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+
+
+A federation (also known as a federal state) is a political entity characterized by a union of partially self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a central federal government (federalism). In a federation, the self-governing status of the component states, as well as the division of power between them and the central government, is typically constitutionally entrenched and may not be altered by a unilateral decision of either party, the states or the federal political body. Alternatively, a federation is a form of government in which sovereign power is formally divided between a central authority and a number of constituent regions so that each region retains some degree of control over its internal affairs.
+
+It is often argued that federal states where the central government has overriding powers, are not truly federal states. For example, such overriding powers may include: the constitutional authority to suspend a constituent state's government by invoking gross mismanagement or civil unrest, or to adopt national legislation that overrides or infringe on the constituent states' powers by invoking the central government's constitutional authority to ensure "peace and good government" or to implement obligations contracted under an international treaty.
+
+The governmental or constitutional structure found in a federation is considered to be federalist, or to be an example of federalism. It can be considered the opposite of another system, the unitary state. France, for example, has been unitary for multiple centuries. Austria and its Bundesländer was a unitary state with administrative divisions that became federated through the implementation of the Austrian Constitution following the 1918 collapse of Austria-Hungary. Germany, with its 16 states, or Bundesländer, is an example of a federation. Federations are often multi-ethnic and cover a large area of territory (such as Russia, the United States, Canada, India, or Brazil), but neither is necessarily the case (such as Saint Kitts and Nevis or the Federated States of Micronesia).
+
+Several ancient chiefdoms and kingdoms, such as the 4th-century BCE League of Corinth, Noricum in Central Europe, and the Iroquois Confederacy in pre-Columbian North America, could be described as federations or confederations. The Old Swiss Confederacy was an early example of formal non-unitary statehood.
+
+Several colonies and dominions in the New World consisted of autonomous provinces, transformed to federal states upon independence such as the United States, and various countries in Latin America (see Spanish American wars of independence). Some of the New World federations failed; the Federal Republic of Central America broke up into independent states less than 20 years after its founding. Others, such as Argentina and Mexico, have shifted between federal, confederal, and unitary systems, before settling into federalism. Brazil became a federation only after the fall of the monarchy, and Venezuela became a federation after the Federal War. Australia and Canada are also federations.
+
+Germany is another nation-state that has switched between confederal, federal and unitary rules, since the German Confederation was founded in 1815. The North German Confederation, the succeeding German Empire and the Weimar Republic were federations.
+
+Founded in 1922, the Soviet Union was formally a federation of Soviet republics, autonomous republics and other federal subjects, though in practice highly centralized under the government of the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation has inherited a similar system.
+
+Nigeria, Pakistan, India and Malaysia (then Federation of Malaya) became federations on or shortly before becoming independent from the British Empire.
+
+In some recent cases, federations have been instituted as a measure to handle ethnic conflict within a state, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Iraq since 2005.
+
+With the United States Constitution having become effective on 4 March 1789, the United States is the oldest surviving federation. On the other end of the timeline is Nepal, which became the newest federation after its constitution went into effect on 20 September 2015.
+
+The component states are in some sense sovereign, insofar as certain powers are reserved to them that may not be exercised by the central government. However, a federation is more than a mere loose alliance of independent states. The component states of a federation usually possess no powers in relation to foreign policy and so enjoy no independent status under international law. However, German Länder have that power,[1] which is beginning to be exercised on a European level.
+
+Some federations are called asymmetric because some states have more autonomy than others. An example of such a federation is Malaysia, in which Sarawak and Sabah agreed to form the federation on different terms and conditions from the states of Peninsular Malaysia.
+
+A federation often emerges from an initial agreement between a number of separate states. The purpose can be the will to solve mutual problems and to provide for mutual defense or to create a nation-state for an ethnicity spread over several states. The former was the case with the United States and Switzerland. However, as the histories of countries and nations vary, the federalist system of a state can be quite different from these models. Australia, for instance, is unique in that it came into existence as a nation by the democratic vote of the citizens of each state, who voted "yes" in referendums to adopt the Australian Constitution. Brazil, on the other hand, has experienced both the federal and the unitary state during its history. Some present day states of the Brazilian federation retain borders set during the Portuguese colonization (before the very existence of the Brazilian state), whereas the latest state, Tocantins, was created by the 1988 Constitution for chiefly administrative reasons.
+
+Seven of the top eight largest countries by area are governed as federations.
+
+A unitary state is sometimes one with only a single, centralized, national tier of government. However, unitary states often also include one or more self-governing regions. The difference between a federation and this kind of unitary state is that in a unitary state the autonomous status of self-governing regions exists by the sufferance of the central government, and may be unilaterally revoked. While it is common for a federation to be brought into being by agreement between a number of formally independent states, in a unitary state self-governing regions are often created through a process of devolution, where a formerly centralized state agrees to grant autonomy to a region that was previously entirely subordinate. Thus federations are often established voluntarily from "below" whereas devolution grants self-government from "above".
+
+It is often part of the philosophy of a unitary state that, regardless of the actual status of any of its parts, its entire territory constitutes a single sovereign entity or nation-state,[citation needed] and that by virtue of this the central government exercises sovereignty over the whole territory as of right. In a federation, on the other hand, sovereignty is often regarded as residing notionally in the component states, or as being shared between these states and the central government.[citation needed]
+
+A confederation, in modern political terms, is usually limited to a permanent union of sovereign states for common action in relation to other states.[2] The closest entity in the world to a confederation at this time is the European Union. While the word "confederation" was officially used when the Canadian federal system was established in 1867, the term refers only to the process and not the resulting state since Canadian provinces are not sovereign and do not claim to be. In the case of Switzerland, while the country is still known as the Swiss Confederation (Confoederatio Helvetica, Confédération Suisse) this is now a misnomer since the Swiss cantons lost their sovereign status in 1848.[3]
+
+In Belgium, however, the opposite movement is underway.[4] Belgium was founded as a centralized state, after the French model, but has gradually been reformed into a federal state by consecutive constitutional reforms since the 1970s. Moreover, although nominally called a federal state, the country's structure already has a number of confederational traits. At present, there is a growing movement to transform the existing federal state into a looser confederation with two or three constitutive states and/or two special regions.[5]
+
+A confederation is most likely to feature three differences when contrasted with a federation: (1) No real direct powers: many confederal decisions are externalized by member-state legislation; (2) Decisions on day-to-day-matters are not taken by simple majority but by special majorities or even by consensus or unanimity (veto for every member); (3) Changes of the constitution, usually a treaty, require unanimity.
+
+Over time these terms acquired distinct connotations leading to the present difference in definition. An example of this is the United States under the Articles of Confederation. The Articles established a national government under what today would be defined as a federal system (albeit with a comparatively weaker federal government). However, Canadians, designed with a stronger central government than the U.S. in the wake of the Civil War of the latter, use the term "Confederation" to refer to the formation or joining, not the structure, of Canada. Legal reforms, court rulings, and political compromises have decentralized Canada in practice since its formation in 1867.
+
+An empire is a multi-ethnic state, multinational state, or a group of nations with a central government established usually through coercion (on the model of the Roman Empire). An empire often includes self-governing regions, but these will possess autonomy only at the sufferance of the central government. On the other hand, a political entity that is an empire in name, may comprise several partly autonomous kingdoms organised together in a federation, with the empire being ruled over by an emperor or senior king (great king, high king, king of kings...). One example of this was the German Empire (1871–1918).
+
+A federacy[6] is where a unitary state incorporates one or more self-governing autonomous areas. It is distinguished from a federation in that the constitutional structure of the state is still unitary, but incorporates federalist principles. Some federations, notably the Åland Islands, were established through international treaty.
+
+A federation differs from a devolved state, such as Indonesia and the United Kingdom, because, in a devolved state, the central government can revoke the independence of the subunits (Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru – Welsh Parliament, Northern Ireland Assembly in the case of the UK) without changing the constitution.
+
+A federation also differs from an associated state, such as the Federated States of Micronesia (in free association with the United States) and Cook Islands and Niue (which form part of the Realm of New Zealand). There are two kinds of associated states: in case of Micronesia, the association is concluded by a treaty between two sovereign states; in the case of the Cook Islands and Niue, the association is concluded by domestic legal arrangements.
+
+The relation between the Crown dependencies of the Isle of Man and the bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey in the Channel Islands and the United Kingdom is very similar to a federate relation: the Islands enjoy independence from the United Kingdom, which, via The Crown, takes care of their foreign relations and defense – although the UK Parliament does have overall power to legislate for the dependencies. However, the islands are neither an incorporated part of the United Kingdom nor are they considered to be independent or associated states. The islands do not have a monarch, per se; rather in the Isle of Man the British Monarch is, ex officio, Lord of Mann, and in the Bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey, the British Monarch rules as the Duke of Normandy.
+
+Dependent territories, such as the British overseas territories, are vested with varying degrees of power; some enjoy considerable independence from the sovereign state, which only takes care of their foreign relations and defense. However, they are neither considered to be part of it nor recognized as sovereign or associated states.
+
+The distinction between a federation and a unitary state is often quite ambiguous. A unitary state may closely resemble a federation in structure and, while a central government may possess the theoretical right to revoke the autonomy of a self-governing region, it may be politically difficult for it to do so in practice. The self-governing regions of some unitary states also often enjoy greater autonomy than those of some federations. For these reasons, it is sometimes argued that some modern unitary states are de facto federations.[7]
+
+De facto federations, or quasi-federations, are often termed "regional states".
+
+Spain is suggested as one possible de facto federation[8] as it grants more self-government to its autonomous communities[9][10] than are retained by the constituent entities of most federations.[11] For the Spanish parliament to revoke the autonomy of regions such as Galicia, Catalonia or the Basque Country would be a political near-impossibility, though nothing bars it legally. The Spanish parliament has, however, suspended the autonomy of Catalonia in response to the Catalan declaration of independence, in the lead up to the 2017 Catalan election.[12] Additionally, some autonomies such as Navarre or the Basque Country have full control over taxation and spending, transferring a small payment to the central government for the common services (military, foreign relations, macroeconomic policy). For example, scholar Enrique Guillén López discusses the "federal nature of Spain's government (a trend that almost no one denies)."[13] Each autonomous community is governed by a Statute of Autonomy (Estatuto de Autonomía) under the Spanish Constitution of 1978.
+
+Although South Africa bears some elements of a federal system, such as the allocation of certain powers to provinces, it is nevertheless constitutionally and functionally a unitary state.[14]
+
+The European Union (EU) is a type of political union or confederation (the assemblage of societies or an association of two or more states into one state).[15] Robert Schuman, the initiator of the European Community system, wrote that a transnational Community like the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community lay midway between an association of States where they retained complete independence and a federation leading to a fusion of States in a super-state.[16]  The Founding Fathers of the European Union wrote the Europe Declaration (Charter of the Community) at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Paris on 18 April 1951 saying that Europe should be organized on a transnational foundation. They envisaged a structure quite different from a federation called the European Political Community.[citation needed]
+
+The EU is a three-pillar structure of the original supranational European Economic Community and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, Euratom, plus two largely intergovernmental pillars dealing with External Affairs and Justice and Home Affairs. The EU is therefore not a de jure federation, although some[who?] academic observers conclude that after 50 years of institutional evolution since the Treaties of Rome it is becoming one.[17] The European Union possesses attributes of a federal state. However, its central government is far weaker than that of most federations and the individual members are sovereign states under international law, so it is usually characterized as an unprecedented form of supra-national union.  The EU has responsibility for important areas such as trade, monetary union, agriculture, fisheries. Nonetheless, EU member states retain the right to act independently in matters of foreign policy and defense, and also enjoy a near-monopoly over other major policy areas such as criminal justice and taxation. Since the Treaty of Lisbon, the Member States' right to leave the Union is codified, and the Union operates with more qualified majority voting (rather than unanimity) in many areas.[citation needed]
+
+By the signature of this Treaty, the participating Parties give proof of their determination to create the first supranational institution and that thus they are laying the true foundation of an organized Europe. This Europe remains open to all nations. We profoundly hope that other nations will join us in our common endeavor.
+
+Europe has charted its own brand of constitutional federalism.
+
+Those uncomfortable using the "F" word in the EU context should feel free to refer to it as a quasi-federal or federal-like system. Nevertheless, for the purposes of the analysis here, the EU has the necessary attributes of a federal system. It is striking that while many scholars of the EU continue to resist analyzing it as a federation, most contemporary students of federalism view the EU as a federal system. (See, for instance, Bednar, Filippov et al., McKay, Kelemen, Defigueido and Weingast)
+
+A more nuanced view has been given by the German Constitutional Court.[19] Here the EU is defined as 'an association of sovereign national states (Staatenverbund)'.[20] With this view, the European Union resembles more of a confederation.
+
+Constitutionally, the power vested in the special administrative regions of the People's Republic is granted from the Central People's Government, through a decision by the National People's Congress. However, there have been certain largely informal grants of power to the provinces, to handle economic affairs and implement national policies, resulting in a system some have termed federalism "with Chinese characteristics".[21]
+
+Constitutionally a unitary state, the political system in Myanmar bears many elements of federalism. Each administrative divisions have its own cabinets and chief ministers, making it more like a federation rather than a unitary state.
+
+Certain forms of political and constitutional dispute are common to federations. One issue is that the exact division of power and responsibility between federal and regional governments is often a source of controversy. Often, as is the case with the United States, such conflicts are resolved through the judicial system, which delimits the powers of federal and local governments. The relationship between federal and local courts varies from nation to nation and can be a controversial and complex issue in itself.
+
+Another common issue in federal systems is the conflict between regional and national interests, or between the interests and aspirations of different ethnic groups. In some federations the entire jurisdiction is relatively homogeneous and each constituent state resembles a miniature version of the whole; this is known as 'congruent federalism'. On the other hand, incongruent federalism exists where different states or regions possess distinct ethnic groups.
+
+The ability of a federal government to create national institutions that can mediate differences that arise because of linguistic, ethnic, religious, or other regional differences is an important challenge. The inability to meet this challenge may lead to the secession of parts of a federation or to civil war, as occurred in the United States (southern states interpreted slavery under the tenth amendment as a state right, while northern states were against slavery, with a catalysis occurring in the then–Kansas Territory), in Nigeria and in Switzerland. In the case of Malaysia, Singapore was expelled from the federation because of rising racial tension. In some cases, internal conflict may lead a federation to collapse entirely, as occurred the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the Gran Colombia, the United Provinces of Central America, and the West Indies Federation.
+
+The federal government is the common or national government of a federation. A federal government may have distinct powers at various levels authorized or delegated to it by its member states. The structure of federal governments vary. Based on a broad definition of a basic federalism, there are two or more levels of government that exist within an established territory and govern through common institutions with overlapping or shared powers as prescribed by a constitution.
+
+The federal government is the government at the level of the sovereign state. Usual responsibilities of this level of government are maintaining national security and exercising international diplomacy, including the right to sign binding treaties. Basically, a modern federal government, within the limits defined by its constitution, has the power to make laws for the whole country, unlike local governments. As originally written, the United States Constitution was created to limit the federal government from exerting power over the states by enumerating only specific powers.  It was further limited by the addition of the Tenth Amendment contained in the Bill of Rights and the Eleventh Amendment.  However, later amendments, particularly the Fourteenth Amendment, gave the federal government considerable authority over states.
+
+Federal government within this structure are the government ministries and departments and agencies to which the ministers of government are assigned.
+
+[22]
+
+Municipalities of Brazil[23]
+
+Some of the proclaimed Arab federations were confederations de facto.

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+State may refer to:

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+State may refer to:

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+A liquid is a nearly incompressible fluid that conforms to the shape of its container but retains a (nearly) constant volume independent of pressure. As such, it is one of the four fundamental states of matter (the others being solid, gas, and plasma), and is the only state with a definite volume but no fixed shape. A liquid is made up of tiny vibrating particles of matter, such as atoms, held together by intermolecular bonds. Like a gas, a liquid is able to flow and take the shape of a container. Most liquids resist compression, although others can be compressed. Unlike a gas, a liquid does not disperse to fill every space of a container, and maintains a fairly constant density. A distinctive property of the liquid state is surface tension, leading to wetting phenomena. Water is, by far, the most common liquid on Earth.
+
+The density of a liquid is usually close to that of a solid, and much higher than in a gas. Therefore, liquid and solid are both termed condensed matter. On the other hand, as liquids and gases share the ability to flow, they are both called fluids. Although liquid water is abundant on Earth, this state of matter is actually the least common in the known universe, because liquids require a relatively narrow temperature/pressure range to exist. Most known matter in the universe is in gaseous form (with traces of detectable solid matter) as interstellar clouds or in plasma from within stars.
+
+Liquid is one of the four primary states of matter, with the others being solid, gas and plasma. A liquid is a fluid. Unlike a solid, the molecules in a liquid have a much greater freedom to move. The forces that bind the molecules together in a solid are only temporary in a liquid, allowing a liquid to flow while a solid remains rigid.
+
+A liquid, like a gas, displays the properties of a fluid. A liquid can flow, assume the shape of a container, and, if placed in a sealed container, will distribute applied pressure evenly to every surface in the container. If liquid is placed in a bag, it can be squeezed into any shape. Unlike a gas, a liquid is nearly incompressible, meaning that it occupies nearly a constant volume over a wide range of pressures; it does not generally expand to fill available space in a container but forms its own surface, and it may not always mix readily with another liquid. These properties make a liquid suitable for applications such as hydraulics.
+
+Liquid particles are bound firmly but not rigidly. They are able to move around one another freely, resulting in a limited degree of particle mobility. As the temperature increases, the increased vibrations of the molecules causes distances between the molecules to increase. When a liquid reaches its boiling point, the cohesive forces that bind the molecules closely together break, and the liquid changes to its gaseous state (unless superheating occurs). If the temperature is decreased, the distances between the molecules become smaller. When the liquid reaches its freezing point the molecules will usually lock into a very specific order, called crystallizing, and the bonds between them become more rigid, changing the liquid into its solid state (unless supercooling occurs).
+
+Only two elements are liquid at standard conditions for temperature and pressure: mercury and bromine. Four more elements have melting points slightly above room temperature: francium, caesium, gallium and rubidium.[1] Metal alloys that are liquid at room temperature include NaK, a sodium-potassium metal alloy, galinstan, a fusible alloy liquid, and some amalgams (alloys involving mercury).
+
+Pure substances that are liquid under normal conditions include water, ethanol and many other organic solvents. Liquid water is of vital importance in chemistry and biology; it is believed to be a necessity for the existence of life.
+
+Inorganic liquids include water, magma, inorganic nonaqueous solvents and many acids.
+
+Important everyday liquids include aqueous solutions like household bleach, other mixtures of different substances such as mineral oil and gasoline, emulsions like vinaigrette or mayonnaise, suspensions like blood, and colloids like paint and milk.
+
+Many gases can be liquefied by cooling, producing liquids such as liquid oxygen, liquid nitrogen, liquid hydrogen and liquid helium. Not all gases can be liquified at atmospheric pressure, however. Carbon dioxide, for example, can only be liquified at pressures above 5.1 atm.[2]
+
+Some materials cannot be classified within the classical three states of matter; they possess solid-like and liquid-like properties. Examples include liquid crystals, used in LCD displays, and biological membranes.
+
+Liquids have a variety of uses, as lubricants, solvents, and coolants. In hydraulic systems, liquid is used to transmit power.
+
+In tribology, liquids are studied for their properties as lubricants. Lubricants such as oil are chosen for viscosity and flow characteristics that are suitable throughout the operating temperature range of the component. Oils are often used in engines, gear boxes, metalworking, and hydraulic systems for their good lubrication properties.[3]
+
+Many liquids are used as solvents, to dissolve other liquids or solids. Solutions are found in a wide variety of applications, including paints, sealants, and adhesives. Naphtha and acetone are used frequently in industry to clean oil, grease, and tar from parts and machinery. Body fluids are water based solutions.
+
+Surfactants are commonly found in soaps and detergents. Solvents like alcohol are often used as antimicrobials. They are found in cosmetics, inks, and liquid dye lasers. They are used in the food industry, in processes such as the extraction of vegetable oil.[4]
+
+Liquids tend to have better thermal conductivity than gases, and the ability to flow makes a liquid suitable for removing excess heat from mechanical components. The heat can be removed by channeling the liquid through a heat exchanger, such as a radiator, or the heat can be removed with the liquid during evaporation.[5] Water or glycol coolants are used to keep engines from overheating.[6] The coolants used in nuclear reactors include water or liquid metals, such as sodium or bismuth.[7] Liquid propellant films are used to cool the thrust chambers of rockets.[8] In machining, water and oils are used to remove the excess heat generated, which can quickly ruin both the work piece and the tooling. During perspiration, sweat removes heat from the human body by evaporating. In the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning industry (HVAC), liquids such as water are used to transfer heat from one area to another.[9]
+
+Similarly, liquids are often used in cooking for their better heat-transfer properties. In addition to better conductivity, because warmer fluids expand and rise while cooler areas contract and sink, liquids with low kinematic viscosity tend to transfer heat through convection at a fairly constant temperature, making a liquid suitable for blanching, boiling, or frying. This phenomenon was also exploited to produce lava lamps. Even higher rates of heat transfer can be achieved by condensing a gas into a liquid. At the liquid's boiling point, all of the heat energy is used to cause the phase change from a liquid to a gas, without an accompanying increase in temperature, and is stored as chemical potential energy. When the gas condenses back into a liquid this excess heat-energy is released at a constant temperature. This phenomenon is used in processes such as steaming. Since liquids often have different boiling points, mixtures or solutions of liquids or gases can typically be separated by distillation, using heat, cold, vacuum, pressure, or other means. Distillation can be found in everything from the production of alcoholic beverages, to oil refineries, to the cryogenic distillation of gases such as argon, oxygen, nitrogen, neon, or xenon by liquefaction (cooling them below their individual boiling points).[10]
+
+Liquid is the primary component of hydraulic systems, which take advantage of Pascal's law to provide fluid power. Devices such as pumps and waterwheels have been used to change liquid motion into mechanical work since ancient times. Oils are forced through hydraulic pumps, which transmit this force to hydraulic cylinders. Hydraulics can be found in many applications, such as automotive brakes and transmissions, heavy equipment, and airplane control systems. Various hydraulic presses are used extensively in repair and manufacturing, for lifting, pressing, clamping and forming.[11]
+
+Liquids are sometimes used in measuring devices. A thermometer often uses the thermal expansion of liquids, such as mercury, combined with their ability to flow to indicate temperature. A manometer uses the weight of the liquid to indicate air pressure.[12]
+
+Quantities of liquids are measured in units of volume. These include the SI unit cubic metre (m3) and its divisions, in particular the cubic decimeter, more commonly called the litre (1 dm3 = 1 L = 0.001 m3), and the cubic centimetre, also called millilitre (1 cm3 = 1 mL = 0.001 L = 10−6 m3).[13]
+
+The volume of a quantity of liquid is fixed by its temperature and pressure. Liquids generally expand when heated, and contract when cooled. Water between 0 °C and 4 °C is a notable exception.[14]
+
+On the other hand, liquids have little compressibility. Water, for example, will compress by only 46.4 parts per million for every unit increase in atmospheric pressure (bar).[15] At around 4000 bar (400 megapascals or 58,000 psi) of pressure at room temperature water experiences only an 11% decrease in volume.[16] Incompressibility makes liquids suitable for transmitting hydraulic power, because a change in pressure at one point in a liquid is transmitted undiminished to every other part of the liquid and very little energy is lost in the form of compression.[17]
+
+However, the negligible compressibility does lead to other phenomena. The banging of pipes, called water hammer, occurs when a valve is suddenly closed, creating a huge pressure-spike at the valve that travels backward through the system at just under the speed of sound. Another phenomenon caused by liquid's incompressibility is cavitation. Because liquids have little elasticity they can literally be pulled apart in areas of high turbulence or dramatic change in direction, such as the trailing edge of a boat propeller or a sharp corner in a pipe. A liquid in an area of low pressure (vacuum) vaporizes and forms bubbles, which then collapse as they enter high pressure areas. This causes liquid to fill the cavities left by the bubbles with tremendous localized force, eroding any adjacent solid surface.[18]
+
+In a gravitational field, liquids exert pressure on the sides of a container as well as on anything within the liquid itself. This pressure is transmitted in all directions and increases with depth. If a liquid is at rest in a uniform gravitational field, the pressure 
+
+
+
+p
+
+
+{\displaystyle p}
+
+ at depth 
+
+
+
+z
+
+
+{\displaystyle z}
+
+ is given by[19]
+
+where:
+
+For a body of water open to the air, 
+
+
+
+
+p
+
+0
+
+
+
+
+{\displaystyle p_{0}}
+
+ would be the atmospheric pressure.
+
+Static liquids in uniform gravitational fields also exhibit the phenomenon of buoyancy, where objects immersed in the liquid experience a net force due to the pressure variation with depth. The magnitude of the force is equal to the weight of the liquid displaced by the object, and the direction of the force depends on the average density of the immersed object. If the density is smaller than that of the liquid, the buoyant force points upward and the object floats, whereas if the density is larger, the buoyant force points downward and the object sinks. This is known as Archimedes' principle.[20]
+
+Unless the volume of a liquid exactly matches the volume of its container, one or more surfaces are observed. The presence of a surface introduces new phenomena which are not present in a bulk liquid. This is because a molecule at a surface possesses bonds with other liquid molecules only on the inner side of the surface, which implies a net force pulling surface molecules inward. Equivalently, this force can be described in terms of energy: there is a fixed amount of energy associated with forming a surface of a given area. This quantity is a material property called the surface tension, in units of energy per unit area (SI units: J/m2). Liquids with strong intermolecular forces tend to have large surface tensions.[21]
+
+A practical implication of surface tension is that liquids tend to minimize their surface area, forming spherical drops and bubbles unless other constraints are present. Surface tension is responsible for a range of other phenomena as well, including surface waves, capillary action, wetting, and ripples. In liquids under nanoscale confinement, surface effects can play a dominating role since – compared with a macroscopic sample of liquid – a much greater fraction of molecules are located near a surface.
+
+The surface tension of a liquid directly affects its wettability. Most common liquids have tensions ranging in the tens of mJ/m2, so droplets of oil, water, or glue can easily merge and adhere to other surfaces, whereas liquid metals such as mercury may have tensions ranging in the hundreds of mJ/m2, thus droplets do not combine easily and surfaces may only wet under specific conditions.
+
+The surface tensions of common liquids occupy a relatively narrow range of values, which contrasts strongly with the enormous variation seen in other mechanical properties, such as viscosity.[22]
+
+An important physical property characterizing the flow of liquids is viscosity. Intuitively, viscosity describes the resistance of a liquid to flow.
+
+More technically, viscosity measures the resistance of a liquid to deformation at a given rate, such as when it is being sheared at finite velocity.[23] A specific example is a liquid flowing through a
+pipe: in this case the liquid undergoes shear deformation since it flows more slowly near the walls of the pipe
+than near the center. As a result, it exhibits viscous resistance to flow. In order to maintain flow, an external force must be applied, such as a pressure difference between the ends of the pipe.
+
+The viscosity of liquids decreases with increasing temperature.[24] Precise control of 
+viscosity is important in many applications, particularly the lubrication industry.
+One way to achieve such control is by blending two or more liquids of differing viscosities in precise ratios.[25] 
+In addition, various additives exist which can modulate the temperature-dependence of the
+viscosity of lubricating oils. This capability is important since machinery often operate over a range of 
+temperatures (see also viscosity index).[26]
+
+The viscous behavior of a liquid can be either Newtonian or non-Newtonian. A Newtonian liquid exhibits a linear strain/stress curve, meaning its viscosity is independent of time, shear rate, or shear-rate history. Examples of Newtonian liquids include water, glycerin, motor oil, honey, or mercury. A non-Newtonian liquid is one where the viscosity is not independent of these factors and either thickens (increases in viscosity) or thins (decreases in viscosity) under shear. Examples of non-Newtonian liquids include ketchup, mayonnaise, hair gels, play dough, or starch solutions.[27]
+
+The speed of sound in a liquid is given by 
+
+
+
+c
+=
+
+
+K
+
+/
+
+ρ
+
+
+
+
+{\displaystyle c={\sqrt {K/\rho }}}
+
+ where 
+
+
+
+K
+
+
+{\displaystyle K}
+
+ is the bulk modulus of the liquid and 
+
+
+
+ρ
+
+
+{\displaystyle \rho }
+
+ the density. As an example, water has a bulk modulus of about 2.2 GPa and a density of 1000 kg/m3, which gives c = 1.5 km/s.[28]
+
+At a temperature below the boiling point, any matter in liquid form will evaporate until the condensation of gas above reach an equilibrium. At this point the gas will condense at the same rate as the liquid evaporates. Thus, a liquid cannot exist permanently if the evaporated liquid is continually removed. A liquid at its boiling point will evaporate more quickly than the gas can condense at the current pressure. A liquid at or above its boiling point will normally boil, though superheating can prevent this in certain circumstances.
+
+At a temperature below the freezing point, a liquid will tend to crystallize, changing to its solid form. Unlike the transition to gas, there is no equilibrium at this transition under constant pressure, so unless supercooling occurs, the liquid will eventually completely crystallize. Note that this is only true under constant pressure, so e.g. water and ice in a closed, strong container might reach an equilibrium where both phases coexist. For the opposite transition from solid to liquid, see melting.
+
+The phase diagram explains why liquids do not exist in space or any other vacuum. Since the pressure is zero (except on surfaces or interiors of planets and moons) water and other liquids exposed to space will either immediately boil or freeze depending on the temperature. In regions of space near the earth, water will freeze if the sun is not shining directly on it and vapourize (sublime) as soon as it is in sunlight. If water exists as ice on the moon, it can only exist in shadowed holes where the sun never shines and where the surrounding rock doesn't heat it up too much. At some point near the orbit of Saturn, the light from the sun is too faint to sublime ice to water vapour. This is evident from the longevity of the ice that composes Saturn's rings.
+
+Liquids can form solutions with gases, solids, and other liquids.
+
+Two liquids are said to be miscible if they can form a solution in any proportion; otherwise they are immiscible. As an example, water and ethanol (drinking alcohol) are miscible whereas water and gasoline are immiscible.[29] In some cases a mixture of otherwise immiscible liquids can be stabilized to form an emulsion, where one liquid is dispersed throughout the other as microscopic droplets. Usually this requires the presence of a surfactant in order to stabilize the droplets. A familiar example of an emulsion is mayonnaise, which consists of a mixture of water and oil that is stabilized by lecithin, a substance found in egg yolks.[30]
+
+The molecules which compose liquids are disordered and strongly interacting,
+which makes liquids difficult to describe rigorously at the molecular level. This stands
+in contrast with the other two common phases of matter, gases and solids. 
+Although gases are disordered, they are sufficiently dilute that
+many-body interactions can be ignored, and molecular interactions can instead be modeled
+in terms of well-defined binary collision events. Conversely, although solids are dense and strongly
+interacting, their regular structure at the molecular level (e.g. a crystalline lattice) allows for 
+significant theoretical simplifications. For these reasons, the microscopic theory of liquids
+is less developed than that of gases and solids.[31]
+
+In a liquid, atoms do not form a crystalline lattice, nor do they show any other form of long-range order. This is evidenced by the absence of Bragg peaks in X-ray and neutron diffraction. Under normal conditions, the diffraction pattern has circular symmetry, expressing the isotropy of the liquid. In radial direction, the diffraction intensity smoothly oscillates. This is usually described by the static structure factor S(q), with wavenumber q=(4π/λ)sinθ given by the wavelength λ of the probe (photon or neutron) and the Bragg angle θ. The oscillations of S(q) express the near order of the liquid, i.e. the correlations between an atom and a few shells of nearest, second nearest, ... neighbors.
+
+A more intuitive description of these correlations is given by the radial distribution function g(r), which is basically the Fourier transform of S(q). It represents a spatial average of a temporal snapshot of pair correlations in the liquid.
+
+The above expression for the sound velocity 
+
+
+
+c
+=
+
+
+K
+
+/
+
+ρ
+
+
+
+
+{\displaystyle c={\sqrt {K/\rho }}}
+
+ contains the bulk modulus K. If K is frequency independent then the liquid behaves as a linear medium, so that sound propagates without dissipation and without mode coupling. In reality, any liquid shows some dispersion: with increasing frequency, K crosses over from the low-frequency, liquid-like limit 
+
+
+
+
+K
+
+0
+
+
+
+
+{\displaystyle K_{0}}
+
+ to the high-frequency, solid-like limit 
+
+
+
+
+K
+
+∞
+
+
+
+
+{\displaystyle K_{\infty }}
+
+. In normal liquids, most of this cross over takes place at frequencies between GHz and THz, sometimes called hypersound.
+
+At sub-GHz frequencies, a normal liquid cannot sustain shear waves: the zero-frequency limit of the shear modulus is 
+
+
+
+
+G
+
+0
+
+
+=
+0
+
+
+{\displaystyle G_{0}=0}
+
+. This is sometimes seen as the defining property of a liquid.[32][33] 
+However, just as the bulk modulus K, the shear modulus G is frequency dependent,
+and at hypersound frequencies it shows a similar cross over from the liquid-like limit 
+
+
+
+
+G
+
+0
+
+
+
+
+{\displaystyle G_{0}}
+
+ to a solid-like, non-zero limit 
+
+
+
+
+G
+
+∞
+
+
+
+
+{\displaystyle G_{\infty }}
+
+.
+
+According to the Kramers-Kronig relation, the dispersion in the sound velocity (given by the real part of K or G) goes along with a maximum in the sound attenuation (dissipation, given by the imaginary part of K or G). According to linear response theory, the Fourier transform of K or G describes how the system returns to equilibrium after an external perturbation; for this reason, the dispersion step in the GHz..THz region is also called structural relaxation. According to the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, relaxation towards equilibrium is intimately connected to fluctuations in equilibrium. The density fluctuations associated with sound waves can be experimentally observed by Brillouin scattering.
+
+On supercooling a liquid towards the glass transition, the crossover from liquid-like to solid-like response moves from GHz to MHz, kHz, Hz, ...; equivalently, the characteristic time of structural relaxation increases from ns to μs, ms, s, ... This is the microscopic explanation for the above-mentioned viscoelastic behaviour of glass-forming liquids.
+
+The mechanisms of atomic/molecular diffusion (or particle displacement) in solids are closely related to the mechanisms of viscous flow and solidification in liquid materials. Descriptions of viscosity in terms of molecular "free space" within the liquid[34]
+were modified as needed in order to account for liquids whose molecules are known to be "associated" in the liquid state at ordinary temperatures. When various molecules combine together to form an associated molecule, they enclose within a semi-rigid system a certain amount of space which before was available as free space for mobile molecules. Thus, increase in viscosity upon cooling due to the tendency of most substances to become associated on cooling.[35]
+
+Similar arguments could be used to describe the effects of pressure on viscosity, where it may be assumed that the viscosity is chiefly a function of the volume for liquids with a finite compressibility. An increasing viscosity with rise of pressure is therefore expected. In addition, if the volume is expanded by heat but reduced again by pressure, the viscosity remains the same.
+
+The local tendency to orientation of molecules in small groups lends the liquid (as referred to previously) a certain degree of association. This association results in a considerable "internal pressure" within a liquid, which is due almost entirely to those molecules which, on account of their temporary low velocities (following the Maxwell distribution) have coalesced with other molecules. The internal pressure between several such molecules might correspond to that between a group of molecules in the solid form.

