United States (Overview)

I

Introduction

United States (Overview), United States of America, popularly referred to as the United States or as America, a federal republic on the continent of North America, consisting of 48 contiguous states and the noncontiguous states of Alaska and Hawaii. The United States is discussed in seven articles: this overview, as well as separate articles on United States (Geography), United States (People), United States (Culture), United States (Economy), United States (Government), and United States (History).

These six topics—geography, people, culture, economy, government, and history—comprise the interrelated elements of the nation’s experience. Geography is the first element because landforms, resources, and climate affected how people who came to the United States formed new societies. People, in all their variety, are the second element because they formed communities and built a society. The next three elements are major parts of that society—its culture, economy, and government. History tells the story of how people created a society. It details how people adapted to geographical settings, how they constructed and changed their economy and government, and how their culture changed along the way. Thus all of the six topics—geography, people, culture, economy, government, and history—form a progression of interconnected topics.

II

E Pluribus Unum: The American Experience

E Pluribus Unum is the United States motto, appearing on the nation’s coins and paper money, and on many of its public monuments. It means “From many, one.” First used to unify the 13 British colonies in North America during the American Revolution (1775-1783), this phrase acquired new meaning when the United States received wave after wave of immigrants from many lands. These immigrants had to find ways to reconcile their varied backgrounds and fit together under a constitution and a set of laws. That process of creating one society out of many different backgrounds is one of the biggest stories of the American experience.

“What then is the American, this new man?” asked one of thousands of immigrants who came to North America in the 18th century. “He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles…Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.”

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Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur, who wrote under the pseudonym J. Hector St. John, wrote these words more than 200 years ago. In 1759, at the age of 24, Crèvecoeur emigrated from France to the American colonies. Learning English quickly and making a success of himself as a farmer in upstate New York, he married an English woman and became a celebrated observer of the American scene. Amazed at the mingling of people from many parts of the world, Crèvecoeur pointed to a family headed by an Englishman who had married a Dutch woman, whose son married a French woman, and whose four sons had each married a woman of a different nationality. “From this promiscuous breed that race now called Americans have arisen,” he proclaimed.

A hundred years later, on the other side of the continent, Harriette Lane Levy wrote of growing up as a Jew. In her San Francisco neighborhood, she remembered, “The baker was German; the fish man, Italian; the grocer, a Jew; the butcher, Irish; the steam laundryman, a New Englander. The vegetable vendor and the regular laundryman who came to the house were Chinese.”

The United States began as an immigrant society, and it has continued to be a mingling of immigrants ever since. Even Native Americans, the first people to live in North America, descended from people who arrived from Asia many thousands of years ago. Since 1820, 63 million immigrants have arrived in the United States. Never in the history of the world has a country been braided together from so many strands of people arriving with different languages, histories, and cultures.

How could a nation of such diversity meld together so many different humans? Alexis de Tocqueville, another Frenchman who traveled to the United States, was fascinated with this question. He knew that the nation had to find some kind of glue to bind together so many different peoples. He found that glue in the American political system that had developed by the 1830s—a politics of participation based on the notion that to be legitimate and lasting, a government had to derive its power from the people. These principles were part of the political system created by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. This system aimed to create “one federated whole,” but this was an ideal yet to be accomplished. Today, the American people are still reaching for that ideal.

The goal of E pluribus unum has been closely connected with an ongoing debate: What is the meaning of the three resounding words that open the Constitution of the United States—“We, the people.” Every generation has faced the question, How wide is the circle of “we”? The various answers to that question have defined the degree of democracy in the United States. Creating one from the many, then, has been inseparable from deciding how democratic the nation will be.

Accordingly, a second theme of this set of articles on the United States is the growth of democracy in the nation and in its institutions and culture. This process has sometimes been tumultuous and often dramatic. The idealistic agenda set forth by the Founding Fathers—that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—remains the standard by which we judge ourselves.

These two themes help connect the various parts of the American experience, each of which is described in one of the six articles on the United States. Each of the articles is one part of the jigsaw puzzle that is the American experience. The puzzle forms a picture, which can only be fully understood when all the pieces are in place.

III

United States Geography

Early school geography lessons begin with names and locations of the 50 U.S. states and their capitals. But geography is much more than places on a map. Geography more broadly involves peoples, places, and environments—and how these three are connected. The United States (Geography) article describes the physical features of the United States—such as its landforms, lakes, rivers, and climate. It also examines the distinctive regions of the United States. Finally, the article traces how people transformed the landscape and how they grappled with environmental issues connected to population growth, urbanization, and industrialization.

In the article on geography, the interactions of people, places, and environments are related to one of the themes—the search for unity, for oneness, among what one early observer of the American scene called the nation’s “mixed multitude.” Every immigrant to this country comes with a geographical, historical, and cultural background, and all three become part of the American mosaic. Some, because of geographical closeness to their home country, especially those from Mexico, retain more of their home culture (and maintain it longer) than those whose place of origin lies an ocean away. Similarly, the place where an immigrant takes up a new life—in a city filled with people from the same country or in a small community with few friends from the home country friends—can affect how they absorb American ways and how they meld into the larger society.

Geography affects every human, every community, every region, and every nation. Hence, a geographical dimension will be found in the other five major articles on the United States. Geography is one reason why so many people immigrated to the United States or migrated from one region to another. The U.S. economy depends heavily on geographic factors such as natural resources, climate, and the transportation provided by its waterways. Some local governments are organized around geography. For example, rivers may mark the boundaries of counties. History, in integrating all parts of the American experience, always has geography as one of its parts.

IV

United States People

When Europeans first reached North America in the 1520s, they encountered other people—Native Americans—and they also encountered a new geography. Some imagined they were entering “a howling wilderness”—an environment filled with exotic flora and fauna but sparsely populated. In reality, they found their way to a landmass that was widely settled. But soon after the Europeans’ arrival, the population of the Americas plummeted, largely because Native Americans lacked immunity to smallpox, influenza, and other infectious diseases that the Europeans brought with them. Europeans mostly by choice and Africans almost entirely by coercion came to the western hemisphere. However, the number of people living in what is today the continental United States did not regain the population level before European contact (estimated to be 8 million to 10 million indigenous people) until the 1840s.

How did the population of the United States grow to today’s 300 million, the third largest in the world? The article United States (People) traces this growth. It is closely connected with the first theme of E pluribus unum and the second theme of striving for greater democracy.

The article details the diversity of the U.S. population as it grew from natural increase and from immigration. More than that of any other country in the world, the population of the United States has increased through repeated waves of immigration. Immigration gives the United States its distinctive character, and each wave of immigration changed the ethnic, racial, and religious composition of U.S. society. This diversity provided a rich mingling of cultures, but it has also been a source of tension and conflict, clouding the American promise of equality, freedom, and justice, and impeding the pursuit of E pluribus unum.

The article also shows how the population of the United States has changed. The fertility rate, for example, has fallen steadily over the past two centuries. In the colonial era, the average American woman gave birth to eight children; in the 1990s, she had two children. This profound revolution in the biological history of the nation connects with another major change in U.S. society—women working outside the home. The connection between changing birthrates and the shifting composition of the labor force is very powerful. Or consider life expectancy. People live much longer than they did in the early years of the United States, raising questions about how to maintain the social security system and provide care for the elderly. This is just one example of how the people, the economy, and the government are bound together.