
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
The mid-Atlantic region includes Delaware, Maryland, New
Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and the city of Washington, D.C.
These industrial areas attracted millions of European immigrants
and gave rise to some of the East Coast's largest cities: New
York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The South includes Alabama,
Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi,
North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West
Virginia, all of which struggled after the Civil War, which lasted
from 1860-1865. The Midwest is home to the country's
agricultural base and is called the "nation's breadbasket." The
region comprises the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas,
Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio,
South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The Southwest is a beautiful stark
landscape of prairie and desert. The states of Arizona, New
Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas are considered the Southwest and
are home to some of the world's great natural marvels, including
the Grand Canyon and Carlsbad Caverns. The American West,
home of rolling plains and the cowboy, is a symbol of the
pioneering spirit of the United States. The West is diverse,
ranging from endless wilderness to barren desert, coral reefs to
Arctic tundra, Hollywood to Yellowstone. The states of the West
include Alaska, Colorado, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana,
Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

NATURE : The landscape varies across the large country from

tropical beaches in Florida to peaks in the Rocky Mountains, from
rolling prairie lands and barren deserts in the West to dense
wilderness areas in the Northeast and Northwest. Interspersed
throughout are the Great Lakes, the Grand Canyon, the majestic
Yosemite Valley, and the mighty Mississippi River. The wildlife is
as diverse as the landscape. Mammals such as bison once
roamed freely across the plains, but now live only in preserves.
Black bears, grizzlies, and polar bears are the largest carnivores.
There are over 20,000 flower species and most came from
Europe. There are more than 400 areas which are protected and
maintained by the National Park Service, and many other parks in
each state. The bald eagle is the national bird and symbol of the
United States and is a protected species.

GOVERNMENT & ECONOMY : Citizens over the age of 18 years

old vote to elect the President and Vice President of United
States every four years. The president lives in the White House in
the capital city of Washington, D.C. There are two houses of
Congress: the Senate and the House of Representatives. There
are 100 senators, two from each of the 50 states and each
serves a six-year term. There are 435 representatives who must
be elected every two years. The Supreme Court is made up of
nine justices who are picked by the president and must be
approved by Congress. For the first time in the nation's history an
African American, Barack Obama, was elected President of the
United States in 2008. He was reelected for a second term in
2012. Advances in the past hundred years have established
America as a world leader economically, militarily, and
technologically. America has the largest coal reserves in the
world.

HISTORY : For centuries native peoples lived across the vast

expanse that would become the United States. Starting in the
16th century, settlers moved from Europe to the New World,
established colonies, and displaced these native peoples.
Explorers arrived from Spain in 1565 at St. Augustine, Florida, and
the British landed in 1587 to establish a colony in Roanoke, in
present-day Virginia. In 1606 another British colony was
established in what would become Jamestown, Virginia. From
there, the French founded Quebec in 1608, then the Dutch
started a colony in 1609 in present-day New York. Europeans
continued to settle in the New World in ever-increasing numbers
throughout the next couple of centuries.

Conflict with the Native Americans : While Native Americans

resisted European efforts to gain land and power, they were
often outnumbered and didn’t have as powerful of weapons. The
settlers also brought diseases that the native peoples had not
faced before, and these illnesses sometimes had horrible
effects. A 1616 epidemic killed an estimated 75 percent of the
Native Americans in the New England region of North America.
During this time, fights between the settlers and Native
Americans erupted often, particularly as more people claimed
land where the Native Americans lived. The U.S. government
signed nearly 400 peace treaties between the mid-18th century
and the mid-19th century to try to show they wanted peace with
the Indigenous tribes. But the government did not honor most of
these treaties, and even sent military units to forcibly remove
Native Americans from their lands. For example, in 1830,
President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which
granted land west of the Mississippi River to Native American
tribes who agreed to give up their lands. But this broke with
other treaties he had signed with Native American tribes in the
Southeast. The removal was supposed to be voluntary, but
Jackson used legal and military action to remove several tribes
from their homelands and ended nearly 70 treaties during his
presidency. By the mid-19th century, most Native American
tribes had been wiped out or moved to live on much smaller
portions of land in the Midwest.

Declaring Independence : In 1776, colonists living in the New

England area of the New World drafted the Declaration of
Independence, a document that stated that the American
colonies were tired of being ruled by Great Britain (now called
the United Kingdom). The settlers fought for—and won—their
independence and formed a union of states based on a new
constitution. But despite stating that “all men are created equal”
in the Declaration of Independence, the new country was home
to millions of enslaved people.