en/1858.html.txt

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+The Papal States (/ˈpeɪpəl/ PAY-pəl; Italian: Stato Pontificio), officially the State of the Church (Italian: Stato della Chiesa, Italian pronunciation: [ˈstaːto della ˈkjeːsa]; Latin: Status Ecclesiasticus;[2] also Dicio Pontificia), were a series of territories in the Italian Peninsula under the direct sovereign rule of the pope, from the 8th century until 1870. They were among the major states of Italy from roughly the 8th century until the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia successfully unified the Italian Peninsula by conquest in a campaign virtually concluded in 1861 and definitively in 1870. At their zenith, the Papal States covered most of the modern Italian regions of Lazio (which includes Rome), Marche, Umbria and Romagna, and portions of Emilia. These holdings were considered to be a manifestation of the temporal power of the pope, as opposed to his ecclesiastical primacy.
+
+By 1861, much of the Papal States' territory had been conquered by the Kingdom of Italy. Only Lazio, including Rome, remained under the pope's temporal control. In 1870, the pope lost Lazio and Rome and had no physical territory at all, except the Basilica of St Peter and the papal residence and related buildings around the Vatican quarter of Rome, which the new Italian state did not occupy militarily.  In 1929 the head of the Italian government, at the time the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, ended the crisis between unified Italy and the Holy See by negotiating the Lateran Treaty, signed by the two parties. This recognized the sovereignty of the Holy See over a newly created international territorial entity, the Vatican City State, limited to a token territory.
+
+The Papal States were also known as the Papal State (although the plural is usually preferred, the singular is equally correct as the polity was more than a mere personal union). The territories were also referred to variously as the State(s) of the Church, the Pontifical States, the Ecclesiastical States, or the Roman States (Italian: Stato Pontificio, also Stato della Chiesa, Stati della Chiesa, Stati Pontifici, and Stato Ecclesiastico; Latin: Status Pontificius, also Dicio Pontificia "papal rule").[3] To some extent the name used varied with the preferences and habits of the European languages in which it was expressed.
+
+For its first 300 years the Catholic Church was persecuted and unrecognized, unable to hold or transfer property.[4] Early congregations met in rooms set aside for that purpose in the homes of well-to-do individuals, and a number of early churches, known as titular churches and located on the outskirts of Ancient Rome, were held as property by individuals, rather than by the Church itself. Nonetheless, the properties held nominally or actually by individual members of the Roman churches would usually be considered as a common patrimony handed over successively to the legitimate "heir" of that property, often its senior deacons, who were, in turn, assistants to the local bishop. This common patrimony attached to the churches at Rome and thus, under its ruling bishop, became quite considerable, including as it did not only houses etc. in Rome or nearby but landed estates, such as latifundias, whole or in part, across Italy and beyond.[5]
+
+This system began to change during the reign of the Emperor Constantine I, who made Christianity legal within the Roman Empire, and restored to it any properties that had been confiscated; in the larger cities of the empire this would have been quite considerable, and the Roman patrimony not least among them.[4] The Lateran Palace was the first significant new donation to the Church, most probably a gift from Constantine himself.[4]
+
+Other donations followed, primarily in mainland Italy but also in the provinces of the Roman Empire. However, the Church held all of these lands as a private landowner, not as a sovereign entity. When in the 5th century the Italian peninsula passed under the control of Odoacer and, later, the Ostrogoths, the Church organization in Italy, with the pope at its head, submitted of necessity to their sovereign authority while asserting its spiritual primacy over the whole Church.[citation needed]
+
+The seeds of the Papal States as a sovereign political entity were planted in the 6th century. Beginning in 535, the Byzantine Empire, under Emperor Justinian I, launched a reconquest of Italy that took decades and devastated Italy's political and economic structures. Just as these wars wound down, the Lombards entered the peninsula from the north and conquered much of the countryside. By the 7th century, Byzantine authority was largely limited to a diagonal band running roughly from Ravenna, where the emperor's representative, or Exarch, was located, to Rome and south to Naples (the "Rome-Ravenna corridor"[6][7][8]), plus coastal exclaves.[9]
+
+With effective Byzantine power weighted at the northeast end of this territory, the pope, as the largest landowner and most prestigious figure in Italy, began by default to take on much of the ruling authority that Byzantines were unable to project to the area around the city of Rome.[citation needed] While the popes remained Byzantine subjects, in practice the Duchy of Rome, an area roughly equivalent to modern-day Latium, became an independent state ruled by the pope.[10]
+
+The Church's independence, combined with popular support for the papacy in Italy, enabled various popes to defy the will of the Byzantine emperor; Pope Gregory II even excommunicated Emperor Leo III during the Iconoclastic Controversy.[citation needed] Nevertheless, the pope and the exarch still worked together to control the rising power of the Lombards in Italy. As Byzantine power weakened, though, the papacy took an ever-larger role in defending Rome from the Lombards, usually through diplomacy.[citation needed] In practice, the papal efforts served to focus Lombard aggrandizement on the exarch and Ravenna. A climactic moment in the founding of the Papal States was the agreement over boundaries embodied in the Lombard King Liutprand's Donation of Sutri (728) to Pope Gregory II.[11]
+
+When the Exarchate of Ravenna finally fell to the Lombards in 751,[12] the Duchy of Rome was completely cut off from the Byzantine Empire, of which it was theoretically still a part. The popes renewed earlier attempts to secure the support of the Franks. In 751, Pope Zachary had Pepin the Short crowned king in place of the powerless Merovingian figurehead king Childeric III. Zachary's successor, Pope Stephen II, later granted Pepin the title Patrician of the Romans. Pepin led a Frankish army into Italy in 754 and 756. Pepin defeated the Lombards – taking control of northern Italy – and made a gift (called the Donation of Pepin) of the properties formerly constituting the Exarchate of Ravenna to the pope.
+
+In 781, Charlemagne codified the regions over which the pope would be temporal sovereign: the Duchy of Rome was key, but the territory was expanded to include Ravenna, the Duchy of the Pentapolis, parts of the Duchy of Benevento, Tuscany, Corsica, Lombardy, and a number of Italian cities. The cooperation between the papacy and the Carolingian dynasty climaxed in 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as 'Emperor of the Romans'.
+
+The precise nature of the relationship between the popes and emperors – and between the Papal States and the Empire – is disputed. It was unclear whether the Papal States were a separate realm with the pope as their sovereign ruler, merely a part of the Frankish Empire over which the popes had administrative control, as suggested in the late-9th-century treatise Libellus de imperatoria potestate in urbe Roma, or whether the Holy Roman Emperors were vicars of the pope (as a sort of Archemperor) ruling Christendom, with the pope directly responsible only for the environs of Rome and spiritual duties.
+
+Events in the 9th century postponed the conflict. The Holy Roman Empire in its Frankish form collapsed as it was subdivided among Charlemagne's grandchildren. Imperial power in Italy waned and the papacy's prestige declined. This led to a rise in the power of the local Roman nobility, and the control of the Papal States during the early 10th century by a powerful and corrupt aristocratic family, the Theophylacti. This period was later dubbed the Saeculum obscurum ("dark age"), and sometimes as the "rule by harlots".[13]
+
+In practice, the popes were unable to exercise effective sovereignty over the extensive and mountainous territories of the Papal States, and the region preserved its old system of government, with many small countships and marquisates, each centred upon a fortified rocca.
+
+Over several campaigns in the mid-10th century, the German ruler Otto I conquered northern Italy; Pope John XII crowned him emperor (the first so crowned in more than forty years) and the two of them ratified the Diploma Ottonianum, by which the emperor became the guarantor of the independence of the Papal States.[14] Yet over the next two centuries, popes and emperors squabbled over a variety of issues, and the German rulers routinely treated the Papal States as part of their realms on those occasions when they projected power into Italy. As the Gregorian Reform worked to free the administration of the church from imperial interference, the independence of the Papal States increased in importance. After the extinction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, the German emperors rarely interfered in Italian affairs. In response to the struggle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Treaty of Venice made official the independence of Papal States from the Holy Roman Empire in 1177. By 1300, the Papal States, along with the rest of the Italian principalities, were effectively independent.
+
+From 1305 to 1378, the popes lived in the papal enclave of Avignon, surrounded by Provence and under the influence of the French kings. This period was known as the "Avignonese" or "Babylonian Captivity".[15][16][17][18][19][20] During this period the city of Avignon itself was added to the Papal States; it remained a papal possession for some 400 years even after the popes returned to Rome, until it was seized and incorporated into the French state during the French Revolution.
+
+During this Avignon Papacy, local despots took advantage of the absence of the popes to establish themselves in nominally papal cities: the Pepoli in Bologna, the Ordelaffi in Forlì, the Manfredi in Faenza, the Malatesta in Rimini all gave nominal acknowledgement to their papal overlords and were declared vicars of the Church.
+
+In Ferrara, the death of Azzo VIII d'Este without legitimate heirs (1308[21]) encouraged Pope Clement V to bring Ferrara under his direct rule: however, it was governed by his appointed vicar, King Robert of Naples, for only nine years before the citizens recalled the Este from exile (1317); interdiction and excommunications were in vain: in 1332 John XXII was obliged to name three Este brothers as his vicars in Ferrara.[22]
+
+In Rome itself the Orsini and the Colonna struggled for supremacy,[23] dividing the city's rioni between them. The resulting aristocratic anarchy in the city provided the setting for the fantastic dreams of universal democracy of Cola di Rienzo, who was acclaimed Tribune of the People in 1347,[24] and met a violent death in early October 1354 as he was assassinated by supporters of the Colonna family.[25] To many, rather than an ancient Roman tribune reborn, he had become just another tyrant using the rhetoric of Roman renewal and rebirth to mask his grab for power.[25] As Prof. Guido Ruggiero states, "even with the support of Petrarch, his return to first times and the rebirth of ancient Rome was one that would not prevail."[25]
+
+The Rienzo episode engendered renewed attempts from the absentee papacy to re-establish order in the dissolving Papal States, resulting in the military progress of Cardinal Albornoz, who was appointed papal legate, and his condottieri heading a small mercenary army. Having received the support of the archbishop of Milan and Giovanni Visconti, he defeated Giovanni di Vico, lord of Viterbo, moving against Galeotto Malatesta of Rimini and the Ordelaffi of Forlì, the Montefeltro of Urbino and the da Polenta of Ravenna, and against the cities of Senigallia and Ancona. The last holdouts against full papal control were Giovanni Manfredi of Faenza and Francesco II Ordelaffi of Forlì. Albornoz, at the point of being recalled, in a meeting with all the Papal vicars on 29 April 1357, promulgated the Constitutiones Sanctæ Matris Ecclesiæ, which replaced the mosaic of local law and accumulated traditional 'liberties' with a uniform code of civil law. These Constitutiones Egidiane mark a watershed in the legal history of the Papal States; they remained in effect until 1816. Pope Urban V ventured a return to Italy in 1367 that proved premature; he returned to Avignon in 1370 just before his death.[26]
+
+During the Renaissance, the papal territory expanded greatly, notably under the popes Alexander VI and Julius II. The pope became one of Italy's most important secular rulers as well as the head of the Church, signing treaties with other sovereigns and fighting wars. In practice, though, most of the Papal States was still only nominally controlled by the pope, and much of the territory was ruled by minor princes. Control was always contested; indeed it took until the 16th century for the pope to have any genuine control over all his territories.
+
+Papal responsibilities were often (as in the early 16th century) in conflict. The Papal States were involved in at least three wars in the first two decades.[27] Julius II, the "Warrior Pope", fought on their behalf.
+
+The Reformation began in 1517. In 1527, before the Holy Roman Empire fought the Protestants, troops loyal to Emperor Charles V brutally sacked Rome and imprisoned Pope Clement VII, as a side effect of battles over the Papal States.[28] Thus Clement VII was forced to give up Parma, Modena, and several smaller territories.[29][28] A generation later the armies of King Philip II of Spain defeated those of Pope Paul IV over the same issues.[30]
+
+This period saw a gradual revival of the pope's temporal power in the Papal States. Throughout the 16th century virtually independent fiefs such as Rimini (a possession of the Malatesta family) were brought back under Papal control. In 1512 the state of the church annexed Parma and Piacenza, which in 1545 became an independent ducate under an illegitimate son of Pope Paul III. This process culminated in the reclaiming of the Duchy of Ferrara in 1598,[31][32] and the Duchy of Urbino in 1631.[33]
+
+At its greatest extent, in the 18th century, the Papal States included most of central Italy – Latium, Umbria, Marche and the Legations of Ravenna, Ferrara and Bologna extending north into the Romagna. It also included the small enclaves of Benevento and Pontecorvo in southern Italy and the larger Comtat Venaissin around Avignon in southern France.
+
+The French Revolution affected the temporal territories of the Papacy as well as the Roman Church in general. In 1791 Revolutionary France annexed the Comtat Venaissin and Avignon.[34] Later, with the French invasion of Italy in 1796, the Legations (the Papal States' northern territories[34]) were seized and became part of the Cisalpine Republic.[34]
+
+Two years later, French forces invaded the remaining area of the Papal States and General Louis-Alexandre Berthier declared a Roman Republic (February 1798).[34] Pope Pius VI fled to Siena, and died in exile in Valence (France) in 1799.[34] The French Consulate restored the Papal States in June 1800 and the newly-elected Pope Pius VII took up residency in Rome, but the French Empire under Napoleon invaded in 1808, and this time on 17 May 1809 the remainder of the States of the Church were annexed to France,[34] forming the départements of Tibre and Trasimène.
+
+Following the fall of the Napoleonic system in 1814, the Congress of Vienna officially restored the Italian territories of the Papal States (but not the Comtat Venaissin or Avignon) to Vatican control.[34]
+
+From 1814 until the death of Pope Gregory XVI in 1846, the popes followed a reactionary policy in the Papal States. For instance, the city of Rome maintained the last Jewish ghetto in Western Europe. The Papal States, in 1870, were the last countries to discontinue the practice of castrating young boys of musical promise, making them castrati, who were in demand musically. There were hopes[by whom?] that this would change when Pope Pius IX (in office 1846-1878) succeeded Gregory XVI and began to introduce liberal reforms.
+
+Italian nationalism had been stoked during the Napoleonic period but dashed by the settlement of the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), which sought to restore the pre-Napoleonic conditions: most of northern Italy was under the rule of junior branches of the Habsburgs and the Bourbons, with the House of Savoy in Sardinia-Piedmont constituting the only independent Italian state. The Papal States in central Italy and the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south were both restored. Popular opposition to the reconstituted and corrupt clerical government led to numerous revolts, which were suppressed by the intervention of the Austrian army.
+
+The nationalist and liberal revolutions of 1848 affected much of Europe. In February 1849 a Roman Republic was declared,[36] and the hitherto liberally-inclined Pope Pius IX had to flee the city. The revolution was suppressed with French help in 1850 and Pius IX switched to a conservative line of government.
+
+As a result of the Austro-Sardinian War of 1859, Sardinia-Piedmont annexed Lombardy, while Giuseppe Garibaldi overthrew the Bourbon monarchy in the south.[37][38] Afraid that Garibaldi would set up a republican government, the Piedmont government petitioned French Emperor Napoleon III for permission to send troops through the Papal States to gain control of the south. This was granted on the condition that Rome be left undisturbed. In 1860, with much of the region already in rebellion against Papal rule, Sardinia-Piedmont conquered the eastern two-thirds of the Papal States and cemented its hold on the south. Bologna, Ferrara, Umbria, the Marches, Benevento and Pontecorvo were all formally annexed by November of the same year. While considerably reduced, the Papal States nevertheless still covered the Latium and large areas northwest of Rome.
+
+A unified Kingdom of Italy was declared and in March 1861 the first Italian parliament, which met in Turin, the old capital of Piedmont, declared Rome the capital of the new Kingdom. However, the Italian government could not take possession of the city because a French garrison in Rome protected Pope Pius IX. The opportunity for the Kingdom of Italy to eliminate the Papal States came in 1870; the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July prompted Napoleon III to recall his garrison from Rome and the collapse of the Second French Empire at the Battle of Sedan deprived Rome of its French protector. King Victor Emmanuel II at first aimed at a peaceful conquest of the city and proposed sending troops into Rome, under the guise of offering protection to the pope. When the pope refused, Italy declared war on 10 September 1870, and the Italian Army, commanded by General Raffaele Cadorna, crossed the frontier of the papal territory on September 11 and advanced slowly toward Rome. The Italian Army reached the Aurelian Walls on September 19 and placed Rome under a state of siege. Although the pope's tiny army was incapable of defending the city, Pius IX ordered it to put up more than a token resistance to emphasize that Italy was acquiring Rome by force and not consent. This incidentally served the purposes of the Italian State and gave rise to the myth of the Breach of Porta Pia, in reality a tame affair involving a cannonade at close range that demolished a 1600-year-old wall in poor repair. Pope Pius IX ordered the commander of the papal forces to limit the defense of the city in order to avoid bloodshed.[39] The city was captured on 20 September 1870. Rome and what was left of the Papal States were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy as a result of a plebiscite the following October. This marked the definite end of the Papal States.[34]
+
+Despite the fact that the traditionally Catholic powers did not come to the pope's aid, the papacy rejected the 1871 "Law of Guarantees" and any substantial accommodation with the Italian Kingdom, especially any proposal which required the pope to become an Italian subject. Instead the papacy confined itself (see Prisoner in the Vatican) to the Apostolic Palace and adjacent buildings in the loop of the ancient fortifications known as the Leonine City, on Vatican Hill. From there it maintained a number of features pertaining to sovereignty, such as diplomatic relations, since in canon law these were inherent in the papacy. In the 1920s, the papacy – then under Pius XI – renounced the bulk of the Papal States, and the Lateran Treaty with Italy (then ruled by the National Fascist Party under Benito Mussolini[40]) was signed on 11 February 1929,[40] creating the State of the Vatican City, forming the sovereign territory of the Holy See, which was also indemnified to some degree for loss of territory.
+
+As the plural name Papal States indicates, the various regional components retained their identity under papal rule. The pope was represented in each province by a governor, who bore one of a number of titles. These included "papal legate", as in the former principality of Benevento, or at Bologna, in Romagna, and the March of Ancona;  and  "papal delegate", as in the former duchy of Pontecorvo and in the Campagne and Maritime Province. Other titles like "Papal Vicar", "Vicar General", and also several titles of nobility, such as "count" or even "prince" were used. However, throughout the history of the Papal States many warlords and even bandit chieftains controlled cities and small duchies without having received any title from the Pope of the day.
+
+Historically the Papal States maintained military forces composed of volunteers and mercenaries. Between 1860 and 1870 the Papal Army (Esercito Pontificio in Italian) comprised two regiments of locally recruited Italian infantry, two Swiss regiments and a battalion of Irish volunteers, plus artillery and dragoons.[41]
+In 1861 an international Catholic volunteer corps, called Papal Zouaves after a kind of French colonial native Algerian infantry, and imitating their uniform type, was created. Predominantly made up of Dutch, French and Belgian volunteers, this corps saw service against Garibaldi's Redshirts, Italian patriots, and finally the forces of the newly united Italy.[42]
+
+The Papal Army was disbanded in 1870, leaving only the Palatine Guard, which was itself disbanded on 14 September 1970 by Pope Paul VI;[43] the Noble Guard, which also disbanded in 1970; and the Swiss Guard, which continues to serve both as a ceremonial unit at the Vatican and as the pope's protective force.
+
+A small Papal Navy was also maintained, based at Civitavecchia on the west coast and Ancona on the east. With the fall of the Papal States in 1870 the last ships of the flotilla were sailed to France, where they were sold on the death of Pius IX.
+
+Coordinates: 42°49′16″N 12°36′10″E / 42.82111°N 12.60278°E / 42.82111; 12.60278

en/1859.html.txt

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+
+
+
+
+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] The 48 contiguous states and Washington, D.C., are in North America between Canada and Mexico, while Alaska is in the far northwestern part of North America and Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. Territories of the United States are scattered throughout the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.
+
+States possess a number of powers and rights under the United States Constitution, such as regulating intrastate commerce, running elections, creating local governments, and ratifying constitutional amendments. Each state has its own constitution, grounded in republican principles, and government, consisting of three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial.[4] All states and their residents are represented in the federal Congress, a bicameral legislature consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Each state is represented by two senators, while representatives are distributed among the states in proportion to the most recent constitutionally mandated decennial census.[5] Additionally, each state is entitled to select a number of electors to vote in the Electoral College, the body that elects the president of the United States, equal to the total of representatives and senators in Congress from that state.[6] Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1 of the Constitution grants to Congress the authority to admit new states into the Union. Since the establishment of the United States in 1776, the number of states has expanded from the original 13 to the current total of 50, and each new state is admitted on an equal footing with the existing states.[7]
+
+As provided by Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress exercises "exclusive jurisdiction" over the federal district, which is not part of any state. Prior to passage of the 1973 District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which devolved certain Congressional powers to an elected mayor and council, the district did not have an elected local government. Even so, Congress retains the right to review and overturn laws created by the council and intervene in local affairs.[8] As it is not a state, the district does not have representation in the Senate. However, since 1971, its residents have been represented in the House of Representatives by a non-voting delegate.[9] Additionally, since 1961, following ratification of the 23rd Amendment, the district has been entitled to select three electors to vote in the Electoral College.
+
+In addition to the 50 states and federal district, the United States has sovereignty over 14 territories. Five of them (American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) have a permanent, nonmilitary population, while nine of them do not. With the exception of Navassa Island, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which are located in the Caribbean, all territories are located in the Pacific Ocean. One territory, Palmyra Atoll, is considered to be incorporated, meaning the full body of the Constitution has been applied to it; the other territories are unincorporated, meaning the Constitution does not fully apply to them. Ten territories (the Minor Outlying Islands and American Samoa) are considered to be unorganized, meaning they have not had an Organic Act enacted by Congress; the four other territories are organized, meaning they have had an Organic Act that has been enacted by Congress. The five inhabited territories each have limited autonomy and a non-voting delegate in Congress, in addition to having territorial legislatures and governors, but residents cannot vote in federal elections.
+
+California is the most populous state, with 38,332,521 residents (2013 estimate); Wyoming is the least populous, with an estimated 582,658 residents. The District of Columbia, with an estimated 646,449 residents as of 2012, has a higher population than the two least populous states (Wyoming and Vermont). The largest state by area is Alaska, encompassing 665,384 square miles (1,723,340 km2), while the smallest is Rhode Island, encompassing 1,545 square miles (4,000 km2). The first state to ratify the current Constitution was Delaware, which it did on December 7, 1787, while the newest state is Hawaii, which was admitted to the Union on August 21, 1959. The largest territory in terms of both population and size is Puerto Rico, with 3,725,789 residents as of the 2010 Census and a total area of 5,325 square miles (13,790 km2).
+
+The table below lists the 50 states, with their current capital, largest city,[A] the date they ratified the U.S. Constitution or were admitted to the Union, population and area data, and number of representative(s) in the U.S. House of Representatives.[B]

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+Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (Italian pronunciation: [ameˈdɛːo modiʎˈʎaːni]; 12 July 1884 – 24 January 1920) was an Italian Jewish painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterized by elongation of faces, necks, and figures that were not received well during his lifetime but later found acceptance. Modigliani spent his youth in Italy, where he studied the art of antiquity and the Renaissance. In 1906 he moved to Paris, where he came into contact with such artists as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși. By 1912 Modigliani was exhibiting highly stylized sculptures with Cubists of the Section d'Or group at the Salon d'Automne.
+
+Modigliani's oeuvre includes paintings and drawings. From 1909 to 1914 he devoted himself mainly to sculpture. His main subject was portraits and full figures, both in the images and in the sculptures. Modigliani had little success while alive, but after his death achieved great popularity. He died of tubercular meningitis, at the age of 35, in Paris.
+
+Modigliani was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno, Italy.[1] A port city, Livorno had long served as a refuge for those persecuted for their religion, and was home to a large Jewish community. His maternal great-great-grandfather, Solomon Garsin, had immigrated to Livorno in the 18th century as a refugee.[2]
+
+Modigliani's mother, Eugénie Garsin, born and raised in Marseille, was descended from an intellectual, scholarly family of Sephardic ancestry that for generations had lived along the Mediterranean coastline. Fluent in many languages, her ancestors were authorities on sacred Jewish texts and had founded a school of Talmudic studies. Family legend traced the family lineage to the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The family business was a credit agency with branches in Livorno, Marseille, Tunis, and London, though their fortunes ebbed and flowed.[3][4]
+
+Modigliani's father, Flaminio, was a member of an Italian Jewish family of successful businessmen and entrepreneurs. While not as culturally sophisticated as the Garsins, they knew how to invest in and develop thriving business endeavors. When the Garsin and Modigliani families announced the engagement of their children, Flaminio was a wealthy young mining engineer. He managed the mine in Sardinia and also managed the almost 30,000 acres (12,141 ha) of timberland the family owned.[5]
+
+A reversal in fortune occurred to this prosperous family in 1883. An economic downturn in the price of metal plunged the Modiglianis into bankruptcy. Ever resourceful, Modigliani's mother used her social contacts to establish a school and, along with her two sisters, made the school into a successful enterprise.[6]
+
+Amedeo Modigliani was the fourth child, whose birth coincided with the disastrous financial collapse of his father's business interests. Amedeo's birth saved the family from ruin; according to an ancient law, creditors could not seize the bed of a pregnant woman or a mother with a newborn child. The bailiffs entered the family's home just as Eugenia went into labour; the family protected their most valuable assets by piling them on top of her.
+
+Modigliani had a close relationship with his mother, who taught him at home until he was 10. Beset with health problems after an attack of pleurisy when he was about 11, a few years later he developed a case of typhoid fever. When he was 16 he was taken ill again and contracted the tuberculosis which would later claim his life. After Modigliani recovered from the second bout of pleurisy, his mother took him on a tour of southern Italy: Naples, Capri, Rome and Amalfi, then north to Florence and Venice.[7][8][9]
+
+His mother was, in many ways, instrumental in his ability to pursue art as a vocation. When he was 11 years of age, she had noted in her diary: "The child's character is still so unformed that I cannot say what I think of it. He behaves like a spoiled child, but he does not lack intelligence. We shall have to wait and see what is inside this chrysalis. Perhaps an artist?"[10]
+
+Modigliani is known to have drawn and painted from a very early age, and thought himself "already a painter", his mother wrote,[11] even before beginning formal studies. Despite her misgivings that launching him on a course of studying art would impinge upon his other studies, his mother indulged the young Modigliani's passion for the subject.
+
+At the age of fourteen, while sick with typhoid fever, he raved in his delirium that he wanted, above all else, to see the paintings in the Palazzo Pitti and the Uffizi in Florence. As Livorno's local museum housed only a sparse few paintings by the Italian Renaissance masters, the tales he had heard about the great works held in Florence intrigued him, and it was a source of considerable despair to him, in his sickened state, that he might never get the chance to view them in person. His mother promised that she would take him to Florence herself, the moment he was recovered. Not only did she fulfil this promise, but she also undertook to enroll him with the best painting master in Livorno, Guglielmo Micheli.
+
+Modigliani worked in Micheli's Art School from 1898 to 1900. Among his colleagues in that studio would have been Llewelyn Lloyd, Giulio Cesare Vinzio, Manlio Martinelli, Gino Romiti, Renato Natali, and Oscar Ghiglia. Here his earliest formal artistic instruction took place in an atmosphere steeped in a study of the styles and themes of 19th-century Italian art. In his earliest Parisian work, traces of this influence, and that of his studies of Renaissance art, can still be seen. His nascent work was influenced by such Parisian artists as Giovanni Boldini and Toulouse-Lautrec.
+
+Modigliani showed great promise while with Micheli, and ceased his studies only when he was forced to, by the onset of tuberculosis.
+
+In 1901, whilst in Rome, Modigliani admired the work of Domenico Morelli, a painter of dramatic religious and literary scenes. Morelli had served as an inspiration for a group of iconoclasts who were known by the title "the Macchiaioli" (from macchia —"dash of colour", or, more derogatively, "stain"), and Modigliani had already been exposed to the influences of the Macchiaioli. This localized landscape movement reacted against the bourgeois stylings of the academic genre painters. While sympathetically connected to (and actually pre-dating) the French Impressionists, the Macchiaioli did not make the same impact upon international art culture as did the contemporaries and followers of Monet, and are today largely forgotten outside Italy.
+
+Modigliani's connection with the movement was through Guglielmo Micheli, his first art teacher. Micheli was not only a Macchiaiolo himself, but had been a pupil of the famous Giovanni Fattori, a founder of the movement. Micheli's work, however, was so fashionable and the genre so commonplace that the young Modigliani reacted against it, preferring to ignore the obsession with landscape that, as with French Impressionism, characterized the movement. Micheli also tried to encourage his pupils to paint en plein air, but Modigliani never really got a taste for this style of working, sketching in cafés, but preferring to paint indoors, and especially in his own studio. Even when compelled to paint landscapes (three are known to exist),[12] Modigliani chose a proto-Cubist palette more akin to Cézanne than to the Macchiaioli.
+
+While with Micheli, Modigliani studied not only landscape, but also portraiture, still life, and the nude. His fellow students recall that the last was where he displayed his greatest talent, and apparently this was not an entirely academic pursuit for the teenager: when not painting nudes, he was occupied with seducing the household maid.[11]
+
+Despite his rejection of the Macchiaioli approach, Modigliani nonetheless found favour with his teacher, who referred to him as "Superman", a pet name reflecting the fact that Modigliani was not only quite adept at his art, but also that he regularly quoted from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Fattori himself would often visit the studio, and approved of the young artist's innovations.[13]
+
+In 1902, Modigliani continued what was to be a lifelong infatuation with life drawing, enrolling in the Scuola Libera di Nudo, or "Free School of Nude Studies", of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. A year later, while still suffering from tuberculosis, he moved to Venice, where he registered to study at the Regia Accademia ed Istituto di Belle Arti.
+It is in Venice that he first smoked hashish and, rather than studying, began to spend time frequenting disreputable parts of the city. The impact of these lifestyle choices upon his developing artistic style is open to conjecture, although these choices do seem to be more than simple teenage rebellion, or the cliched hedonism and bohemianism that was almost expected of artists of the time; his pursuit of the seedier side of life appears to have roots in his appreciation of radical philosophies, including those of Nietzsche.
+
+Having been exposed to erudite philosophical literature as a young boy under the tutelage of Isaco Garsin, his maternal grandfather, he continued to read and be influenced through his art studies by the writings of Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Carducci, Comte de Lautréamont, and others, and developed the belief that the only route to true creativity was through defiance and disorder.
+
+Letters that he wrote from his 'sabbatical' in Capri in 1901 clearly indicate that he is being more and more influenced by the thinking of Nietzsche. In these letters, he advised friend Oscar Ghiglia;
+
+(hold sacred all) which can exalt and excite your intelligence... (and) ... seek to provoke ... and to perpetuate ... these fertile stimuli, because they can push the intelligence to its maximum creative power.[14]
+
+The work of Lautréamont was equally influential at this time. This doomed poet's Les Chants de Maldoror became the seminal work for the Parisian Surrealists of Modigliani's generation, and the book became Modigliani's favourite to the extent that he learnt it by heart.[13] The poetry of Lautréamont is characterized by the juxtaposition of fantastical elements, and by sadistic imagery; the fact that Modigliani was so taken by this text in his early teens gives a good indication of his developing tastes. Baudelaire and D'Annunzio similarly appealed to the young artist, with their interest in corrupted beauty, and the expression of that insight through Symbolist imagery.
+
+Modigliani wrote to Ghiglia extensively from Capri, where his mother had taken him to assist in his recovery from tuberculosis. These letters are a sounding board for the developing ideas brewing in Modigliani's mind. Ghiglia was seven years Modigliani's senior, and it is likely that it was he who showed the young man the limits of his horizons in Livorno. Like all precocious teenagers, Modigliani preferred the company of older companions, and Ghiglia's role in his adolescence was to be a sympathetic ear as he worked himself out, principally in the convoluted letters that he regularly sent, and which survive today.[15]
+
+Dear friend, I write to pour myself out to you and to affirm myself to myself. I am the prey of great powers that surge forth and then disintegrate ... A bourgeois told me today–insulted me–that I or at least my brain was lazy. It did me good. I should like such a warning every morning upon awakening: but they cannot understand us nor can they understand life...[16]
+
+In 1906, Modigliani moved to Paris, then the focal point of the avant-garde. In fact, his arrival at the centre of artistic experimentation coincided with the arrival of two other foreigners who were also to leave their marks upon the art world: Gino Severini and Juan Gris.
+
+He later befriended Jacob Epstein, they aimed to set up a studio together with a shared vision to create a Temple of Beauty to be enjoyed by all, for which Modigliani created drawings and paintings of the intended stone caryatids for ‘The Pillars of Tenderness’ which would support the imagined temple.[17]
+
+Modigliani squatted in the Bateau-Lavoir,[18] a commune for penniless artists in Montmartre, renting himself a studio in Rue Caulaincourt. Even though this artists' quarter of Montmartre was characterized by generalized poverty, Modigliani himself presented—initially, at least—as one would expect the son of a family trying to maintain the appearances of its lost financial standing to present: his wardrobe was dapper without ostentation, and the studio he rented was appointed in a style appropriate to someone with a finely attuned taste in plush drapery and Renaissance reproductions. He soon made efforts to assume the guise of the bohemian artist, but, even in his brown corduroys, scarlet scarf and large black hat, he continued to appear as if he were slumming it, having fallen upon harder times.[14]
+
+When he first arrived in Paris, he wrote home regularly to his mother, he sketched his nudes at the Académie Colarossi, and he drank wine in moderation. He was at that time considered by those who knew him as a bit reserved, verging on the asocial.[14] He is noted to have commented, upon meeting Picasso who, at the time, was wearing his trademark workmen's clothes, that even though the man was a genius, that did not excuse his uncouth appearance.[14]
+
+Within a year of arriving in Paris, however, his demeanour and reputation had changed dramatically. He transformed himself from a dapper academician artist into a sort of prince of vagabonds.
+
+The poet and journalist Louis Latourette, upon visiting the artist's previously well-appointed studio after his transformation, discovered the place in upheaval, the Renaissance reproductions discarded from the walls, the plush drapes in disarray. Modigliani was already an alcoholic and a drug addict by this time, and his studio reflected this. Modigliani's behaviour at this time sheds some light upon his developing style as an artist, in that the studio had become almost a sacrificial effigy for all that he resented about the academic art that had marked his life and his training up to that point.
+
+Not only did he remove all the trappings of his bourgeois heritage from his studio, but he also set about destroying practically all of his own early work, which he described as "Childish baubles, done when I was a dirty bourgeois".[19]
+
+The motivation for this violent rejection of his earlier self is the subject of considerable speculation. From the time of his arrival in Paris, Modigliani consciously crafted a charade persona for himself and cultivated his reputation as a hopeless drunk and voracious drug user. His escalating intake of drugs and alcohol may have been a means by which Modigliani masked his tuberculosis from his acquaintances, few of whom knew of his condition.[20] Tuberculosis—the leading cause of death in France by 1900[21]—was highly communicable, there was no cure, and those who had it were feared, ostracized, and pitied. Modigliani thrived on camaraderie and would not let himself be isolated as an invalid; he used drink and drugs as palliatives to ease his physical pain, helping him to maintain a façade of vitality and allowing him to continue to create his art.[22]
+
+Modigliani's use of drink and drugs intensified from about 1914 onward. After years of remission and recurrence, this was the period during which the symptoms of his tuberculosis worsened, signaling that the disease had reached an advanced stage.[23]
+
+He sought the company of artists such as Utrillo and Soutine, seeking acceptance and validation for his work from his colleagues.[19] Modigliani's behavior stood out even in these Bohemian surroundings: he carried on frequent affairs, drank heavily, and used absinthe and hashish. While drunk, he would sometimes strip himself naked at social gatherings.[25] He died in Paris, aged 35. He became the epitome of the tragic artist, creating a posthumous legend almost as well known as that of Vincent van Gogh.
+
+During the 1920s, in the wake of Modigliani's career and spurred on by comments by André Salmon crediting hashish and absinthe with the genesis of Modigliani's style, many hopefuls tried to emulate his "success" by embarking on a path of substance abuse and bohemian excess. Salmon claimed that whereas Modigliani was a totally pedestrian artist when sober, "...from the day that he abandoned himself to certain forms of debauchery, an unexpected light came upon him, transforming his art. From that day on, he became one who must be counted among the masters of living art."[26]
+
+Some art historians suggest[26] that it is entirely possible that Modigliani would have achieved even greater artistic heights had he not been immured in, and destroyed by, his own self-indulgences.
+
+During his early years in Paris, Modigliani worked at a furious pace. He was constantly sketching, making as many as a hundred drawings a day. However, many of his works were lost—destroyed by him as inferior, left behind in his frequent changes of address, or given to girlfriends who did not keep them.[25]
+
+He was first influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, but around 1907 he became fascinated with the work of Paul Cézanne. Eventually he developed his own unique style, one that cannot be adequately categorized with those of other artists.
+
+He met the first serious love of his life, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, in 1910, when he was 26. They had studios in the same building, and although 21-year-old Anna had recently married, they began an affair.[27] Anna was tall with dark hair, pale skin and grey-green eyes: she embodied Modigliani's aesthetic ideal and the pair became engrossed in each other. After a year, however, Anna returned to her husband.[28]
+
+Portrait of Maude Abrantes, 1907, Hecht Museum
+
+Paul Guillaume, Novo Pilota, 1915, Musée de l'Orangerie
+
+Bride and Groom, 1915
+
+Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz, 1916
+
+Jean Cocteau, 1916, Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum
+
+Léon Indenbaum, 1916, Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection, on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum
+
+Portrait of Beatrice Hastings, 1916
+
+Portrait of Moise Kisling, 1915
+
+Madame Kisling, 1917
+
+Portrait of the Artist's Wife (Jeanne Hébuterne), 1918
+
+Dedie Hayden, 1918, Centre Georges Pompidou
+
+Self-portrait, 1919, oil on canvas, Museum of Contemporary Art, São Paulo, Brazil
+
+Gypsy Woman with Baby, 1919, National Gallery of Art
+
+The Little Peasant, 1918, Tate Liverpool
+
+Portrait of a Young Woman, 1918, New Orleans Museum of Art
+
+Buste de femme, unknown, before 1919, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires)
+
+Beatrice Hastings, 1916–1919, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
+
+Woman with a Fan, 1919, stolen from Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
+
+Portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne, Seated, 1918, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
+
+Portrait of Blaise Cendrars, 1917, Galleria Sabauda, Turin
+
+In 1909, Modigliani returned home to Livorno, sickly and tired from his wild lifestyle. Soon he was back in Paris, this time renting a studio in Montparnasse. He originally saw himself as a sculptor rather than a painter, and was encouraged to continue after Paul Guillaume, an ambitious young art dealer, took an interest in his work and introduced him to sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. He was Constantin Brâncuși's disciple for one year.
+
+Although a series of Modigliani's sculptures were exhibited in the Salon d'Automne of 1912, by 1914 he abandoned sculpting and focused solely on his painting, a move precipitated by the difficulty in acquiring sculptural materials due to the outbreak of war, and by Modigliani's physical debilitation.[4]
+
+In June 2010 Modigliani's Tête, a limestone carving of a woman's head, became the third most expensive sculpture ever sold.
+
+Modigliani painted a series of portraits of contemporary artists and friends in Montparnasse: Chaim Soutine, Moïse Kisling, Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Marie "Marevna" Vorobyev-Stebeslka, Juan Gris, Max Jacob, Jacques Lipchitz, Blaise Cendrars, and Jean Cocteau, all sat for stylized renditions.
+
+At the outset of World War I, Modigliani tried to enlist in the army but was refused because of his poor health.[29]
+
+Known as Modì (which plays on the French word 'maudit', meaning 'cursed') by many Parisians, but as Dedo to his family and friends, Modigliani was a handsome man, and attracted much female attention.[30] Women came and went until Beatrice Hastings entered his life. She stayed with him for almost two years, was the subject of several of his portraits, including Madame Pompadour, and the object of much of his drunken wrath.[30]
+
+When the British painter Nina Hamnett arrived in Montparnasse in 1914, on her first evening there the smiling man at the next table in the café introduced himself as "Modigliani, painter and Jew". They became great friends.
+
+In 1916, Modigliani befriended the Polish poet and art dealer Léopold Zborowski and his wife Anna. Zborowski became Modigliani's primary art dealer and friend during the artist's final years, helping him financially, and also organizing his show in Paris in 1917.
+
+The several dozen nudes Modigliani painted between 1916 and 1919 constitute many of his best-known works. This series of nudes was commissioned by Modigliani's dealer and friend Léopold Zborowski, who lent the artist use of his apartment, supplied models and painting materials, and paid him between fifteen and twenty francs each day for his work.[31]
+
+The paintings from this arrangement were thus different from his previous depictions of friends and lovers in that they were funded by Zborowski either for his own collection, as a favor to his friend, or with an eye to their "commercial potential", rather than originating from the artist's personal circle of acquaintances.[32]
+
+The Paris show of 1917 was Modigliani's only solo exhibition during his life, and is "notorious" in modern art history for its sensational public reception and the attendant issues of obscenity.[33] The show was closed by police on its opening day, but continued thereafter, most likely after the removal of paintings from the gallery's streetfront window.[33]
+
+Nude Sitting on a Divan is one of a series of nudes painted by Modigliani in 1917 that created a sensation when exhibited in Paris that year. According to the catalogue description from the 2010 sale of the painting at Sotheby's, seven nudes were exhibited in the 1917 show.
+
+Nu couché realized $170,405,000 at a Christie's, New York, sale on 9 November 2015, a record for a Modigliani painting and placing it high among the most expensive paintings ever sold.[34]
+
+Iris Tree, c. 1916, Courtauld Institute of Art
+
+Reclining Nude, 1917, Metropolitan Museum of Art
+
+Seated Nude, 1917, Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp
+
+Nude Sitting on a Divan ("La Belle Romaine"), 1917
+
+Nude, 1917, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
+
+Nude on a Blue Cushion, 1917, National Gallery of Art
+
+Nu couché, 1917–18, sold for $170.4 million in 2015 to Liu Yiqian[35]
+
+Seated Nude, 1918, Honolulu Museum of Art
+
+On a trip to Nice which had been conceived and organized by Zborowski, Modigliani, Foujita and other artists tried to sell their works to rich tourists. Modigliani managed to sell a few pictures, but only for a few francs each. Despite this, during this time he produced most of the paintings that later became his most popular and valued works.[citation needed]
+
+During his lifetime, he sold a number of his works, but never for any great amount of money. What funds he did receive soon vanished for his habits.[36]
+
+In the spring of 1917, the Russian sculptor Chana Orloff introduced him to a beautiful 19-year-old art student named Jeanne Hébuterne[37] who had posed for Tsuguharu Foujita. From a conservative bourgeois background, Hébuterne was renounced by her devout Roman Catholic family for her liaison with Modigliani, whom they saw as little more than a debauched derelict. Despite her family's objections, soon they were living together.
+
+Modigliani ended his relationship with the English poet and art critic Beatrice Hastings and a short time later Hébuterne and Modigliani moved together into a studio on the Rue de la Grande Chaumière. Jeanne began to pose for him and appears in several of his paintings. Jeanne Hébuterne became a principal subject for Modigliani's art.
+
+On 3 December 1917, Modigliani's first one-man exhibition opened at the Berthe Weill Gallery in Paris. The chief of the Paris police was scandalized by Modigliani's nudes and forced him to close the exhibition within a few hours after its opening.
+
+Towards the end of the First World War, early in 1918, Modigliani left Paris with Hébuterne to escape from the war and travelled to Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer. They would spend a year in France. During that time they had a busy social life with many friends, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico and André Derain.
+
+After he and Hébuterne moved to Nice on 29 November 1918, she gave birth to a daughter whom they named Jeanne (1918–1984). In May 1919 they returned to Paris with their infant daughter and moved into an apartment on the rue de la Grande Chaumière.
+
+Hébuterne became pregnant again. Modigliani then got engaged to her, but Jeanne's parents were against the marriage, especially because of Modigliani's reputation as an alcoholic and drug user. However, Modigliani officially recognized her daughter as his child. The wedding plans were shattered independently of Jeanne's parents' resistance when Modigliani discovered he had a severe form of tuberculosis.
+
+Although he continued to paint, Modigliani's health deteriorated rapidly, and his alcohol-induced blackouts became more frequent.
+
+In 1920, after not hearing from him for several days, a neighbour checked on the family and found Modigliani in bed delirious and holding onto Hébuterne. A doctor was summoned, but little could be done because Modigliani was in the final stage of his disease, tubercular meningitis. He died on 24 January 1920, at the Hôpital de la Charité.
+
+There was an enormous funeral, attended by many from the artistic communities in Montmartre and Montparnasse. When Modigliani died, twenty-one-year-old Hébuterne was eight months pregnant with their second child.
+
+A day later, Hébuterne was taken to her parents' home. There, inconsolable, she threw herself out of a fifth-floor window, two days after Modigliani's death, killing herself and her unborn child. Modigliani was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Hébuterne was buried at the Cimetière de Bagneux near Paris, and it was not until 1930 that her embittered family allowed her body to be moved to rest beside Modigliani. A single tombstone honors them both. His epitaph reads: "Struck down by death at the moment of glory". Hers reads: "Devoted companion to the extreme sacrifice".[38]
+
+Managing only one solo exhibition in his life and giving his work away in exchange for meals in restaurants, Modigliani died destitute.
+
+The linear form of African sculpture and the depictive humanism of the figurative Renaissance painters informed his work. Working during that fertile period of “isms,” Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, Modigliani did not choose to be categorized within any of these prevailing, defining confines. He was unclassifiable, stubbornly insisting on his difference. He was an artist putting down paint on canvas creating works not to shock and outrage, but to say, “This is what I see.”
+
+More appreciated over the years by collectors than academicians and critics, Modigliani was indifferent to staking a claim for himself in the intellectual avant-garde of the art world. One can say he recognized the merit of Jean Cocteau’s proclamation: “Ne t'attardes pas avec l'avant-garde” (“Don’t wait with the avant-garde”).[39] Pseudo-goitre, a medical condition is also known as Modigliani syndrome. This name was derived from the curved neck of women in Modigliani's paintings which appeared like pseudogoitre.[40]
+
+Since his death, Modigliani's reputation has soared. Nine novels, a play, a documentary, and three feature films have been devoted to his life. Modigliani's sister in Florence adopted his daughter, Jeanne (1918–1984). As an adult, she wrote a biography of her father titled Modigliani: Man and Myth.
+
+The Modigliani estate is one of the most problematic in the art world. There are at least five catalogues raisonnés of the artist's work including two volumes by Ambrogio Ceroni, last updated in 1972. Arthur Pfannstiel (1929 and 1956) and Joseph Lanthemann's (1970) books are widely dismissed today. Milanese scholar Osvaldo Patani produced three volumes: paintings (1991), drawings (1992) and one on the Paul Alexandre period (1994), while Christian Parisot has published Volumes I, II and IV (in 1970, 1971 and 1996) of a catalogue raisonné.[41]
+
+In 2006, about 6,000 documents from the estate—believed to be the only ones existing—were moved permanently from France to Italy. Parisot, as president of the Modigliani Institut Archives Légales in Rome, had the legal right to authenticate Modigliani's work.[42] In 2013, Parisot was arrested by the Italian Art forgery unit after a two-year investigation (following a largely advertised exhibition in Catania, presenting original artworks[43]); the police seized works attributed to the artist, along with suspect authenticity certificates.[44]
+
+The French art historian Marc Restellini is preparing Modigliani's catalogue raisonné.[45]
+
+The Modigliani Project, headed by Dr. Kenneth Wayne, was founded in 2012 to aid in the researching of Modigliani artworks.[46] As part of this endeavor the organization is preparing a new catalogue raisonné of Modigliani's artwork.[45]
+
+In November 2010, a painting of a nude by Amedeo Modigliani, part of a series of nudes he created around 1917, sold for more than $68.9m (£42.7m) at an auction in New York—a record for the artist's work. Bidding for La Belle Romaine pushed its price well past its $40m (£24.8m) estimate. Modigliani's previous auction record was 43.2m euros (£35.8m), set earlier in 2010 in Paris. Another painting by the artist—Jeanne Hébuterne (au chapeau), one of the first portraits he painted of his lover—sold for $19.1m (£11.8m), much higher than its pre-sale estimate of $9–12m (£5.6–7.4m).[47]
+
+On 9 November 2015 the 1917 painting Nu couché, sold at Christie's in New York for US$170.4 million.[48] On 14 May 2018 the 1917 painting Nu couché (sur le côté gauche) sold at Sotheby's in New York for $157.2 million. This was the highest auction price in Sotheby's history.[49]
+
+Two films have been made about Modigliani: Les Amants de Montparnasse (1958), directed by Jacques Becker and starring Gérard Philipe as Modigliani; and Modigliani (2004), directed by Mick Davis and starring Andy García as Modigliani.
+
+Modigliani's art was an influence on director Andy Muschietti, who found his works frightening as a child. Creatures based on Modigliani's style have appeared in his films Mama (2013) and It (2017).[50]
+
+In 1987 the U.S. synth-pop band Book of Love released the single "Modigliani (Lost In Your Eyes)".
+
+In 1991 the Italian singer-songwriter Vinicio Capossela, released his second album titled Modi' which is also the title of the album's first track. The song's title recalls the French term "Maudit" (cursed) and gives an almost impressionist depiction of Modigliani's troubled soul, embracing in its lyrics the painter's well known love of poetry.
+
+In 2015 Italian jazz player Claudio Ottaviano released the composition "Modigliani", opening track for the album Aurora on NuomRecords.
+
+Modi'Tango (Giovanna Pieri Buti, violin - Emiliano Degl'Innocenti, doublebass - Alessandro Ottaviani, accordion) is a musical band based in Livorno, that honours Modigliani taking inspiration from an oneiric meeting in Montparnasse between Modigliani and Carlos Gardel in front of a Milonga
+
+In 2011 Peter Schjeldahl, reviewing Meryle Secrest's book Modigliani: A Life, wrote:
+
+I recall my thrilled first exposure, as a teenager, to one of his long-necked women, with their piquantly tipped heads and mask-like faces. The rakish stylization and the succulent color were easy to enjoy, and the payoff was sanguinely erotic in a way that endorsed my personal wishes to be bold and tender and noble, overcoming the wimp that I was. In that moment, I used up Modigliani's value for my life. But in museums ever since I have been happy to salute his pictures with residually grateful, quick looks.[51]
+
+Schjeldahl reports Secrest's speculation that Modigliani was happy to let people consider him an alcoholic and drug addict, "and thus to mistake the symptoms of his tuberculosis, which he kept a secret. Drunks were tolerated; carriers of infectious diseases were not."[51]
+
+27 sculptures by Modigliani are known to exist.[citation needed]

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+
+
+Coordinates: 25°S 133°E / 25°S 133°E / -25; 133
+
+Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia,[12] is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. It is the largest country in Oceania and the world's sixth-largest country by total area. The population of 26 million[6] is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard.[13] Australia's capital is Canberra, and its largest city is Sydney. The country's other major metropolitan areas are Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide.
+
+Indigenous Australians inhabited the continent for about 65,000 years[14] prior to the first arrival of Dutch explorers in the early 17th century, who named it New Holland. In 1770, Australia's eastern half was claimed by Great Britain and initially settled through penal transportation to the colony of New South Wales from 26 January 1788, a date which became Australia's national day. The population grew steadily in subsequent decades, and by the time of an 1850s gold rush, most of the continent had been explored by European settlers and an additional five self-governing crown colonies established. On 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. Australia has since maintained a stable liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy, comprising six states and ten territories.
+
+Australia is the oldest,[15] flattest,[16] and driest inhabited continent,[17][18] with the least fertile soils.[19][20] It has a landmass of 7,617,930 square kilometres (2,941,300 sq mi).[21] A megadiverse country, its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes, with deserts in the centre, tropical rainforests in the north-east, and mountain ranges in the south-east. Australia generates its income from various sources, including mining-related exports, telecommunications, banking, manufacturing, and international education.[22][23][24]
+
+Australia is a highly developed country, with the world's 14th-largest economy. It has a high-income economy, with the world's tenth-highest per capita income.[25] It is a regional power and has the world's 13th-highest military expenditure.[26] Immigrants account for 30% of the population,[27] the highest proportion in any country with a population over 10 million.[28] Having the third-highest human development index and the eighth-highest ranked democracy globally, the country ranks highly in quality of life, health, education, economic freedom, civil liberties, and political rights,[29] with all its major cities faring well in global comparative livability surveys.[30] Australia is a member of the United Nations, G20, Commonwealth of Nations, ANZUS, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), World Trade Organization, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, Pacific Islands Forum, and the ASEAN Plus Six mechanism.
+
+The name Australia (pronounced /əˈstreɪliə/ in Australian English[31]) is derived from the Latin Terra Australis ("southern land"), a name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times.[32] When Europeans first began visiting and mapping Australia in the 17th century, the name Terra Australis was naturally applied to the new territories.[N 5]
+
+Until the early 19th century, Australia was best known as "New Holland", a name first applied by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1644 (as Nieuw-Holland) and subsequently anglicised. Terra Australis still saw occasional usage, such as in scientific texts.[N 6] The name Australia was popularised by the explorer Matthew Flinders, who said it was "more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth".[38] Several famous early cartographers also made use of the word Australia on maps. Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594) used the phrase climata australia on his double cordiform map of the world of 1538, as did Gemma Frisius (1508–1555), who was Mercator's teacher and collaborator, on his own cordiform wall map in 1540. Australia appears in a book on astronomy by Cyriaco Jacob zum Barth published in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1545.[39]
+
+The first time that Australia appears to have been officially used was in April 1817, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie acknowledged the receipt of Flinders' charts of Australia from Lord Bathurst.[40] In December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted.[41] In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially by that name.[42] The first official published use of the new name came with the publication in 1830 of The Australia Directory by the Hydrographic Office.[43]
+
+Colloquial names for Australia include "Oz" and "the Land Down Under" (usually shortened to just "Down Under"). Other epithets include "the Great Southern Land", "the Lucky Country", "the Sunburnt Country", and "the Wide Brown Land". The latter two both derive from Dorothea Mackellar's 1908 poem "My Country".[44]
+
+Human habitation of the Australian continent is known to have begun at least 65,000 years ago,[45][46] with the migration of people by land bridges and short sea-crossings from what is now Southeast Asia.[47] The Madjedbebe rock shelter in Arnhem Land is recognised as the oldest site showing the presence of humans in Australia.[48]  The oldest human remains found are the Lake Mungo remains, which have been dated to around 41,000 years ago.[49][50] These people were the ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians.[51] Aboriginal Australian culture is one of the oldest continual cultures on earth.[52]
+
+At the time of first European contact, most Indigenous Australians were hunter-gatherers with complex economies and societies.[53][54] Recent archaeological finds suggest that a population of 750,000 could have been sustained.[55][56] Indigenous Australians have an oral culture with spiritual values based on reverence for the land and a belief in the Dreamtime.[57] The Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas.[58] The northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited sporadically by Makassan fishermen from what is now Indonesia.[59]
+
+The first recorded European sighting of the Australian mainland, and the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent, are attributed to the Dutch.[60] The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken captained by Dutch navigator, Willem Janszoon.[61] He sighted the coast of Cape York Peninsula in early 1606, and made landfall on 26 February at the Pennefather River near the modern town of Weipa on Cape York.[62] Later that year, Spanish explorer Luís Vaz de Torres sailed through, and navigated, Torres Strait islands.[63] The Dutch charted the whole of the western and northern coastlines and named the island continent "New Holland" during the 17th century, and although no attempt at settlement was made,[62] a number of shipwrecks left men either stranded or, as in the case of the Batavia in 1629, marooned for mutiny and murder, thus becoming the first Europeans to permanently inhabit the continent.[64] William Dampier, an English explorer and privateer, landed on the north-west coast of New Holland in 1688 (while serving as a crewman under pirate Captain John Read[65]) and again in 1699 on a return trip.[66] In 1770, James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast, which he named New South Wales and claimed for Great Britain.[67]
+
+With the loss of its American colonies in 1783, the British Government sent a fleet of ships, the "First Fleet", under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, to establish a new penal colony in New South Wales. A camp was set up and the Union flag raised at Sydney Cove, Port Jackson, on 26 January 1788,[68][69] a date which later became Australia's national day, Australia Day. Most early convicts were transported for petty crimes and assigned as labourers or servants upon arrival. While the majority settled into colonial society once emancipated, convict rebellions and uprisings were also staged, but invariably suppressed under martial law. The 1808 Rum Rebellion, the only successful armed takeover of government in Australia, instigated a two-year period of military rule.[70]
+
+The indigenous population declined for 150 years following settlement, mainly due to infectious disease.[71] Thousands more died as a result of frontier conflict with settlers.[72] A government policy of "assimilation" beginning with the Aboriginal Protection Act 1869 resulted in the removal of many Aboriginal children from their families and communities—referred to as the Stolen Generations—a practice which also contributed to the decline in the indigenous population.[73] As a result of the 1967 referendum, the Federal government's power to enact special laws with respect to a particular race was extended to enable the making of laws with respect to Aboriginals.[74] Traditional ownership of land ("native title") was not recognised in law until 1992, when the High Court of Australia held in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) that the legal doctrine that Australia had been terra nullius ("land belonging to no one") did not apply to Australia at the time of British settlement.[75]
+
+The expansion of British control over other areas of the continent began in the early 19th century, initially confined to coastal regions. A settlement was established in Van Diemen's Land (present-day Tasmania) in 1803, and it became a separate colony in 1825.[76] In 1813, Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth crossed the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, opening the interior to European settlement.[77]  The British claim was extended to the whole Australian continent in 1827 when Major Edmund Lockyer established a settlement on King George Sound (modern-day Albany, Western Australia).[78] The Swan River Colony was established in 1829, evolving into the largest Australian colony by area, Western Australia.[79] In accordance with population growth, separate colonies were carved from parts of New South Wales: South Australia in 1836, New Zealand in 1841, Victoria in 1851, and Queensland in 1859.[80] The Northern Territory was excised from South Australia in 1911.[81] South Australia was founded as a "free province"—it was never a penal colony.[82] Western Australia was also founded "free" but later accepted transported convicts, the last of which arrived in 1868, decades after transportation had ceased to the other colonies.[83] By 1850, Europeans still had not entered large areas of the inland. Explorers remained ambitious to discover new lands for agriculture or answers to scientific enquiries.[84]
+
+A series of gold rushes beginning in the early 1850s led to an influx of new migrants from China, North America and mainland Europe,[85] and also spurred outbreaks of bushranging and civil unrest. The latter peaked in 1854 when Ballarat miners launched the Eureka Rebellion against gold license fees.[86] Between 1855 and 1890, the six colonies individually gained responsible government, managing most of their own affairs while remaining part of the British Empire.[87] The Colonial Office in London retained control of some matters, notably foreign affairs,[88] defence,[89] and international shipping.
+
+On 1 January 1901, federation of the colonies was achieved after a decade of planning, consultation and voting.[90] After the 1907 Imperial Conference, Australia and the other self-governing British colonies were given the status of "dominion" within the British Empire.[91][92] The Federal Capital Territory (later renamed the Australian Capital Territory) was formed in 1911 as the location for the future federal capital of Canberra. Melbourne was the temporary seat of government from 1901 to 1927 while Canberra was being constructed.[93] The Northern Territory was transferred from the control of the South Australian government to the federal parliament in 1911.[94] Australia became the colonial ruler of the Territory of Papua (which had initially been annexed by Queensland in 1888) in 1902 and of the Territory of New Guinea (formerly German New Guinea) in 1920. The two were unified as the Territory of Papua and New Guinea in 1949 and gained independence from Australia in 1975.
+
+In 1914, Australia joined Britain in fighting World War I, with support from both the outgoing Commonwealth Liberal Party and the incoming Australian Labor Party.[95][96] Australians took part in many of the major battles fought on the Western Front.[97] Of about 416,000 who served, about 60,000 were killed and another 152,000 were wounded.[98] Many Australians regard the defeat of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs) at Gallipoli as the birth of the nation—its first major military action.[99][100] The Kokoda Track campaign is regarded by many as an analogous nation-defining event during World War II.[101]
+
+Britain's Statute of Westminster 1931 formally ended most of the constitutional links between Australia and the UK. Australia adopted it in 1942,[102] but it was backdated to 1939 to confirm the validity of legislation passed by the Australian Parliament during World War II.[103][104] The shock of Britain's defeat in Asia in 1942, followed soon after by the Japanese bombing of Darwin and attack on Sydney Harbour, led to a widespread belief in Australia that an invasion was imminent, and a shift towards the United States as a new ally and protector.[105] Since 1951, Australia has been a formal military ally of the US, under the ANZUS treaty.[106]
+
+After World War II, Australia encouraged immigration from mainland Europe. Since the 1970s and following the abolition of the White Australia policy, immigration from Asia and elsewhere was also promoted.[107] As a result, Australia's demography, culture, and self-image were transformed.[108] The Australia Act 1986 severed the remaining constitutional ties between Australia and the UK.[109] In a 1999 referendum, 55% of voters and a majority in every state rejected a proposal to become a republic with a president appointed by a two-thirds vote in both Houses of the Australian Parliament. There has been an increasing focus in foreign policy on ties with other Pacific Rim nations, while maintaining close ties with Australia's traditional allies and trading partners.[110]
+
+Surrounded by the Indian and Pacific oceans,[N 7] Australia is separated from Asia by the Arafura and Timor seas, with the Coral Sea lying off the Queensland coast, and the Tasman Sea lying between Australia and New Zealand. The world's smallest continent[112] and sixth largest country by total area,[113] Australia—owing to its size and isolation—is often dubbed the "island continent"[114] and is sometimes considered the world's largest island.[115] Australia has 34,218 kilometres (21,262 mi) of coastline (excluding all offshore islands),[116] and claims an extensive Exclusive Economic Zone of 8,148,250 square kilometres (3,146,060 sq mi). This exclusive economic zone does not include the Australian Antarctic Territory.[117] Apart from Macquarie Island, Australia lies between latitudes 9° and 44°S, and longitudes 112° and 154°E.
+
+Australia's size gives it a wide variety of landscapes, with tropical rainforests in the north-east, mountain ranges in the south-east, south-west and east, and desert in the centre.[118] The desert or semi-arid land commonly known as the outback makes up by far the largest portion of land.[119] Australia is the driest inhabited continent; its annual rainfall averaged over continental area is less than 500 mm.[120] The population density, 3.2 inhabitants per square kilometre, although a large proportion of the population lives along the temperate south-eastern coastline.[121]
+
+The Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef,[122] lies a short distance off the north-east coast and extends for over 2,000 kilometres (1,240 mi). Mount Augustus, claimed to be the world's largest monolith,[123] is located in Western Australia. At 2,228 metres (7,310 ft), Mount Kosciuszko is the highest mountain on the Australian mainland. Even taller are Mawson Peak (at 2,745 metres or 9,006 feet), on the remote Australian external territory of Heard Island, and, in the Australian Antarctic Territory, Mount McClintock and Mount Menzies, at 3,492 metres (11,457 ft) and 3,355 metres (11,007 ft) respectively.[124]
+
+Eastern Australia is marked by the Great Dividing Range, which runs parallel to the coast of Queensland, New South Wales and much of Victoria. The name is not strictly accurate, because parts of the range consist of low hills, and the highlands are typically no more than 1,600 metres (5,249 ft) in height.[125] The coastal uplands and a belt of Brigalow grasslands lie between the coast and the mountains, while inland of the dividing range are large areas of grassland and shrubland.[125][126] These include the western plains of New South Wales, and the Mitchell Grass Downs and Mulga Lands of inland Queensland. The northernmost point of the east coast is the tropical Cape York Peninsula.[127][128][129][130]
+
+The landscapes of the Top End and the Gulf Country—with their tropical climate—include forest, woodland, wetland, grassland, rainforest and desert.[131][132][133] At the north-west corner of the continent are the sandstone cliffs and gorges of The Kimberley, and below that the Pilbara. The Victoria Plains tropical savanna lies south of the Kimberly and Arnhem Land savannas, forming a transition between the coastal savannas and the interior deserts.[134][135][136] At the heart of the country are the uplands of central Australia. Prominent features of the centre and south include Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock), the famous sandstone monolith, and the inland Simpson, Tirari and Sturt Stony, Gibson, Great Sandy, Tanami, and Great Victoria deserts, with the famous Nullarbor Plain on the southern coast.[137][138][139][140] The Western Australian mulga shrublands lie between the interior deserts and Mediterranean-climate Southwest Australia.[141][142]
+
+Lying on the Indo-Australian Plate, the mainland of Australia is the lowest and most primordial landmass on Earth with a relatively stable geological history.[143][144] The landmass includes virtually all known rock types and from all geological time periods spanning over 3.8 billion years of the Earth's history. The Pilbara Craton is one of only two pristine Archaean 3.6–2.7 Ga (billion years ago) crusts identified on the Earth.[145]
+
+Having been part of all major supercontinents, the Australian continent began to form after the breakup of Gondwana in the Permian, with the separation of the continental landmass from the African continent and Indian subcontinent. It separated from Antarctica over a prolonged period beginning in the Permian and continuing through to the Cretaceous.[146] When the last glacial period ended in about 10,000 BC, rising sea levels formed Bass Strait, separating Tasmania from the mainland. Then between about 8,000 and 6,500 BC, the lowlands in the north were flooded by the sea, separating New Guinea, the Aru Islands, and the mainland of Australia.[147] The Australian continent is currently moving toward Eurasia at the rate of 6 to 7 centimetres a year.[148]
+
+The Australian mainland's continental crust, excluding the thinned margins, has an average thickness of 38 km, with a range in thickness from 24 km to 59 km.[149] Australia's geology can be divided into several main sections, showcasing that the continent grew from west to east: the Archaean cratonic shields found mostly in the west, Proterozoic fold belts in the centre and Phanerozoic sedimentary basins, metamorphic and igneous rocks in the east.[150]
+
+The Australian mainland and Tasmania are situated in the middle of the tectonic plate and currently have no active volcanoes,[151] but due to passing over the East Australia hotspot, recent volcanism has occurred during the Holocene, in the Newer Volcanics Province of western Victoria and southeastern South Australia. Volcanism also occurs in the island of New Guinea (considered geologically as part of the Australian continent), and in the Australian external territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands.[152] Seismic activity in the Australian mainland and Tasmania is also low, with the greatest number of fatalities having occurred in the 1989 Newcastle earthquake.[153]
+
+The climate of Australia is significantly influenced by ocean currents, including the Indian Ocean Dipole and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which is correlated with periodic drought, and the seasonal tropical low-pressure system that produces cyclones in northern Australia.[155][156] These factors cause rainfall to vary markedly from year to year. Much of the northern part of the country has a tropical, predominantly summer-rainfall (monsoon).[120] The south-west corner of the country has a Mediterranean climate.[157] The south-east ranges from oceanic (Tasmania and coastal Victoria) to humid subtropical (upper half of New South Wales), with the highlands featuring alpine and subpolar oceanic climates. The interior is arid to semi-arid.[120]
+
+According to the Bureau of Meteorology's 2011 Australian Climate Statement, Australia had lower than average temperatures in 2011 as a consequence of a La Niña weather pattern; however, "the country's 10-year average continues to demonstrate the rising trend in temperatures, with 2002–2011 likely to rank in the top two warmest 10-year periods on record for Australia, at 0.52 °C (0.94 °F) above the long-term average".[158] Furthermore, 2014 was Australia's third warmest year since national temperature observations commenced in 1910.[159][160]
+
+Water restrictions are frequently in place in many regions and cities of Australia in response to chronic shortages due to urban population increases and localised drought.[161][162] Throughout much of the continent, major flooding regularly follows extended periods of drought, flushing out inland river systems, overflowing dams and inundating large inland flood plains, as occurred throughout Eastern Australia in 2010, 2011 and 2012 after the 2000s Australian drought.
+
+Australia's carbon dioxide emissions per capita are among the highest in the world, lower than those of only a few other industrialised nations.[163]
+
+January 2019 was the hottest month ever in Australia with average temperatures exceeding 30 °C (86 °F).[164][165]
+
+The 2019–20 Australian bushfire season was Australia's worst bushfire season on record.[166]
+
+Although most of Australia is semi-arid or desert, the continent includes a diverse range of habitats from alpine heaths to tropical rainforests. Fungi typify that diversity—an estimated 250,000 species—of which only 5% have been described—occur in Australia.[167] Because of the continent's great age, extremely variable weather patterns, and long-term geographic isolation, much of Australia's biota is unique. About 85% of flowering plants, 84% of mammals, more than 45% of birds, and 89% of in-shore, temperate-zone fish are endemic.[168] Australia has at least 755 species of reptile, more than any other country in the world.[169] Besides Antarctica, Australia is the only continent that developed without feline species. Feral cats may have been introduced in the 17th century by Dutch shipwrecks, and later in the 18th century by European settlers. They are now considered a major factor in the decline and extinction of many vulnerable and endangered native species.[170]
+
+Australian forests are mostly made up of evergreen species, particularly eucalyptus trees in the less arid regions; wattles replace them as the dominant species in drier regions and deserts.[171] Among well-known Australian animals are the monotremes (the platypus and echidna); a host of marsupials, including the kangaroo, koala, and wombat, and birds such as the emu and the kookaburra.[171] Australia is home to many dangerous animals including some of the most venomous snakes in the world.[172] The dingo was introduced by Austronesian people who traded with Indigenous Australians around 3000 BCE.[173] Many animal and plant species became extinct soon after first human settlement,[174] including the Australian megafauna; others have disappeared since European settlement, among them the thylacine.[175][176]
+
+Many of Australia's ecoregions, and the species within those regions, are threatened by human activities and introduced animal, chromistan, fungal and plant species.[177] All these factors have led to Australia's having the highest mammal extinction rate of any country in the world.[178] The federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 is the legal framework for the protection of threatened species.[179] Numerous protected areas have been created under the National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia's Biological Diversity to protect and preserve unique ecosystems;[180][181] 65 wetlands are listed under the Ramsar Convention,[182] and 16 natural World Heritage Sites have been established.[183] Australia was ranked 21st out of 178 countries in the world on the 2018 Environmental Performance Index.[184] There are more than 1,800 animals and plants on Australia's threatened species list, including more than 500 animals.[185]
+
+Australia is a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy.[186] The country has maintained a stable liberal democratic political system under its constitution, which is one of the world's oldest, since Federation in 1901. It is also one of the world's oldest federations, in which power is divided between the federal and state and territorial governments. The Australian system of government combines elements derived from the political systems of the United Kingdom (a fused executive, constitutional monarchy and strong party discipline) and the United States (federalism, a written constitution and strong bicameralism with an elected upper house), along with distinctive indigenous features.[187][188]
+
+The federal government is separated into three branches:
+
+Elizabeth II reigns as Queen of Australia and is represented in Australia by the governor-general at the federal level and by the governors at the state level, who by convention act on the advice of her ministers.[190][191] Thus, in practice the governor-general acts as a legal figurehead for the actions of the prime minister and the Federal Executive Council. The governor-general does have extraordinary reserve powers which may be exercised outside the prime minister's request in rare and limited circumstances, the most notable exercise of which was the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in the constitutional crisis of 1975.[192]
+
+In the Senate (the upper house), there are 76 senators: twelve each from the states and two each from the mainland territories (the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory).[193] The House of Representatives (the lower house) has 151 members elected from single-member electoral divisions, commonly known as "electorates" or "seats", allocated to states on the basis of population,[194] with each original state guaranteed a minimum of five seats.[195] Elections for both chambers are normally held every three years simultaneously; senators have overlapping six-year terms except for those from the territories, whose terms are not fixed but are tied to the electoral cycle for the lower house; thus only 40 of the 76 places in the Senate are put to each election unless the cycle is interrupted by a double dissolution.[193]
+
+Australia's electoral system uses preferential voting for all lower house elections with the exception of Tasmania and the ACT which, along with the Senate and most state upper houses, combine it with proportional representation in a system known as the single transferable vote. Voting is compulsory for all enrolled citizens 18 years and over in every jurisdiction,[196] as is enrolment (with the exception of South Australia).[197] The party with majority support in the House of Representatives forms the government and its leader becomes Prime Minister. In cases where no party has majority support, the Governor-General has the constitutional power to appoint the Prime Minister and, if necessary, dismiss one that has lost the confidence of Parliament.[198]
+
+There are two major political groups that usually form government, federally and in the states: the Australian Labor Party and the Coalition which is a formal grouping of the Liberal Party and its minor partner, the National Party.[199][200] Within Australian political culture, the Coalition is considered centre-right and the Labor Party is considered centre-left.[201] Independent members and several minor parties have achieved representation in Australian parliaments, mostly in upper houses. The Australian Greens are often considered the "third force" in politics, being the third largest party by both vote and membership.[202]
+
+The most recent federal election was held on 18 May 2019 and resulted in the Coalition, led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, retaining government.[203]
+
+Australia has six states—New South Wales (NSW), Queensland (QLD), South Australia (SA), Tasmania (TAS), Victoria (VIC) and Western Australia (WA)—and two major mainland territories—the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and the Northern Territory (NT). In most respects, these two territories function as states, except that the Commonwealth Parliament has the power to modify or repeal any legislation passed by the territory parliaments.[204]
+
+Under the constitution, the states essentially have plenary legislative power to legislate on any subject, whereas the Commonwealth (federal) Parliament may legislate only within the subject areas enumerated under section 51. For example, state parliaments have the power to legislate with respect to education, criminal law and state police, health, transport, and local government, but the Commonwealth Parliament does not have any specific power to legislate in these areas.[205] However, Commonwealth laws prevail over state laws to the extent of the inconsistency.[206] In addition, the Commonwealth has the power to levy income tax which, coupled with the power to make grants to States, has given it the financial means to incentivise States to pursue specific legislative agendas within areas over which the Commonwealth does not have legislative power.
+
+Each state and major mainland territory has its own parliament—unicameral in the Northern Territory, the ACT and Queensland, and bicameral in the other states. The states are sovereign entities, although subject to certain powers of the Commonwealth as defined by the Constitution. The lower houses are known as the Legislative Assembly (the House of Assembly in South Australia and Tasmania); the upper houses are known as the Legislative Council. The head of the government in each state is the Premier and in each territory the Chief Minister. The Queen is represented in each state by a governor; and in the Northern Territory, the administrator.[207] In the Commonwealth, the Queen's representative is the governor-general.[208]
+
+The Commonwealth Parliament also directly administers the external territories of Ashmore and Cartier Islands, the Australian Antarctic Territory, Christmas Island, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, the Coral Sea Islands, and Heard Island and McDonald Islands, as well as the internal Jervis Bay Territory, a naval base and sea port for the national capital in land that was formerly part of New South Wales.[189] The external territory of Norfolk Island previously exercised considerable autonomy under the Norfolk Island Act 1979 through its own legislative assembly and an Administrator to represent the Queen.[209] In 2015, the Commonwealth Parliament abolished self-government, integrating Norfolk Island into the Australian tax and welfare systems and replacing its legislative assembly with a council.[210] Macquarie Island is part of Tasmania,[211] and Lord Howe Island of New South Wales.[212]
+
+Over recent decades, Australia's foreign relations have been driven by a close association with the United States through the ANZUS pact, and by a desire to develop relationships with Asia and the Pacific, particularly through ASEAN, the Pacific Islands Forum and the Pacific Community, of which Australia is a founding member. In 2005 Australia secured an inaugural seat at the East Asia Summit following its accession to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia, and in 2011 attended the Sixth East Asia Summit in Indonesia. Australia is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, in which the Commonwealth Heads of Government meetings provide the main forum for co-operation.[213] Australia has pursued the cause of international trade liberalisation.[214] It led the formation of the Cairns Group and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.[215][216]
+
+Australia is a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Trade Organization,[217][218] and has pursued several major bilateral free trade agreements, most recently the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement[219] and Closer Economic Relations with New Zealand,[220] with another free trade agreement being negotiated with China—the Australia–China Free Trade Agreement—and Japan,[221] South Korea in 2011,[222][223] Australia–Chile Free Trade Agreement, and as of November 2015[update] has put the Trans-Pacific Partnership before parliament for ratification.[224]
+
+Australia maintains a deeply integrated relationship with neighbouring New Zealand, with free mobility of citizens between the two countries under the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement and free trade under the 
+Australia–New Zealand Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement.[225] New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom are the most favourably viewed countries in the world by Australian people,[226][227] sharing a number of close diplomatic, military and cultural ties with Australia.
+
+Along with New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Malaysia and Singapore, Australia is party to the Five Power Defence Arrangements, a regional defence agreement. A founding member country of the United Nations, Australia is strongly committed to multilateralism[228] and maintains an international aid program under which some 60 countries receive assistance. The 2005–06 budget provides A$2.5 billion for development assistance.[229] Australia ranks fifteenth overall in the Center for Global Development's 2012 Commitment to Development Index.[230]
+
+Australia's armed forces—the Australian Defence Force (ADF)—comprise the Royal Australian Navy (RAN), the Australian Army and the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), in total numbering 81,214 personnel (including 57,982 regulars and 23,232 reservists) as of November 2015[update]. The titular role of Commander-in-Chief is vested in the Governor-General, who appoints a Chief of the Defence Force from one of the armed services on the advice of the government.[231] Day-to-day force operations are under the command of the Chief, while broader administration and the formulation of defence policy is undertaken by the Minister and Department of Defence.
+
+In the 2016–17 budget, defence spending comprised 2% of GDP, representing the world's 12th largest defence budget.[232] Australia has been involved in UN and regional peacekeeping, disaster relief and armed conflict, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq; it currently has deployed about 2,241 personnel in varying capacities to 12 international operations in areas including Iraq and Afghanistan.[233]
+
+A wealthy country, Australia has a market economy, a high GDP per capita, and a relatively low rate of poverty. In terms of average wealth, Australia ranked second in the world after Switzerland from 2013 until 2018.[235] In 2018, Australia overtook Switzerland and became the country with the highest average wealth.[235] Australia's poverty rate increased from 10.2% to 11.8%, from 2000/01 to 2013.[236][237] It was identified by the Credit Suisse Research Institute as the nation with the highest median wealth in the world and the second-highest average wealth per adult in 2013.[236]
+
+The Australian dollar is the currency for the nation, including Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and Norfolk Island, as well as the independent Pacific Island states of Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu. With the 2006 merger of the Australian Stock Exchange and the Sydney Futures Exchange, the Australian Securities Exchange became the ninth largest in the world.[238]
+
+Ranked fifth in the Index of Economic Freedom (2017),[239] Australia is the world's 14th largest economy and has the tenth highest per capita GDP (nominal) at US$55,692.[240] The country was ranked third in the United Nations 2017 Human Development Index.[241] Melbourne reached top spot for the fourth year in a row on The Economist's 2014 list of the world's most liveable cities,[242] followed by Adelaide, Sydney, and Perth in the fifth, seventh, and ninth places respectively. Total government debt in Australia is about A$190 billion[243]—20% of GDP in 2010.[244] Australia has among the highest house prices and some of the highest household debt levels in the world.[245]
+
+An emphasis on exporting commodities rather than manufactured goods has underpinned a significant increase in Australia's terms of trade since the start of the 21st century, due to rising commodity prices. Australia has a balance of payments that is more than 7% of GDP negative, and has had persistently large current account deficits for more than 50 years.[246] Australia has grown at an average annual rate of 3.6% for over 15 years, in comparison to the OECD annual average of 2.5%.[246]
+
+Australia was the only advanced economy not to experience a recession due to the global financial downturn in 2008–2009.[247] However, the economies of six of Australia's major trading partners have been in recession[when?], which in turn has affected Australia, significantly hampering its economic growth in recent years[when?].[248][249] From 2012 to early 2013, Australia's national economy grew, but some non-mining states and Australia's non-mining economy experienced a recession.[250][251][252]
+
+The Hawke Government floated the Australian dollar in 1983 and partially deregulated the financial system.[253] The Howard Government followed with a partial deregulation of the labour market and the further privatisation of state-owned businesses, most notably in the telecommunications industry.[254] The indirect tax system was substantially changed in July 2000 with the introduction of a 10% Goods and Services Tax (GST).[255] In Australia's tax system, personal and company income tax are the main sources of government revenue.[256]
+
+As of September 2018[update], there were 12,640,800 people employed (either full- or part-time), with an unemployment rate of 5.2%.[257] Data released in mid-November 2013 showed that the number of welfare recipients had grown by 55%. In 2007 228,621 Newstart unemployment allowance recipients were registered, a total that increased to 646,414 in March 2013.[258] According to the Graduate Careers Survey, full-time employment for newly qualified professionals from various occupations has declined since 2011 but it increases for graduates three years after graduation.[259][260]
+
+Since 2008[when?], inflation has typically been 2–3% and the base interest rate 5–6%. The service sector of the economy, including tourism, education, and financial services, accounts for about 70% of GDP.[261] Rich in natural resources, Australia is a major exporter of agricultural products, particularly wheat and wool, minerals such as iron-ore and gold, and energy in the forms of liquified natural gas and coal. Although agriculture and natural resources account for only 3% and 5% of GDP respectively, they contribute substantially to export performance. Australia's largest export markets are Japan, China, the United States, South Korea, and New Zealand.[262] Australia is the world's fourth largest exporter of wine, and the wine industry contributes A$5.5 billion per year to the nation's economy.[263]
+
+Access to biocapacity in Australia is much higher than world average. In 2016, Australia had 12.3 global hectares[264] of biocapacity per person within its territory, much more than the world average of 1.6 global hectares per person.[265] In 2016 Australia used 6.6 global hectares of biocapacity per person – their ecological footprint of consumption. This means they use half as much biocapacity as Australia contains. As a result, Australia is running a biocapacity reserve.[264]
+
+In 2020 ACOSS released a new report revealing that poverty is growing in Australia, with an estimated 3.2 million people, or 13.6% of the population, living below the internationally accepted poverty line of 50% of a country's median income. It also estimated that there are 774,000 (17.7%) children under the age of 15 that are in poverty.[266][267]
+
+Australia has an average population density of 3.3 persons per square kilometre of total land area, which makes it is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. The population is heavily concentrated on the east coast, and in particular in the south-eastern region between South East Queensland to the north-east and Adelaide to the south-west.[268]
+
+Australia is highly urbanised, with 67% of the population living in the Greater Capital City Statistical Areas (metropolitan areas of the state and mainland territorial capital cities) in 2018.[269] Metropolitan areas with more than one million inhabitants are Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.
+
+In common with many other developed countries, Australia is experiencing a demographic shift towards an older population, with more retirees and fewer people of working age. In 2018 the average age of the Australian population was 38.8 years.[270] In 2015, 2.15% of the Australian population lived overseas, one of the lowest proportions worldwide.[271]
+
+Between 1788 and the Second World War, the vast majority of settlers and immigrants came from the British Isles (principally England, Ireland and Scotland), although there was significant immigration from China and Germany during the 19th century. In the decades immediately following the Second World War, Australia received a large wave of immigration from across Europe, with many more immigrants arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe than in previous decades. Since the end of the White Australia policy in 1973, Australia has pursued an official policy of multiculturalism,[274] and there has been a large and continuing wave of immigration from across the world, with Asia being the largest source of immigrants in the 21st century.[275]
+
+Today, Australia has the world's eighth-largest immigrant population, with immigrants accounting for 30% of the population, a higher proportion than in any other nation with a population of over 10 million.[27][276] 160,323 permanent immigrants were admitted to Australia in 2018–19 (excluding refugees),[275] whilst there was a net population gain of 239,600 people from all permanent and temporary immigration in that year.[277] The majority of immigrants are skilled,[275] but the immigration program includes categories for family members and refugees.[277] In 2019 the largest foreign-born populations were those born in England (3.9%), Mainland China (2.7%), India (2.6%), New Zealand (2.2%), the Philippines (1.2%) and Vietnam (1%).[27]
+
+In the 2016 Australian census, the most commonly nominated ancestries were:[N 9][278][279]
+
+At the 2016 census, 649,171 people (2.8% of the total population) identified as being Indigenous—Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders.[N 12][281] Indigenous Australians experience higher than average rates of imprisonment and unemployment, lower levels of education, and life expectancies for males and females that are, respectively, 11 and 17 years lower than those of non-indigenous Australians.[262][282][283] Some remote Indigenous communities have been described as having "failed state"-like conditions.[284]
+
+Although Australia has no official language, English is the de facto national language.[2] Australian English is a major variety of the language with a distinctive accent and lexicon,[285] and differs slightly from other varieties of English in grammar and spelling.[286] General Australian serves as the standard dialect.
+
+According to the 2016 census, English is the only language spoken in the home for 72.7% of the population. The next most common languages spoken at home are Mandarin (2.5%), Arabic (1.4%), Cantonese (1.2%), Vietnamese (1.2%) and Italian (1.2%).[278] A considerable proportion of first- and second-generation migrants are bilingual.
+
+Over 250 Indigenous Australian languages are thought to have existed at the time of first European contact,[287] of which fewer than twenty are still in daily use by all age groups.[288][289] About 110 others are spoken exclusively by older people.[289] At the time of the 2006 census, 52,000 Indigenous Australians, representing 12% of the Indigenous population, reported that they spoke an Indigenous language at home.[290] Australia has a sign language known as Auslan, which is the main language of about 10,112 deaf people who reported that they spoke Auslan language at home in the 2016 census.[291]
+
+Australia has no state religion; Section 116 of the Australian Constitution prohibits the federal government from making any law to establish any religion, impose any religious observance, or prohibit the free exercise of any religion.[293] In the 2016 census, 52.1% of Australians were counted as Christian, including 22.6% as Catholic and 13.3% as Anglican; 30.1% of the population reported having "no religion"; 8.2% identify with non-Christian religions, the largest of these being Islam (2.6%), followed by Buddhism (2.4%), Hinduism (1.9%), Sikhism (0.5%) and Judaism (0.4%). The remaining 9.7% of the population did not provide an adequate answer. Those who reported having no religion increased conspicuously from 19% in 2006 to 22% in 2011 to 30.1% in 2016.[292]
+
+Before European settlement, the animist beliefs of Australia's indigenous people had been practised for many thousands of years. Mainland Aboriginal Australians' spirituality is known as the Dreamtime and it places a heavy emphasis on belonging to the land. The collection of stories that it contains shaped Aboriginal law and customs. Aboriginal art, story and dance continue to draw on these spiritual traditions. The spirituality and customs of Torres Strait Islanders, who inhabit the islands between Australia and New Guinea, reflected their Melanesian origins and dependence on the sea. The 1996 Australian census counted more than 7000 respondents as followers of a traditional Aboriginal religion.[294]
+
+Since the arrival of the First Fleet of British ships in 1788, Christianity has become the major religion practised in Australia. Christian churches have played an integral role in the development of education, health and welfare services in Australia. For much of Australian history, the Church of England (now known as the Anglican Church of Australia) was the largest religious denomination, with a large Roman Catholic minority. However, multicultural immigration has contributed to a steep decline in its relative position since the Second World War. Similarly, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism and Judaism have all grown in Australia over the past half-century.[295]
+
+Australia has one of the lowest levels of religious adherence in the world.[296] In 2001, only 8.8% of Australians attended church on a weekly basis.[297]
+
+Australia's life expectancy is the third highest in the world for males and the seventh highest for females.[298] Life expectancy in Australia in 2010 was 79.5 years for males and 84.0 years for females.[299] Australia has the highest rates of skin cancer in the world,[300] while cigarette smoking is the largest preventable cause of death and disease, responsible for 7.8% of the total mortality and disease. Ranked second in preventable causes is hypertension at 7.6%, with obesity third at 7.5%.[301][302] Australia ranks 35th in the world[303] and near the top of developed nations for its proportion of obese adults[304] and nearly two thirds (63%) of its adult population is either overweight or obese.[305]
+
+Total expenditure on health (including private sector spending) is around 9.8% of GDP.[306] Australia introduced universal health care in 1975.[307] Known as Medicare, it is now nominally funded by an income tax surcharge known as the Medicare levy, currently set at 2%.[308] The states manage hospitals and attached outpatient services, while the Commonwealth funds the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (subsidising the costs of medicines) and general practice.[307]
+
+School attendance, or registration for home schooling,[310] is compulsory throughout Australia. Education is the responsibility of the individual states and territories[311] so the rules vary between states, but in general children are required to attend school from the age of about 5 until about 16.[312][313] In some states (e.g., Western Australia,[314] the Northern Territory[315] and New South Wales[316][317]), children aged 16–17 are required to either attend school or participate in vocational training, such as an apprenticeship.
+
+Australia has an adult literacy rate that was estimated to be 99% in 2003.[318] However, a 2011–12 report for the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that Tasmania has a literacy and numeracy rate of only 50%.[319] In the Programme for International Student Assessment, Australia regularly scores among the top five of thirty major developed countries (member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Catholic education accounts for the largest non-government sector.
+
+Australia has 37 government-funded universities and two private universities, as well as a number of other specialist institutions that provide approved courses at the higher education level.[320] The OECD places Australia among the most expensive nations to attend university.[321] There is a state-based system of vocational training, known as TAFE, and many trades conduct apprenticeships for training new tradespeople.[322] About 58% of Australians aged from 25 to 64 have vocational or tertiary qualifications,[262] and the tertiary graduation rate of 49% is the highest among OECD countries. 30.9 percent of Australia's population has attained a higher education qualification, which is among the highest percentages in the world.[323][324][325]
+
+Australia has the highest ratio of international students per head of population in the world by a large margin, with 812,000 international students enrolled in the nation's universities and vocational institutions in 2019.[326][327] Accordingly, in 2019, international students represented on average 26.7% of the student bodies of Australian universities.  International education therefore represents one of the country's largest exports and has a pronounced influence on the country's demographics, with a significant proportion of international students remaining in Australia after graduation on various skill and employment visas.[328]
+
+Since 1788, the primary influence behind Australian culture has been Anglo-Celtic Western culture, with some Indigenous influences.[330][331] The divergence and evolution that has occurred in the ensuing centuries has resulted in a distinctive Australian culture.[332][333] The culture of the United States has also been highly influential, particularly through television and cinema. Other cultural influences come from neighbouring Asian countries, and through large-scale immigration from non-English-speaking nations.[334]
+
+Australia has over 100,000 Aboriginal rock art sites,[335] and traditional designs, patterns and stories infuse contemporary Indigenous Australian art, "the last great art movement of the 20th century" according to critic Robert Hughes;[336] its exponents include Emily Kame Kngwarreye.[337] Early colonial artists showed a fascination with the unfamiliar land.[338] The impressionistic works of Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and other members of the 19th-century Heidelberg School—the first "distinctively Australian" movement in Western art—gave expression to nationalist sentiments in the lead-up to Federation.[338] While the school remained influential into the 1900s, modernists such as Margaret Preston, and, later, Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, explored new artistic trends.[338] The landscape remained a central subject matter for Fred Williams, Brett Whiteley and other post-war artists whose works, eclectic in style yet uniquely Australian, moved between the figurative and the abstract.[338][339] The national and state galleries maintain collections of local and international art.[340] Australia has one of the world's highest attendances of art galleries and museums per head of population.[341]
+
+Australian literature grew slowly in the decades following European settlement though Indigenous oral traditions, many of which have since been recorded in writing, are much older.[343] In the 1870s, Adam Lindsay Gordon posthumously became the first Australian poet to attain a wide readership. Following in his footsteps, Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson captured the experience of the bush using a distinctive Australian vocabulary.[344] Their works are still popular; Paterson's bush poem "Waltzing Matilda" (1895) is regarded as Australia's unofficial national anthem.[345] Miles Franklin is the namesake of Australia's most prestigious literary prize, awarded annually to the best novel about Australian life.[346] Its first recipient, Patrick White, went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973.[347] Australian Booker Prize winners include Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally and Richard Flanagan.[348] Author David Malouf, playwright David Williamson and poet Les Murray are also renowned.[349][350]
+
+Many of Australia's performing arts companies receive funding through the federal government's Australia Council.[351] There is a symphony orchestra in each state,[352] and a national opera company, Opera Australia,[353] well known for its famous soprano Joan Sutherland.[354] At the beginning of the 20th century, Nellie Melba was one of the world's leading opera singers.[355] Ballet and dance are represented by The Australian Ballet and various state companies. Each state has a publicly funded theatre company.[356]
+
+The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), the world's first feature-length narrative film, spurred a boom in Australian cinema during the silent film era.[357] After World War I, Hollywood monopolised the industry,[358] and by the 1960s Australian film production had effectively ceased.[359] With the benefit of government support, the Australian New Wave of the 1970s brought provocative and successful films, many exploring themes of national identity, such as Wake in Fright and Gallipoli,[360] while Crocodile Dundee and the Ozploitation movement's Mad Max series became international blockbusters.[361] In a film market flooded with foreign content, Australian films delivered a 7.7% share of the local box office in 2015.[362] The AACTAs are Australia's premier film and television awards, and notable Academy Award winners from Australia include Geoffrey Rush, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger.[363]
+
+Australia has two public broadcasters (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the multicultural Special Broadcasting Service), three commercial television networks, several pay-TV services,[364] and numerous public, non-profit television and radio stations. Each major city has at least one daily newspaper,[364] and there are two national daily newspapers, The Australian and The Australian Financial Review.[364] In 2010, Reporters Without Borders placed Australia 18th on a list of 178 countries ranked by press freedom, behind New Zealand (8th) but ahead of the United Kingdom (19th) and United States (20th).[365] This relatively low ranking is primarily because of the limited diversity of commercial media ownership in Australia;[366] most print media are under the control of News Corporation and, after Fairfax Media was merged with Nine, Nine Entertainment Co.[367]
+
+Most Indigenous Australian groups subsisted on a simple hunter-gatherer diet of native fauna and flora, otherwise called bush tucker.[368] The first settlers introduced British food to the continent, much of which is now considered typical Australian food, such as the Sunday roast.[369][370] Multicultural immigration transformed Australian cuisine; post-World War II European migrants, particularly from the Mediterranean, helped to build a thriving Australian coffee culture, and the influence of Asian cultures has led to Australian variants of their staple foods, such as the Chinese-inspired dim sim and Chiko Roll.[371] Vegemite, pavlova, lamingtons and meat pies are regarded as iconic Australian foods.[372] Australian wine is produced mainly in the southern, cooler parts of the country.
+
+Australia is also known for its cafe and coffee culture in urban centres, which has influenced coffee culture abroad, including New York City.[373] Australia was responsible for the flat white coffee–purported to have originated in a Sydney cafe in the mid-1980s.[374]
+
+Cricket and football are the predominate sports in Australia during the summer and winter months, respectively. Australia is unique in that it has professional leagues for four football codes. Originating in Melbourne in the 1850s, Australian rules football is the most popular code in all states except New South Wales and Queensland, where rugby league holds sway, followed by rugby union. Soccer, while ranked fourth in popularity and resources, has the highest overall participation rates.[376] Cricket is popular across all borders and has been regarded by many Australians as the national sport. The Australian national cricket team competed against England in the first Test match (1877) and the first One Day International (1971), and against New Zealand in the first Twenty20 International (2004), winning all three games. It has also participated in every edition of the Cricket World Cup, winning the tournament a record five times.[377]
+
+Australia is a powerhouse in water-based sports, such as swimming and surfing.[378] The surf lifesaving movement originated in Australia, and the volunteer lifesaver is one of the country's icons.[379] Nationally, other popular sports include horse racing, basketball, and motor racing. The annual Melbourne Cup horse race and the Sydney to Hobart yacht race attract intense interest.[380] In 2016, the Australian Sports Commission revealed that swimming, cycling and soccer are the three most popular participation sports.[381][382]
+
+Australia is one of five nations to have participated in every Summer Olympics of the modern era,[383] and has hosted the Games twice: 1956 in Melbourne and 2000 in Sydney.[384] Australia has also participated in every Commonwealth Games,[385] hosting the event in 1938, 1962, 1982, 2006 and 2018.[386] Australia made its inaugural appearance at the Pacific Games in 2015. As well as being a regular FIFA World Cup participant, Australia has won the OFC Nations Cup four times and the AFC Asian Cup once—the only country to have won championships in two different FIFA confederations.[387] In June 2020, Australia won its bid to co-host the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup with New Zealand.[388][389]  The country regularly competes among the world elite basketball teams as it is among the global top three teams in terms of qualifications to the Basketball Tournament at the Summer Olympics. Other major international events held in Australia include the Australian Open tennis grand slam tournament, international cricket matches, and the Australian Formula One Grand Prix. The highest-rating television programs include sports telecasts such as the Summer Olympics, FIFA World Cup, The Ashes, Rugby League State of Origin, and the grand finals of the National Rugby League and Australian Football League.[390] Skiing in Australia began in the 1860s and snow sports take place in the Australian Alps and parts of Tasmania.
+