Slavery in the United States : Enslaved Africans were brought to

North America by boat as early as 1619. The trans-Atlantic slave
trade saw more than 12.5 million people kidnapped from Africa
and sold at ports throughout the Americas over the next couple
of centuries. By 1860, nearly four million enslaved people lived in
the country. Most worked in the South, where their free labor
allowed the sugar, cotton, and tobacco industries to flourish.
Enslaved people even built the White House and the U.S. Capitol.
When Abraham Lincoln became president in 1861, the nation had
been arguing for more than a hundred years about enslaving
people and each state’s right to allow it. Lincoln wanted to end
slavery. Many people in the northern states agreed with him;
some people in the southern states, however, relied on enslaved
people to farm their crops and did not want slavery to end.
Eventually, 11 southern states formed the Confederate States of
America to oppose the 23 northern states that remained in the
Union. The Civil War began on April 12, 1861. The Civil War was
fought between abolitionists, or people who wanted to end
slavery, and the pro-slavery Confederacy. Enslaved people
weren’t freed until Lincoln delivered his famous Emancipation
Proclamation speech in 1863, midway through the war. Two years
later, the Civil War ended with a Union victory.
That same year, the passage of the 13th Amendment officially
abolished the practice of slavery and ended nearly 250 years of
slavery in the country. But it did not end racism. Former enslaved
people—as well as their descendants—struggled with
discrimination, and African American heroes today are still
fighting for equality.

Progress (and Wars) in the 20th Century : After the Civil War, the
United States continued to expand westward until 1890, when
the U.S. government declared the West fully explored. During this
time of expansion, the population grew from about five million
people in 1800 to nearly 80 million people in 1900. The early
1900s were a time of progress in the United States. This in part
was because of the number of immigrants coming to the
country looking for opportunity. Between 1900 and 1915, 15
million immigrants arrived in the United States from countries
such as Italy, Russia, and Poland. The new citizens worked in
places such as gold mines and garment factories, and helped
construct railroads and canals. These immigrants brought new
ideas and culture to the young country. The 20th century was
also a time of industrial advancement. The development of the
automobile and the airplane lead to an increase in factory jobs
and marked a shift in more people moving to live and work in big
cities instead of farming in small towns. But there were tough
times, too. The United States fought alongside Great Britain,
France, Russia, Italy, Romania, and Japan against Germany,
Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire (now the
country of Turkey) in World War I, before the country suffered
through what became known as the Great Depression, a time of
economic crisis during the 1930s.
In the 1940s, then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt steered
the country out of the Depression before leading the country
during the Second World War, alongside allies France, Great
Britain, and the Soviet Union (now Russia), against Germany, Italy,
and Japan. The United States’ reputation as a progressive
country took hold after the two World Wars and the Great
Depression. The ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s were a time of innovation in
the nation. In 1958, NASA—the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration—started exploring the possibility of space flight.
By 1969, the agency landed the first human on the moon.
Throughout these three decades, the fight for civil rights in the
country continued with Americans of all backgrounds fighting for
equal rights for their fellow citizens. Civil rights leader Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is perhaps the most
famous speech associated with the civil rights movement.
Historic firsts for people of color during these decades include
Dalip Singh Saund becoming the first Asian American elected to
the Congress in 1957; Thurgood Marshall becomingthe first
African American justice to serve on the Supreme Court in 1967;
and Shirley Chisholm becoming the first African American
female elected to Congress in 1968. The late 1900s saw the U.S.
government get involved in several wars on different fronts,
including the Vietnam War, a war between what was then the
two separate countries of North and South Vietnam, in which the
United States sided with South Vietnam; the Cold War, a long
period of non-violent tensions between the United States and
the former Soviet Union, now Russia; and the Gulf War, a war
waged by 30-plus nations lead by the United States against the
country of Iraq.

An Attack on America : Although the country was still a relatively

young nation at the beginning of the 21st century, the United
States had established itself as a global power. Some people saw
this power as a threat. On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists who
disagreed with the United States’ involvement in world affairs
hijacked four planes. Two of the planes were flown into the two
110-story skyscrapers that made up New York City’s World Trade
Center. Another crashed into the Pentagon outside of
Washington, D.C. The fourth plane went down in a Pennsylvania
field. Nearly 3,000 people died that day. Then-president George
W. Bush sent troops to Afghanistan after the events of 9/11. He
hoped to capture those responsible for the attacks, including al
Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Bush also sent troops
to Iraq in 2003, after rumors started that the country was hiding
dangerous weapons that the president wanted to find and
destroy. While bin Laden was eventually located and killed in 2011,
the United States is still fighting what’s called “the war on
terrorism” today.

Historic Firsts—Plus, a Pandemic : The 21st century marked more

progress for the United States, particularly at its highest levels of
government. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first African
American to be elected president of the United States. In 2020,
Kamala Harris became the first Black and Indian American
person and the first woman elected vice president. The early
2000s also saw the elections of Donald Trump, the first U.S.
president to be impeached twice, in 2016; and Joe Biden, the
oldest person to be elected president, in 2020. The United
States—along with the rest of the world—also endured the
coronavirus pandemic that began in 2020.