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+State may refer to:

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+Solid is one of the four fundamental states of matter (the others being liquid, gas and plasma). The molecules in a solid are closely packed together and contain the least amount of kinetic energy. A solid is characterized by structural rigidity and resistance to a force applied to the surface. Unlike a liquid, a solid object does not flow to take on the shape of its container, nor does it expand to fill the entire available volume like a gas. The atoms in a solid are bound to each other, either in a regular geometric lattice (crystalline solids, which include metals and ordinary ice), or irregularly (an amorphous solid such as common window glass). Solids cannot be compressed with little pressure whereas gases can be compressed with little pressure because the molecules in a gas are loosely packed.
+
+The branch of physics that deals with solids is called solid-state physics, and is the main branch of condensed matter physics (which also includes liquids). Materials science is primarily concerned with the physical and chemical properties of solids. Solid-state chemistry is especially concerned with the synthesis of novel materials, as well as the science of identification and chemical composition.
+
+The atoms, molecules or ions that make up solids may be arranged in an orderly repeating pattern, or irregularly. Materials whose constituents are arranged in a regular pattern are known as crystals. In some cases, the regular ordering can continue unbroken over a large scale, for example diamonds, where each diamond is a single crystal. Solid objects that are large enough to see and handle are rarely composed of a single crystal, but instead are made of a large number of single crystals, known as crystallites, whose size can vary from a few nanometers to several meters. Such materials are called polycrystalline. Almost all common metals, and many ceramics, are polycrystalline.
+
+In other materials, there is no long-range order in the position of the atoms. These solids are known as amorphous solids; examples include polystyrene and glass.
+
+Whether a solid is crystalline or amorphous depends on the material involved, and the conditions in which it was formed. Solids that are formed by slow cooling will tend to be crystalline, while solids that are frozen rapidly are more likely to be amorphous. Likewise, the specific crystal structure adopted by a crystalline solid depends on the material involved and on how it was formed.
+
+While many common objects, such as an ice cube or a coin, are chemically identical throughout, many other common materials comprise a number of different substances packed together. For example, a typical rock is an aggregate of several different minerals and mineraloids, with no specific chemical composition. Wood is a natural organic material consisting primarily of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of organic lignin. In materials science, composites of more than one constituent material can be designed to have desired properties.
+
+The forces between the atoms in a solid can take a variety of forms. For example, a crystal of sodium chloride (common salt) is made up of ionic sodium and chlorine, which are held together by ionic bonds.[1] In diamond[2] or silicon, the atoms share electrons and form covalent bonds.[3] In metals, electrons are shared in metallic bonding.[4] Some solids, particularly most organic compounds, are held together with van der Waals forces resulting from the polarization of the electronic charge cloud on each molecule. The dissimilarities between the types of solid result from the differences between their bonding.
+
+Metals typically are strong, dense, and good conductors of both electricity and heat.[5][6] 
+The bulk of the elements in the periodic table, those to the left of a diagonal line drawn from boron to polonium, are metals.
+Mixtures of two or more elements in which the major component is a metal are known as alloys.
+
+People have been using metals for a variety of purposes since prehistoric times.
+The strength and reliability of metals has led to their widespread use in construction of buildings and other structures, as well as in most vehicles, many appliances and tools, pipes, road signs and railroad tracks. Iron and aluminium are the two most commonly used structural metals. They are also the most abundant metals in the Earth's crust. Iron is most commonly used in the form of an alloy, steel, which contains up to 2.1% carbon, making it much harder than pure iron.
+
+Because metals are good conductors of electricity, they are valuable in electrical appliances and for carrying an electric current over long distances with little energy loss or dissipation. Thus, electrical power grids rely on metal cables to distribute electricity. Home electrical systems, for example, are wired with copper for its good conducting properties and easy machinability. The high thermal conductivity of most metals also makes them useful for stovetop cooking utensils.
+
+The study of metallic elements and their alloys makes up a significant portion of the fields of solid-state chemistry, physics, materials science and engineering.
+
+Metallic solids are held together by a high density of shared, delocalized electrons, known as "metallic bonding". In a metal, atoms readily lose their outermost ("valence") electrons, forming positive ions. The free electrons are spread over the entire solid, which is held together firmly by electrostatic interactions between the ions and the electron cloud.[7] The large number of free electrons gives metals their high values of electrical and thermal conductivity. The free electrons also prevent transmission of visible light, making metals opaque, shiny and lustrous.
+
+More advanced models of metal properties consider the effect of the positive ions cores on the delocalised electrons. As most metals have crystalline structure, those ions are usually arranged into a periodic lattice. Mathematically, the potential of the ion cores can be treated by various models, the simplest being the nearly free electron model.
+
+Minerals are naturally occurring solids formed through various geological processes[8] under high pressures. To be classified as a true mineral, a substance must have a crystal structure with uniform physical properties throughout. Minerals range in composition from pure elements and simple salts to very complex silicates with thousands of known forms. In contrast, a rock sample is a random aggregate of minerals and/or mineraloids, and has no specific chemical composition. The vast majority of the rocks of the Earth's crust consist of quartz (crystalline SiO2), feldspar, mica, chlorite, kaolin, calcite, epidote, olivine, augite, hornblende, magnetite, hematite, limonite and a few other minerals. Some minerals, like quartz, mica or feldspar are common, while others have been found in only a few locations worldwide. The largest group of minerals by far is the silicates (most rocks are ≥95% silicates), which are composed largely of silicon and oxygen, with the addition of ions of aluminium, magnesium, iron, calcium and other metals.
+
+Ceramic solids are composed of inorganic compounds, usually oxides of chemical elements.[9] They are chemically inert, and often are capable of withstanding chemical erosion that occurs in an acidic or caustic environment. Ceramics generally can withstand high temperatures ranging from 1000 to 1600 °C (1800 to 3000 °F). Exceptions include non-oxide inorganic materials, such as nitrides, borides and carbides.
+
+Traditional ceramic raw materials include clay minerals such as kaolinite, more recent materials include aluminium oxide (alumina). The modern ceramic materials, which are classified as advanced ceramics, include silicon carbide and tungsten carbide. Both are valued for their abrasion resistance, and hence find use in such applications as the wear plates of crushing equipment in mining operations.
+
+Most ceramic materials, such as alumina and its compounds, are formed from fine powders, yielding a fine grained polycrystalline microstructure that is filled with light-scattering centers comparable to the wavelength of visible light. Thus, they are generally opaque materials, as opposed to transparent materials. Recent nanoscale (e.g. sol-gel) technology has, however, made possible the production of polycrystalline transparent ceramics such as transparent alumina and alumina compounds for such applications as high-power lasers. Advanced ceramics are also used in the medicine, electrical and electronics industries.
+
+Ceramic engineering is the science and technology of creating solid-state ceramic materials, parts and devices. This is done either by the action of heat, or, at lower temperatures, using precipitation reactions from chemical solutions. The term includes the purification of raw materials, the study and production of the chemical compounds concerned, their formation into components, and the study of their structure, composition and properties.
+
+Mechanically speaking, ceramic materials are brittle, hard, strong in compression and weak in shearing and tension. Brittle materials may exhibit significant tensile strength by supporting a static load. Toughness indicates how much energy a material can absorb before mechanical failure, while fracture toughness (denoted KIc ) describes the ability of a material with inherent microstructural flaws to resist fracture via crack growth and propagation. If a material has a large value of fracture toughness, the basic principles of fracture mechanics suggest that it will most likely undergo ductile fracture. Brittle fracture is very characteristic of most ceramic and glass-ceramic materials that typically exhibit low (and inconsistent) values of KIc.
+
+For an example of applications of ceramics, the extreme hardness of zirconia is utilized in the manufacture of knife blades, as well as other industrial cutting tools. Ceramics such as alumina, boron carbide and silicon carbide have been used in bulletproof vests to repel large-caliber rifle fire. Silicon nitride parts are used in ceramic ball bearings, where their high hardness makes them wear resistant. In general, ceramics are also chemically resistant and can be used in wet environments where steel bearings would be susceptible to oxidation (or rust).
+
+As another example of ceramic applications, in the early 1980s, Toyota researched production of an adiabatic ceramic engine with an operating temperature of over 6000 °F (3300 °C). Ceramic engines do not require a cooling system and hence allow a major weight reduction and therefore greater fuel efficiency. In a conventional metallic engine, much of the energy released from the fuel must be dissipated as waste heat in order to prevent a meltdown of the metallic parts. Work is also being done in developing ceramic parts for gas turbine engines. Turbine engines made with ceramics could operate more efficiently, giving aircraft greater range and payload for a set amount of fuel. Such engines are not in production, however, because the manufacturing of ceramic parts in the sufficient precision and durability is difficult and costly. Processing methods often result in a wide distribution of microscopic flaws that frequently play a detrimental role in the sintering process, resulting in the proliferation of cracks, and ultimate mechanical failure.
+
+Glass-ceramic materials share many properties with both non-crystalline glasses and crystalline ceramics. They are formed as a glass, and then partially crystallized by heat treatment, producing both amorphous and crystalline phases so that crystalline grains are embedded within a non-crystalline intergranular phase.
+
+Glass-ceramics are used to make cookware (originally known by the brand name CorningWare) and stovetops that have both high resistance to thermal shock and extremely low permeability to liquids. The negative coefficient of thermal expansion of the crystalline ceramic phase can be balanced with the positive coefficient of the glassy phase. At a certain point (~70% crystalline) the glass-ceramic has a net coefficient of thermal expansion close to zero. This type of glass-ceramic exhibits excellent mechanical properties and can sustain repeated and quick temperature changes up to 1000 °C.
+
+Glass ceramics may also occur naturally when lightning strikes the crystalline (e.g. quartz) grains found in most beach sand. In this case, the extreme and immediate heat of the lightning (~2500 °C) creates hollow, branching rootlike structures called fulgurite via fusion.
+
+Organic chemistry studies the structure, properties, composition, reactions, and preparation by synthesis (or other means) of chemical compounds of carbon and hydrogen, which may contain any number of other elements such as nitrogen, oxygen and the halogens: fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine. Some organic compounds may also contain the elements phosphorus or sulfur. Examples of organic solids include wood, paraffin wax, naphthalene and a wide variety of polymers and plastics.
+
+Wood is a natural organic material consisting primarily of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of lignin. Regarding mechanical properties, the fibers are strong in tension, and the lignin matrix resists compression. Thus wood has been an important construction material since humans began building shelters and using boats. Wood to be used for construction work is commonly known as lumber or timber. In construction, wood is not only a structural material, but is also used to form the mould for concrete.
+
+Wood-based materials are also extensively used for packaging (e.g. cardboard) and paper, which are both created from the refined pulp. The chemical pulping processes use a combination of high temperature and alkaline (kraft) or acidic (sulfite) chemicals to break the chemical bonds of the lignin before burning it out.
+
+One important property of carbon in organic chemistry is that it can form certain compounds, the individual molecules of which are capable of attaching themselves to one another, thereby forming a chain or a network. The process is called polymerization and the chains or networks polymers, while the source compound is a monomer. Two main groups of polymers exist: those artificially manufactured are referred to as industrial polymers or synthetic polymers (plastics) and those naturally occurring as biopolymers.
+
+Monomers can have various chemical substituents, or functional groups, which can affect the chemical properties of organic compounds, such as solubility and chemical reactivity, as well as the physical properties, such as hardness, density, mechanical or tensile strength, abrasion resistance, heat resistance, transparency, color, etc.. In proteins, these differences give the polymer the ability to adopt a biologically active conformation in preference to others (see self-assembly).
+
+People have been using natural organic polymers for centuries in the form of waxes and shellac, which is classified as a thermoplastic polymer. A plant polymer named cellulose provided the tensile strength for natural fibers and ropes, and by the early 19th century natural rubber was in widespread use. Polymers are the raw materials (the resins) used to make what are commonly called plastics. Plastics are the final product, created after one or more polymers or additives have been added to a resin during processing, which is then shaped into a final form. Polymers that have been around, and that are in current widespread use, include carbon-based polyethylene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, polystyrene, nylons, polyesters, acrylics, polyurethane, and polycarbonates, and silicon-based silicones. Plastics are generally classified as "commodity", "specialty" and "engineering" plastics.
+
+Composite materials contain two or more macroscopic phases, one of which is often ceramic. For example, a continuous matrix, and a dispersed phase of ceramic particles or fibers.
+
+Applications of composite materials range from structural elements such as steel-reinforced concrete, to the thermally insulative tiles that play a key and integral role in NASA's Space Shuttle thermal protection system, which is used to protect the surface of the shuttle from the heat of re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. One example is Reinforced Carbon-Carbon (RCC), the light gray material that withstands reentry temperatures up to 1510 °C (2750 °F) and protects the nose cap and leading edges of Space Shuttle's wings. RCC is a laminated composite material made from graphite rayon cloth and impregnated with a phenolic resin. After curing at high temperature in an autoclave, the laminate is pyrolized to convert the resin to carbon, impregnated with furfural alcohol in a vacuum chamber, and cured/pyrolized to convert the furfural alcohol to carbon. In order to provide oxidation resistance for reuse capability, the outer layers of the RCC are converted to silicon carbide.
+
+Domestic examples of composites can be seen in the "plastic" casings of television sets, cell-phones and so on. These plastic casings are usually a composite made up of a thermoplastic matrix such as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) in which calcium carbonate chalk, talc, glass fibers or carbon fibers have been added for strength, bulk, or electro-static dispersion. These additions may be referred to as reinforcing fibers, or dispersants, depending on their purpose.
+
+Thus, the matrix material surrounds and supports the reinforcement materials by maintaining their relative positions. The reinforcements impart their special mechanical and physical properties to enhance the matrix properties. A synergism produces material properties unavailable from the individual constituent materials, while the wide variety of matrix and strengthening materials provides the designer with the choice of an optimum combination.
+
+Semiconductors are materials that have an electrical resistivity (and conductivity) between that of metallic conductors and non-metallic insulators. They can be found in the periodic table moving diagonally downward right from boron. They separate the electrical conductors (or metals, to the left) from the insulators (to the right).
+
+Devices made from semiconductor materials are the foundation of modern electronics, including radio, computers, telephones, etc. Semiconductor devices include the transistor, solar cells, diodes and integrated circuits. Solar photovoltaic panels are large semiconductor devices that directly convert light into electrical energy.
+
+In a metallic conductor, current is carried by the flow of electrons", but in semiconductors, current can be carried either by electrons or by the positively charged "holes" in the electronic band structure of the material. Common semiconductor materials include silicon, germanium and gallium arsenide.
+
+Many traditional solids exhibit different properties when they shrink to nanometer sizes. For example, nanoparticles of usually yellow gold and gray silicon are red in color; gold nanoparticles melt at much lower temperatures (~300 °C for 2.5 nm size) than the gold slabs (1064 °C);[10] and metallic nanowires are much stronger than the corresponding bulk metals.[11][12] The high surface area of nanoparticles makes them extremely attractive for certain applications in the field of energy. For example, platinum metals may provide improvements as automotive fuel catalysts, as well as proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells. Also, ceramic oxides (or cermets) of lanthanum, cerium, manganese and nickel are now being developed as solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC). Lithium, lithium-titanate and tantalum nanoparticles are being applied in lithium ion batteries. Silicon nanoparticles have been shown to dramatically expand the storage capacity of lithium ion batteries during the expansion/contraction cycle. Silicon nanowires cycle without significant degradation and present the potential for use in batteries with greatly expanded storage times. Silicon nanoparticles are also being used in new forms of solar energy cells. Thin film deposition of silicon quantum dots on the polycrystalline silicon substrate of a photovoltaic (solar) cell increases voltage output as much as 60% by fluorescing the incoming light prior to capture. Here again, surface area of the nanoparticles (and thin films) plays a critical role in maximizing the amount of absorbed radiation.
+
+Many natural (or biological) materials are complex composites with remarkable mechanical properties. These complex structures, which have risen from hundreds of million years of evolution, are inspiring materials scientists in the design of novel materials. Their defining characteristics include structural hierarchy, multifunctionality and self-healing capability. Self-organization is also a fundamental feature of many biological materials and the manner by which the structures are assembled from the molecular level up. Thus, self-assembly is emerging as a new strategy in the chemical synthesis of high performance biomaterials.
+
+Physical properties of elements and compounds that provide conclusive evidence of chemical composition include odor, color, volume, density (mass per unit volume), melting point, boiling point, heat capacity, physical form and shape at room temperature (solid, liquid or gas; cubic, trigonal crystals, etc.), hardness, porosity, index of refraction and many others. This section discusses some physical properties of materials in the solid state.
+
+The mechanical properties of materials describe characteristics such as their strength and resistance to deformation. For example, steel beams are used in construction because of their high strength, meaning that they neither break nor bend significantly under the applied load.
+
+Mechanical properties include elasticity and plasticity, tensile strength, compressive strength, shear strength, fracture toughness, ductility (low in brittle materials), and indentation hardness.  Solid mechanics is the study of the behavior of solid matter under external actions such as external forces and temperature changes.
+
+A solid does not exhibit macroscopic flow, as fluids do. Any degree of departure from its original shape is called deformation. The proportion of deformation to original size is called strain. If the applied stress is sufficiently low, almost all solid materials behave in such a way that the strain is directly proportional to the stress (Hooke's law). The coefficient of the proportion is called the modulus of elasticity or Young's modulus. This region of deformation is known as the linearly elastic region. Three models can describe how a solid responds to an applied stress:
+
+Many materials become weaker at high temperatures.  Materials that retain their strength at high temperatures, called refractory materials, are useful for many purposes. For example, glass-ceramics have become extremely useful for countertop cooking, as they exhibit excellent mechanical properties and can sustain repeated and quick temperature changes up to 1000 °C.
+In the aerospace industry, high performance materials used in the design of aircraft and/or spacecraft exteriors must have a high resistance to thermal shock. Thus, synthetic fibers spun out of organic polymers and polymer/ceramic/metal composite materials and fiber-reinforced polymers are now being designed with this purpose in mind.
+
+Because solids have thermal energy, their atoms vibrate about fixed mean positions within the ordered (or disordered) lattice. The spectrum of lattice vibrations in a crystalline or glassy network provides the foundation for the kinetic theory of solids. This motion occurs at the atomic level, and thus cannot be observed or detected without highly specialized equipment, such as that used in spectroscopy.
+
+Thermal properties of solids include thermal conductivity, which is the property of a material that indicates its ability to conduct heat. Solids also have a specific heat capacity, which is the capacity of a material to store energy in the form of heat (or thermal lattice vibrations).
+
+Electrical properties include conductivity, resistance, impedance and capacitance. Electrical conductors such as metals and alloys are contrasted with electrical insulators such as glasses and ceramics. Semiconductors behave somewhere in between. Whereas conductivity in metals is caused by electrons, both electrons and holes contribute to current in semiconductors. Alternatively, ions support electric current in ionic conductors.
+
+Many materials also exhibit superconductivity at low temperatures; they include metallic elements such as tin and aluminium, various metallic alloys, some heavily doped semiconductors, and certain ceramics. The electrical resistivity of most electrical (metallic) conductors generally decreases gradually as the temperature is lowered, but remains finite. In a superconductor, however, the resistance drops abruptly to zero when the material is cooled below its critical temperature. An electric current flowing in a loop of superconducting wire can persist indefinitely with no power source.
+
+A dielectric, or electrical insulator, is a substance that is highly resistant to the flow of electric current. A dielectric, such as plastic, tends to concentrate an applied electric field within itself, which property is used in capacitors. A capacitor is an electrical device that can store energy in the electric field between a pair of closely spaced conductors (called 'plates'). When voltage is applied to the capacitor, electric charges of equal magnitude, but opposite polarity, build up on each plate. Capacitors are used in electrical circuits as energy-storage devices, as well as in electronic filters to differentiate between high-frequency and low-frequency signals.
+
+Piezoelectricity is the ability of crystals to generate a voltage in response to an applied mechanical stress. The piezoelectric effect is reversible in that piezoelectric crystals, when subjected to an externally applied voltage, can change shape by a small amount. Polymer materials like rubber, wool, hair, wood fiber, and silk often behave as electrets. For example, the polymer polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) exhibits a piezoelectric response several times larger than the traditional piezoelectric material quartz (crystalline SiO2). The deformation (~0.1%) lends itself to useful technical applications such as high-voltage sources, loudspeakers, lasers, as well as chemical, biological, and acousto-optic sensors and/or transducers.
+
+Materials can transmit (e.g. glass) or reflect (e.g. metals) visible light.
+
+Many materials will transmit some wavelengths while blocking others. For example, window glass is transparent to visible light, but much less so to most of the frequencies of ultraviolet light that cause sunburn. This property is used for frequency-selective optical filters, which can alter the color of incident light.
+
+For some purposes, both the optical and mechanical properties of a material can be of interest. For example, the sensors on an infrared homing ("heat-seeking") missile must be protected by a cover that is transparent to infrared radiation. The current material of choice for high-speed infrared-guided missile domes is single-crystal sapphire. The optical transmission of sapphire does not actually extend to cover the entire mid-infrared range (3–5 µm), but starts to drop off at wavelengths greater than approximately 4.5 µm at room temperature. While the strength of sapphire is better than that of other available mid-range infrared dome materials at room temperature, it weakens above 600 °C. A long-standing trade-off exists between optical bandpass and mechanical durability; new materials such as transparent ceramics or optical nanocomposites may provide improved performance.
+
+Guided lightwave transmission involves the field of fiber optics and the ability of certain glasses to transmit, simultaneously and with low loss of intensity, a range of frequencies (multi-mode optical waveguides) with little interference between them. Optical waveguides are used as components in integrated optical circuits or as the transmission medium in optical communication systems.
+
+A solar cell or photovoltaic cell is a device that converts light energy into electrical energy. Fundamentally, the device needs to fulfill only two functions: photo-generation of charge carriers (electrons and holes) in a light-absorbing material, and separation of the charge carriers to a conductive contact that will transmit the electricity (simply put, carrying electrons off through a metal contact into an external circuit). This conversion is called the photoelectric effect, and the field of research related to solar cells is known as photovoltaics.
+
+Solar cells have many applications. They have long been used in situations where electrical power from the grid is unavailable, such as in remote area power systems, Earth-orbiting satellites and space probes, handheld calculators, wrist watches, remote radiotelephones and water pumping applications. More recently, they are starting to be used in assemblies of solar modules (photovoltaic arrays) connected to the electricity grid through an inverter, that is not to act as a sole supply but as an additional electricity source.
+
+All solar cells require a light absorbing material contained within the cell structure to absorb photons and generate electrons via the photovoltaic effect. The materials used in solar cells tend to have the property of preferentially absorbing the wavelengths of solar light that reach the earth surface. Some solar cells are optimized for light absorption beyond Earth's atmosphere, as well.

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+The Papal States (/ˈpeɪpəl/ PAY-pəl; Italian: Stato Pontificio), officially the State of the Church (Italian: Stato della Chiesa, Italian pronunciation: [ˈstaːto della ˈkjeːsa]; Latin: Status Ecclesiasticus;[2] also Dicio Pontificia), were a series of territories in the Italian Peninsula under the direct sovereign rule of the pope, from the 8th century until 1870. They were among the major states of Italy from roughly the 8th century until the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia successfully unified the Italian Peninsula by conquest in a campaign virtually concluded in 1861 and definitively in 1870. At their zenith, the Papal States covered most of the modern Italian regions of Lazio (which includes Rome), Marche, Umbria and Romagna, and portions of Emilia. These holdings were considered to be a manifestation of the temporal power of the pope, as opposed to his ecclesiastical primacy.
+
+By 1861, much of the Papal States' territory had been conquered by the Kingdom of Italy. Only Lazio, including Rome, remained under the pope's temporal control. In 1870, the pope lost Lazio and Rome and had no physical territory at all, except the Basilica of St Peter and the papal residence and related buildings around the Vatican quarter of Rome, which the new Italian state did not occupy militarily.  In 1929 the head of the Italian government, at the time the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, ended the crisis between unified Italy and the Holy See by negotiating the Lateran Treaty, signed by the two parties. This recognized the sovereignty of the Holy See over a newly created international territorial entity, the Vatican City State, limited to a token territory.
+
+The Papal States were also known as the Papal State (although the plural is usually preferred, the singular is equally correct as the polity was more than a mere personal union). The territories were also referred to variously as the State(s) of the Church, the Pontifical States, the Ecclesiastical States, or the Roman States (Italian: Stato Pontificio, also Stato della Chiesa, Stati della Chiesa, Stati Pontifici, and Stato Ecclesiastico; Latin: Status Pontificius, also Dicio Pontificia "papal rule").[3] To some extent the name used varied with the preferences and habits of the European languages in which it was expressed.
+
+For its first 300 years the Catholic Church was persecuted and unrecognized, unable to hold or transfer property.[4] Early congregations met in rooms set aside for that purpose in the homes of well-to-do individuals, and a number of early churches, known as titular churches and located on the outskirts of Ancient Rome, were held as property by individuals, rather than by the Church itself. Nonetheless, the properties held nominally or actually by individual members of the Roman churches would usually be considered as a common patrimony handed over successively to the legitimate "heir" of that property, often its senior deacons, who were, in turn, assistants to the local bishop. This common patrimony attached to the churches at Rome and thus, under its ruling bishop, became quite considerable, including as it did not only houses etc. in Rome or nearby but landed estates, such as latifundias, whole or in part, across Italy and beyond.[5]
+
+This system began to change during the reign of the Emperor Constantine I, who made Christianity legal within the Roman Empire, and restored to it any properties that had been confiscated; in the larger cities of the empire this would have been quite considerable, and the Roman patrimony not least among them.[4] The Lateran Palace was the first significant new donation to the Church, most probably a gift from Constantine himself.[4]
+
+Other donations followed, primarily in mainland Italy but also in the provinces of the Roman Empire. However, the Church held all of these lands as a private landowner, not as a sovereign entity. When in the 5th century the Italian peninsula passed under the control of Odoacer and, later, the Ostrogoths, the Church organization in Italy, with the pope at its head, submitted of necessity to their sovereign authority while asserting its spiritual primacy over the whole Church.[citation needed]
+
+The seeds of the Papal States as a sovereign political entity were planted in the 6th century. Beginning in 535, the Byzantine Empire, under Emperor Justinian I, launched a reconquest of Italy that took decades and devastated Italy's political and economic structures. Just as these wars wound down, the Lombards entered the peninsula from the north and conquered much of the countryside. By the 7th century, Byzantine authority was largely limited to a diagonal band running roughly from Ravenna, where the emperor's representative, or Exarch, was located, to Rome and south to Naples (the "Rome-Ravenna corridor"[6][7][8]), plus coastal exclaves.[9]
+
+With effective Byzantine power weighted at the northeast end of this territory, the pope, as the largest landowner and most prestigious figure in Italy, began by default to take on much of the ruling authority that Byzantines were unable to project to the area around the city of Rome.[citation needed] While the popes remained Byzantine subjects, in practice the Duchy of Rome, an area roughly equivalent to modern-day Latium, became an independent state ruled by the pope.[10]
+
+The Church's independence, combined with popular support for the papacy in Italy, enabled various popes to defy the will of the Byzantine emperor; Pope Gregory II even excommunicated Emperor Leo III during the Iconoclastic Controversy.[citation needed] Nevertheless, the pope and the exarch still worked together to control the rising power of the Lombards in Italy. As Byzantine power weakened, though, the papacy took an ever-larger role in defending Rome from the Lombards, usually through diplomacy.[citation needed] In practice, the papal efforts served to focus Lombard aggrandizement on the exarch and Ravenna. A climactic moment in the founding of the Papal States was the agreement over boundaries embodied in the Lombard King Liutprand's Donation of Sutri (728) to Pope Gregory II.[11]
+
+When the Exarchate of Ravenna finally fell to the Lombards in 751,[12] the Duchy of Rome was completely cut off from the Byzantine Empire, of which it was theoretically still a part. The popes renewed earlier attempts to secure the support of the Franks. In 751, Pope Zachary had Pepin the Short crowned king in place of the powerless Merovingian figurehead king Childeric III. Zachary's successor, Pope Stephen II, later granted Pepin the title Patrician of the Romans. Pepin led a Frankish army into Italy in 754 and 756. Pepin defeated the Lombards – taking control of northern Italy – and made a gift (called the Donation of Pepin) of the properties formerly constituting the Exarchate of Ravenna to the pope.
+
+In 781, Charlemagne codified the regions over which the pope would be temporal sovereign: the Duchy of Rome was key, but the territory was expanded to include Ravenna, the Duchy of the Pentapolis, parts of the Duchy of Benevento, Tuscany, Corsica, Lombardy, and a number of Italian cities. The cooperation between the papacy and the Carolingian dynasty climaxed in 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as 'Emperor of the Romans'.
+
+The precise nature of the relationship between the popes and emperors – and between the Papal States and the Empire – is disputed. It was unclear whether the Papal States were a separate realm with the pope as their sovereign ruler, merely a part of the Frankish Empire over which the popes had administrative control, as suggested in the late-9th-century treatise Libellus de imperatoria potestate in urbe Roma, or whether the Holy Roman Emperors were vicars of the pope (as a sort of Archemperor) ruling Christendom, with the pope directly responsible only for the environs of Rome and spiritual duties.
+
+Events in the 9th century postponed the conflict. The Holy Roman Empire in its Frankish form collapsed as it was subdivided among Charlemagne's grandchildren. Imperial power in Italy waned and the papacy's prestige declined. This led to a rise in the power of the local Roman nobility, and the control of the Papal States during the early 10th century by a powerful and corrupt aristocratic family, the Theophylacti. This period was later dubbed the Saeculum obscurum ("dark age"), and sometimes as the "rule by harlots".[13]
+
+In practice, the popes were unable to exercise effective sovereignty over the extensive and mountainous territories of the Papal States, and the region preserved its old system of government, with many small countships and marquisates, each centred upon a fortified rocca.
+
+Over several campaigns in the mid-10th century, the German ruler Otto I conquered northern Italy; Pope John XII crowned him emperor (the first so crowned in more than forty years) and the two of them ratified the Diploma Ottonianum, by which the emperor became the guarantor of the independence of the Papal States.[14] Yet over the next two centuries, popes and emperors squabbled over a variety of issues, and the German rulers routinely treated the Papal States as part of their realms on those occasions when they projected power into Italy. As the Gregorian Reform worked to free the administration of the church from imperial interference, the independence of the Papal States increased in importance. After the extinction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, the German emperors rarely interfered in Italian affairs. In response to the struggle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Treaty of Venice made official the independence of Papal States from the Holy Roman Empire in 1177. By 1300, the Papal States, along with the rest of the Italian principalities, were effectively independent.
+
+From 1305 to 1378, the popes lived in the papal enclave of Avignon, surrounded by Provence and under the influence of the French kings. This period was known as the "Avignonese" or "Babylonian Captivity".[15][16][17][18][19][20] During this period the city of Avignon itself was added to the Papal States; it remained a papal possession for some 400 years even after the popes returned to Rome, until it was seized and incorporated into the French state during the French Revolution.
+
+During this Avignon Papacy, local despots took advantage of the absence of the popes to establish themselves in nominally papal cities: the Pepoli in Bologna, the Ordelaffi in Forlì, the Manfredi in Faenza, the Malatesta in Rimini all gave nominal acknowledgement to their papal overlords and were declared vicars of the Church.
+
+In Ferrara, the death of Azzo VIII d'Este without legitimate heirs (1308[21]) encouraged Pope Clement V to bring Ferrara under his direct rule: however, it was governed by his appointed vicar, King Robert of Naples, for only nine years before the citizens recalled the Este from exile (1317); interdiction and excommunications were in vain: in 1332 John XXII was obliged to name three Este brothers as his vicars in Ferrara.[22]
+
+In Rome itself the Orsini and the Colonna struggled for supremacy,[23] dividing the city's rioni between them. The resulting aristocratic anarchy in the city provided the setting for the fantastic dreams of universal democracy of Cola di Rienzo, who was acclaimed Tribune of the People in 1347,[24] and met a violent death in early October 1354 as he was assassinated by supporters of the Colonna family.[25] To many, rather than an ancient Roman tribune reborn, he had become just another tyrant using the rhetoric of Roman renewal and rebirth to mask his grab for power.[25] As Prof. Guido Ruggiero states, "even with the support of Petrarch, his return to first times and the rebirth of ancient Rome was one that would not prevail."[25]
+
+The Rienzo episode engendered renewed attempts from the absentee papacy to re-establish order in the dissolving Papal States, resulting in the military progress of Cardinal Albornoz, who was appointed papal legate, and his condottieri heading a small mercenary army. Having received the support of the archbishop of Milan and Giovanni Visconti, he defeated Giovanni di Vico, lord of Viterbo, moving against Galeotto Malatesta of Rimini and the Ordelaffi of Forlì, the Montefeltro of Urbino and the da Polenta of Ravenna, and against the cities of Senigallia and Ancona. The last holdouts against full papal control were Giovanni Manfredi of Faenza and Francesco II Ordelaffi of Forlì. Albornoz, at the point of being recalled, in a meeting with all the Papal vicars on 29 April 1357, promulgated the Constitutiones Sanctæ Matris Ecclesiæ, which replaced the mosaic of local law and accumulated traditional 'liberties' with a uniform code of civil law. These Constitutiones Egidiane mark a watershed in the legal history of the Papal States; they remained in effect until 1816. Pope Urban V ventured a return to Italy in 1367 that proved premature; he returned to Avignon in 1370 just before his death.[26]
+
+During the Renaissance, the papal territory expanded greatly, notably under the popes Alexander VI and Julius II. The pope became one of Italy's most important secular rulers as well as the head of the Church, signing treaties with other sovereigns and fighting wars. In practice, though, most of the Papal States was still only nominally controlled by the pope, and much of the territory was ruled by minor princes. Control was always contested; indeed it took until the 16th century for the pope to have any genuine control over all his territories.
+
+Papal responsibilities were often (as in the early 16th century) in conflict. The Papal States were involved in at least three wars in the first two decades.[27] Julius II, the "Warrior Pope", fought on their behalf.
+
+The Reformation began in 1517. In 1527, before the Holy Roman Empire fought the Protestants, troops loyal to Emperor Charles V brutally sacked Rome and imprisoned Pope Clement VII, as a side effect of battles over the Papal States.[28] Thus Clement VII was forced to give up Parma, Modena, and several smaller territories.[29][28] A generation later the armies of King Philip II of Spain defeated those of Pope Paul IV over the same issues.[30]
+
+This period saw a gradual revival of the pope's temporal power in the Papal States. Throughout the 16th century virtually independent fiefs such as Rimini (a possession of the Malatesta family) were brought back under Papal control. In 1512 the state of the church annexed Parma and Piacenza, which in 1545 became an independent ducate under an illegitimate son of Pope Paul III. This process culminated in the reclaiming of the Duchy of Ferrara in 1598,[31][32] and the Duchy of Urbino in 1631.[33]
+
+At its greatest extent, in the 18th century, the Papal States included most of central Italy – Latium, Umbria, Marche and the Legations of Ravenna, Ferrara and Bologna extending north into the Romagna. It also included the small enclaves of Benevento and Pontecorvo in southern Italy and the larger Comtat Venaissin around Avignon in southern France.
+
+The French Revolution affected the temporal territories of the Papacy as well as the Roman Church in general. In 1791 Revolutionary France annexed the Comtat Venaissin and Avignon.[34] Later, with the French invasion of Italy in 1796, the Legations (the Papal States' northern territories[34]) were seized and became part of the Cisalpine Republic.[34]
+
+Two years later, French forces invaded the remaining area of the Papal States and General Louis-Alexandre Berthier declared a Roman Republic (February 1798).[34] Pope Pius VI fled to Siena, and died in exile in Valence (France) in 1799.[34] The French Consulate restored the Papal States in June 1800 and the newly-elected Pope Pius VII took up residency in Rome, but the French Empire under Napoleon invaded in 1808, and this time on 17 May 1809 the remainder of the States of the Church were annexed to France,[34] forming the départements of Tibre and Trasimène.
+
+Following the fall of the Napoleonic system in 1814, the Congress of Vienna officially restored the Italian territories of the Papal States (but not the Comtat Venaissin or Avignon) to Vatican control.[34]
+
+From 1814 until the death of Pope Gregory XVI in 1846, the popes followed a reactionary policy in the Papal States. For instance, the city of Rome maintained the last Jewish ghetto in Western Europe. The Papal States, in 1870, were the last countries to discontinue the practice of castrating young boys of musical promise, making them castrati, who were in demand musically. There were hopes[by whom?] that this would change when Pope Pius IX (in office 1846-1878) succeeded Gregory XVI and began to introduce liberal reforms.
+
+Italian nationalism had been stoked during the Napoleonic period but dashed by the settlement of the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), which sought to restore the pre-Napoleonic conditions: most of northern Italy was under the rule of junior branches of the Habsburgs and the Bourbons, with the House of Savoy in Sardinia-Piedmont constituting the only independent Italian state. The Papal States in central Italy and the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south were both restored. Popular opposition to the reconstituted and corrupt clerical government led to numerous revolts, which were suppressed by the intervention of the Austrian army.
+
+The nationalist and liberal revolutions of 1848 affected much of Europe. In February 1849 a Roman Republic was declared,[36] and the hitherto liberally-inclined Pope Pius IX had to flee the city. The revolution was suppressed with French help in 1850 and Pius IX switched to a conservative line of government.
+
+As a result of the Austro-Sardinian War of 1859, Sardinia-Piedmont annexed Lombardy, while Giuseppe Garibaldi overthrew the Bourbon monarchy in the south.[37][38] Afraid that Garibaldi would set up a republican government, the Piedmont government petitioned French Emperor Napoleon III for permission to send troops through the Papal States to gain control of the south. This was granted on the condition that Rome be left undisturbed. In 1860, with much of the region already in rebellion against Papal rule, Sardinia-Piedmont conquered the eastern two-thirds of the Papal States and cemented its hold on the south. Bologna, Ferrara, Umbria, the Marches, Benevento and Pontecorvo were all formally annexed by November of the same year. While considerably reduced, the Papal States nevertheless still covered the Latium and large areas northwest of Rome.
+
+A unified Kingdom of Italy was declared and in March 1861 the first Italian parliament, which met in Turin, the old capital of Piedmont, declared Rome the capital of the new Kingdom. However, the Italian government could not take possession of the city because a French garrison in Rome protected Pope Pius IX. The opportunity for the Kingdom of Italy to eliminate the Papal States came in 1870; the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July prompted Napoleon III to recall his garrison from Rome and the collapse of the Second French Empire at the Battle of Sedan deprived Rome of its French protector. King Victor Emmanuel II at first aimed at a peaceful conquest of the city and proposed sending troops into Rome, under the guise of offering protection to the pope. When the pope refused, Italy declared war on 10 September 1870, and the Italian Army, commanded by General Raffaele Cadorna, crossed the frontier of the papal territory on September 11 and advanced slowly toward Rome. The Italian Army reached the Aurelian Walls on September 19 and placed Rome under a state of siege. Although the pope's tiny army was incapable of defending the city, Pius IX ordered it to put up more than a token resistance to emphasize that Italy was acquiring Rome by force and not consent. This incidentally served the purposes of the Italian State and gave rise to the myth of the Breach of Porta Pia, in reality a tame affair involving a cannonade at close range that demolished a 1600-year-old wall in poor repair. Pope Pius IX ordered the commander of the papal forces to limit the defense of the city in order to avoid bloodshed.[39] The city was captured on 20 September 1870. Rome and what was left of the Papal States were annexed to the Kingdom of Italy as a result of a plebiscite the following October. This marked the definite end of the Papal States.[34]
+
+Despite the fact that the traditionally Catholic powers did not come to the pope's aid, the papacy rejected the 1871 "Law of Guarantees" and any substantial accommodation with the Italian Kingdom, especially any proposal which required the pope to become an Italian subject. Instead the papacy confined itself (see Prisoner in the Vatican) to the Apostolic Palace and adjacent buildings in the loop of the ancient fortifications known as the Leonine City, on Vatican Hill. From there it maintained a number of features pertaining to sovereignty, such as diplomatic relations, since in canon law these were inherent in the papacy. In the 1920s, the papacy – then under Pius XI – renounced the bulk of the Papal States, and the Lateran Treaty with Italy (then ruled by the National Fascist Party under Benito Mussolini[40]) was signed on 11 February 1929,[40] creating the State of the Vatican City, forming the sovereign territory of the Holy See, which was also indemnified to some degree for loss of territory.
+
+As the plural name Papal States indicates, the various regional components retained their identity under papal rule. The pope was represented in each province by a governor, who bore one of a number of titles. These included "papal legate", as in the former principality of Benevento, or at Bologna, in Romagna, and the March of Ancona;  and  "papal delegate", as in the former duchy of Pontecorvo and in the Campagne and Maritime Province. Other titles like "Papal Vicar", "Vicar General", and also several titles of nobility, such as "count" or even "prince" were used. However, throughout the history of the Papal States many warlords and even bandit chieftains controlled cities and small duchies without having received any title from the Pope of the day.
+
+Historically the Papal States maintained military forces composed of volunteers and mercenaries. Between 1860 and 1870 the Papal Army (Esercito Pontificio in Italian) comprised two regiments of locally recruited Italian infantry, two Swiss regiments and a battalion of Irish volunteers, plus artillery and dragoons.[41]
+In 1861 an international Catholic volunteer corps, called Papal Zouaves after a kind of French colonial native Algerian infantry, and imitating their uniform type, was created. Predominantly made up of Dutch, French and Belgian volunteers, this corps saw service against Garibaldi's Redshirts, Italian patriots, and finally the forces of the newly united Italy.[42]
+
+The Papal Army was disbanded in 1870, leaving only the Palatine Guard, which was itself disbanded on 14 September 1970 by Pope Paul VI;[43] the Noble Guard, which also disbanded in 1970; and the Swiss Guard, which continues to serve both as a ceremonial unit at the Vatican and as the pope's protective force.
+
+A small Papal Navy was also maintained, based at Civitavecchia on the west coast and Ancona on the east. With the fall of the Papal States in 1870 the last ships of the flotilla were sailed to France, where they were sold on the death of Pius IX.
+
+Coordinates: 42°49′16″N 12°36′10″E / 42.82111°N 12.60278°E / 42.82111; 12.60278

en/1864.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,332 @@
+
+
+Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100
+
+The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country mostly located in central North America, between Canada and Mexico. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions.[i] At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), it is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area.[e] With a 2019 estimated population of over 328 million,[7] the U.S. is the third most populous country in the world. The Americans are a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been shaped through centuries of immigration. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City.
+
+Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago,[19] and European colonization began in the 16th century. The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolutionary War lasting between 1775 and 1783, leading to independence.[20] Beginning in the late 18th century, the United States vigorously expanded across North America, gradually acquiring new territories,[21] killing and displacing Native Americans, and admitting new states. By 1848, the United States spanned the continent.[21]
+Slavery was legal in much of the United States until the second half of the 19th century, when the American Civil War led to its abolition.[22][23]
+
+The Spanish–American War and World War I entrenched the U.S. as a world power, a status confirmed by the outcome of World War II. It was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.[24]
+
+The United States is a federal republic and a representative democracy. It is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), NATO, and other international organizations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
+
+A highly developed country, the United States is the world's largest economy and accounts for approximately a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP).[25] The United States is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter of goods, by value.[26][27] Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total,[28] it holds 29.4% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share held by any country.[29] Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, median income, median wealth, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity.[30][31] It is the foremost military power in the world, making up more than a third of global military spending,[32] and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.[33]
+
+The first known use of the name "America" dates back to 1507, when it appeared on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. On this map, the name applied to South America in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.[34] After returning from his expeditions, Vespucci first postulated that the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern limit, as initially thought by Christopher Columbus, but instead were part of an entirely separate landmass thus far unknown to the Europeans.[35] In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator used the name "America" on his own world map, applying it to the entire Western Hemisphere.[36]
+
+The first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written by Stephen Moylan, Esq., to Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort.[37][38][39] The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.[40]
+
+The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed no later than June 17, 1776, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'".[41] The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'".[42] In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence.[41] This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.[41]
+
+The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms are the "U.S.," the "USA," and "America." Colloquial names are the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States." "Columbia," a name popular in poetry and songs of the late 18th century, derives its origin from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia." Many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.[43]
+
+The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865.[44] The singular form—e.g., "the United States is"—became popular after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States." The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.[45]
+
+A citizen of the United States is an "American." "United States," "American" and "U.S." refer to the country adjectivally ("American values," "U.S. forces"). In English, the word "American" rarely refers to topics or subjects not directly connected with the United States.[46]
+
+It has been generally accepted that the first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 12,000 years ago; however, increasing evidence suggests an even earlier arrival.[19][47][48] After crossing the land bridge, the Paleo-Indians moved southward along the Pacific coast[49] and through an interior ice-free corridor.[50] The Clovis culture, which appeared around 11,000 BC, was initially believed to represent the first wave of human settlement of the Americas.[51][52] It is likely these represent the first of three major waves of migration into North America.[53]
+
+Over time, indigenous cultures in North America grew increasingly complex, and some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture in the southeast, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies.[54] The Mississippian culture flourished in the south from 800 to 1600 AD, extending from the Mexican border down through Florida.[55] Its city state Cahokia is the largest, most complex pre-Columbian archaeological site in the modern-day United States.[56] In the Four Corners region, Ancestral Puebloan culture developed from centuries of agricultural experimentation.[57]
+
+Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Taos Pueblo.[58][59] The earthworks constructed by Native Americans of the Poverty Point culture have also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the southern Great Lakes region, the Iroquois Confederacy was established at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.[60] Most prominent along the Atlantic coast were the Algonquian tribes, who practiced hunting and trapping, along with limited cultivation.
+
+With the progress of European colonization in the territories of the contemporary United States, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[61] The native population of America declined after European arrival for various reasons,[62][63] primarily diseases such as smallpox and measles.[64][65]
+
+Estimating the native population of North America at the time of European contact is difficult.[66][67] Douglas H. Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution estimated that there was a population of 92,916 in the south Atlantic states and a population of 473,616 in the Gulf states,[68] but most academics regard this figure as too low.[66] Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns believed the populations were much higher, suggesting 1,100,000 along the shores of the gulf of Mexico, 2,211,000 people living between Florida and Massachusetts, 5,250,000 in the Mississippi Valley and tributaries and 697,000 people in the Florida peninsula.[66][67]
+
+In the early days of colonization, many European settlers were subject to food shortages, disease, and attacks from Native Americans. Native Americans were also often at war with neighboring tribes and allied with Europeans in their colonial wars. In many cases, however, natives and settlers came to depend on each other. Settlers traded for food and animal pelts; natives for guns, ammunition and other European goods.[69] Natives taught many settlers to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. European missionaries and others felt it was important to "civilize" the Native Americans and urged them to adopt European agricultural techniques and lifestyles.[70][71]
+
+With the advancement of European colonization in North America, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[72] The first Europeans to arrive in the contiguous United States were Spanish conquistadors such as Juan Ponce de León, who made his first visit to Florida in 1513. Even earlier, Christopher Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his 1493 voyage. The Spanish set up the first settlements in Florida and New Mexico such as Saint Augustine[73] and Santa Fe. The French established their own as well along the Mississippi River. Successful English settlement on the eastern coast of North America began with the Virginia Colony in 1607 at Jamestown and with the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. Many settlers were dissenting Christian groups who came seeking religious freedom. The continent's first elected legislative assembly, Virginia's House of Burgesses, was created in 1619. The Mayflower Compact, signed by the Pilgrims before disembarking, and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, established precedents for the pattern of representative self-government and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies.[74][75]
+
+Most settlers in every colony were small farmers, though other industries were formed. Cash crops included tobacco, rice, and wheat. Extraction industries grew up in furs, fishing and lumber. Manufacturers produced rum and ships, and by the late colonial period, Americans were producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply.[76] Cities eventually dotted the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs. English colonists were supplemented by waves of Scotch-Irish immigrants and other groups. As coastal land grew more expensive, freed indentured servants claimed lands further west.[77]
+
+A large-scale slave trade with English privateers began.[78] Because of less disease and better food and treatment, the life expectancy of slaves was much higher in North America than further south, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.[79][80] Colonial society was largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, and colonies passed acts for and against the practice.[81][82] But by the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in the South.[83]
+
+With the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were administered by the British as overseas dependencies.[84] All nonetheless had local governments with elections open to most free men.[85] With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grew rapidly. Relatively small Native American populations were eclipsed.[86] The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest both in religion and in religious liberty.[87]
+
+During the Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans, who were being conquered and displaced, the 13 British colonies had a population of over 2.1 million in 1770, about a third that of Britain. Despite continuing, new arrivals, the rate of natural increase was such that by the 1770s only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas.[88] The colonies' distance from Britain had allowed the development of self-government, but their unprecedented success motivated monarchs to periodically seek to reassert royal authority.[89]
+
+In 1774, the Spanish Navy ship Santiago, under Juan Pérez, entered and anchored in an inlet of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, in present-day British Columbia. Although the Spanish did not land, natives paddled to the ship to trade furs for abalone shells from California.[90] At the time, the Spanish were able to monopolize the trade between Asia and North America, granting limited licenses to the Portuguese. When the Russians began establishing a growing fur trading system in Alaska, the Spanish began to challenge the Russians, with Pérez's voyage being the first of many to the Pacific Northwest.[91][j]
+
+During his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook became the first European to begin formal contact with Hawaii.[93] Captain Cook's last voyage included sailing along the coast of North America and Alaska searching for a Northwest Passage for approximately nine months.[94]
+
+The American Revolutionary War was the first successful colonial war of independence against a European power. Americans had developed an ideology of "republicanism" asserting that government rested on the will of the people as expressed in their local legislatures. They demanded their rights as Englishmen and "no taxation without representation". The British insisted on administering the empire through Parliament, and the conflict escalated into war.[95]
+
+The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that Great Britain was not protecting Americans' unalienable rights. July 4 is celebrated annually as Independence Day.[96] In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a decentralized government that operated until 1789.[96]
+
+Following the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781,[97] Britain signed the peace treaty of 1783, and American sovereignty was internationally recognized and the country was granted all lands east of the Mississippi River. Nationalists led the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788. The federal government was reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789. George Washington, who had led the Continental Army to victory, was the first president elected under the new constitution. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.[98]
+
+Although the federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808, after 1820, cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and along with it, the slave population.[99][100][101] The Second Great Awakening, especially 1800–1840, converted millions to evangelical Protestantism. In the North, it energized multiple social reform movements, including abolitionism;[102] in the South, Methodists and Baptists proselytized among slave populations.[103]
+
+Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of American Indian Wars.[104] The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation's area.[105] The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism.[106] A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819.[107] The expansion was aided by steam power, when steamboats began traveling along America's large water systems, many of which were connected by new canals, such as the Erie and the I&M; then, even faster railroads began their stretch across the nation's land.[108]
+
+From 1820 to 1850, Jacksonian democracy began a set of reforms which included wider white male suffrage; it led to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that forcibly resettled Indians into the west on Indian reservations. The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 during a period of expansionist Manifest destiny.[109] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest.[110] Victory in the Mexican–American War resulted in the 1848 Mexican Cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest.[111]
+The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 spurred migration to the Pacific coast, which led to the California Genocide[112][113][114][115] and the creation of additional western states.[116] After the Civil War, new transcontinental railways made relocation easier for settlers, expanded internal trade and increased conflicts with Native Americans.[117] In 1869, a new Peace Policy nominally promised to protect Native Americans from abuses, avoid further war, and secure their eventual U.S. citizenship. Nonetheless, large-scale conflicts continued throughout the West into the 1900s.
+
+Irreconcilable sectional conflict regarding the slavery of Africans and African Americans ultimately led to the American Civil War.[118] Initially, states entering the Union had alternated between slave and free states, keeping a sectional balance in the Senate, while free states outstripped slave states in population and in the House of Representatives. But with additional western territory and more free-soil states, tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over federalism and disposition of the territories, as well as whether to expand or restrict slavery.[119]
+
+With the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, conventions in thirteen slave states ultimately declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "South" or the "Confederacy"), while the federal government (the "Union") maintained that secession was illegal.[119] In order to bring about this secession, military action was initiated by the secessionists, and the Union responded in kind. The ensuing war would become the deadliest military conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of approximately 618,000 soldiers as well as many civilians.[120] The Union initially simply fought to keep the country united. Nevertheless, as casualties mounted after 1863 and Lincoln delivered his Emancipation Proclamation, the main purpose of the war from the Union's viewpoint became the abolition of slavery. Indeed, when the Union ultimately won the war in April 1865, each of the states in the defeated South was required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery.
+
+The government enacted three constitutional amendments in the years after the war: the aforementioned Thirteenth as well as the Fourteenth Amendment providing citizenship to the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves,[121] and the Fifteenth Amendment ensuring in theory that African Americans had the right to vote. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power[122] aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the South while guaranteeing the rights of the newly freed slaves.
+
+Reconstruction began in earnest following the war. While President Lincoln attempted to foster friendship and forgiveness between the Union and the former Confederacy, his assassination on April 14, 1865, drove a wedge between North and South again. Republicans in the federal government made it their goal to oversee the rebuilding of the South and to ensure the rights of African Americans. They persisted until the Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to cease protecting the rights of African Americans in the South in order for Democrats to concede the presidential election of 1876.
+
+Southern white Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers," took control of the South after the end of Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1910 the Redeemers established so-called Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising most blacks and some poor whites throughout the region. Blacks faced racial segregation, especially in the South.[123] They also occasionally experienced vigilante violence, including lynching.[124]
+
+In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe supplied a surplus of labor for the country's industrialization and transformed its culture.[126] National infrastructure including telegraph and transcontinental railroads spurred economic growth and greater settlement and development of the American Old West. The later invention of electric light and the telephone would also affect communication and urban life.[127]
+
+The United States fought Indian Wars west of the Mississippi River from 1810 to at least 1890.[128] Most of these conflicts ended with the cession of Native American territory and their confinement to Indian reservations. This further expanded acreage under mechanical cultivation, increasing surpluses for international markets.[129] Mainland expansion also included the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.[130] In 1893, pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the monarchy and formed the Republic of Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were ceded by Spain in the same year, following the Spanish–American War.[131] American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the end of the Second Samoan Civil War.[132] The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.[133]
+
+Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. Tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie led the nation's progress in railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. Banking became a major part of the economy, with J. P. Morgan playing a notable role. The American economy boomed, becoming the world's largest, and the United States achieved great power status.[134] These dramatic changes were accompanied by social unrest and the rise of populist, socialist, and anarchist movements.[135] This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which saw significant reforms including women's suffrage, alcohol prohibition, regulation of consumer goods, greater antitrust measures to ensure competition and attention to worker conditions.[136][137][138]
+
+The United States remained neutral from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 until 1917, when it joined the war as an "associated power," alongside the formal Allies of World War I, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson took a leading diplomatic role at the Paris Peace Conference and advocated strongly for the U.S. to join the League of Nations. However, the Senate refused to approve this and did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles that established the League of Nations.[139]
+
+In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage.[140] The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of radio for mass communication and the invention of early television.[141] The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal.[142] The Great Migration of millions of African Americans out of the American South began before World War I and extended through the 1960s;[143] whereas the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration.[144]
+
+At first effectively neutral during World War II, the United States began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers.[145] Although Japan attacked the United States first, the U.S. nonetheless pursued a "Europe first" defense policy.[146] The United States thus left its vast Asian colony, the Philippines, isolated and fighting a losing struggle against Japanese invasion and occupation, as military resources were devoted to the European theater. During the war, the United States was referred to as one of the "Four Policemen"[147] of Allies power who met to plan the postwar world, along with Britain, the Soviet Union and China.[148][149] Although the nation lost around 400,000 military personnel,[150] it emerged relatively undamaged from the war with even greater economic and military influence.[151]
+
+The United States played a leading role in the Bretton Woods and Yalta conferences with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and other Allies, which signed agreements on new international financial institutions and Europe's postwar reorganization. As an Allied victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war.[152] The United States and Japan then fought each other in the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.[153][154] The United States eventually developed the first nuclear weapons and used them on Japan in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese surrendered on September 2, ending World War II.[155][156]
+
+After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for power, influence, and prestige during what became known as the Cold War, driven by an ideological divide between capitalism and communism.[157] They dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its NATO allies on one side and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other. The U.S. developed a policy of containment towards the expansion of communist influence. While the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict.[citation needed]
+
+The United States often opposed Third World movements that it viewed as Soviet-sponsored, and occasionally pursued direct action for regime change against left-wing governments, even supporting right-wing authoritarian governments at times.[158] American troops fought communist Chinese and North Korean forces in the Korean War of 1950–53.[159] The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite and its 1961 launch of the first manned spaceflight initiated a "Space Race" in which the United States became the first nation to land a man on the moon in 1969.[159] A proxy war in Southeast Asia eventually evolved into full American participation, as the Vietnam War.[citation needed]
+
+At home, the U.S. experienced sustained economic expansion and a rapid growth of its population and middle class. Construction of an Interstate Highway System transformed the nation's infrastructure over the following decades. Millions moved from farms and inner cities to large suburban housing developments.[160][161] In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th and last U.S. state added to the country.[162] The growing Civil Rights Movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader and figurehead. A combination of court decisions and legislation, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, sought to end racial discrimination.[163][164][165] Meanwhile, a counterculture movement grew which was fueled by opposition to the Vietnam war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution.
+
+The launch of a "War on Poverty" expanded entitlements and welfare spending, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that provide health coverage to the elderly and poor, respectively, and the means-tested Food Stamp Program and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.[166]
+
+The 1970s and early 1980s saw the onset of stagflation. After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan responded to economic stagnation with free-market oriented reforms. Following the collapse of détente, he abandoned "containment" and initiated the more aggressive "rollback" strategy towards the USSR.[167][168][169][170][171] After a surge in female labor participation over the previous decade, by 1985 the majority of women aged 16 and over were employed.[172]
+
+The late 1980s brought a "thaw" in relations with the USSR, and its collapse in 1991 finally ended the Cold War.[173][174][175][176] This brought about unipolarity[177] with the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The concept of Pax Americana, which had appeared in the post-World War II period, gained wide popularity as a term for the post-Cold War new world order.[citation needed]
+
+After the Cold War, the conflict in the Middle East triggered a crisis in 1990, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, an ally of the United States. Fearing the instability would spread to other regions, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Shield, a defensive force buildup in Saudi Arabia, and Operation Desert Storm, in a staging titled the Gulf War; waged by coalition forces from 34 nations, led by the United States against Iraq ending in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restoration of the monarchy.[178]
+
+Originating within U.S. military defense networks, the Internet spread to international academic platforms and then to the public in the 1990s, greatly affecting the global economy, society, and culture.[179] Due to the dot-com boom, stable monetary policy, and reduced social welfare spending, the 1990s saw the longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history.[180] Beginning in 1994, the U.S. entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), prompting trade among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to soar.[181]
+
+On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people.[182] In response, the United States launched the War on Terror, which included a war in Afghanistan and the 2003–11 Iraq War.[183][184]
+
+Government policy designed to promote affordable housing,[185] widespread failures in corporate and regulatory governance,[186] and historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve[187] led to the mid-2000s housing bubble, which culminated with the 2008 financial crisis, the nation's largest economic contraction since the Great Depression.[188] Barack Obama, the first African-American[189] and multiracial[190] president, was elected in 2008 amid the crisis,[191] and subsequently passed stimulus measures and the Dodd–Frank Act in an attempt to mitigate its negative effects and ensure there would not be a repeat of the crisis. In 2010, the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, which made the most sweeping reforms to the nation's healthcare system in nearly five decades, including mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges.[citation needed]
+
+American forces in Iraq were withdrawn in large numbers in 2009 and 2010, and the war in the region was declared formally over in December 2011.[192] But months earlier, Operation Neptune Spear led to the death of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.[193] In the presidential election of 2016, Republican Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States. On January 20, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed.[194] As of July 2020, the United States has over 4 million COVID-19 cases and over 145,000 deaths.[195] The United States is, by far, the country with the most cases of COVID-19 since April 11, 2020.[196]
+
+The 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia occupy a combined area of 3,119,884.69 square miles (8,080,464.3 km2). Of this area, 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2) is contiguous land, composing 83.65% of total U.S. land area.[197][198] Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, is 10,931 square miles (28,311 km2) in area. The populated territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands together cover 9,185 square miles (23,789 km2).[199] Measured by only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.[200]
+
+The United States is the world's third- or fourth-largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and nearly equal to China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted, and how the total size of the United States is measured.[e][201][202]
+
+The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont.[203] The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest.[204] The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast.[204]
+
+The Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking around 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado.[205] Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Chihuahua and Mojave.[206] The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast, both ranges reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m). The lowest and highest points in the contiguous United States are in the state of California,[207] and only about 84 miles (135 km) apart.[208] At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali is the highest peak in the country and in North America.[209] Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature.[210]
+
+The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.[211] The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains have an alpine climate. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Hawaii and the southern tip of Florida are tropical, as well as its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.[212] States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur in the country, mainly in Tornado Alley areas in the Midwest and South.[213] Overall, the United States has the world's most violent weather, receiving more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world.[214]
+
+The U.S. ecology is megadiverse: about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and more than 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland.[216] The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 bird species, 311 reptile species, and 295 amphibian species,[217] as well as about 91,000 insect species.[218]
+
+There are 62 national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas.[219] Altogether, the government owns about 28% of the country's land area,[220] mostly in the western states.[221] Most of this land is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching, and about .86% is used for military purposes.[222][223]
+
+Environmental issues include debates on oil and nuclear energy, dealing with air and water pollution, the economic costs of protecting wildlife, logging and deforestation,[224][225] and international responses to global warming.[226][227] The most prominent environmental agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by presidential order in 1970.[228] The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act.[229] The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is intended to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.[230]
+
+The U.S. Census Bureau officially estimated the country's population to be 328,239,523 as of July 1, 2019.[231] In addition, the Census Bureau provides a continuously updated U.S. Population Clock that approximates the latest population of the 50 states and District of Columbia based on the Bureau's most recent demographic trends.[234] According to the clock, on May 23, 2020, the U.S. population exceeded 329 million residents, with a net gain of one person every 19 seconds, or about 4,547 people per day. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world, after China and India. In 2018 the median age of the United States population was 38.1 years.[235]
+
+In 2018, there were almost 90 million immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrants (second-generation Americans) in the United States, accounting for 28% of the overall U.S. population.[236] The United States has a very diverse population; 37 ancestry groups have more than one million members.[237] German Americans are the largest ethnic group (more than 50 million)—followed by Irish Americans (circa 37 million), Mexican Americans (circa 31 million) and English Americans (circa 28 million).[238][239]
+
+White Americans (mostly European ancestry) are the largest racial group at 73.1% of the population; African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third-largest ancestry group.[237] Asian Americans are the country's second-largest racial minority; the three largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans.[237] The largest American community with European ancestry is German Americans, which consists of more than 14% of the total population.[240] In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively).[241] The census counted more than 19 million people of "Some Other Race" who were "unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories in 2010, more than 18.5 million (97%) of whom are of Hispanic ethnicity.[241]
+
+In 2017, out of the U.S. foreign-born population, some 45% (20.7 million) were naturalized citizens, 27% (12.3 million) were lawful permanent residents (including many eligible to become citizens), 6% (2.2 million) were temporary lawful residents, and 23% (10.5 million) were unauthorized immigrants.[242] Among current living immigrants to the U.S., the top five countries of birth are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and El Salvador. Until 2017 and 2018, the United States led the world in refugee resettlement for decades, admitted more refugees than the rest of the world combined.[243] From fiscal year 1980 until 2017, 55% of refugees came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 13% from Africa, and 4% from Latin America.[243]
+
+A 2017 United Nations report projected that the U.S. would be one of nine countries in which world population growth through 2050 would be concentrated.[244] A 2020 U.S. Census Bureau report projected the population of the country could be anywhere between 320 million and 447 million by 2060, depending on the rate of in-migration; in all projected scenarios, a lower fertility rate and increases in life expectancy would result in an aging population.[245] The United States has an annual birth rate of 13 per 1,000, which is five births per 1,000 below the world average.[246] Its population growth rate is positive at 0.7%, higher than that of many developed nations.[247]
+
+About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (including suburbs);[202] about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000.[248] In 2008, 273 incorporated municipalities had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than one million residents, and four cities had over two million (namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston).[249] Estimates for the year 2018 show that 53 metropolitan areas have populations greater than one million. Many metros in the South, Southwest and West grew significantly between 2010 and 2018. The Dallas and Houston metros increased by more than a million people, while the Washington, D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and Phoenix metros all grew by more than 500,000 people.
+
+English (specifically, American English) is the de facto national language of the United States. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2010, about 230 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. 12% of the population speaks Spanish at home, making it the second most common language. Spanish is also the most widely taught second language.[250][251]
+
+Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii.[252] In addition to English, Alaska recognizes twenty official Native languages,[253][k] and South Dakota recognizes Sioux.[254] While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French.[255] Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms.[256]
+
+Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan[257] is officially recognized by American Samoa and Chamorro[258] is an official language of Guam. Both Carolinian and Chamorro have official recognition in the Northern Mariana Islands.[259]
+Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico and is more widely spoken than English there.[260]
+
+The most widely taught foreign languages in the United States, in terms of enrollment numbers from kindergarten through university undergraduate education, are Spanish (around 7.2 million students), French (1.5 million), and German (500,000). Other commonly taught languages include Latin, Japanese, ASL, Italian, and Chinese.[261][262] 18% of all Americans claim to speak both English and another language.[263]
+
+Religion in the United States (2017)[266]
+
+The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids Congress from passing laws respecting its establishment.
+
+In a 2013 survey, 56% of Americans said religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other Western nation.[267] In a 2009 Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they attended church weekly or almost weekly; the figures ranged from a low of 23% in Vermont to a high of 63% in Mississippi.[268]
+
+In a 2014 survey, 70.6% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians;[269] Protestants accounted for 46.5%, while Roman Catholics, at 20.8%, formed the largest single Christian group.[270] In 2014, 5.9% of the U.S. adult population claimed a non-Christian religion.[271] These include Judaism (1.9%), Islam (0.9%), Hinduism (0.7%), and Buddhism (0.7%).[271] The survey also reported that 22.8% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist or simply having no religion—up from 8.2% in 1990.[270][272][273] There are also Unitarian Universalist, Scientologist, Baha'i, Sikh, Jain, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Satanist, Taoist, Druid, Native American, Afro-American, traditional African, Wiccan, Gnostic, humanist and deist communities.[274][275]
+
+Protestantism is the largest Christian religious grouping in the United States, accounting for almost half of all Americans. Baptists collectively form the largest branch of Protestantism at 15.4%,[276] and the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest individual Protestant denomination at 5.3% of the U.S. population.[276] Apart from Baptists, other Protestant categories include nondenominational Protestants, Methodists, Pentecostals, unspecified Protestants, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, other Reformed, Episcopalians/Anglicans, Quakers, Adventists, Holiness, Christian fundamentalists, Anabaptists, Pietists, and multiple others.[276]
+
+As with other Western countries, the U.S. is becoming less religious. Irreligion is growing rapidly among Americans under 30.[277] Polls show that overall American confidence in organized religion has been declining since the mid to late 1980s,[278] and that younger Americans, in particular, are becoming increasingly irreligious.[271][279] In a 2012 study, the Protestant share of the U.S. population had dropped to 48%, thus ending its status as religious category of the majority for the first time.[280][281] Americans with no religion have 1.7 children compared to 2.2 among Christians. The unaffiliated are less likely to marry with 37% marrying compared to 52% of Christians.[282]
+
+The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. By contrast, religion plays the least important role in New England and in the Western United States.[268]
+
+As of 2018[update], 52% of Americans age 15 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 32% had never been married.[283] Women now work mostly outside the home and receive the majority of bachelor's degrees.[284]
+
+The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is 26.5 per 1,000 women. The rate has declined by 57% since 1991.[285] Abortion is legal throughout the country. Abortion rates, currently 241 per 1,000 live births and 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, are falling but remain higher than most Western nations.[286] In 2013, the average age at first birth was 26 and 41% of births were to unmarried women.[287]
+
+The total fertility rate in 2016 was 1820.5 births per 1000 women.[288] Adoption in the United States is common and relatively easy from a legal point of view (compared to other Western countries).[289] As of 2001[update], with more than 127,000 adoptions, the U.S. accounted for nearly half of the total number of adoptions worldwide.[needs update][290] Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, and it is legal for same-sex couples to adopt. Polygamy is illegal throughout the U.S.[291]
+
+In 2019, the U.S. had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.[292]
+
+The United States had a life expectancy of 78.6 years at birth in 2017, which was the third year of declines in life expectancy following decades of continuous increase. The recent decline, primarily among the age group 25 to 64, is largely due to sharp increases in the drug overdose and suicide rates; the country has one of the highest suicide rates among wealthy countries.[293][294] Life expectancy was highest among Asians and Hispanics and lowest among blacks.[295][296] According to CDC and Census Bureau data, deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug overdoses hit record highs in 2017.[297]
+
+Increasing obesity in the United States and health improvements elsewhere contributed to lowering the country's rank in life expectancy from 11th in the world in 1987, to 42nd in 2007, and as of 2017 the country had the lowest life expectancy among Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and seven countries of western Europe.[298][299] Obesity rates have more than doubled in the last 30 years and are the highest in the industrialized world.[300][301] Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight.[302] Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.[303]
+
+In 2010, coronary artery disease, lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and traffic accidents caused the most years of life lost in the U.S. Low back pain, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety caused the most years lost to disability. The most harmful risk factors were poor diet, tobacco smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, physical inactivity, and alcohol use. Alzheimer's disease, drug abuse, kidney disease, cancer, and falls caused the most additional years of life lost over their age-adjusted 1990 per-capita rates.[304] U.S. teenage pregnancy and abortion rates are substantially higher than in other Western nations, especially among blacks and Hispanics.[305]
+
+Health-care coverage in the United States is a combination of public and private efforts and is not universal. In 2017, 12.2% of the population did not carry health insurance.[306] The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue.[307][308] Federal legislation, passed in early 2010, roughly halved the uninsured share of the population, though the bill and its ultimate effect are issues of controversy.[309][310] The U.S. health-care system far outspends any other nation, measured both in per capita spending and as percentage of GDP.[311] At the same time, the U.S. is a global leader in medical innovation.[312]
+
+American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. In most states, children are required to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn 18 (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at 16 or 17.[313]
+
+About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.[314] The U.S. spends more on education per student than any nation in the world, spending more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student.[315][needs update] Some 80% of U.S. college students attend public universities.[316]
+
+Of Americans 25 and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees.[317] The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.[202][318] The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.[319]
+
+The United States has many private and public institutions of higher education. The majority of the world's top universities, as listed by various ranking organizations, are in the U.S.[320][321][322] There are also local community colleges with generally more open admission policies, shorter academic programs, and lower tuition.
+
+In 2018, U21, a network of research-intensive universities, ranked the United States first in the world for breadth and quality of higher education, and 15th when GDP was a factor.[323] As for public expenditures on higher education, the U.S. trails some other OECD nations but spends more per student than the OECD average, and more than all nations in combined public and private spending.[315][324] As of 2018[update], student loan debt exceeded 1.5 trillion dollars.[325][326]
+
+The United States is a federal republic of 50 states, a federal district, five territories and several uninhabited island possessions.[327][328][329] It is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law."[330] For 2018, the U.S. ranked 25th on the Democracy Index.[331] On Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index its public sector position deteriorated from a score of 76 in 2015 to 69 in 2019.[332]
+
+In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government: federal, state, and local. The local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district.
+
+The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document.[333] The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus. The Constitution has been amended 27 times;[334] the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights. All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review and any law ruled by the courts to be in violation of the Constitution is voided. The principle of judicial review, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was established by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison (1803)[335] in a decision handed down by Chief Justice John Marshall.[336]
+
+The federal government comprises three branches:
+
+The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population. Each state then draws single-member districts to conform with the census apportionment. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories each have one member of Congress—these members are not allowed to vote.[341]
+
+The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one-third of Senate seats are up for election every two years. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories do not have senators.[341] The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia.[342] The Supreme Court, led by the chief justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.[343]
+
+The state governments are structured in a roughly similar fashion, though Nebraska has a unicameral legislature.[344] The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.
+
+The 50 states are the principal administrative divisions in the country. These are subdivided into counties or county equivalents and further divided into municipalities. The District of Columbia is a federal district that contains the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C.[345] The states and the District of Columbia choose the president of the United States. Each state has presidential electors equal to the number of their representatives and senators in Congress; the District of Columbia has three (because of the 23rd Amendment).[346] Territories of the United States such as Puerto Rico do not have presidential electors, and so people in those territories cannot vote for the president.[341]
+
+The United States also observes tribal sovereignty of the American Indian nations to a limited degree, as it does with the states' sovereignty. American Indians are U.S. citizens and tribal lands are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress and the federal courts. Like the states they have a great deal of autonomy, but also like the states, tribes are not allowed to make war, engage in their own foreign relations, or print and issue currency.[347]
+
+Citizenship is granted at birth in all states, the District of Columbia, and all major U.S. territories except American Samoa.[348][349][m]
+
+The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history.[352] For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote. The president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College.[353]
+
+In American political culture, the center-right Republican Party is considered "conservative" and the center-left Democratic Party is considered "liberal."[354][355] The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states," are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.
+
+Republican Donald Trump, the winner of the 2016 presidential election, is serving as the 45th president of the United States.[356] Leadership in the Senate includes Republican vice president Mike Pence, Republican president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.[357] Leadership in the House includes Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.[358]
+
+In the 116th United States Congress, the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democratic Party and the Senate is controlled by the Republican Party, giving the U.S. a split Congress. The Senate consists of 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats; the House consists of 233 Democrats, 196 Republicans, and 1 Libertarian.[359] Of state governors, there are 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. Among the D.C. mayor and the five territorial governors, there are two Republicans, one Democrat, one New Progressive, and two Independents.[360]
+
+The United States has an established structure of foreign relations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. New York City is home to the United Nations Headquarters. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States (although the U.S. still maintains unofficial relations with Bhutan and Taiwan).[361] It is a member of the G7,[362] G20, and OECD.
+
+The United States has a "Special Relationship" with the United Kingdom[363] and strong ties with India, Canada,[364] Australia,[365] New Zealand,[366] the Philippines,[367] Japan,[368] South Korea,[369] Israel,[370] and several European Union countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.[371] It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Colombia is traditionally considered by the United States as its most loyal ally in South America.[372][373]
+
+The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau through the Compact of Free Association.[374]
+
+Taxation in the United States is levied at the federal, state, and local government levels. This includes taxes on income, payroll, property, sales, imports, estates, and gifts, as well as various fees. Taxation in the United States is based on citizenship, not residency.[375] Both non-resident citizens and Green Card holders living abroad are taxed on their income irrespective of where they live or where their income is earned. The United States is one of the only countries in the world to do so.[376]
+
+In 2010 taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP.[377] Based on CBO estimates,[378] under 2013 tax law the top 1% will be paying the highest average tax rates since 1979, while other income groups will remain at historic lows.[379] For 2018, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 400 households was 23%, compared to 24.2% for the bottom half of U.S. households.[380]
+
+
+
+During fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $3.54 trillion on a budget or cash basis, down $60 billion or 1.7% vs. fiscal year 2011 spending of $3.60 trillion. Major categories of fiscal year 2012 spending included: Medicare & Medicaid (23%), Social Security (22%), Defense Department (19%), non-defense discretionary (17%), other mandatory (13%) and interest (6%).[382]
+
+The total national debt of the United States in the United States was $18.527 trillion (106% of the GDP) in 2014.[383][n] The United States has the largest external debt in the world[387] and the 34th largest government debt as a % of GDP in the world.[388]
+
+The president is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and by the Department of the Navy during times of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.[389]
+
+Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System.[390] American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's 11 active aircraft carriers, and Marine expeditionary units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad,[391] and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries.[392]
+
+The military budget of the United States in 2011 was more than $700 billion, 41% of global military spending. At 4.7% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top 15 military spenders, after Saudi Arabia.[393]  Defense spending plays a major role in science and technology investment, with roughly half of U.S. federal research and development funded by the Department of Defense.[394] Defense's share of the overall U.S. economy has generally declined in recent decades, from Cold War peaks of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 and 69.5% of federal outlays in 1954 to 4.7% of GDP and 18.8% of federal outlays in 2011.[395]
+
+The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.[396] More than 90% of the world's 14,000 nuclear weapons are owned by Russia and the United States.[397]
+
+Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police departments and sheriff's offices, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties, including protecting civil rights, national security and enforcing U.S. federal courts' rulings and federal laws.[398] State courts conduct most criminal trials while federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state criminal courts.
+
+A cross-sectional analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed that United States "homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher."[399] In 2016, the US murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000.[400] Gun ownership rights, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, continue to be the subject of contention.
+
+The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world.[401] As of 2020, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that there were some 2.3 million people incarcerated.[402]  The imprisonment rate for all prisoners sentenced to more than a year in state or federal facilities is 478 per 100,000 in 2013.[403] According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of inmates held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses.[404] About 9% of prisoners are held in privatized prisons.[402] The practice of privately operated prisons began in the 1980s and has been a subject of contention.[405]
+
+Capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and at the state level in 30 states.[406][407] No executions took place from 1967 to 1977, owing in part to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Since the decision there have been more than 1,300 executions, a majority of these taking place in three states: Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.[408] Meanwhile, several states have either abolished or struck down death penalty laws. In 2019, the country had the sixth-highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.[409]
+
+According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $16.8 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 19% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).[417] The United States is the largest importer of goods and second-largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2010, the total U.S. trade deficit was $635 billion.[418] Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners.[419]
+
+From 1983 to 2008, U.S. real compounded annual GDP growth was 3.3%, compared to a 2.3% weighted average for the rest of the G7.[420] The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita[421] and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP.[417] The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.[422]
+
+In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 86.4% of the economy.[425] While its economy has reached a postindustrial level of development, the United States remains an industrial power.[426] Consumer spending comprised 68% of the U.S. economy in 2015.[427] In August 2010, the American labor force consisted of 154.1 million people (50%). With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people. It has a smaller welfare state and redistributes less income through government action than most European nations.[428]
+
+The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation[429] and is one of a few countries in the world without paid family leave as a legal right.[430] While federal law does not require sick leave, it is a common benefit for government workers and full-time employees at corporations.[431] 74% of full-time American workers get paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although only 24% of part-time workers get the same benefits.[431] In 2009, the United States had the third-highest workforce productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands.[432]
+
+
+
+The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. Methods for producing interchangeable parts were developed by the U.S. War Department by the Federal Armories during the first half of the 19th century. This technology, along with the establishment of a machine tool industry, enabled the U.S. to have large-scale manufacturing of sewing machines, bicycles, and other items in the late 19th century and became known as the American system of manufacturing. Factory electrification in the early 20th century and introduction of the assembly line and other labor-saving techniques created the system of mass production.[433] In the 21st century, approximately two-thirds of research and development funding comes from the private sector.[434] The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor.[435][436]
+
+In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's research laboratory, one of the first of its kind, developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera.[437] The latter led to emergence of the worldwide entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.[438]
+
+The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann, to immigrate to the United States.[439] During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age, while the Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and aeronautics.[440][441]
+
+The invention of the transistor in the 1950s, a key active component in practically all modern electronics, led to many technological developments and a significant expansion of the U.S. technology industry.[442] This, in turn, led to the establishment of many new technology companies and regions around the country such as Silicon Valley in California. Advancements by American microprocessor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel along with both computer software and hardware companies that include Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems created and popularized the personal computer. The ARPANET was developed in the 1960s to meet Defense Department requirements, and became the first of a series of networks which evolved into the Internet.[443]
+
+Accounting for 4.24% of the global population, Americans collectively possess 29.4% of the world's total wealth, and Americans make up roughly half of the world's population of millionaires.[444] The Global Food Security Index ranked the U.S. number one for food affordability and overall food security in March 2013.[445] Americans on average have more than twice as much living space per dwelling and per person as European Union residents, and more than every EU nation.[446] For 2017 the United Nations Development Programme ranked the United States 13th among 189 countries in its Human Development Index and 25th among 151 countries in its inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI).[447]
+
+Wealth, like income and taxes, is highly concentrated; the richest 10% of the adult population possess 72% of the country's household wealth, while the bottom half claim only 2%.[448] According to a September 2017 report by the Federal Reserve, the top 1% controlled 38.6% of the country's wealth in 2016.[449] According to a 2018 study by the OECD, the United States has a larger percentage of low-income workers than almost any other developed nation. This is largely because at-risk workers get almost no government support and are further set back by a very weak collective bargaining system.[450] The top one percent of income-earners accounted for 52 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2015, where income is defined as market income excluding government transfers.[451] In 2018, U.S. income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau.[452]
+
+After years of stagnation, median household income reached a record high in 2016 following two consecutive years of record growth. Income inequality remains at record highs however, with the top fifth of earners taking home more than half of all overall income.[454] The rise in the share of total annual income received by the top one percent, which has more than doubled from nine percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2011, has significantly affected income inequality,[455] leaving the United States with one of the widest income distributions among OECD nations.[456]  The extent and relevance of income inequality is a matter of debate.[457][458][459]
+
+Between June 2007 and November 2008, the global recession led to falling asset prices around the world. Assets owned by Americans lost about a quarter of their value.[460] Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth was down $14 trillion, but has since increased $14 trillion over 2006 levels.[461] At the end of 2014, household debt amounted to $11.8 trillion,[462] down from $13.8 trillion at the end of 2008.[463]
+
+There were about 578,424 sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in the US in January 2014, with almost two-thirds staying in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program.[464] In 2011, 16.7 million children lived in food-insecure households, about 35% more than 2007 levels, though only 1.1% of U.S. children, or 845,000, saw reduced food intake or disrupted eating patterns at some point during the year, and most cases were not chronic.[465] As of June 2018[update], 40 million people, roughly 12.7% of the U.S. population, were living in poverty, with 18.5 million of those living in deep poverty (a family income below one-half of the poverty threshold) and over five million live "in 'Third World' conditions." In 2016, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, which made up 32.6% of the impoverished population.[466] In 2017, the U.S. state or territory with the lowest poverty rate was New Hampshire (7.6%), and the one with the highest was American Samoa (65%).[467][468][469]
+
+Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of public roads.[471] The United States has the world's second-largest automobile market,[472] and has the highest rate of per-capita vehicle ownership in the world, with 765 vehicles per 1,000 Americans (1996).[473][needs update] In 2017, there were 255,009,283 non-two wheel motor vehicles, or about 910 vehicles per 1,000 people.[474]
+
+The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned and has been largely deregulated since 1978, while most major airports are publicly owned.[475] The three largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are US-based; American Airlines is number one after its 2013 acquisition by US Airways.[476] Of the world's 50 busiest passenger airports, 16 are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.[477]
+
+The United States energy market is about 29,000 terawatt hours per year.[478] In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear and renewable energy sources.[479]
+
+Since 2007, the total greenhouse gas emissions by the United States are the second highest by country, exceeded only by China.[480] The United States has historically been the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gas emissions per capita remain high.[481]
+
+The United States is home to many cultures and a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.[483][484] Aside from the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors settled or immigrated within the past five centuries.[485] Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.[483][486] More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.[483]
+
+Americans have traditionally been characterized by a strong work ethic, competitiveness, and individualism,[487] as well as a unifying belief in an "American creed" emphasizing liberty, equality, private property, democracy, rule of law, and a preference for limited government.[488] Americans are extremely charitable by global standards. According to a 2006 British study, Americans gave 1.67% of GDP to charity, more than any other nation studied.[489][490][491]
+
+The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants.[492] Whether this perception is accurate has been a topic of debate.[493][494][495][496][420][497] While mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,[498] scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.[499] While Americans tend  to greatly value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is also generally seen as a positive attribute.[500]
+
+In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.[501] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."[502]
+
+Twelve U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Bob Dylan in 2016. William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[503] Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.[504]
+
+The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty, and later Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of American philosophical academia. John Rawls and Robert Nozick also led a revival of political philosophy.
+
+In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.[505] Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new, individualistic styles. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.[506] Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.[507]
+
+Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain with about three-quarters of grain products made of wheat flour[508] and many dishes use indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers.[509] These homegrown foods are part of a shared national menu on one of America's most popular holidays, Thanksgiving, when some Americans make traditional foods to celebrate the occasion.[510]
+
+The American fast food industry, the world's largest,[511] pioneered the drive-through format in the 1940s.[512] Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[513] Americans drink three times as much coffee as tea.[514] Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.[515][516]
+
+Although little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music.
+
+The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European and African traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s.[517]
+
+Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. Rock bands such as Metallica, the Eagles, and Aerosmith are among the highest grossing in worldwide sales.[518][519][520] In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk.
+
+More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities,[517] as have contemporary musical artists such as Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West, and Ariana Grande.[521]
+
+Hollywood, a northern district of Los Angeles, California, is one of the leaders in motion picture production.[522] The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope.[523] Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, although in the 21st century an increasing number of films are not made there, and film companies have been subject to the forces of globalization.[524]
+
+Director D. W. Griffith, the top American filmmaker during the silent film period, was central to the development of film grammar, and producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising.[525] Directors such as John Ford redefined the image of the American Old West, and, like others such as John Huston, broadened the possibilities of cinema with location shooting. The industry enjoyed its golden years, in what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood," from the early sound period until the early 1960s,[526] with screen actors such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe becoming iconic figures.[527][528] In the 1970s, "New Hollywood" or the "Hollywood Renaissance"[529] was defined by grittier films influenced by French and Italian realist pictures of the post-war period.[530] In more recent times, directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron have gained renown for their blockbuster films, often characterized by high production costs and earnings.
+
+Notable films topping the American Film Institute's AFI 100 list include Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time,[531][532] Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Graduate (1967), On the Waterfront (1954), Schindler's List (1993), Singin' in the Rain (1952), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).[533] The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, have been held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1929,[534] and the Golden Globe Awards have been held annually since January 1944.[535]
+
+American football is by several measures the most popular spectator sport;[537] the National Football League (NFL) has the highest average attendance of any sports league in the world, and the Super Bowl is watched by tens of millions globally. Baseball has been regarded as the U.S. national sport since the late 19th century, with Major League Baseball (MLB) being the top league. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports, with the top leagues being the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL). College football and basketball attract large audiences.[538] In soccer, the country hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the men's national soccer team qualified for ten World Cups and the women's team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup four times; Major League Soccer is the sport's highest league in the United States (featuring 23 American and three Canadian teams). The market for professional sports in the United States is roughly $69 billion, roughly 50% larger than that of all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined.[539]
+
+Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri were the first ever Olympic Games held outside of Europe.[540] As of 2017[update], the United States has won 2,522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 305 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.[541]
+While most major U.S. sports such as baseball and American football have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, some of which have become popular worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.[542] The most watched individual sports are golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR.[543][544]
+
+The four major broadcasters in the U.S. are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX). The four major broadcast television networks are all commercial entities. Cable television offers hundreds of channels catering to a variety of niches.[545] Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercial, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.[546]
+
+In 1998, the number of U.S. commercial radio stations had grown to 4,793 AM stations and 5,662 FM stations. In addition, there are 1,460 public radio stations. Most of these stations are run by universities and public authorities for educational purposes and are financed by public or private funds, subscriptions, and corporate underwriting. Much public-radio broadcasting is supplied by NPR. NPR was incorporated in February 1970 under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967; its television counterpart, PBS, was created by the same legislation. As of September 30, 2014[update], there are 15,433 licensed full-power radio stations in the U.S. according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).[547]
+
+Well-known newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.[548] Although the cost of publishing has increased over the years, the price of newspapers has generally remained low, forcing newspapers to rely more on advertising revenue and on articles provided by a major wire service, such as the Associated Press or Reuters, for their national and world coverage. With very few exceptions, all the newspapers in the U.S. are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families. Major cities often have "alternative weeklies" to complement the mainstream daily papers, such as New York City's The Village Voice or Los Angeles' LA Weekly. Major cities may also support a local business journal, trade papers relating to local industries, and papers for local ethnic and social groups. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Twitter.[549]
+
+More than 800 publications are produced in Spanish, the second most commonly used language in the United States behind English.[550][551]
+
+Internet sources
+

en/1865.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,332 @@
+
+
+Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100
+
+The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country mostly located in central North America, between Canada and Mexico. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions.[i] At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), it is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area.[e] With a 2019 estimated population of over 328 million,[7] the U.S. is the third most populous country in the world. The Americans are a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been shaped through centuries of immigration. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City.
+
+Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago,[19] and European colonization began in the 16th century. The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolutionary War lasting between 1775 and 1783, leading to independence.[20] Beginning in the late 18th century, the United States vigorously expanded across North America, gradually acquiring new territories,[21] killing and displacing Native Americans, and admitting new states. By 1848, the United States spanned the continent.[21]
+Slavery was legal in much of the United States until the second half of the 19th century, when the American Civil War led to its abolition.[22][23]
+
+The Spanish–American War and World War I entrenched the U.S. as a world power, a status confirmed by the outcome of World War II. It was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.[24]
+
+The United States is a federal republic and a representative democracy. It is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), NATO, and other international organizations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
+
+A highly developed country, the United States is the world's largest economy and accounts for approximately a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP).[25] The United States is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter of goods, by value.[26][27] Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total,[28] it holds 29.4% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share held by any country.[29] Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, median income, median wealth, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity.[30][31] It is the foremost military power in the world, making up more than a third of global military spending,[32] and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.[33]
+
+The first known use of the name "America" dates back to 1507, when it appeared on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. On this map, the name applied to South America in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.[34] After returning from his expeditions, Vespucci first postulated that the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern limit, as initially thought by Christopher Columbus, but instead were part of an entirely separate landmass thus far unknown to the Europeans.[35] In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator used the name "America" on his own world map, applying it to the entire Western Hemisphere.[36]
+
+The first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written by Stephen Moylan, Esq., to Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort.[37][38][39] The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.[40]
+
+The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed no later than June 17, 1776, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'".[41] The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'".[42] In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence.[41] This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.[41]
+
+The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms are the "U.S.," the "USA," and "America." Colloquial names are the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States." "Columbia," a name popular in poetry and songs of the late 18th century, derives its origin from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia." Many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.[43]
+
+The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865.[44] The singular form—e.g., "the United States is"—became popular after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States." The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.[45]
+
+A citizen of the United States is an "American." "United States," "American" and "U.S." refer to the country adjectivally ("American values," "U.S. forces"). In English, the word "American" rarely refers to topics or subjects not directly connected with the United States.[46]
+
+It has been generally accepted that the first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 12,000 years ago; however, increasing evidence suggests an even earlier arrival.[19][47][48] After crossing the land bridge, the Paleo-Indians moved southward along the Pacific coast[49] and through an interior ice-free corridor.[50] The Clovis culture, which appeared around 11,000 BC, was initially believed to represent the first wave of human settlement of the Americas.[51][52] It is likely these represent the first of three major waves of migration into North America.[53]
+
+Over time, indigenous cultures in North America grew increasingly complex, and some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture in the southeast, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies.[54] The Mississippian culture flourished in the south from 800 to 1600 AD, extending from the Mexican border down through Florida.[55] Its city state Cahokia is the largest, most complex pre-Columbian archaeological site in the modern-day United States.[56] In the Four Corners region, Ancestral Puebloan culture developed from centuries of agricultural experimentation.[57]
+
+Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Taos Pueblo.[58][59] The earthworks constructed by Native Americans of the Poverty Point culture have also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the southern Great Lakes region, the Iroquois Confederacy was established at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.[60] Most prominent along the Atlantic coast were the Algonquian tribes, who practiced hunting and trapping, along with limited cultivation.
+
+With the progress of European colonization in the territories of the contemporary United States, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[61] The native population of America declined after European arrival for various reasons,[62][63] primarily diseases such as smallpox and measles.[64][65]
+
+Estimating the native population of North America at the time of European contact is difficult.[66][67] Douglas H. Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution estimated that there was a population of 92,916 in the south Atlantic states and a population of 473,616 in the Gulf states,[68] but most academics regard this figure as too low.[66] Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns believed the populations were much higher, suggesting 1,100,000 along the shores of the gulf of Mexico, 2,211,000 people living between Florida and Massachusetts, 5,250,000 in the Mississippi Valley and tributaries and 697,000 people in the Florida peninsula.[66][67]
+
+In the early days of colonization, many European settlers were subject to food shortages, disease, and attacks from Native Americans. Native Americans were also often at war with neighboring tribes and allied with Europeans in their colonial wars. In many cases, however, natives and settlers came to depend on each other. Settlers traded for food and animal pelts; natives for guns, ammunition and other European goods.[69] Natives taught many settlers to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. European missionaries and others felt it was important to "civilize" the Native Americans and urged them to adopt European agricultural techniques and lifestyles.[70][71]
+
+With the advancement of European colonization in North America, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[72] The first Europeans to arrive in the contiguous United States were Spanish conquistadors such as Juan Ponce de León, who made his first visit to Florida in 1513. Even earlier, Christopher Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his 1493 voyage. The Spanish set up the first settlements in Florida and New Mexico such as Saint Augustine[73] and Santa Fe. The French established their own as well along the Mississippi River. Successful English settlement on the eastern coast of North America began with the Virginia Colony in 1607 at Jamestown and with the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. Many settlers were dissenting Christian groups who came seeking religious freedom. The continent's first elected legislative assembly, Virginia's House of Burgesses, was created in 1619. The Mayflower Compact, signed by the Pilgrims before disembarking, and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, established precedents for the pattern of representative self-government and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies.[74][75]
+
+Most settlers in every colony were small farmers, though other industries were formed. Cash crops included tobacco, rice, and wheat. Extraction industries grew up in furs, fishing and lumber. Manufacturers produced rum and ships, and by the late colonial period, Americans were producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply.[76] Cities eventually dotted the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs. English colonists were supplemented by waves of Scotch-Irish immigrants and other groups. As coastal land grew more expensive, freed indentured servants claimed lands further west.[77]
+
+A large-scale slave trade with English privateers began.[78] Because of less disease and better food and treatment, the life expectancy of slaves was much higher in North America than further south, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.[79][80] Colonial society was largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, and colonies passed acts for and against the practice.[81][82] But by the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in the South.[83]
+
+With the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were administered by the British as overseas dependencies.[84] All nonetheless had local governments with elections open to most free men.[85] With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grew rapidly. Relatively small Native American populations were eclipsed.[86] The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest both in religion and in religious liberty.[87]
+
+During the Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans, who were being conquered and displaced, the 13 British colonies had a population of over 2.1 million in 1770, about a third that of Britain. Despite continuing, new arrivals, the rate of natural increase was such that by the 1770s only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas.[88] The colonies' distance from Britain had allowed the development of self-government, but their unprecedented success motivated monarchs to periodically seek to reassert royal authority.[89]
+
+In 1774, the Spanish Navy ship Santiago, under Juan Pérez, entered and anchored in an inlet of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, in present-day British Columbia. Although the Spanish did not land, natives paddled to the ship to trade furs for abalone shells from California.[90] At the time, the Spanish were able to monopolize the trade between Asia and North America, granting limited licenses to the Portuguese. When the Russians began establishing a growing fur trading system in Alaska, the Spanish began to challenge the Russians, with Pérez's voyage being the first of many to the Pacific Northwest.[91][j]
+
+During his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook became the first European to begin formal contact with Hawaii.[93] Captain Cook's last voyage included sailing along the coast of North America and Alaska searching for a Northwest Passage for approximately nine months.[94]
+
+The American Revolutionary War was the first successful colonial war of independence against a European power. Americans had developed an ideology of "republicanism" asserting that government rested on the will of the people as expressed in their local legislatures. They demanded their rights as Englishmen and "no taxation without representation". The British insisted on administering the empire through Parliament, and the conflict escalated into war.[95]
+
+The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that Great Britain was not protecting Americans' unalienable rights. July 4 is celebrated annually as Independence Day.[96] In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a decentralized government that operated until 1789.[96]
+
+Following the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781,[97] Britain signed the peace treaty of 1783, and American sovereignty was internationally recognized and the country was granted all lands east of the Mississippi River. Nationalists led the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788. The federal government was reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789. George Washington, who had led the Continental Army to victory, was the first president elected under the new constitution. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.[98]
+
+Although the federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808, after 1820, cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and along with it, the slave population.[99][100][101] The Second Great Awakening, especially 1800–1840, converted millions to evangelical Protestantism. In the North, it energized multiple social reform movements, including abolitionism;[102] in the South, Methodists and Baptists proselytized among slave populations.[103]
+
+Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of American Indian Wars.[104] The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation's area.[105] The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism.[106] A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819.[107] The expansion was aided by steam power, when steamboats began traveling along America's large water systems, many of which were connected by new canals, such as the Erie and the I&M; then, even faster railroads began their stretch across the nation's land.[108]
+
+From 1820 to 1850, Jacksonian democracy began a set of reforms which included wider white male suffrage; it led to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that forcibly resettled Indians into the west on Indian reservations. The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 during a period of expansionist Manifest destiny.[109] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest.[110] Victory in the Mexican–American War resulted in the 1848 Mexican Cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest.[111]
+The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 spurred migration to the Pacific coast, which led to the California Genocide[112][113][114][115] and the creation of additional western states.[116] After the Civil War, new transcontinental railways made relocation easier for settlers, expanded internal trade and increased conflicts with Native Americans.[117] In 1869, a new Peace Policy nominally promised to protect Native Americans from abuses, avoid further war, and secure their eventual U.S. citizenship. Nonetheless, large-scale conflicts continued throughout the West into the 1900s.
+
+Irreconcilable sectional conflict regarding the slavery of Africans and African Americans ultimately led to the American Civil War.[118] Initially, states entering the Union had alternated between slave and free states, keeping a sectional balance in the Senate, while free states outstripped slave states in population and in the House of Representatives. But with additional western territory and more free-soil states, tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over federalism and disposition of the territories, as well as whether to expand or restrict slavery.[119]
+
+With the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, conventions in thirteen slave states ultimately declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "South" or the "Confederacy"), while the federal government (the "Union") maintained that secession was illegal.[119] In order to bring about this secession, military action was initiated by the secessionists, and the Union responded in kind. The ensuing war would become the deadliest military conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of approximately 618,000 soldiers as well as many civilians.[120] The Union initially simply fought to keep the country united. Nevertheless, as casualties mounted after 1863 and Lincoln delivered his Emancipation Proclamation, the main purpose of the war from the Union's viewpoint became the abolition of slavery. Indeed, when the Union ultimately won the war in April 1865, each of the states in the defeated South was required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery.
+
+The government enacted three constitutional amendments in the years after the war: the aforementioned Thirteenth as well as the Fourteenth Amendment providing citizenship to the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves,[121] and the Fifteenth Amendment ensuring in theory that African Americans had the right to vote. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power[122] aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the South while guaranteeing the rights of the newly freed slaves.
+
+Reconstruction began in earnest following the war. While President Lincoln attempted to foster friendship and forgiveness between the Union and the former Confederacy, his assassination on April 14, 1865, drove a wedge between North and South again. Republicans in the federal government made it their goal to oversee the rebuilding of the South and to ensure the rights of African Americans. They persisted until the Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to cease protecting the rights of African Americans in the South in order for Democrats to concede the presidential election of 1876.
+
+Southern white Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers," took control of the South after the end of Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1910 the Redeemers established so-called Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising most blacks and some poor whites throughout the region. Blacks faced racial segregation, especially in the South.[123] They also occasionally experienced vigilante violence, including lynching.[124]
+
+In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe supplied a surplus of labor for the country's industrialization and transformed its culture.[126] National infrastructure including telegraph and transcontinental railroads spurred economic growth and greater settlement and development of the American Old West. The later invention of electric light and the telephone would also affect communication and urban life.[127]
+
+The United States fought Indian Wars west of the Mississippi River from 1810 to at least 1890.[128] Most of these conflicts ended with the cession of Native American territory and their confinement to Indian reservations. This further expanded acreage under mechanical cultivation, increasing surpluses for international markets.[129] Mainland expansion also included the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.[130] In 1893, pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the monarchy and formed the Republic of Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were ceded by Spain in the same year, following the Spanish–American War.[131] American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the end of the Second Samoan Civil War.[132] The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.[133]
+
+Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. Tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie led the nation's progress in railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. Banking became a major part of the economy, with J. P. Morgan playing a notable role. The American economy boomed, becoming the world's largest, and the United States achieved great power status.[134] These dramatic changes were accompanied by social unrest and the rise of populist, socialist, and anarchist movements.[135] This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which saw significant reforms including women's suffrage, alcohol prohibition, regulation of consumer goods, greater antitrust measures to ensure competition and attention to worker conditions.[136][137][138]
+
+The United States remained neutral from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 until 1917, when it joined the war as an "associated power," alongside the formal Allies of World War I, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson took a leading diplomatic role at the Paris Peace Conference and advocated strongly for the U.S. to join the League of Nations. However, the Senate refused to approve this and did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles that established the League of Nations.[139]
+
+In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage.[140] The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of radio for mass communication and the invention of early television.[141] The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal.[142] The Great Migration of millions of African Americans out of the American South began before World War I and extended through the 1960s;[143] whereas the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration.[144]
+
+At first effectively neutral during World War II, the United States began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers.[145] Although Japan attacked the United States first, the U.S. nonetheless pursued a "Europe first" defense policy.[146] The United States thus left its vast Asian colony, the Philippines, isolated and fighting a losing struggle against Japanese invasion and occupation, as military resources were devoted to the European theater. During the war, the United States was referred to as one of the "Four Policemen"[147] of Allies power who met to plan the postwar world, along with Britain, the Soviet Union and China.[148][149] Although the nation lost around 400,000 military personnel,[150] it emerged relatively undamaged from the war with even greater economic and military influence.[151]
+
+The United States played a leading role in the Bretton Woods and Yalta conferences with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and other Allies, which signed agreements on new international financial institutions and Europe's postwar reorganization. As an Allied victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war.[152] The United States and Japan then fought each other in the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.[153][154] The United States eventually developed the first nuclear weapons and used them on Japan in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese surrendered on September 2, ending World War II.[155][156]
+
+After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for power, influence, and prestige during what became known as the Cold War, driven by an ideological divide between capitalism and communism.[157] They dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its NATO allies on one side and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other. The U.S. developed a policy of containment towards the expansion of communist influence. While the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict.[citation needed]
+
+The United States often opposed Third World movements that it viewed as Soviet-sponsored, and occasionally pursued direct action for regime change against left-wing governments, even supporting right-wing authoritarian governments at times.[158] American troops fought communist Chinese and North Korean forces in the Korean War of 1950–53.[159] The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite and its 1961 launch of the first manned spaceflight initiated a "Space Race" in which the United States became the first nation to land a man on the moon in 1969.[159] A proxy war in Southeast Asia eventually evolved into full American participation, as the Vietnam War.[citation needed]
+
+At home, the U.S. experienced sustained economic expansion and a rapid growth of its population and middle class. Construction of an Interstate Highway System transformed the nation's infrastructure over the following decades. Millions moved from farms and inner cities to large suburban housing developments.[160][161] In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th and last U.S. state added to the country.[162] The growing Civil Rights Movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader and figurehead. A combination of court decisions and legislation, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, sought to end racial discrimination.[163][164][165] Meanwhile, a counterculture movement grew which was fueled by opposition to the Vietnam war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution.
+
+The launch of a "War on Poverty" expanded entitlements and welfare spending, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that provide health coverage to the elderly and poor, respectively, and the means-tested Food Stamp Program and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.[166]
+
+The 1970s and early 1980s saw the onset of stagflation. After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan responded to economic stagnation with free-market oriented reforms. Following the collapse of détente, he abandoned "containment" and initiated the more aggressive "rollback" strategy towards the USSR.[167][168][169][170][171] After a surge in female labor participation over the previous decade, by 1985 the majority of women aged 16 and over were employed.[172]
+
+The late 1980s brought a "thaw" in relations with the USSR, and its collapse in 1991 finally ended the Cold War.[173][174][175][176] This brought about unipolarity[177] with the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The concept of Pax Americana, which had appeared in the post-World War II period, gained wide popularity as a term for the post-Cold War new world order.[citation needed]
+
+After the Cold War, the conflict in the Middle East triggered a crisis in 1990, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, an ally of the United States. Fearing the instability would spread to other regions, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Shield, a defensive force buildup in Saudi Arabia, and Operation Desert Storm, in a staging titled the Gulf War; waged by coalition forces from 34 nations, led by the United States against Iraq ending in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restoration of the monarchy.[178]
+
+Originating within U.S. military defense networks, the Internet spread to international academic platforms and then to the public in the 1990s, greatly affecting the global economy, society, and culture.[179] Due to the dot-com boom, stable monetary policy, and reduced social welfare spending, the 1990s saw the longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history.[180] Beginning in 1994, the U.S. entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), prompting trade among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to soar.[181]
+
+On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people.[182] In response, the United States launched the War on Terror, which included a war in Afghanistan and the 2003–11 Iraq War.[183][184]
+
+Government policy designed to promote affordable housing,[185] widespread failures in corporate and regulatory governance,[186] and historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve[187] led to the mid-2000s housing bubble, which culminated with the 2008 financial crisis, the nation's largest economic contraction since the Great Depression.[188] Barack Obama, the first African-American[189] and multiracial[190] president, was elected in 2008 amid the crisis,[191] and subsequently passed stimulus measures and the Dodd–Frank Act in an attempt to mitigate its negative effects and ensure there would not be a repeat of the crisis. In 2010, the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, which made the most sweeping reforms to the nation's healthcare system in nearly five decades, including mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges.[citation needed]
+
+American forces in Iraq were withdrawn in large numbers in 2009 and 2010, and the war in the region was declared formally over in December 2011.[192] But months earlier, Operation Neptune Spear led to the death of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.[193] In the presidential election of 2016, Republican Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States. On January 20, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed.[194] As of July 2020, the United States has over 4 million COVID-19 cases and over 145,000 deaths.[195] The United States is, by far, the country with the most cases of COVID-19 since April 11, 2020.[196]
+
+The 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia occupy a combined area of 3,119,884.69 square miles (8,080,464.3 km2). Of this area, 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2) is contiguous land, composing 83.65% of total U.S. land area.[197][198] Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, is 10,931 square miles (28,311 km2) in area. The populated territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands together cover 9,185 square miles (23,789 km2).[199] Measured by only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.[200]
+
+The United States is the world's third- or fourth-largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and nearly equal to China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted, and how the total size of the United States is measured.[e][201][202]
+
+The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont.[203] The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest.[204] The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast.[204]
+
+The Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking around 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado.[205] Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Chihuahua and Mojave.[206] The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast, both ranges reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m). The lowest and highest points in the contiguous United States are in the state of California,[207] and only about 84 miles (135 km) apart.[208] At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali is the highest peak in the country and in North America.[209] Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature.[210]
+
+The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.[211] The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains have an alpine climate. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Hawaii and the southern tip of Florida are tropical, as well as its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.[212] States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur in the country, mainly in Tornado Alley areas in the Midwest and South.[213] Overall, the United States has the world's most violent weather, receiving more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world.[214]
+
+The U.S. ecology is megadiverse: about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and more than 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland.[216] The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 bird species, 311 reptile species, and 295 amphibian species,[217] as well as about 91,000 insect species.[218]
+
+There are 62 national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas.[219] Altogether, the government owns about 28% of the country's land area,[220] mostly in the western states.[221] Most of this land is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching, and about .86% is used for military purposes.[222][223]
+
+Environmental issues include debates on oil and nuclear energy, dealing with air and water pollution, the economic costs of protecting wildlife, logging and deforestation,[224][225] and international responses to global warming.[226][227] The most prominent environmental agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by presidential order in 1970.[228] The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act.[229] The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is intended to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.[230]
+
+The U.S. Census Bureau officially estimated the country's population to be 328,239,523 as of July 1, 2019.[231] In addition, the Census Bureau provides a continuously updated U.S. Population Clock that approximates the latest population of the 50 states and District of Columbia based on the Bureau's most recent demographic trends.[234] According to the clock, on May 23, 2020, the U.S. population exceeded 329 million residents, with a net gain of one person every 19 seconds, or about 4,547 people per day. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world, after China and India. In 2018 the median age of the United States population was 38.1 years.[235]
+
+In 2018, there were almost 90 million immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrants (second-generation Americans) in the United States, accounting for 28% of the overall U.S. population.[236] The United States has a very diverse population; 37 ancestry groups have more than one million members.[237] German Americans are the largest ethnic group (more than 50 million)—followed by Irish Americans (circa 37 million), Mexican Americans (circa 31 million) and English Americans (circa 28 million).[238][239]
+
+White Americans (mostly European ancestry) are the largest racial group at 73.1% of the population; African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third-largest ancestry group.[237] Asian Americans are the country's second-largest racial minority; the three largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans.[237] The largest American community with European ancestry is German Americans, which consists of more than 14% of the total population.[240] In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively).[241] The census counted more than 19 million people of "Some Other Race" who were "unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories in 2010, more than 18.5 million (97%) of whom are of Hispanic ethnicity.[241]
+
+In 2017, out of the U.S. foreign-born population, some 45% (20.7 million) were naturalized citizens, 27% (12.3 million) were lawful permanent residents (including many eligible to become citizens), 6% (2.2 million) were temporary lawful residents, and 23% (10.5 million) were unauthorized immigrants.[242] Among current living immigrants to the U.S., the top five countries of birth are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and El Salvador. Until 2017 and 2018, the United States led the world in refugee resettlement for decades, admitted more refugees than the rest of the world combined.[243] From fiscal year 1980 until 2017, 55% of refugees came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 13% from Africa, and 4% from Latin America.[243]
+
+A 2017 United Nations report projected that the U.S. would be one of nine countries in which world population growth through 2050 would be concentrated.[244] A 2020 U.S. Census Bureau report projected the population of the country could be anywhere between 320 million and 447 million by 2060, depending on the rate of in-migration; in all projected scenarios, a lower fertility rate and increases in life expectancy would result in an aging population.[245] The United States has an annual birth rate of 13 per 1,000, which is five births per 1,000 below the world average.[246] Its population growth rate is positive at 0.7%, higher than that of many developed nations.[247]
+
+About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (including suburbs);[202] about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000.[248] In 2008, 273 incorporated municipalities had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than one million residents, and four cities had over two million (namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston).[249] Estimates for the year 2018 show that 53 metropolitan areas have populations greater than one million. Many metros in the South, Southwest and West grew significantly between 2010 and 2018. The Dallas and Houston metros increased by more than a million people, while the Washington, D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and Phoenix metros all grew by more than 500,000 people.
+
+English (specifically, American English) is the de facto national language of the United States. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2010, about 230 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. 12% of the population speaks Spanish at home, making it the second most common language. Spanish is also the most widely taught second language.[250][251]
+
+Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii.[252] In addition to English, Alaska recognizes twenty official Native languages,[253][k] and South Dakota recognizes Sioux.[254] While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French.[255] Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms.[256]
+
+Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan[257] is officially recognized by American Samoa and Chamorro[258] is an official language of Guam. Both Carolinian and Chamorro have official recognition in the Northern Mariana Islands.[259]
+Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico and is more widely spoken than English there.[260]
+
+The most widely taught foreign languages in the United States, in terms of enrollment numbers from kindergarten through university undergraduate education, are Spanish (around 7.2 million students), French (1.5 million), and German (500,000). Other commonly taught languages include Latin, Japanese, ASL, Italian, and Chinese.[261][262] 18% of all Americans claim to speak both English and another language.[263]
+
+Religion in the United States (2017)[266]
+
+The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids Congress from passing laws respecting its establishment.
+
+In a 2013 survey, 56% of Americans said religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other Western nation.[267] In a 2009 Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they attended church weekly or almost weekly; the figures ranged from a low of 23% in Vermont to a high of 63% in Mississippi.[268]
+
+In a 2014 survey, 70.6% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians;[269] Protestants accounted for 46.5%, while Roman Catholics, at 20.8%, formed the largest single Christian group.[270] In 2014, 5.9% of the U.S. adult population claimed a non-Christian religion.[271] These include Judaism (1.9%), Islam (0.9%), Hinduism (0.7%), and Buddhism (0.7%).[271] The survey also reported that 22.8% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist or simply having no religion—up from 8.2% in 1990.[270][272][273] There are also Unitarian Universalist, Scientologist, Baha'i, Sikh, Jain, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Satanist, Taoist, Druid, Native American, Afro-American, traditional African, Wiccan, Gnostic, humanist and deist communities.[274][275]
+
+Protestantism is the largest Christian religious grouping in the United States, accounting for almost half of all Americans. Baptists collectively form the largest branch of Protestantism at 15.4%,[276] and the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest individual Protestant denomination at 5.3% of the U.S. population.[276] Apart from Baptists, other Protestant categories include nondenominational Protestants, Methodists, Pentecostals, unspecified Protestants, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, other Reformed, Episcopalians/Anglicans, Quakers, Adventists, Holiness, Christian fundamentalists, Anabaptists, Pietists, and multiple others.[276]
+
+As with other Western countries, the U.S. is becoming less religious. Irreligion is growing rapidly among Americans under 30.[277] Polls show that overall American confidence in organized religion has been declining since the mid to late 1980s,[278] and that younger Americans, in particular, are becoming increasingly irreligious.[271][279] In a 2012 study, the Protestant share of the U.S. population had dropped to 48%, thus ending its status as religious category of the majority for the first time.[280][281] Americans with no religion have 1.7 children compared to 2.2 among Christians. The unaffiliated are less likely to marry with 37% marrying compared to 52% of Christians.[282]
+
+The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. By contrast, religion plays the least important role in New England and in the Western United States.[268]
+
+As of 2018[update], 52% of Americans age 15 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 32% had never been married.[283] Women now work mostly outside the home and receive the majority of bachelor's degrees.[284]
+
+The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is 26.5 per 1,000 women. The rate has declined by 57% since 1991.[285] Abortion is legal throughout the country. Abortion rates, currently 241 per 1,000 live births and 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, are falling but remain higher than most Western nations.[286] In 2013, the average age at first birth was 26 and 41% of births were to unmarried women.[287]
+
+The total fertility rate in 2016 was 1820.5 births per 1000 women.[288] Adoption in the United States is common and relatively easy from a legal point of view (compared to other Western countries).[289] As of 2001[update], with more than 127,000 adoptions, the U.S. accounted for nearly half of the total number of adoptions worldwide.[needs update][290] Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, and it is legal for same-sex couples to adopt. Polygamy is illegal throughout the U.S.[291]
+
+In 2019, the U.S. had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.[292]
+
+The United States had a life expectancy of 78.6 years at birth in 2017, which was the third year of declines in life expectancy following decades of continuous increase. The recent decline, primarily among the age group 25 to 64, is largely due to sharp increases in the drug overdose and suicide rates; the country has one of the highest suicide rates among wealthy countries.[293][294] Life expectancy was highest among Asians and Hispanics and lowest among blacks.[295][296] According to CDC and Census Bureau data, deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug overdoses hit record highs in 2017.[297]
+
+Increasing obesity in the United States and health improvements elsewhere contributed to lowering the country's rank in life expectancy from 11th in the world in 1987, to 42nd in 2007, and as of 2017 the country had the lowest life expectancy among Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and seven countries of western Europe.[298][299] Obesity rates have more than doubled in the last 30 years and are the highest in the industrialized world.[300][301] Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight.[302] Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.[303]
+
+In 2010, coronary artery disease, lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and traffic accidents caused the most years of life lost in the U.S. Low back pain, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety caused the most years lost to disability. The most harmful risk factors were poor diet, tobacco smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, physical inactivity, and alcohol use. Alzheimer's disease, drug abuse, kidney disease, cancer, and falls caused the most additional years of life lost over their age-adjusted 1990 per-capita rates.[304] U.S. teenage pregnancy and abortion rates are substantially higher than in other Western nations, especially among blacks and Hispanics.[305]
+
+Health-care coverage in the United States is a combination of public and private efforts and is not universal. In 2017, 12.2% of the population did not carry health insurance.[306] The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue.[307][308] Federal legislation, passed in early 2010, roughly halved the uninsured share of the population, though the bill and its ultimate effect are issues of controversy.[309][310] The U.S. health-care system far outspends any other nation, measured both in per capita spending and as percentage of GDP.[311] At the same time, the U.S. is a global leader in medical innovation.[312]
+
+American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. In most states, children are required to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn 18 (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at 16 or 17.[313]
+
+About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.[314] The U.S. spends more on education per student than any nation in the world, spending more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student.[315][needs update] Some 80% of U.S. college students attend public universities.[316]
+
+Of Americans 25 and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees.[317] The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.[202][318] The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.[319]
+
+The United States has many private and public institutions of higher education. The majority of the world's top universities, as listed by various ranking organizations, are in the U.S.[320][321][322] There are also local community colleges with generally more open admission policies, shorter academic programs, and lower tuition.
+
+In 2018, U21, a network of research-intensive universities, ranked the United States first in the world for breadth and quality of higher education, and 15th when GDP was a factor.[323] As for public expenditures on higher education, the U.S. trails some other OECD nations but spends more per student than the OECD average, and more than all nations in combined public and private spending.[315][324] As of 2018[update], student loan debt exceeded 1.5 trillion dollars.[325][326]
+
+The United States is a federal republic of 50 states, a federal district, five territories and several uninhabited island possessions.[327][328][329] It is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law."[330] For 2018, the U.S. ranked 25th on the Democracy Index.[331] On Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index its public sector position deteriorated from a score of 76 in 2015 to 69 in 2019.[332]
+
+In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government: federal, state, and local. The local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district.
+
+The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document.[333] The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus. The Constitution has been amended 27 times;[334] the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights. All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review and any law ruled by the courts to be in violation of the Constitution is voided. The principle of judicial review, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was established by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison (1803)[335] in a decision handed down by Chief Justice John Marshall.[336]
+
+The federal government comprises three branches:
+
+The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population. Each state then draws single-member districts to conform with the census apportionment. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories each have one member of Congress—these members are not allowed to vote.[341]
+
+The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one-third of Senate seats are up for election every two years. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories do not have senators.[341] The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia.[342] The Supreme Court, led by the chief justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.[343]
+
+The state governments are structured in a roughly similar fashion, though Nebraska has a unicameral legislature.[344] The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.
+
+The 50 states are the principal administrative divisions in the country. These are subdivided into counties or county equivalents and further divided into municipalities. The District of Columbia is a federal district that contains the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C.[345] The states and the District of Columbia choose the president of the United States. Each state has presidential electors equal to the number of their representatives and senators in Congress; the District of Columbia has three (because of the 23rd Amendment).[346] Territories of the United States such as Puerto Rico do not have presidential electors, and so people in those territories cannot vote for the president.[341]
+
+The United States also observes tribal sovereignty of the American Indian nations to a limited degree, as it does with the states' sovereignty. American Indians are U.S. citizens and tribal lands are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress and the federal courts. Like the states they have a great deal of autonomy, but also like the states, tribes are not allowed to make war, engage in their own foreign relations, or print and issue currency.[347]
+
+Citizenship is granted at birth in all states, the District of Columbia, and all major U.S. territories except American Samoa.[348][349][m]
+
+The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history.[352] For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote. The president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College.[353]
+
+In American political culture, the center-right Republican Party is considered "conservative" and the center-left Democratic Party is considered "liberal."[354][355] The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states," are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.
+
+Republican Donald Trump, the winner of the 2016 presidential election, is serving as the 45th president of the United States.[356] Leadership in the Senate includes Republican vice president Mike Pence, Republican president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.[357] Leadership in the House includes Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.[358]
+
+In the 116th United States Congress, the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democratic Party and the Senate is controlled by the Republican Party, giving the U.S. a split Congress. The Senate consists of 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats; the House consists of 233 Democrats, 196 Republicans, and 1 Libertarian.[359] Of state governors, there are 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. Among the D.C. mayor and the five territorial governors, there are two Republicans, one Democrat, one New Progressive, and two Independents.[360]
+
+The United States has an established structure of foreign relations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. New York City is home to the United Nations Headquarters. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States (although the U.S. still maintains unofficial relations with Bhutan and Taiwan).[361] It is a member of the G7,[362] G20, and OECD.
+
+The United States has a "Special Relationship" with the United Kingdom[363] and strong ties with India, Canada,[364] Australia,[365] New Zealand,[366] the Philippines,[367] Japan,[368] South Korea,[369] Israel,[370] and several European Union countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.[371] It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Colombia is traditionally considered by the United States as its most loyal ally in South America.[372][373]
+
+The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau through the Compact of Free Association.[374]
+
+Taxation in the United States is levied at the federal, state, and local government levels. This includes taxes on income, payroll, property, sales, imports, estates, and gifts, as well as various fees. Taxation in the United States is based on citizenship, not residency.[375] Both non-resident citizens and Green Card holders living abroad are taxed on their income irrespective of where they live or where their income is earned. The United States is one of the only countries in the world to do so.[376]
+
+In 2010 taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP.[377] Based on CBO estimates,[378] under 2013 tax law the top 1% will be paying the highest average tax rates since 1979, while other income groups will remain at historic lows.[379] For 2018, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 400 households was 23%, compared to 24.2% for the bottom half of U.S. households.[380]
+
+
+
+During fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $3.54 trillion on a budget or cash basis, down $60 billion or 1.7% vs. fiscal year 2011 spending of $3.60 trillion. Major categories of fiscal year 2012 spending included: Medicare & Medicaid (23%), Social Security (22%), Defense Department (19%), non-defense discretionary (17%), other mandatory (13%) and interest (6%).[382]
+
+The total national debt of the United States in the United States was $18.527 trillion (106% of the GDP) in 2014.[383][n] The United States has the largest external debt in the world[387] and the 34th largest government debt as a % of GDP in the world.[388]
+
+The president is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and by the Department of the Navy during times of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.[389]
+
+Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System.[390] American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's 11 active aircraft carriers, and Marine expeditionary units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad,[391] and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries.[392]
+
+The military budget of the United States in 2011 was more than $700 billion, 41% of global military spending. At 4.7% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top 15 military spenders, after Saudi Arabia.[393]  Defense spending plays a major role in science and technology investment, with roughly half of U.S. federal research and development funded by the Department of Defense.[394] Defense's share of the overall U.S. economy has generally declined in recent decades, from Cold War peaks of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 and 69.5% of federal outlays in 1954 to 4.7% of GDP and 18.8% of federal outlays in 2011.[395]
+
+The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.[396] More than 90% of the world's 14,000 nuclear weapons are owned by Russia and the United States.[397]
+
+Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police departments and sheriff's offices, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties, including protecting civil rights, national security and enforcing U.S. federal courts' rulings and federal laws.[398] State courts conduct most criminal trials while federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state criminal courts.
+
+A cross-sectional analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed that United States "homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher."[399] In 2016, the US murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000.[400] Gun ownership rights, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, continue to be the subject of contention.
+
+The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world.[401] As of 2020, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that there were some 2.3 million people incarcerated.[402]  The imprisonment rate for all prisoners sentenced to more than a year in state or federal facilities is 478 per 100,000 in 2013.[403] According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of inmates held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses.[404] About 9% of prisoners are held in privatized prisons.[402] The practice of privately operated prisons began in the 1980s and has been a subject of contention.[405]
+
+Capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and at the state level in 30 states.[406][407] No executions took place from 1967 to 1977, owing in part to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Since the decision there have been more than 1,300 executions, a majority of these taking place in three states: Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.[408] Meanwhile, several states have either abolished or struck down death penalty laws. In 2019, the country had the sixth-highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.[409]
+
+According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $16.8 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 19% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).[417] The United States is the largest importer of goods and second-largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2010, the total U.S. trade deficit was $635 billion.[418] Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners.[419]
+
+From 1983 to 2008, U.S. real compounded annual GDP growth was 3.3%, compared to a 2.3% weighted average for the rest of the G7.[420] The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita[421] and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP.[417] The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.[422]
+
+In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 86.4% of the economy.[425] While its economy has reached a postindustrial level of development, the United States remains an industrial power.[426] Consumer spending comprised 68% of the U.S. economy in 2015.[427] In August 2010, the American labor force consisted of 154.1 million people (50%). With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people. It has a smaller welfare state and redistributes less income through government action than most European nations.[428]
+
+The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation[429] and is one of a few countries in the world without paid family leave as a legal right.[430] While federal law does not require sick leave, it is a common benefit for government workers and full-time employees at corporations.[431] 74% of full-time American workers get paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although only 24% of part-time workers get the same benefits.[431] In 2009, the United States had the third-highest workforce productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands.[432]
+
+
+
+The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. Methods for producing interchangeable parts were developed by the U.S. War Department by the Federal Armories during the first half of the 19th century. This technology, along with the establishment of a machine tool industry, enabled the U.S. to have large-scale manufacturing of sewing machines, bicycles, and other items in the late 19th century and became known as the American system of manufacturing. Factory electrification in the early 20th century and introduction of the assembly line and other labor-saving techniques created the system of mass production.[433] In the 21st century, approximately two-thirds of research and development funding comes from the private sector.[434] The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor.[435][436]
+
+In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's research laboratory, one of the first of its kind, developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera.[437] The latter led to emergence of the worldwide entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.[438]
+
+The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann, to immigrate to the United States.[439] During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age, while the Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and aeronautics.[440][441]
+
+The invention of the transistor in the 1950s, a key active component in practically all modern electronics, led to many technological developments and a significant expansion of the U.S. technology industry.[442] This, in turn, led to the establishment of many new technology companies and regions around the country such as Silicon Valley in California. Advancements by American microprocessor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel along with both computer software and hardware companies that include Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems created and popularized the personal computer. The ARPANET was developed in the 1960s to meet Defense Department requirements, and became the first of a series of networks which evolved into the Internet.[443]
+
+Accounting for 4.24% of the global population, Americans collectively possess 29.4% of the world's total wealth, and Americans make up roughly half of the world's population of millionaires.[444] The Global Food Security Index ranked the U.S. number one for food affordability and overall food security in March 2013.[445] Americans on average have more than twice as much living space per dwelling and per person as European Union residents, and more than every EU nation.[446] For 2017 the United Nations Development Programme ranked the United States 13th among 189 countries in its Human Development Index and 25th among 151 countries in its inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI).[447]
+
+Wealth, like income and taxes, is highly concentrated; the richest 10% of the adult population possess 72% of the country's household wealth, while the bottom half claim only 2%.[448] According to a September 2017 report by the Federal Reserve, the top 1% controlled 38.6% of the country's wealth in 2016.[449] According to a 2018 study by the OECD, the United States has a larger percentage of low-income workers than almost any other developed nation. This is largely because at-risk workers get almost no government support and are further set back by a very weak collective bargaining system.[450] The top one percent of income-earners accounted for 52 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2015, where income is defined as market income excluding government transfers.[451] In 2018, U.S. income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau.[452]
+
+After years of stagnation, median household income reached a record high in 2016 following two consecutive years of record growth. Income inequality remains at record highs however, with the top fifth of earners taking home more than half of all overall income.[454] The rise in the share of total annual income received by the top one percent, which has more than doubled from nine percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2011, has significantly affected income inequality,[455] leaving the United States with one of the widest income distributions among OECD nations.[456]  The extent and relevance of income inequality is a matter of debate.[457][458][459]
+
+Between June 2007 and November 2008, the global recession led to falling asset prices around the world. Assets owned by Americans lost about a quarter of their value.[460] Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth was down $14 trillion, but has since increased $14 trillion over 2006 levels.[461] At the end of 2014, household debt amounted to $11.8 trillion,[462] down from $13.8 trillion at the end of 2008.[463]
+
+There were about 578,424 sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in the US in January 2014, with almost two-thirds staying in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program.[464] In 2011, 16.7 million children lived in food-insecure households, about 35% more than 2007 levels, though only 1.1% of U.S. children, or 845,000, saw reduced food intake or disrupted eating patterns at some point during the year, and most cases were not chronic.[465] As of June 2018[update], 40 million people, roughly 12.7% of the U.S. population, were living in poverty, with 18.5 million of those living in deep poverty (a family income below one-half of the poverty threshold) and over five million live "in 'Third World' conditions." In 2016, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, which made up 32.6% of the impoverished population.[466] In 2017, the U.S. state or territory with the lowest poverty rate was New Hampshire (7.6%), and the one with the highest was American Samoa (65%).[467][468][469]
+
+Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of public roads.[471] The United States has the world's second-largest automobile market,[472] and has the highest rate of per-capita vehicle ownership in the world, with 765 vehicles per 1,000 Americans (1996).[473][needs update] In 2017, there were 255,009,283 non-two wheel motor vehicles, or about 910 vehicles per 1,000 people.[474]
+
+The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned and has been largely deregulated since 1978, while most major airports are publicly owned.[475] The three largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are US-based; American Airlines is number one after its 2013 acquisition by US Airways.[476] Of the world's 50 busiest passenger airports, 16 are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.[477]
+
+The United States energy market is about 29,000 terawatt hours per year.[478] In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear and renewable energy sources.[479]
+
+Since 2007, the total greenhouse gas emissions by the United States are the second highest by country, exceeded only by China.[480] The United States has historically been the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gas emissions per capita remain high.[481]
+
+The United States is home to many cultures and a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.[483][484] Aside from the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors settled or immigrated within the past five centuries.[485] Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.[483][486] More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.[483]
+
+Americans have traditionally been characterized by a strong work ethic, competitiveness, and individualism,[487] as well as a unifying belief in an "American creed" emphasizing liberty, equality, private property, democracy, rule of law, and a preference for limited government.[488] Americans are extremely charitable by global standards. According to a 2006 British study, Americans gave 1.67% of GDP to charity, more than any other nation studied.[489][490][491]
+
+The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants.[492] Whether this perception is accurate has been a topic of debate.[493][494][495][496][420][497] While mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,[498] scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.[499] While Americans tend  to greatly value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is also generally seen as a positive attribute.[500]
+
+In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.[501] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."[502]
+
+Twelve U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Bob Dylan in 2016. William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[503] Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.[504]
+
+The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty, and later Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of American philosophical academia. John Rawls and Robert Nozick also led a revival of political philosophy.
+
+In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.[505] Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new, individualistic styles. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.[506] Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.[507]
+
+Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain with about three-quarters of grain products made of wheat flour[508] and many dishes use indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers.[509] These homegrown foods are part of a shared national menu on one of America's most popular holidays, Thanksgiving, when some Americans make traditional foods to celebrate the occasion.[510]
+
+The American fast food industry, the world's largest,[511] pioneered the drive-through format in the 1940s.[512] Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[513] Americans drink three times as much coffee as tea.[514] Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.[515][516]
+
+Although little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music.
+
+The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European and African traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s.[517]
+
+Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. Rock bands such as Metallica, the Eagles, and Aerosmith are among the highest grossing in worldwide sales.[518][519][520] In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk.
+
+More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities,[517] as have contemporary musical artists such as Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West, and Ariana Grande.[521]
+
+Hollywood, a northern district of Los Angeles, California, is one of the leaders in motion picture production.[522] The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope.[523] Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, although in the 21st century an increasing number of films are not made there, and film companies have been subject to the forces of globalization.[524]
+
+Director D. W. Griffith, the top American filmmaker during the silent film period, was central to the development of film grammar, and producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising.[525] Directors such as John Ford redefined the image of the American Old West, and, like others such as John Huston, broadened the possibilities of cinema with location shooting. The industry enjoyed its golden years, in what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood," from the early sound period until the early 1960s,[526] with screen actors such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe becoming iconic figures.[527][528] In the 1970s, "New Hollywood" or the "Hollywood Renaissance"[529] was defined by grittier films influenced by French and Italian realist pictures of the post-war period.[530] In more recent times, directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron have gained renown for their blockbuster films, often characterized by high production costs and earnings.
+
+Notable films topping the American Film Institute's AFI 100 list include Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time,[531][532] Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Graduate (1967), On the Waterfront (1954), Schindler's List (1993), Singin' in the Rain (1952), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).[533] The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, have been held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1929,[534] and the Golden Globe Awards have been held annually since January 1944.[535]
+
+American football is by several measures the most popular spectator sport;[537] the National Football League (NFL) has the highest average attendance of any sports league in the world, and the Super Bowl is watched by tens of millions globally. Baseball has been regarded as the U.S. national sport since the late 19th century, with Major League Baseball (MLB) being the top league. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports, with the top leagues being the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL). College football and basketball attract large audiences.[538] In soccer, the country hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the men's national soccer team qualified for ten World Cups and the women's team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup four times; Major League Soccer is the sport's highest league in the United States (featuring 23 American and three Canadian teams). The market for professional sports in the United States is roughly $69 billion, roughly 50% larger than that of all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined.[539]
+
+Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri were the first ever Olympic Games held outside of Europe.[540] As of 2017[update], the United States has won 2,522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 305 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.[541]
+While most major U.S. sports such as baseball and American football have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, some of which have become popular worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.[542] The most watched individual sports are golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR.[543][544]
+
+The four major broadcasters in the U.S. are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX). The four major broadcast television networks are all commercial entities. Cable television offers hundreds of channels catering to a variety of niches.[545] Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercial, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.[546]
+
+In 1998, the number of U.S. commercial radio stations had grown to 4,793 AM stations and 5,662 FM stations. In addition, there are 1,460 public radio stations. Most of these stations are run by universities and public authorities for educational purposes and are financed by public or private funds, subscriptions, and corporate underwriting. Much public-radio broadcasting is supplied by NPR. NPR was incorporated in February 1970 under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967; its television counterpart, PBS, was created by the same legislation. As of September 30, 2014[update], there are 15,433 licensed full-power radio stations in the U.S. according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).[547]
+
+Well-known newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.[548] Although the cost of publishing has increased over the years, the price of newspapers has generally remained low, forcing newspapers to rely more on advertising revenue and on articles provided by a major wire service, such as the Associated Press or Reuters, for their national and world coverage. With very few exceptions, all the newspapers in the U.S. are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families. Major cities often have "alternative weeklies" to complement the mainstream daily papers, such as New York City's The Village Voice or Los Angeles' LA Weekly. Major cities may also support a local business journal, trade papers relating to local industries, and papers for local ethnic and social groups. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Twitter.[549]
+
+More than 800 publications are produced in Spanish, the second most commonly used language in the United States behind English.[550][551]
+
+Internet sources
+

en/1866.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,332 @@
+
+
+Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100
+
+The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country mostly located in central North America, between Canada and Mexico. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions.[i] At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), it is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area.[e] With a 2019 estimated population of over 328 million,[7] the U.S. is the third most populous country in the world. The Americans are a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been shaped through centuries of immigration. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City.
+
+Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago,[19] and European colonization began in the 16th century. The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolutionary War lasting between 1775 and 1783, leading to independence.[20] Beginning in the late 18th century, the United States vigorously expanded across North America, gradually acquiring new territories,[21] killing and displacing Native Americans, and admitting new states. By 1848, the United States spanned the continent.[21]
+Slavery was legal in much of the United States until the second half of the 19th century, when the American Civil War led to its abolition.[22][23]
+
+The Spanish–American War and World War I entrenched the U.S. as a world power, a status confirmed by the outcome of World War II. It was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.[24]
+
+The United States is a federal republic and a representative democracy. It is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), NATO, and other international organizations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
+
+A highly developed country, the United States is the world's largest economy and accounts for approximately a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP).[25] The United States is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter of goods, by value.[26][27] Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total,[28] it holds 29.4% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share held by any country.[29] Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, median income, median wealth, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity.[30][31] It is the foremost military power in the world, making up more than a third of global military spending,[32] and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.[33]
+
+The first known use of the name "America" dates back to 1507, when it appeared on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. On this map, the name applied to South America in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.[34] After returning from his expeditions, Vespucci first postulated that the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern limit, as initially thought by Christopher Columbus, but instead were part of an entirely separate landmass thus far unknown to the Europeans.[35] In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator used the name "America" on his own world map, applying it to the entire Western Hemisphere.[36]
+
+The first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written by Stephen Moylan, Esq., to Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort.[37][38][39] The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.[40]
+
+The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed no later than June 17, 1776, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'".[41] The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'".[42] In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence.[41] This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.[41]
+
+The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms are the "U.S.," the "USA," and "America." Colloquial names are the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States." "Columbia," a name popular in poetry and songs of the late 18th century, derives its origin from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia." Many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.[43]
+
+The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865.[44] The singular form—e.g., "the United States is"—became popular after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States." The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.[45]
+
+A citizen of the United States is an "American." "United States," "American" and "U.S." refer to the country adjectivally ("American values," "U.S. forces"). In English, the word "American" rarely refers to topics or subjects not directly connected with the United States.[46]
+
+It has been generally accepted that the first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 12,000 years ago; however, increasing evidence suggests an even earlier arrival.[19][47][48] After crossing the land bridge, the Paleo-Indians moved southward along the Pacific coast[49] and through an interior ice-free corridor.[50] The Clovis culture, which appeared around 11,000 BC, was initially believed to represent the first wave of human settlement of the Americas.[51][52] It is likely these represent the first of three major waves of migration into North America.[53]
+
+Over time, indigenous cultures in North America grew increasingly complex, and some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture in the southeast, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies.[54] The Mississippian culture flourished in the south from 800 to 1600 AD, extending from the Mexican border down through Florida.[55] Its city state Cahokia is the largest, most complex pre-Columbian archaeological site in the modern-day United States.[56] In the Four Corners region, Ancestral Puebloan culture developed from centuries of agricultural experimentation.[57]
+
+Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Taos Pueblo.[58][59] The earthworks constructed by Native Americans of the Poverty Point culture have also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the southern Great Lakes region, the Iroquois Confederacy was established at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.[60] Most prominent along the Atlantic coast were the Algonquian tribes, who practiced hunting and trapping, along with limited cultivation.
+
+With the progress of European colonization in the territories of the contemporary United States, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[61] The native population of America declined after European arrival for various reasons,[62][63] primarily diseases such as smallpox and measles.[64][65]
+
+Estimating the native population of North America at the time of European contact is difficult.[66][67] Douglas H. Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution estimated that there was a population of 92,916 in the south Atlantic states and a population of 473,616 in the Gulf states,[68] but most academics regard this figure as too low.[66] Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns believed the populations were much higher, suggesting 1,100,000 along the shores of the gulf of Mexico, 2,211,000 people living between Florida and Massachusetts, 5,250,000 in the Mississippi Valley and tributaries and 697,000 people in the Florida peninsula.[66][67]
+
+In the early days of colonization, many European settlers were subject to food shortages, disease, and attacks from Native Americans. Native Americans were also often at war with neighboring tribes and allied with Europeans in their colonial wars. In many cases, however, natives and settlers came to depend on each other. Settlers traded for food and animal pelts; natives for guns, ammunition and other European goods.[69] Natives taught many settlers to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. European missionaries and others felt it was important to "civilize" the Native Americans and urged them to adopt European agricultural techniques and lifestyles.[70][71]
+
+With the advancement of European colonization in North America, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[72] The first Europeans to arrive in the contiguous United States were Spanish conquistadors such as Juan Ponce de León, who made his first visit to Florida in 1513. Even earlier, Christopher Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his 1493 voyage. The Spanish set up the first settlements in Florida and New Mexico such as Saint Augustine[73] and Santa Fe. The French established their own as well along the Mississippi River. Successful English settlement on the eastern coast of North America began with the Virginia Colony in 1607 at Jamestown and with the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. Many settlers were dissenting Christian groups who came seeking religious freedom. The continent's first elected legislative assembly, Virginia's House of Burgesses, was created in 1619. The Mayflower Compact, signed by the Pilgrims before disembarking, and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, established precedents for the pattern of representative self-government and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies.[74][75]
+
+Most settlers in every colony were small farmers, though other industries were formed. Cash crops included tobacco, rice, and wheat. Extraction industries grew up in furs, fishing and lumber. Manufacturers produced rum and ships, and by the late colonial period, Americans were producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply.[76] Cities eventually dotted the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs. English colonists were supplemented by waves of Scotch-Irish immigrants and other groups. As coastal land grew more expensive, freed indentured servants claimed lands further west.[77]
+
+A large-scale slave trade with English privateers began.[78] Because of less disease and better food and treatment, the life expectancy of slaves was much higher in North America than further south, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.[79][80] Colonial society was largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, and colonies passed acts for and against the practice.[81][82] But by the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in the South.[83]
+
+With the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were administered by the British as overseas dependencies.[84] All nonetheless had local governments with elections open to most free men.[85] With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grew rapidly. Relatively small Native American populations were eclipsed.[86] The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest both in religion and in religious liberty.[87]
+
+During the Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans, who were being conquered and displaced, the 13 British colonies had a population of over 2.1 million in 1770, about a third that of Britain. Despite continuing, new arrivals, the rate of natural increase was such that by the 1770s only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas.[88] The colonies' distance from Britain had allowed the development of self-government, but their unprecedented success motivated monarchs to periodically seek to reassert royal authority.[89]
+
+In 1774, the Spanish Navy ship Santiago, under Juan Pérez, entered and anchored in an inlet of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, in present-day British Columbia. Although the Spanish did not land, natives paddled to the ship to trade furs for abalone shells from California.[90] At the time, the Spanish were able to monopolize the trade between Asia and North America, granting limited licenses to the Portuguese. When the Russians began establishing a growing fur trading system in Alaska, the Spanish began to challenge the Russians, with Pérez's voyage being the first of many to the Pacific Northwest.[91][j]
+
+During his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook became the first European to begin formal contact with Hawaii.[93] Captain Cook's last voyage included sailing along the coast of North America and Alaska searching for a Northwest Passage for approximately nine months.[94]
+
+The American Revolutionary War was the first successful colonial war of independence against a European power. Americans had developed an ideology of "republicanism" asserting that government rested on the will of the people as expressed in their local legislatures. They demanded their rights as Englishmen and "no taxation without representation". The British insisted on administering the empire through Parliament, and the conflict escalated into war.[95]
+
+The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that Great Britain was not protecting Americans' unalienable rights. July 4 is celebrated annually as Independence Day.[96] In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a decentralized government that operated until 1789.[96]
+
+Following the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781,[97] Britain signed the peace treaty of 1783, and American sovereignty was internationally recognized and the country was granted all lands east of the Mississippi River. Nationalists led the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788. The federal government was reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789. George Washington, who had led the Continental Army to victory, was the first president elected under the new constitution. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.[98]
+
+Although the federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808, after 1820, cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and along with it, the slave population.[99][100][101] The Second Great Awakening, especially 1800–1840, converted millions to evangelical Protestantism. In the North, it energized multiple social reform movements, including abolitionism;[102] in the South, Methodists and Baptists proselytized among slave populations.[103]
+
+Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of American Indian Wars.[104] The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation's area.[105] The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism.[106] A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819.[107] The expansion was aided by steam power, when steamboats began traveling along America's large water systems, many of which were connected by new canals, such as the Erie and the I&M; then, even faster railroads began their stretch across the nation's land.[108]
+
+From 1820 to 1850, Jacksonian democracy began a set of reforms which included wider white male suffrage; it led to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that forcibly resettled Indians into the west on Indian reservations. The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 during a period of expansionist Manifest destiny.[109] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest.[110] Victory in the Mexican–American War resulted in the 1848 Mexican Cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest.[111]
+The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 spurred migration to the Pacific coast, which led to the California Genocide[112][113][114][115] and the creation of additional western states.[116] After the Civil War, new transcontinental railways made relocation easier for settlers, expanded internal trade and increased conflicts with Native Americans.[117] In 1869, a new Peace Policy nominally promised to protect Native Americans from abuses, avoid further war, and secure their eventual U.S. citizenship. Nonetheless, large-scale conflicts continued throughout the West into the 1900s.
+
+Irreconcilable sectional conflict regarding the slavery of Africans and African Americans ultimately led to the American Civil War.[118] Initially, states entering the Union had alternated between slave and free states, keeping a sectional balance in the Senate, while free states outstripped slave states in population and in the House of Representatives. But with additional western territory and more free-soil states, tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over federalism and disposition of the territories, as well as whether to expand or restrict slavery.[119]
+
+With the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, conventions in thirteen slave states ultimately declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "South" or the "Confederacy"), while the federal government (the "Union") maintained that secession was illegal.[119] In order to bring about this secession, military action was initiated by the secessionists, and the Union responded in kind. The ensuing war would become the deadliest military conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of approximately 618,000 soldiers as well as many civilians.[120] The Union initially simply fought to keep the country united. Nevertheless, as casualties mounted after 1863 and Lincoln delivered his Emancipation Proclamation, the main purpose of the war from the Union's viewpoint became the abolition of slavery. Indeed, when the Union ultimately won the war in April 1865, each of the states in the defeated South was required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery.
+
+The government enacted three constitutional amendments in the years after the war: the aforementioned Thirteenth as well as the Fourteenth Amendment providing citizenship to the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves,[121] and the Fifteenth Amendment ensuring in theory that African Americans had the right to vote. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power[122] aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the South while guaranteeing the rights of the newly freed slaves.
+
+Reconstruction began in earnest following the war. While President Lincoln attempted to foster friendship and forgiveness between the Union and the former Confederacy, his assassination on April 14, 1865, drove a wedge between North and South again. Republicans in the federal government made it their goal to oversee the rebuilding of the South and to ensure the rights of African Americans. They persisted until the Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to cease protecting the rights of African Americans in the South in order for Democrats to concede the presidential election of 1876.
+
+Southern white Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers," took control of the South after the end of Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1910 the Redeemers established so-called Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising most blacks and some poor whites throughout the region. Blacks faced racial segregation, especially in the South.[123] They also occasionally experienced vigilante violence, including lynching.[124]
+
+In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe supplied a surplus of labor for the country's industrialization and transformed its culture.[126] National infrastructure including telegraph and transcontinental railroads spurred economic growth and greater settlement and development of the American Old West. The later invention of electric light and the telephone would also affect communication and urban life.[127]
+
+The United States fought Indian Wars west of the Mississippi River from 1810 to at least 1890.[128] Most of these conflicts ended with the cession of Native American territory and their confinement to Indian reservations. This further expanded acreage under mechanical cultivation, increasing surpluses for international markets.[129] Mainland expansion also included the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.[130] In 1893, pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the monarchy and formed the Republic of Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were ceded by Spain in the same year, following the Spanish–American War.[131] American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the end of the Second Samoan Civil War.[132] The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.[133]
+
+Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. Tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie led the nation's progress in railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. Banking became a major part of the economy, with J. P. Morgan playing a notable role. The American economy boomed, becoming the world's largest, and the United States achieved great power status.[134] These dramatic changes were accompanied by social unrest and the rise of populist, socialist, and anarchist movements.[135] This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which saw significant reforms including women's suffrage, alcohol prohibition, regulation of consumer goods, greater antitrust measures to ensure competition and attention to worker conditions.[136][137][138]
+
+The United States remained neutral from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 until 1917, when it joined the war as an "associated power," alongside the formal Allies of World War I, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson took a leading diplomatic role at the Paris Peace Conference and advocated strongly for the U.S. to join the League of Nations. However, the Senate refused to approve this and did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles that established the League of Nations.[139]
+
+In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage.[140] The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of radio for mass communication and the invention of early television.[141] The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal.[142] The Great Migration of millions of African Americans out of the American South began before World War I and extended through the 1960s;[143] whereas the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration.[144]
+
+At first effectively neutral during World War II, the United States began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers.[145] Although Japan attacked the United States first, the U.S. nonetheless pursued a "Europe first" defense policy.[146] The United States thus left its vast Asian colony, the Philippines, isolated and fighting a losing struggle against Japanese invasion and occupation, as military resources were devoted to the European theater. During the war, the United States was referred to as one of the "Four Policemen"[147] of Allies power who met to plan the postwar world, along with Britain, the Soviet Union and China.[148][149] Although the nation lost around 400,000 military personnel,[150] it emerged relatively undamaged from the war with even greater economic and military influence.[151]
+
+The United States played a leading role in the Bretton Woods and Yalta conferences with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and other Allies, which signed agreements on new international financial institutions and Europe's postwar reorganization. As an Allied victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war.[152] The United States and Japan then fought each other in the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.[153][154] The United States eventually developed the first nuclear weapons and used them on Japan in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese surrendered on September 2, ending World War II.[155][156]
+
+After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for power, influence, and prestige during what became known as the Cold War, driven by an ideological divide between capitalism and communism.[157] They dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its NATO allies on one side and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other. The U.S. developed a policy of containment towards the expansion of communist influence. While the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict.[citation needed]
+
+The United States often opposed Third World movements that it viewed as Soviet-sponsored, and occasionally pursued direct action for regime change against left-wing governments, even supporting right-wing authoritarian governments at times.[158] American troops fought communist Chinese and North Korean forces in the Korean War of 1950–53.[159] The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite and its 1961 launch of the first manned spaceflight initiated a "Space Race" in which the United States became the first nation to land a man on the moon in 1969.[159] A proxy war in Southeast Asia eventually evolved into full American participation, as the Vietnam War.[citation needed]
+
+At home, the U.S. experienced sustained economic expansion and a rapid growth of its population and middle class. Construction of an Interstate Highway System transformed the nation's infrastructure over the following decades. Millions moved from farms and inner cities to large suburban housing developments.[160][161] In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th and last U.S. state added to the country.[162] The growing Civil Rights Movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader and figurehead. A combination of court decisions and legislation, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, sought to end racial discrimination.[163][164][165] Meanwhile, a counterculture movement grew which was fueled by opposition to the Vietnam war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution.
+
+The launch of a "War on Poverty" expanded entitlements and welfare spending, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that provide health coverage to the elderly and poor, respectively, and the means-tested Food Stamp Program and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.[166]
+
+The 1970s and early 1980s saw the onset of stagflation. After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan responded to economic stagnation with free-market oriented reforms. Following the collapse of détente, he abandoned "containment" and initiated the more aggressive "rollback" strategy towards the USSR.[167][168][169][170][171] After a surge in female labor participation over the previous decade, by 1985 the majority of women aged 16 and over were employed.[172]
+
+The late 1980s brought a "thaw" in relations with the USSR, and its collapse in 1991 finally ended the Cold War.[173][174][175][176] This brought about unipolarity[177] with the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The concept of Pax Americana, which had appeared in the post-World War II period, gained wide popularity as a term for the post-Cold War new world order.[citation needed]
+
+After the Cold War, the conflict in the Middle East triggered a crisis in 1990, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, an ally of the United States. Fearing the instability would spread to other regions, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Shield, a defensive force buildup in Saudi Arabia, and Operation Desert Storm, in a staging titled the Gulf War; waged by coalition forces from 34 nations, led by the United States against Iraq ending in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restoration of the monarchy.[178]
+
+Originating within U.S. military defense networks, the Internet spread to international academic platforms and then to the public in the 1990s, greatly affecting the global economy, society, and culture.[179] Due to the dot-com boom, stable monetary policy, and reduced social welfare spending, the 1990s saw the longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history.[180] Beginning in 1994, the U.S. entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), prompting trade among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to soar.[181]
+
+On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people.[182] In response, the United States launched the War on Terror, which included a war in Afghanistan and the 2003–11 Iraq War.[183][184]
+
+Government policy designed to promote affordable housing,[185] widespread failures in corporate and regulatory governance,[186] and historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve[187] led to the mid-2000s housing bubble, which culminated with the 2008 financial crisis, the nation's largest economic contraction since the Great Depression.[188] Barack Obama, the first African-American[189] and multiracial[190] president, was elected in 2008 amid the crisis,[191] and subsequently passed stimulus measures and the Dodd–Frank Act in an attempt to mitigate its negative effects and ensure there would not be a repeat of the crisis. In 2010, the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, which made the most sweeping reforms to the nation's healthcare system in nearly five decades, including mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges.[citation needed]
+
+American forces in Iraq were withdrawn in large numbers in 2009 and 2010, and the war in the region was declared formally over in December 2011.[192] But months earlier, Operation Neptune Spear led to the death of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.[193] In the presidential election of 2016, Republican Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States. On January 20, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed.[194] As of July 2020, the United States has over 4 million COVID-19 cases and over 145,000 deaths.[195] The United States is, by far, the country with the most cases of COVID-19 since April 11, 2020.[196]
+
+The 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia occupy a combined area of 3,119,884.69 square miles (8,080,464.3 km2). Of this area, 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2) is contiguous land, composing 83.65% of total U.S. land area.[197][198] Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, is 10,931 square miles (28,311 km2) in area. The populated territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands together cover 9,185 square miles (23,789 km2).[199] Measured by only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.[200]
+
+The United States is the world's third- or fourth-largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and nearly equal to China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted, and how the total size of the United States is measured.[e][201][202]
+
+The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont.[203] The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest.[204] The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast.[204]
+
+The Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking around 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado.[205] Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Chihuahua and Mojave.[206] The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast, both ranges reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m). The lowest and highest points in the contiguous United States are in the state of California,[207] and only about 84 miles (135 km) apart.[208] At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali is the highest peak in the country and in North America.[209] Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature.[210]
+
+The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.[211] The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains have an alpine climate. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Hawaii and the southern tip of Florida are tropical, as well as its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.[212] States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur in the country, mainly in Tornado Alley areas in the Midwest and South.[213] Overall, the United States has the world's most violent weather, receiving more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world.[214]
+
+The U.S. ecology is megadiverse: about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and more than 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland.[216] The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 bird species, 311 reptile species, and 295 amphibian species,[217] as well as about 91,000 insect species.[218]
+
+There are 62 national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas.[219] Altogether, the government owns about 28% of the country's land area,[220] mostly in the western states.[221] Most of this land is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching, and about .86% is used for military purposes.[222][223]
+
+Environmental issues include debates on oil and nuclear energy, dealing with air and water pollution, the economic costs of protecting wildlife, logging and deforestation,[224][225] and international responses to global warming.[226][227] The most prominent environmental agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by presidential order in 1970.[228] The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act.[229] The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is intended to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.[230]
+
+The U.S. Census Bureau officially estimated the country's population to be 328,239,523 as of July 1, 2019.[231] In addition, the Census Bureau provides a continuously updated U.S. Population Clock that approximates the latest population of the 50 states and District of Columbia based on the Bureau's most recent demographic trends.[234] According to the clock, on May 23, 2020, the U.S. population exceeded 329 million residents, with a net gain of one person every 19 seconds, or about 4,547 people per day. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world, after China and India. In 2018 the median age of the United States population was 38.1 years.[235]
+
+In 2018, there were almost 90 million immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrants (second-generation Americans) in the United States, accounting for 28% of the overall U.S. population.[236] The United States has a very diverse population; 37 ancestry groups have more than one million members.[237] German Americans are the largest ethnic group (more than 50 million)—followed by Irish Americans (circa 37 million), Mexican Americans (circa 31 million) and English Americans (circa 28 million).[238][239]
+
+White Americans (mostly European ancestry) are the largest racial group at 73.1% of the population; African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third-largest ancestry group.[237] Asian Americans are the country's second-largest racial minority; the three largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans.[237] The largest American community with European ancestry is German Americans, which consists of more than 14% of the total population.[240] In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively).[241] The census counted more than 19 million people of "Some Other Race" who were "unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories in 2010, more than 18.5 million (97%) of whom are of Hispanic ethnicity.[241]
+
+In 2017, out of the U.S. foreign-born population, some 45% (20.7 million) were naturalized citizens, 27% (12.3 million) were lawful permanent residents (including many eligible to become citizens), 6% (2.2 million) were temporary lawful residents, and 23% (10.5 million) were unauthorized immigrants.[242] Among current living immigrants to the U.S., the top five countries of birth are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and El Salvador. Until 2017 and 2018, the United States led the world in refugee resettlement for decades, admitted more refugees than the rest of the world combined.[243] From fiscal year 1980 until 2017, 55% of refugees came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 13% from Africa, and 4% from Latin America.[243]
+
+A 2017 United Nations report projected that the U.S. would be one of nine countries in which world population growth through 2050 would be concentrated.[244] A 2020 U.S. Census Bureau report projected the population of the country could be anywhere between 320 million and 447 million by 2060, depending on the rate of in-migration; in all projected scenarios, a lower fertility rate and increases in life expectancy would result in an aging population.[245] The United States has an annual birth rate of 13 per 1,000, which is five births per 1,000 below the world average.[246] Its population growth rate is positive at 0.7%, higher than that of many developed nations.[247]
+
+About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (including suburbs);[202] about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000.[248] In 2008, 273 incorporated municipalities had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than one million residents, and four cities had over two million (namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston).[249] Estimates for the year 2018 show that 53 metropolitan areas have populations greater than one million. Many metros in the South, Southwest and West grew significantly between 2010 and 2018. The Dallas and Houston metros increased by more than a million people, while the Washington, D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and Phoenix metros all grew by more than 500,000 people.
+
+English (specifically, American English) is the de facto national language of the United States. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2010, about 230 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. 12% of the population speaks Spanish at home, making it the second most common language. Spanish is also the most widely taught second language.[250][251]
+
+Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii.[252] In addition to English, Alaska recognizes twenty official Native languages,[253][k] and South Dakota recognizes Sioux.[254] While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French.[255] Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms.[256]
+
+Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan[257] is officially recognized by American Samoa and Chamorro[258] is an official language of Guam. Both Carolinian and Chamorro have official recognition in the Northern Mariana Islands.[259]
+Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico and is more widely spoken than English there.[260]
+
+The most widely taught foreign languages in the United States, in terms of enrollment numbers from kindergarten through university undergraduate education, are Spanish (around 7.2 million students), French (1.5 million), and German (500,000). Other commonly taught languages include Latin, Japanese, ASL, Italian, and Chinese.[261][262] 18% of all Americans claim to speak both English and another language.[263]
+
+Religion in the United States (2017)[266]
+
+The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids Congress from passing laws respecting its establishment.
+
+In a 2013 survey, 56% of Americans said religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other Western nation.[267] In a 2009 Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they attended church weekly or almost weekly; the figures ranged from a low of 23% in Vermont to a high of 63% in Mississippi.[268]
+
+In a 2014 survey, 70.6% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians;[269] Protestants accounted for 46.5%, while Roman Catholics, at 20.8%, formed the largest single Christian group.[270] In 2014, 5.9% of the U.S. adult population claimed a non-Christian religion.[271] These include Judaism (1.9%), Islam (0.9%), Hinduism (0.7%), and Buddhism (0.7%).[271] The survey also reported that 22.8% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist or simply having no religion—up from 8.2% in 1990.[270][272][273] There are also Unitarian Universalist, Scientologist, Baha'i, Sikh, Jain, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Satanist, Taoist, Druid, Native American, Afro-American, traditional African, Wiccan, Gnostic, humanist and deist communities.[274][275]
+
+Protestantism is the largest Christian religious grouping in the United States, accounting for almost half of all Americans. Baptists collectively form the largest branch of Protestantism at 15.4%,[276] and the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest individual Protestant denomination at 5.3% of the U.S. population.[276] Apart from Baptists, other Protestant categories include nondenominational Protestants, Methodists, Pentecostals, unspecified Protestants, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, other Reformed, Episcopalians/Anglicans, Quakers, Adventists, Holiness, Christian fundamentalists, Anabaptists, Pietists, and multiple others.[276]
+
+As with other Western countries, the U.S. is becoming less religious. Irreligion is growing rapidly among Americans under 30.[277] Polls show that overall American confidence in organized religion has been declining since the mid to late 1980s,[278] and that younger Americans, in particular, are becoming increasingly irreligious.[271][279] In a 2012 study, the Protestant share of the U.S. population had dropped to 48%, thus ending its status as religious category of the majority for the first time.[280][281] Americans with no religion have 1.7 children compared to 2.2 among Christians. The unaffiliated are less likely to marry with 37% marrying compared to 52% of Christians.[282]
+
+The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. By contrast, religion plays the least important role in New England and in the Western United States.[268]
+
+As of 2018[update], 52% of Americans age 15 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 32% had never been married.[283] Women now work mostly outside the home and receive the majority of bachelor's degrees.[284]
+
+The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is 26.5 per 1,000 women. The rate has declined by 57% since 1991.[285] Abortion is legal throughout the country. Abortion rates, currently 241 per 1,000 live births and 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, are falling but remain higher than most Western nations.[286] In 2013, the average age at first birth was 26 and 41% of births were to unmarried women.[287]
+
+The total fertility rate in 2016 was 1820.5 births per 1000 women.[288] Adoption in the United States is common and relatively easy from a legal point of view (compared to other Western countries).[289] As of 2001[update], with more than 127,000 adoptions, the U.S. accounted for nearly half of the total number of adoptions worldwide.[needs update][290] Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, and it is legal for same-sex couples to adopt. Polygamy is illegal throughout the U.S.[291]
+
+In 2019, the U.S. had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.[292]
+
+The United States had a life expectancy of 78.6 years at birth in 2017, which was the third year of declines in life expectancy following decades of continuous increase. The recent decline, primarily among the age group 25 to 64, is largely due to sharp increases in the drug overdose and suicide rates; the country has one of the highest suicide rates among wealthy countries.[293][294] Life expectancy was highest among Asians and Hispanics and lowest among blacks.[295][296] According to CDC and Census Bureau data, deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug overdoses hit record highs in 2017.[297]
+
+Increasing obesity in the United States and health improvements elsewhere contributed to lowering the country's rank in life expectancy from 11th in the world in 1987, to 42nd in 2007, and as of 2017 the country had the lowest life expectancy among Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and seven countries of western Europe.[298][299] Obesity rates have more than doubled in the last 30 years and are the highest in the industrialized world.[300][301] Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight.[302] Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.[303]
+
+In 2010, coronary artery disease, lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and traffic accidents caused the most years of life lost in the U.S. Low back pain, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety caused the most years lost to disability. The most harmful risk factors were poor diet, tobacco smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, physical inactivity, and alcohol use. Alzheimer's disease, drug abuse, kidney disease, cancer, and falls caused the most additional years of life lost over their age-adjusted 1990 per-capita rates.[304] U.S. teenage pregnancy and abortion rates are substantially higher than in other Western nations, especially among blacks and Hispanics.[305]
+
+Health-care coverage in the United States is a combination of public and private efforts and is not universal. In 2017, 12.2% of the population did not carry health insurance.[306] The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue.[307][308] Federal legislation, passed in early 2010, roughly halved the uninsured share of the population, though the bill and its ultimate effect are issues of controversy.[309][310] The U.S. health-care system far outspends any other nation, measured both in per capita spending and as percentage of GDP.[311] At the same time, the U.S. is a global leader in medical innovation.[312]
+
+American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. In most states, children are required to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn 18 (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at 16 or 17.[313]
+
+About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.[314] The U.S. spends more on education per student than any nation in the world, spending more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student.[315][needs update] Some 80% of U.S. college students attend public universities.[316]
+
+Of Americans 25 and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees.[317] The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.[202][318] The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.[319]
+
+The United States has many private and public institutions of higher education. The majority of the world's top universities, as listed by various ranking organizations, are in the U.S.[320][321][322] There are also local community colleges with generally more open admission policies, shorter academic programs, and lower tuition.
+
+In 2018, U21, a network of research-intensive universities, ranked the United States first in the world for breadth and quality of higher education, and 15th when GDP was a factor.[323] As for public expenditures on higher education, the U.S. trails some other OECD nations but spends more per student than the OECD average, and more than all nations in combined public and private spending.[315][324] As of 2018[update], student loan debt exceeded 1.5 trillion dollars.[325][326]
+
+The United States is a federal republic of 50 states, a federal district, five territories and several uninhabited island possessions.[327][328][329] It is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law."[330] For 2018, the U.S. ranked 25th on the Democracy Index.[331] On Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index its public sector position deteriorated from a score of 76 in 2015 to 69 in 2019.[332]
+
+In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government: federal, state, and local. The local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district.
+
+The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document.[333] The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus. The Constitution has been amended 27 times;[334] the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights. All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review and any law ruled by the courts to be in violation of the Constitution is voided. The principle of judicial review, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was established by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison (1803)[335] in a decision handed down by Chief Justice John Marshall.[336]
+
+The federal government comprises three branches:
+
+The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population. Each state then draws single-member districts to conform with the census apportionment. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories each have one member of Congress—these members are not allowed to vote.[341]
+
+The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one-third of Senate seats are up for election every two years. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories do not have senators.[341] The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia.[342] The Supreme Court, led by the chief justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.[343]
+
+The state governments are structured in a roughly similar fashion, though Nebraska has a unicameral legislature.[344] The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.
+
+The 50 states are the principal administrative divisions in the country. These are subdivided into counties or county equivalents and further divided into municipalities. The District of Columbia is a federal district that contains the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C.[345] The states and the District of Columbia choose the president of the United States. Each state has presidential electors equal to the number of their representatives and senators in Congress; the District of Columbia has three (because of the 23rd Amendment).[346] Territories of the United States such as Puerto Rico do not have presidential electors, and so people in those territories cannot vote for the president.[341]
+
+The United States also observes tribal sovereignty of the American Indian nations to a limited degree, as it does with the states' sovereignty. American Indians are U.S. citizens and tribal lands are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress and the federal courts. Like the states they have a great deal of autonomy, but also like the states, tribes are not allowed to make war, engage in their own foreign relations, or print and issue currency.[347]
+
+Citizenship is granted at birth in all states, the District of Columbia, and all major U.S. territories except American Samoa.[348][349][m]
+
+The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history.[352] For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote. The president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College.[353]
+
+In American political culture, the center-right Republican Party is considered "conservative" and the center-left Democratic Party is considered "liberal."[354][355] The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states," are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.
+
+Republican Donald Trump, the winner of the 2016 presidential election, is serving as the 45th president of the United States.[356] Leadership in the Senate includes Republican vice president Mike Pence, Republican president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.[357] Leadership in the House includes Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.[358]
+
+In the 116th United States Congress, the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democratic Party and the Senate is controlled by the Republican Party, giving the U.S. a split Congress. The Senate consists of 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats; the House consists of 233 Democrats, 196 Republicans, and 1 Libertarian.[359] Of state governors, there are 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. Among the D.C. mayor and the five territorial governors, there are two Republicans, one Democrat, one New Progressive, and two Independents.[360]
+
+The United States has an established structure of foreign relations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. New York City is home to the United Nations Headquarters. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States (although the U.S. still maintains unofficial relations with Bhutan and Taiwan).[361] It is a member of the G7,[362] G20, and OECD.
+
+The United States has a "Special Relationship" with the United Kingdom[363] and strong ties with India, Canada,[364] Australia,[365] New Zealand,[366] the Philippines,[367] Japan,[368] South Korea,[369] Israel,[370] and several European Union countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.[371] It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Colombia is traditionally considered by the United States as its most loyal ally in South America.[372][373]
+
+The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau through the Compact of Free Association.[374]
+
+Taxation in the United States is levied at the federal, state, and local government levels. This includes taxes on income, payroll, property, sales, imports, estates, and gifts, as well as various fees. Taxation in the United States is based on citizenship, not residency.[375] Both non-resident citizens and Green Card holders living abroad are taxed on their income irrespective of where they live or where their income is earned. The United States is one of the only countries in the world to do so.[376]
+
+In 2010 taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP.[377] Based on CBO estimates,[378] under 2013 tax law the top 1% will be paying the highest average tax rates since 1979, while other income groups will remain at historic lows.[379] For 2018, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 400 households was 23%, compared to 24.2% for the bottom half of U.S. households.[380]
+
+
+
+During fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $3.54 trillion on a budget or cash basis, down $60 billion or 1.7% vs. fiscal year 2011 spending of $3.60 trillion. Major categories of fiscal year 2012 spending included: Medicare & Medicaid (23%), Social Security (22%), Defense Department (19%), non-defense discretionary (17%), other mandatory (13%) and interest (6%).[382]
+
+The total national debt of the United States in the United States was $18.527 trillion (106% of the GDP) in 2014.[383][n] The United States has the largest external debt in the world[387] and the 34th largest government debt as a % of GDP in the world.[388]
+
+The president is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and by the Department of the Navy during times of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.[389]
+
+Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System.[390] American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's 11 active aircraft carriers, and Marine expeditionary units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad,[391] and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries.[392]
+
+The military budget of the United States in 2011 was more than $700 billion, 41% of global military spending. At 4.7% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top 15 military spenders, after Saudi Arabia.[393]  Defense spending plays a major role in science and technology investment, with roughly half of U.S. federal research and development funded by the Department of Defense.[394] Defense's share of the overall U.S. economy has generally declined in recent decades, from Cold War peaks of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 and 69.5% of federal outlays in 1954 to 4.7% of GDP and 18.8% of federal outlays in 2011.[395]
+
+The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.[396] More than 90% of the world's 14,000 nuclear weapons are owned by Russia and the United States.[397]
+
+Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police departments and sheriff's offices, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties, including protecting civil rights, national security and enforcing U.S. federal courts' rulings and federal laws.[398] State courts conduct most criminal trials while federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state criminal courts.
+
+A cross-sectional analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed that United States "homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher."[399] In 2016, the US murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000.[400] Gun ownership rights, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, continue to be the subject of contention.
+
+The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world.[401] As of 2020, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that there were some 2.3 million people incarcerated.[402]  The imprisonment rate for all prisoners sentenced to more than a year in state or federal facilities is 478 per 100,000 in 2013.[403] According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of inmates held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses.[404] About 9% of prisoners are held in privatized prisons.[402] The practice of privately operated prisons began in the 1980s and has been a subject of contention.[405]
+
+Capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and at the state level in 30 states.[406][407] No executions took place from 1967 to 1977, owing in part to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Since the decision there have been more than 1,300 executions, a majority of these taking place in three states: Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.[408] Meanwhile, several states have either abolished or struck down death penalty laws. In 2019, the country had the sixth-highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.[409]
+
+According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $16.8 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 19% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).[417] The United States is the largest importer of goods and second-largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2010, the total U.S. trade deficit was $635 billion.[418] Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners.[419]
+
+From 1983 to 2008, U.S. real compounded annual GDP growth was 3.3%, compared to a 2.3% weighted average for the rest of the G7.[420] The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita[421] and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP.[417] The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.[422]
+
+In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 86.4% of the economy.[425] While its economy has reached a postindustrial level of development, the United States remains an industrial power.[426] Consumer spending comprised 68% of the U.S. economy in 2015.[427] In August 2010, the American labor force consisted of 154.1 million people (50%). With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people. It has a smaller welfare state and redistributes less income through government action than most European nations.[428]
+
+The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation[429] and is one of a few countries in the world without paid family leave as a legal right.[430] While federal law does not require sick leave, it is a common benefit for government workers and full-time employees at corporations.[431] 74% of full-time American workers get paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although only 24% of part-time workers get the same benefits.[431] In 2009, the United States had the third-highest workforce productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands.[432]
+
+
+
+The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. Methods for producing interchangeable parts were developed by the U.S. War Department by the Federal Armories during the first half of the 19th century. This technology, along with the establishment of a machine tool industry, enabled the U.S. to have large-scale manufacturing of sewing machines, bicycles, and other items in the late 19th century and became known as the American system of manufacturing. Factory electrification in the early 20th century and introduction of the assembly line and other labor-saving techniques created the system of mass production.[433] In the 21st century, approximately two-thirds of research and development funding comes from the private sector.[434] The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor.[435][436]
+
+In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's research laboratory, one of the first of its kind, developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera.[437] The latter led to emergence of the worldwide entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.[438]
+
+The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann, to immigrate to the United States.[439] During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age, while the Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and aeronautics.[440][441]
+
+The invention of the transistor in the 1950s, a key active component in practically all modern electronics, led to many technological developments and a significant expansion of the U.S. technology industry.[442] This, in turn, led to the establishment of many new technology companies and regions around the country such as Silicon Valley in California. Advancements by American microprocessor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel along with both computer software and hardware companies that include Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems created and popularized the personal computer. The ARPANET was developed in the 1960s to meet Defense Department requirements, and became the first of a series of networks which evolved into the Internet.[443]
+
+Accounting for 4.24% of the global population, Americans collectively possess 29.4% of the world's total wealth, and Americans make up roughly half of the world's population of millionaires.[444] The Global Food Security Index ranked the U.S. number one for food affordability and overall food security in March 2013.[445] Americans on average have more than twice as much living space per dwelling and per person as European Union residents, and more than every EU nation.[446] For 2017 the United Nations Development Programme ranked the United States 13th among 189 countries in its Human Development Index and 25th among 151 countries in its inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI).[447]
+
+Wealth, like income and taxes, is highly concentrated; the richest 10% of the adult population possess 72% of the country's household wealth, while the bottom half claim only 2%.[448] According to a September 2017 report by the Federal Reserve, the top 1% controlled 38.6% of the country's wealth in 2016.[449] According to a 2018 study by the OECD, the United States has a larger percentage of low-income workers than almost any other developed nation. This is largely because at-risk workers get almost no government support and are further set back by a very weak collective bargaining system.[450] The top one percent of income-earners accounted for 52 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2015, where income is defined as market income excluding government transfers.[451] In 2018, U.S. income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau.[452]
+
+After years of stagnation, median household income reached a record high in 2016 following two consecutive years of record growth. Income inequality remains at record highs however, with the top fifth of earners taking home more than half of all overall income.[454] The rise in the share of total annual income received by the top one percent, which has more than doubled from nine percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2011, has significantly affected income inequality,[455] leaving the United States with one of the widest income distributions among OECD nations.[456]  The extent and relevance of income inequality is a matter of debate.[457][458][459]
+
+Between June 2007 and November 2008, the global recession led to falling asset prices around the world. Assets owned by Americans lost about a quarter of their value.[460] Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth was down $14 trillion, but has since increased $14 trillion over 2006 levels.[461] At the end of 2014, household debt amounted to $11.8 trillion,[462] down from $13.8 trillion at the end of 2008.[463]
+
+There were about 578,424 sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in the US in January 2014, with almost two-thirds staying in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program.[464] In 2011, 16.7 million children lived in food-insecure households, about 35% more than 2007 levels, though only 1.1% of U.S. children, or 845,000, saw reduced food intake or disrupted eating patterns at some point during the year, and most cases were not chronic.[465] As of June 2018[update], 40 million people, roughly 12.7% of the U.S. population, were living in poverty, with 18.5 million of those living in deep poverty (a family income below one-half of the poverty threshold) and over five million live "in 'Third World' conditions." In 2016, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, which made up 32.6% of the impoverished population.[466] In 2017, the U.S. state or territory with the lowest poverty rate was New Hampshire (7.6%), and the one with the highest was American Samoa (65%).[467][468][469]
+
+Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of public roads.[471] The United States has the world's second-largest automobile market,[472] and has the highest rate of per-capita vehicle ownership in the world, with 765 vehicles per 1,000 Americans (1996).[473][needs update] In 2017, there were 255,009,283 non-two wheel motor vehicles, or about 910 vehicles per 1,000 people.[474]
+
+The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned and has been largely deregulated since 1978, while most major airports are publicly owned.[475] The three largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are US-based; American Airlines is number one after its 2013 acquisition by US Airways.[476] Of the world's 50 busiest passenger airports, 16 are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.[477]
+
+The United States energy market is about 29,000 terawatt hours per year.[478] In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear and renewable energy sources.[479]
+
+Since 2007, the total greenhouse gas emissions by the United States are the second highest by country, exceeded only by China.[480] The United States has historically been the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gas emissions per capita remain high.[481]
+
+The United States is home to many cultures and a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.[483][484] Aside from the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors settled or immigrated within the past five centuries.[485] Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.[483][486] More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.[483]
+
+Americans have traditionally been characterized by a strong work ethic, competitiveness, and individualism,[487] as well as a unifying belief in an "American creed" emphasizing liberty, equality, private property, democracy, rule of law, and a preference for limited government.[488] Americans are extremely charitable by global standards. According to a 2006 British study, Americans gave 1.67% of GDP to charity, more than any other nation studied.[489][490][491]
+
+The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants.[492] Whether this perception is accurate has been a topic of debate.[493][494][495][496][420][497] While mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,[498] scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.[499] While Americans tend  to greatly value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is also generally seen as a positive attribute.[500]
+
+In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.[501] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."[502]
+
+Twelve U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Bob Dylan in 2016. William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[503] Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.[504]
+
+The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty, and later Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of American philosophical academia. John Rawls and Robert Nozick also led a revival of political philosophy.
+
+In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.[505] Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new, individualistic styles. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.[506] Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.[507]
+
+Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain with about three-quarters of grain products made of wheat flour[508] and many dishes use indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers.[509] These homegrown foods are part of a shared national menu on one of America's most popular holidays, Thanksgiving, when some Americans make traditional foods to celebrate the occasion.[510]
+
+The American fast food industry, the world's largest,[511] pioneered the drive-through format in the 1940s.[512] Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[513] Americans drink three times as much coffee as tea.[514] Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.[515][516]
+
+Although little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music.
+
+The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European and African traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s.[517]
+
+Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. Rock bands such as Metallica, the Eagles, and Aerosmith are among the highest grossing in worldwide sales.[518][519][520] In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk.
+
+More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities,[517] as have contemporary musical artists such as Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West, and Ariana Grande.[521]
+
+Hollywood, a northern district of Los Angeles, California, is one of the leaders in motion picture production.[522] The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope.[523] Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, although in the 21st century an increasing number of films are not made there, and film companies have been subject to the forces of globalization.[524]
+
+Director D. W. Griffith, the top American filmmaker during the silent film period, was central to the development of film grammar, and producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising.[525] Directors such as John Ford redefined the image of the American Old West, and, like others such as John Huston, broadened the possibilities of cinema with location shooting. The industry enjoyed its golden years, in what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood," from the early sound period until the early 1960s,[526] with screen actors such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe becoming iconic figures.[527][528] In the 1970s, "New Hollywood" or the "Hollywood Renaissance"[529] was defined by grittier films influenced by French and Italian realist pictures of the post-war period.[530] In more recent times, directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron have gained renown for their blockbuster films, often characterized by high production costs and earnings.
+
+Notable films topping the American Film Institute's AFI 100 list include Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time,[531][532] Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Graduate (1967), On the Waterfront (1954), Schindler's List (1993), Singin' in the Rain (1952), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).[533] The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, have been held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1929,[534] and the Golden Globe Awards have been held annually since January 1944.[535]
+
+American football is by several measures the most popular spectator sport;[537] the National Football League (NFL) has the highest average attendance of any sports league in the world, and the Super Bowl is watched by tens of millions globally. Baseball has been regarded as the U.S. national sport since the late 19th century, with Major League Baseball (MLB) being the top league. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports, with the top leagues being the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL). College football and basketball attract large audiences.[538] In soccer, the country hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the men's national soccer team qualified for ten World Cups and the women's team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup four times; Major League Soccer is the sport's highest league in the United States (featuring 23 American and three Canadian teams). The market for professional sports in the United States is roughly $69 billion, roughly 50% larger than that of all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined.[539]
+
+Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri were the first ever Olympic Games held outside of Europe.[540] As of 2017[update], the United States has won 2,522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 305 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.[541]
+While most major U.S. sports such as baseball and American football have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, some of which have become popular worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.[542] The most watched individual sports are golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR.[543][544]
+
+The four major broadcasters in the U.S. are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX). The four major broadcast television networks are all commercial entities. Cable television offers hundreds of channels catering to a variety of niches.[545] Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercial, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.[546]
+
+In 1998, the number of U.S. commercial radio stations had grown to 4,793 AM stations and 5,662 FM stations. In addition, there are 1,460 public radio stations. Most of these stations are run by universities and public authorities for educational purposes and are financed by public or private funds, subscriptions, and corporate underwriting. Much public-radio broadcasting is supplied by NPR. NPR was incorporated in February 1970 under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967; its television counterpart, PBS, was created by the same legislation. As of September 30, 2014[update], there are 15,433 licensed full-power radio stations in the U.S. according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).[547]
+
+Well-known newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.[548] Although the cost of publishing has increased over the years, the price of newspapers has generally remained low, forcing newspapers to rely more on advertising revenue and on articles provided by a major wire service, such as the Associated Press or Reuters, for their national and world coverage. With very few exceptions, all the newspapers in the U.S. are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families. Major cities often have "alternative weeklies" to complement the mainstream daily papers, such as New York City's The Village Voice or Los Angeles' LA Weekly. Major cities may also support a local business journal, trade papers relating to local industries, and papers for local ethnic and social groups. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Twitter.[549]
+
+More than 800 publications are produced in Spanish, the second most commonly used language in the United States behind English.[550][551]
+
+Internet sources
+

en/1867.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,332 @@
+
+
+Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100
+
+The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country mostly located in central North America, between Canada and Mexico. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions.[i] At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), it is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area.[e] With a 2019 estimated population of over 328 million,[7] the U.S. is the third most populous country in the world. The Americans are a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been shaped through centuries of immigration. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City.
+
+Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago,[19] and European colonization began in the 16th century. The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolutionary War lasting between 1775 and 1783, leading to independence.[20] Beginning in the late 18th century, the United States vigorously expanded across North America, gradually acquiring new territories,[21] killing and displacing Native Americans, and admitting new states. By 1848, the United States spanned the continent.[21]
+Slavery was legal in much of the United States until the second half of the 19th century, when the American Civil War led to its abolition.[22][23]
+
+The Spanish–American War and World War I entrenched the U.S. as a world power, a status confirmed by the outcome of World War II. It was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.[24]
+
+The United States is a federal republic and a representative democracy. It is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), NATO, and other international organizations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
+
+A highly developed country, the United States is the world's largest economy and accounts for approximately a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP).[25] The United States is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter of goods, by value.[26][27] Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total,[28] it holds 29.4% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share held by any country.[29] Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, median income, median wealth, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity.[30][31] It is the foremost military power in the world, making up more than a third of global military spending,[32] and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.[33]
+
+The first known use of the name "America" dates back to 1507, when it appeared on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. On this map, the name applied to South America in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.[34] After returning from his expeditions, Vespucci first postulated that the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern limit, as initially thought by Christopher Columbus, but instead were part of an entirely separate landmass thus far unknown to the Europeans.[35] In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator used the name "America" on his own world map, applying it to the entire Western Hemisphere.[36]
+
+The first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written by Stephen Moylan, Esq., to Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort.[37][38][39] The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.[40]
+
+The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed no later than June 17, 1776, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'".[41] The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'".[42] In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence.[41] This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.[41]
+
+The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms are the "U.S.," the "USA," and "America." Colloquial names are the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States." "Columbia," a name popular in poetry and songs of the late 18th century, derives its origin from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia." Many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.[43]
+
+The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865.[44] The singular form—e.g., "the United States is"—became popular after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States." The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.[45]
+
+A citizen of the United States is an "American." "United States," "American" and "U.S." refer to the country adjectivally ("American values," "U.S. forces"). In English, the word "American" rarely refers to topics or subjects not directly connected with the United States.[46]
+
+It has been generally accepted that the first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 12,000 years ago; however, increasing evidence suggests an even earlier arrival.[19][47][48] After crossing the land bridge, the Paleo-Indians moved southward along the Pacific coast[49] and through an interior ice-free corridor.[50] The Clovis culture, which appeared around 11,000 BC, was initially believed to represent the first wave of human settlement of the Americas.[51][52] It is likely these represent the first of three major waves of migration into North America.[53]
+
+Over time, indigenous cultures in North America grew increasingly complex, and some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture in the southeast, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies.[54] The Mississippian culture flourished in the south from 800 to 1600 AD, extending from the Mexican border down through Florida.[55] Its city state Cahokia is the largest, most complex pre-Columbian archaeological site in the modern-day United States.[56] In the Four Corners region, Ancestral Puebloan culture developed from centuries of agricultural experimentation.[57]
+
+Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Taos Pueblo.[58][59] The earthworks constructed by Native Americans of the Poverty Point culture have also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the southern Great Lakes region, the Iroquois Confederacy was established at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.[60] Most prominent along the Atlantic coast were the Algonquian tribes, who practiced hunting and trapping, along with limited cultivation.
+
+With the progress of European colonization in the territories of the contemporary United States, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[61] The native population of America declined after European arrival for various reasons,[62][63] primarily diseases such as smallpox and measles.[64][65]
+
+Estimating the native population of North America at the time of European contact is difficult.[66][67] Douglas H. Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution estimated that there was a population of 92,916 in the south Atlantic states and a population of 473,616 in the Gulf states,[68] but most academics regard this figure as too low.[66] Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns believed the populations were much higher, suggesting 1,100,000 along the shores of the gulf of Mexico, 2,211,000 people living between Florida and Massachusetts, 5,250,000 in the Mississippi Valley and tributaries and 697,000 people in the Florida peninsula.[66][67]
+
+In the early days of colonization, many European settlers were subject to food shortages, disease, and attacks from Native Americans. Native Americans were also often at war with neighboring tribes and allied with Europeans in their colonial wars. In many cases, however, natives and settlers came to depend on each other. Settlers traded for food and animal pelts; natives for guns, ammunition and other European goods.[69] Natives taught many settlers to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. European missionaries and others felt it was important to "civilize" the Native Americans and urged them to adopt European agricultural techniques and lifestyles.[70][71]
+
+With the advancement of European colonization in North America, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[72] The first Europeans to arrive in the contiguous United States were Spanish conquistadors such as Juan Ponce de León, who made his first visit to Florida in 1513. Even earlier, Christopher Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his 1493 voyage. The Spanish set up the first settlements in Florida and New Mexico such as Saint Augustine[73] and Santa Fe. The French established their own as well along the Mississippi River. Successful English settlement on the eastern coast of North America began with the Virginia Colony in 1607 at Jamestown and with the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. Many settlers were dissenting Christian groups who came seeking religious freedom. The continent's first elected legislative assembly, Virginia's House of Burgesses, was created in 1619. The Mayflower Compact, signed by the Pilgrims before disembarking, and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, established precedents for the pattern of representative self-government and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies.[74][75]
+
+Most settlers in every colony were small farmers, though other industries were formed. Cash crops included tobacco, rice, and wheat. Extraction industries grew up in furs, fishing and lumber. Manufacturers produced rum and ships, and by the late colonial period, Americans were producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply.[76] Cities eventually dotted the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs. English colonists were supplemented by waves of Scotch-Irish immigrants and other groups. As coastal land grew more expensive, freed indentured servants claimed lands further west.[77]
+
+A large-scale slave trade with English privateers began.[78] Because of less disease and better food and treatment, the life expectancy of slaves was much higher in North America than further south, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.[79][80] Colonial society was largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, and colonies passed acts for and against the practice.[81][82] But by the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in the South.[83]
+
+With the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were administered by the British as overseas dependencies.[84] All nonetheless had local governments with elections open to most free men.[85] With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grew rapidly. Relatively small Native American populations were eclipsed.[86] The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest both in religion and in religious liberty.[87]
+
+During the Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans, who were being conquered and displaced, the 13 British colonies had a population of over 2.1 million in 1770, about a third that of Britain. Despite continuing, new arrivals, the rate of natural increase was such that by the 1770s only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas.[88] The colonies' distance from Britain had allowed the development of self-government, but their unprecedented success motivated monarchs to periodically seek to reassert royal authority.[89]
+
+In 1774, the Spanish Navy ship Santiago, under Juan Pérez, entered and anchored in an inlet of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, in present-day British Columbia. Although the Spanish did not land, natives paddled to the ship to trade furs for abalone shells from California.[90] At the time, the Spanish were able to monopolize the trade between Asia and North America, granting limited licenses to the Portuguese. When the Russians began establishing a growing fur trading system in Alaska, the Spanish began to challenge the Russians, with Pérez's voyage being the first of many to the Pacific Northwest.[91][j]
+
+During his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook became the first European to begin formal contact with Hawaii.[93] Captain Cook's last voyage included sailing along the coast of North America and Alaska searching for a Northwest Passage for approximately nine months.[94]
+
+The American Revolutionary War was the first successful colonial war of independence against a European power. Americans had developed an ideology of "republicanism" asserting that government rested on the will of the people as expressed in their local legislatures. They demanded their rights as Englishmen and "no taxation without representation". The British insisted on administering the empire through Parliament, and the conflict escalated into war.[95]
+
+The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that Great Britain was not protecting Americans' unalienable rights. July 4 is celebrated annually as Independence Day.[96] In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a decentralized government that operated until 1789.[96]
+
+Following the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781,[97] Britain signed the peace treaty of 1783, and American sovereignty was internationally recognized and the country was granted all lands east of the Mississippi River. Nationalists led the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788. The federal government was reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789. George Washington, who had led the Continental Army to victory, was the first president elected under the new constitution. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.[98]
+
+Although the federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808, after 1820, cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and along with it, the slave population.[99][100][101] The Second Great Awakening, especially 1800–1840, converted millions to evangelical Protestantism. In the North, it energized multiple social reform movements, including abolitionism;[102] in the South, Methodists and Baptists proselytized among slave populations.[103]
+
+Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of American Indian Wars.[104] The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation's area.[105] The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism.[106] A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819.[107] The expansion was aided by steam power, when steamboats began traveling along America's large water systems, many of which were connected by new canals, such as the Erie and the I&M; then, even faster railroads began their stretch across the nation's land.[108]
+
+From 1820 to 1850, Jacksonian democracy began a set of reforms which included wider white male suffrage; it led to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that forcibly resettled Indians into the west on Indian reservations. The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 during a period of expansionist Manifest destiny.[109] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest.[110] Victory in the Mexican–American War resulted in the 1848 Mexican Cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest.[111]
+The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 spurred migration to the Pacific coast, which led to the California Genocide[112][113][114][115] and the creation of additional western states.[116] After the Civil War, new transcontinental railways made relocation easier for settlers, expanded internal trade and increased conflicts with Native Americans.[117] In 1869, a new Peace Policy nominally promised to protect Native Americans from abuses, avoid further war, and secure their eventual U.S. citizenship. Nonetheless, large-scale conflicts continued throughout the West into the 1900s.
+
+Irreconcilable sectional conflict regarding the slavery of Africans and African Americans ultimately led to the American Civil War.[118] Initially, states entering the Union had alternated between slave and free states, keeping a sectional balance in the Senate, while free states outstripped slave states in population and in the House of Representatives. But with additional western territory and more free-soil states, tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over federalism and disposition of the territories, as well as whether to expand or restrict slavery.[119]
+
+With the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, conventions in thirteen slave states ultimately declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "South" or the "Confederacy"), while the federal government (the "Union") maintained that secession was illegal.[119] In order to bring about this secession, military action was initiated by the secessionists, and the Union responded in kind. The ensuing war would become the deadliest military conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of approximately 618,000 soldiers as well as many civilians.[120] The Union initially simply fought to keep the country united. Nevertheless, as casualties mounted after 1863 and Lincoln delivered his Emancipation Proclamation, the main purpose of the war from the Union's viewpoint became the abolition of slavery. Indeed, when the Union ultimately won the war in April 1865, each of the states in the defeated South was required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery.
+
+The government enacted three constitutional amendments in the years after the war: the aforementioned Thirteenth as well as the Fourteenth Amendment providing citizenship to the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves,[121] and the Fifteenth Amendment ensuring in theory that African Americans had the right to vote. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power[122] aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the South while guaranteeing the rights of the newly freed slaves.
+
+Reconstruction began in earnest following the war. While President Lincoln attempted to foster friendship and forgiveness between the Union and the former Confederacy, his assassination on April 14, 1865, drove a wedge between North and South again. Republicans in the federal government made it their goal to oversee the rebuilding of the South and to ensure the rights of African Americans. They persisted until the Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to cease protecting the rights of African Americans in the South in order for Democrats to concede the presidential election of 1876.
+
+Southern white Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers," took control of the South after the end of Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1910 the Redeemers established so-called Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising most blacks and some poor whites throughout the region. Blacks faced racial segregation, especially in the South.[123] They also occasionally experienced vigilante violence, including lynching.[124]
+
+In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe supplied a surplus of labor for the country's industrialization and transformed its culture.[126] National infrastructure including telegraph and transcontinental railroads spurred economic growth and greater settlement and development of the American Old West. The later invention of electric light and the telephone would also affect communication and urban life.[127]
+
+The United States fought Indian Wars west of the Mississippi River from 1810 to at least 1890.[128] Most of these conflicts ended with the cession of Native American territory and their confinement to Indian reservations. This further expanded acreage under mechanical cultivation, increasing surpluses for international markets.[129] Mainland expansion also included the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.[130] In 1893, pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the monarchy and formed the Republic of Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were ceded by Spain in the same year, following the Spanish–American War.[131] American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the end of the Second Samoan Civil War.[132] The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.[133]
+
+Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. Tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie led the nation's progress in railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. Banking became a major part of the economy, with J. P. Morgan playing a notable role. The American economy boomed, becoming the world's largest, and the United States achieved great power status.[134] These dramatic changes were accompanied by social unrest and the rise of populist, socialist, and anarchist movements.[135] This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which saw significant reforms including women's suffrage, alcohol prohibition, regulation of consumer goods, greater antitrust measures to ensure competition and attention to worker conditions.[136][137][138]
+
+The United States remained neutral from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 until 1917, when it joined the war as an "associated power," alongside the formal Allies of World War I, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson took a leading diplomatic role at the Paris Peace Conference and advocated strongly for the U.S. to join the League of Nations. However, the Senate refused to approve this and did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles that established the League of Nations.[139]
+
+In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage.[140] The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of radio for mass communication and the invention of early television.[141] The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal.[142] The Great Migration of millions of African Americans out of the American South began before World War I and extended through the 1960s;[143] whereas the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration.[144]
+
+At first effectively neutral during World War II, the United States began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers.[145] Although Japan attacked the United States first, the U.S. nonetheless pursued a "Europe first" defense policy.[146] The United States thus left its vast Asian colony, the Philippines, isolated and fighting a losing struggle against Japanese invasion and occupation, as military resources were devoted to the European theater. During the war, the United States was referred to as one of the "Four Policemen"[147] of Allies power who met to plan the postwar world, along with Britain, the Soviet Union and China.[148][149] Although the nation lost around 400,000 military personnel,[150] it emerged relatively undamaged from the war with even greater economic and military influence.[151]
+
+The United States played a leading role in the Bretton Woods and Yalta conferences with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and other Allies, which signed agreements on new international financial institutions and Europe's postwar reorganization. As an Allied victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war.[152] The United States and Japan then fought each other in the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.[153][154] The United States eventually developed the first nuclear weapons and used them on Japan in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese surrendered on September 2, ending World War II.[155][156]
+
+After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for power, influence, and prestige during what became known as the Cold War, driven by an ideological divide between capitalism and communism.[157] They dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its NATO allies on one side and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other. The U.S. developed a policy of containment towards the expansion of communist influence. While the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict.[citation needed]
+
+The United States often opposed Third World movements that it viewed as Soviet-sponsored, and occasionally pursued direct action for regime change against left-wing governments, even supporting right-wing authoritarian governments at times.[158] American troops fought communist Chinese and North Korean forces in the Korean War of 1950–53.[159] The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite and its 1961 launch of the first manned spaceflight initiated a "Space Race" in which the United States became the first nation to land a man on the moon in 1969.[159] A proxy war in Southeast Asia eventually evolved into full American participation, as the Vietnam War.[citation needed]
+
+At home, the U.S. experienced sustained economic expansion and a rapid growth of its population and middle class. Construction of an Interstate Highway System transformed the nation's infrastructure over the following decades. Millions moved from farms and inner cities to large suburban housing developments.[160][161] In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th and last U.S. state added to the country.[162] The growing Civil Rights Movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader and figurehead. A combination of court decisions and legislation, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, sought to end racial discrimination.[163][164][165] Meanwhile, a counterculture movement grew which was fueled by opposition to the Vietnam war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution.
+
+The launch of a "War on Poverty" expanded entitlements and welfare spending, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that provide health coverage to the elderly and poor, respectively, and the means-tested Food Stamp Program and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.[166]
+
+The 1970s and early 1980s saw the onset of stagflation. After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan responded to economic stagnation with free-market oriented reforms. Following the collapse of détente, he abandoned "containment" and initiated the more aggressive "rollback" strategy towards the USSR.[167][168][169][170][171] After a surge in female labor participation over the previous decade, by 1985 the majority of women aged 16 and over were employed.[172]
+
+The late 1980s brought a "thaw" in relations with the USSR, and its collapse in 1991 finally ended the Cold War.[173][174][175][176] This brought about unipolarity[177] with the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The concept of Pax Americana, which had appeared in the post-World War II period, gained wide popularity as a term for the post-Cold War new world order.[citation needed]
+
+After the Cold War, the conflict in the Middle East triggered a crisis in 1990, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, an ally of the United States. Fearing the instability would spread to other regions, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Shield, a defensive force buildup in Saudi Arabia, and Operation Desert Storm, in a staging titled the Gulf War; waged by coalition forces from 34 nations, led by the United States against Iraq ending in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restoration of the monarchy.[178]
+
+Originating within U.S. military defense networks, the Internet spread to international academic platforms and then to the public in the 1990s, greatly affecting the global economy, society, and culture.[179] Due to the dot-com boom, stable monetary policy, and reduced social welfare spending, the 1990s saw the longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history.[180] Beginning in 1994, the U.S. entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), prompting trade among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to soar.[181]
+
+On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people.[182] In response, the United States launched the War on Terror, which included a war in Afghanistan and the 2003–11 Iraq War.[183][184]
+
+Government policy designed to promote affordable housing,[185] widespread failures in corporate and regulatory governance,[186] and historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve[187] led to the mid-2000s housing bubble, which culminated with the 2008 financial crisis, the nation's largest economic contraction since the Great Depression.[188] Barack Obama, the first African-American[189] and multiracial[190] president, was elected in 2008 amid the crisis,[191] and subsequently passed stimulus measures and the Dodd–Frank Act in an attempt to mitigate its negative effects and ensure there would not be a repeat of the crisis. In 2010, the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, which made the most sweeping reforms to the nation's healthcare system in nearly five decades, including mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges.[citation needed]
+
+American forces in Iraq were withdrawn in large numbers in 2009 and 2010, and the war in the region was declared formally over in December 2011.[192] But months earlier, Operation Neptune Spear led to the death of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.[193] In the presidential election of 2016, Republican Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States. On January 20, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed.[194] As of July 2020, the United States has over 4 million COVID-19 cases and over 145,000 deaths.[195] The United States is, by far, the country with the most cases of COVID-19 since April 11, 2020.[196]
+
+The 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia occupy a combined area of 3,119,884.69 square miles (8,080,464.3 km2). Of this area, 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2) is contiguous land, composing 83.65% of total U.S. land area.[197][198] Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, is 10,931 square miles (28,311 km2) in area. The populated territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands together cover 9,185 square miles (23,789 km2).[199] Measured by only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.[200]
+
+The United States is the world's third- or fourth-largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and nearly equal to China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted, and how the total size of the United States is measured.[e][201][202]
+
+The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont.[203] The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest.[204] The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast.[204]
+
+The Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking around 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado.[205] Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Chihuahua and Mojave.[206] The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast, both ranges reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m). The lowest and highest points in the contiguous United States are in the state of California,[207] and only about 84 miles (135 km) apart.[208] At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali is the highest peak in the country and in North America.[209] Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature.[210]
+
+The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.[211] The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains have an alpine climate. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Hawaii and the southern tip of Florida are tropical, as well as its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.[212] States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur in the country, mainly in Tornado Alley areas in the Midwest and South.[213] Overall, the United States has the world's most violent weather, receiving more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world.[214]
+
+The U.S. ecology is megadiverse: about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and more than 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland.[216] The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 bird species, 311 reptile species, and 295 amphibian species,[217] as well as about 91,000 insect species.[218]
+
+There are 62 national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas.[219] Altogether, the government owns about 28% of the country's land area,[220] mostly in the western states.[221] Most of this land is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching, and about .86% is used for military purposes.[222][223]
+
+Environmental issues include debates on oil and nuclear energy, dealing with air and water pollution, the economic costs of protecting wildlife, logging and deforestation,[224][225] and international responses to global warming.[226][227] The most prominent environmental agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by presidential order in 1970.[228] The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act.[229] The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is intended to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.[230]
+
+The U.S. Census Bureau officially estimated the country's population to be 328,239,523 as of July 1, 2019.[231] In addition, the Census Bureau provides a continuously updated U.S. Population Clock that approximates the latest population of the 50 states and District of Columbia based on the Bureau's most recent demographic trends.[234] According to the clock, on May 23, 2020, the U.S. population exceeded 329 million residents, with a net gain of one person every 19 seconds, or about 4,547 people per day. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world, after China and India. In 2018 the median age of the United States population was 38.1 years.[235]
+
+In 2018, there were almost 90 million immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrants (second-generation Americans) in the United States, accounting for 28% of the overall U.S. population.[236] The United States has a very diverse population; 37 ancestry groups have more than one million members.[237] German Americans are the largest ethnic group (more than 50 million)—followed by Irish Americans (circa 37 million), Mexican Americans (circa 31 million) and English Americans (circa 28 million).[238][239]
+
+White Americans (mostly European ancestry) are the largest racial group at 73.1% of the population; African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third-largest ancestry group.[237] Asian Americans are the country's second-largest racial minority; the three largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans.[237] The largest American community with European ancestry is German Americans, which consists of more than 14% of the total population.[240] In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively).[241] The census counted more than 19 million people of "Some Other Race" who were "unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories in 2010, more than 18.5 million (97%) of whom are of Hispanic ethnicity.[241]
+
+In 2017, out of the U.S. foreign-born population, some 45% (20.7 million) were naturalized citizens, 27% (12.3 million) were lawful permanent residents (including many eligible to become citizens), 6% (2.2 million) were temporary lawful residents, and 23% (10.5 million) were unauthorized immigrants.[242] Among current living immigrants to the U.S., the top five countries of birth are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and El Salvador. Until 2017 and 2018, the United States led the world in refugee resettlement for decades, admitted more refugees than the rest of the world combined.[243] From fiscal year 1980 until 2017, 55% of refugees came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 13% from Africa, and 4% from Latin America.[243]
+
+A 2017 United Nations report projected that the U.S. would be one of nine countries in which world population growth through 2050 would be concentrated.[244] A 2020 U.S. Census Bureau report projected the population of the country could be anywhere between 320 million and 447 million by 2060, depending on the rate of in-migration; in all projected scenarios, a lower fertility rate and increases in life expectancy would result in an aging population.[245] The United States has an annual birth rate of 13 per 1,000, which is five births per 1,000 below the world average.[246] Its population growth rate is positive at 0.7%, higher than that of many developed nations.[247]
+
+About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (including suburbs);[202] about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000.[248] In 2008, 273 incorporated municipalities had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than one million residents, and four cities had over two million (namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston).[249] Estimates for the year 2018 show that 53 metropolitan areas have populations greater than one million. Many metros in the South, Southwest and West grew significantly between 2010 and 2018. The Dallas and Houston metros increased by more than a million people, while the Washington, D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and Phoenix metros all grew by more than 500,000 people.
+
+English (specifically, American English) is the de facto national language of the United States. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2010, about 230 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. 12% of the population speaks Spanish at home, making it the second most common language. Spanish is also the most widely taught second language.[250][251]
+
+Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii.[252] In addition to English, Alaska recognizes twenty official Native languages,[253][k] and South Dakota recognizes Sioux.[254] While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French.[255] Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms.[256]
+
+Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan[257] is officially recognized by American Samoa and Chamorro[258] is an official language of Guam. Both Carolinian and Chamorro have official recognition in the Northern Mariana Islands.[259]
+Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico and is more widely spoken than English there.[260]
+
+The most widely taught foreign languages in the United States, in terms of enrollment numbers from kindergarten through university undergraduate education, are Spanish (around 7.2 million students), French (1.5 million), and German (500,000). Other commonly taught languages include Latin, Japanese, ASL, Italian, and Chinese.[261][262] 18% of all Americans claim to speak both English and another language.[263]
+
+Religion in the United States (2017)[266]
+
+The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids Congress from passing laws respecting its establishment.
+
+In a 2013 survey, 56% of Americans said religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other Western nation.[267] In a 2009 Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they attended church weekly or almost weekly; the figures ranged from a low of 23% in Vermont to a high of 63% in Mississippi.[268]
+
+In a 2014 survey, 70.6% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians;[269] Protestants accounted for 46.5%, while Roman Catholics, at 20.8%, formed the largest single Christian group.[270] In 2014, 5.9% of the U.S. adult population claimed a non-Christian religion.[271] These include Judaism (1.9%), Islam (0.9%), Hinduism (0.7%), and Buddhism (0.7%).[271] The survey also reported that 22.8% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist or simply having no religion—up from 8.2% in 1990.[270][272][273] There are also Unitarian Universalist, Scientologist, Baha'i, Sikh, Jain, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Satanist, Taoist, Druid, Native American, Afro-American, traditional African, Wiccan, Gnostic, humanist and deist communities.[274][275]
+
+Protestantism is the largest Christian religious grouping in the United States, accounting for almost half of all Americans. Baptists collectively form the largest branch of Protestantism at 15.4%,[276] and the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest individual Protestant denomination at 5.3% of the U.S. population.[276] Apart from Baptists, other Protestant categories include nondenominational Protestants, Methodists, Pentecostals, unspecified Protestants, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, other Reformed, Episcopalians/Anglicans, Quakers, Adventists, Holiness, Christian fundamentalists, Anabaptists, Pietists, and multiple others.[276]
+
+As with other Western countries, the U.S. is becoming less religious. Irreligion is growing rapidly among Americans under 30.[277] Polls show that overall American confidence in organized religion has been declining since the mid to late 1980s,[278] and that younger Americans, in particular, are becoming increasingly irreligious.[271][279] In a 2012 study, the Protestant share of the U.S. population had dropped to 48%, thus ending its status as religious category of the majority for the first time.[280][281] Americans with no religion have 1.7 children compared to 2.2 among Christians. The unaffiliated are less likely to marry with 37% marrying compared to 52% of Christians.[282]
+
+The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. By contrast, religion plays the least important role in New England and in the Western United States.[268]
+
+As of 2018[update], 52% of Americans age 15 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 32% had never been married.[283] Women now work mostly outside the home and receive the majority of bachelor's degrees.[284]
+
+The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is 26.5 per 1,000 women. The rate has declined by 57% since 1991.[285] Abortion is legal throughout the country. Abortion rates, currently 241 per 1,000 live births and 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, are falling but remain higher than most Western nations.[286] In 2013, the average age at first birth was 26 and 41% of births were to unmarried women.[287]
+
+The total fertility rate in 2016 was 1820.5 births per 1000 women.[288] Adoption in the United States is common and relatively easy from a legal point of view (compared to other Western countries).[289] As of 2001[update], with more than 127,000 adoptions, the U.S. accounted for nearly half of the total number of adoptions worldwide.[needs update][290] Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, and it is legal for same-sex couples to adopt. Polygamy is illegal throughout the U.S.[291]
+
+In 2019, the U.S. had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.[292]
+
+The United States had a life expectancy of 78.6 years at birth in 2017, which was the third year of declines in life expectancy following decades of continuous increase. The recent decline, primarily among the age group 25 to 64, is largely due to sharp increases in the drug overdose and suicide rates; the country has one of the highest suicide rates among wealthy countries.[293][294] Life expectancy was highest among Asians and Hispanics and lowest among blacks.[295][296] According to CDC and Census Bureau data, deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug overdoses hit record highs in 2017.[297]
+
+Increasing obesity in the United States and health improvements elsewhere contributed to lowering the country's rank in life expectancy from 11th in the world in 1987, to 42nd in 2007, and as of 2017 the country had the lowest life expectancy among Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and seven countries of western Europe.[298][299] Obesity rates have more than doubled in the last 30 years and are the highest in the industrialized world.[300][301] Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight.[302] Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.[303]
+
+In 2010, coronary artery disease, lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and traffic accidents caused the most years of life lost in the U.S. Low back pain, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety caused the most years lost to disability. The most harmful risk factors were poor diet, tobacco smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, physical inactivity, and alcohol use. Alzheimer's disease, drug abuse, kidney disease, cancer, and falls caused the most additional years of life lost over their age-adjusted 1990 per-capita rates.[304] U.S. teenage pregnancy and abortion rates are substantially higher than in other Western nations, especially among blacks and Hispanics.[305]
+
+Health-care coverage in the United States is a combination of public and private efforts and is not universal. In 2017, 12.2% of the population did not carry health insurance.[306] The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue.[307][308] Federal legislation, passed in early 2010, roughly halved the uninsured share of the population, though the bill and its ultimate effect are issues of controversy.[309][310] The U.S. health-care system far outspends any other nation, measured both in per capita spending and as percentage of GDP.[311] At the same time, the U.S. is a global leader in medical innovation.[312]
+
+American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. In most states, children are required to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn 18 (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at 16 or 17.[313]
+
+About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.[314] The U.S. spends more on education per student than any nation in the world, spending more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student.[315][needs update] Some 80% of U.S. college students attend public universities.[316]
+
+Of Americans 25 and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees.[317] The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.[202][318] The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.[319]
+
+The United States has many private and public institutions of higher education. The majority of the world's top universities, as listed by various ranking organizations, are in the U.S.[320][321][322] There are also local community colleges with generally more open admission policies, shorter academic programs, and lower tuition.
+
+In 2018, U21, a network of research-intensive universities, ranked the United States first in the world for breadth and quality of higher education, and 15th when GDP was a factor.[323] As for public expenditures on higher education, the U.S. trails some other OECD nations but spends more per student than the OECD average, and more than all nations in combined public and private spending.[315][324] As of 2018[update], student loan debt exceeded 1.5 trillion dollars.[325][326]
+
+The United States is a federal republic of 50 states, a federal district, five territories and several uninhabited island possessions.[327][328][329] It is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law."[330] For 2018, the U.S. ranked 25th on the Democracy Index.[331] On Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index its public sector position deteriorated from a score of 76 in 2015 to 69 in 2019.[332]
+
+In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government: federal, state, and local. The local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district.
+
+The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document.[333] The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus. The Constitution has been amended 27 times;[334] the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights. All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review and any law ruled by the courts to be in violation of the Constitution is voided. The principle of judicial review, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was established by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison (1803)[335] in a decision handed down by Chief Justice John Marshall.[336]
+
+The federal government comprises three branches:
+
+The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population. Each state then draws single-member districts to conform with the census apportionment. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories each have one member of Congress—these members are not allowed to vote.[341]
+
+The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one-third of Senate seats are up for election every two years. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories do not have senators.[341] The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia.[342] The Supreme Court, led by the chief justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.[343]
+
+The state governments are structured in a roughly similar fashion, though Nebraska has a unicameral legislature.[344] The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.
+
+The 50 states are the principal administrative divisions in the country. These are subdivided into counties or county equivalents and further divided into municipalities. The District of Columbia is a federal district that contains the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C.[345] The states and the District of Columbia choose the president of the United States. Each state has presidential electors equal to the number of their representatives and senators in Congress; the District of Columbia has three (because of the 23rd Amendment).[346] Territories of the United States such as Puerto Rico do not have presidential electors, and so people in those territories cannot vote for the president.[341]
+
+The United States also observes tribal sovereignty of the American Indian nations to a limited degree, as it does with the states' sovereignty. American Indians are U.S. citizens and tribal lands are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress and the federal courts. Like the states they have a great deal of autonomy, but also like the states, tribes are not allowed to make war, engage in their own foreign relations, or print and issue currency.[347]
+
+Citizenship is granted at birth in all states, the District of Columbia, and all major U.S. territories except American Samoa.[348][349][m]
+
+The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history.[352] For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote. The president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College.[353]
+
+In American political culture, the center-right Republican Party is considered "conservative" and the center-left Democratic Party is considered "liberal."[354][355] The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states," are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.
+
+Republican Donald Trump, the winner of the 2016 presidential election, is serving as the 45th president of the United States.[356] Leadership in the Senate includes Republican vice president Mike Pence, Republican president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.[357] Leadership in the House includes Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.[358]
+
+In the 116th United States Congress, the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democratic Party and the Senate is controlled by the Republican Party, giving the U.S. a split Congress. The Senate consists of 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats; the House consists of 233 Democrats, 196 Republicans, and 1 Libertarian.[359] Of state governors, there are 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. Among the D.C. mayor and the five territorial governors, there are two Republicans, one Democrat, one New Progressive, and two Independents.[360]
+
+The United States has an established structure of foreign relations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. New York City is home to the United Nations Headquarters. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States (although the U.S. still maintains unofficial relations with Bhutan and Taiwan).[361] It is a member of the G7,[362] G20, and OECD.
+
+The United States has a "Special Relationship" with the United Kingdom[363] and strong ties with India, Canada,[364] Australia,[365] New Zealand,[366] the Philippines,[367] Japan,[368] South Korea,[369] Israel,[370] and several European Union countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.[371] It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Colombia is traditionally considered by the United States as its most loyal ally in South America.[372][373]
+
+The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau through the Compact of Free Association.[374]
+
+Taxation in the United States is levied at the federal, state, and local government levels. This includes taxes on income, payroll, property, sales, imports, estates, and gifts, as well as various fees. Taxation in the United States is based on citizenship, not residency.[375] Both non-resident citizens and Green Card holders living abroad are taxed on their income irrespective of where they live or where their income is earned. The United States is one of the only countries in the world to do so.[376]
+
+In 2010 taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP.[377] Based on CBO estimates,[378] under 2013 tax law the top 1% will be paying the highest average tax rates since 1979, while other income groups will remain at historic lows.[379] For 2018, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 400 households was 23%, compared to 24.2% for the bottom half of U.S. households.[380]
+
+
+
+During fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $3.54 trillion on a budget or cash basis, down $60 billion or 1.7% vs. fiscal year 2011 spending of $3.60 trillion. Major categories of fiscal year 2012 spending included: Medicare & Medicaid (23%), Social Security (22%), Defense Department (19%), non-defense discretionary (17%), other mandatory (13%) and interest (6%).[382]
+
+The total national debt of the United States in the United States was $18.527 trillion (106% of the GDP) in 2014.[383][n] The United States has the largest external debt in the world[387] and the 34th largest government debt as a % of GDP in the world.[388]
+
+The president is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and by the Department of the Navy during times of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.[389]
+
+Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System.[390] American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's 11 active aircraft carriers, and Marine expeditionary units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad,[391] and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries.[392]
+
+The military budget of the United States in 2011 was more than $700 billion, 41% of global military spending. At 4.7% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top 15 military spenders, after Saudi Arabia.[393]  Defense spending plays a major role in science and technology investment, with roughly half of U.S. federal research and development funded by the Department of Defense.[394] Defense's share of the overall U.S. economy has generally declined in recent decades, from Cold War peaks of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 and 69.5% of federal outlays in 1954 to 4.7% of GDP and 18.8% of federal outlays in 2011.[395]
+
+The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.[396] More than 90% of the world's 14,000 nuclear weapons are owned by Russia and the United States.[397]
+
+Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police departments and sheriff's offices, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties, including protecting civil rights, national security and enforcing U.S. federal courts' rulings and federal laws.[398] State courts conduct most criminal trials while federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state criminal courts.
+
+A cross-sectional analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed that United States "homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher."[399] In 2016, the US murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000.[400] Gun ownership rights, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, continue to be the subject of contention.
+
+The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world.[401] As of 2020, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that there were some 2.3 million people incarcerated.[402]  The imprisonment rate for all prisoners sentenced to more than a year in state or federal facilities is 478 per 100,000 in 2013.[403] According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of inmates held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses.[404] About 9% of prisoners are held in privatized prisons.[402] The practice of privately operated prisons began in the 1980s and has been a subject of contention.[405]
+
+Capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and at the state level in 30 states.[406][407] No executions took place from 1967 to 1977, owing in part to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Since the decision there have been more than 1,300 executions, a majority of these taking place in three states: Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.[408] Meanwhile, several states have either abolished or struck down death penalty laws. In 2019, the country had the sixth-highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.[409]
+
+According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $16.8 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 19% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).[417] The United States is the largest importer of goods and second-largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2010, the total U.S. trade deficit was $635 billion.[418] Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners.[419]
+
+From 1983 to 2008, U.S. real compounded annual GDP growth was 3.3%, compared to a 2.3% weighted average for the rest of the G7.[420] The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita[421] and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP.[417] The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.[422]
+
+In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 86.4% of the economy.[425] While its economy has reached a postindustrial level of development, the United States remains an industrial power.[426] Consumer spending comprised 68% of the U.S. economy in 2015.[427] In August 2010, the American labor force consisted of 154.1 million people (50%). With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people. It has a smaller welfare state and redistributes less income through government action than most European nations.[428]
+
+The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation[429] and is one of a few countries in the world without paid family leave as a legal right.[430] While federal law does not require sick leave, it is a common benefit for government workers and full-time employees at corporations.[431] 74% of full-time American workers get paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although only 24% of part-time workers get the same benefits.[431] In 2009, the United States had the third-highest workforce productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands.[432]
+
+
+
+The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. Methods for producing interchangeable parts were developed by the U.S. War Department by the Federal Armories during the first half of the 19th century. This technology, along with the establishment of a machine tool industry, enabled the U.S. to have large-scale manufacturing of sewing machines, bicycles, and other items in the late 19th century and became known as the American system of manufacturing. Factory electrification in the early 20th century and introduction of the assembly line and other labor-saving techniques created the system of mass production.[433] In the 21st century, approximately two-thirds of research and development funding comes from the private sector.[434] The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor.[435][436]
+
+In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's research laboratory, one of the first of its kind, developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera.[437] The latter led to emergence of the worldwide entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.[438]
+
+The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann, to immigrate to the United States.[439] During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age, while the Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and aeronautics.[440][441]
+
+The invention of the transistor in the 1950s, a key active component in practically all modern electronics, led to many technological developments and a significant expansion of the U.S. technology industry.[442] This, in turn, led to the establishment of many new technology companies and regions around the country such as Silicon Valley in California. Advancements by American microprocessor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel along with both computer software and hardware companies that include Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems created and popularized the personal computer. The ARPANET was developed in the 1960s to meet Defense Department requirements, and became the first of a series of networks which evolved into the Internet.[443]
+
+Accounting for 4.24% of the global population, Americans collectively possess 29.4% of the world's total wealth, and Americans make up roughly half of the world's population of millionaires.[444] The Global Food Security Index ranked the U.S. number one for food affordability and overall food security in March 2013.[445] Americans on average have more than twice as much living space per dwelling and per person as European Union residents, and more than every EU nation.[446] For 2017 the United Nations Development Programme ranked the United States 13th among 189 countries in its Human Development Index and 25th among 151 countries in its inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI).[447]
+
+Wealth, like income and taxes, is highly concentrated; the richest 10% of the adult population possess 72% of the country's household wealth, while the bottom half claim only 2%.[448] According to a September 2017 report by the Federal Reserve, the top 1% controlled 38.6% of the country's wealth in 2016.[449] According to a 2018 study by the OECD, the United States has a larger percentage of low-income workers than almost any other developed nation. This is largely because at-risk workers get almost no government support and are further set back by a very weak collective bargaining system.[450] The top one percent of income-earners accounted for 52 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2015, where income is defined as market income excluding government transfers.[451] In 2018, U.S. income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau.[452]
+
+After years of stagnation, median household income reached a record high in 2016 following two consecutive years of record growth. Income inequality remains at record highs however, with the top fifth of earners taking home more than half of all overall income.[454] The rise in the share of total annual income received by the top one percent, which has more than doubled from nine percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2011, has significantly affected income inequality,[455] leaving the United States with one of the widest income distributions among OECD nations.[456]  The extent and relevance of income inequality is a matter of debate.[457][458][459]
+
+Between June 2007 and November 2008, the global recession led to falling asset prices around the world. Assets owned by Americans lost about a quarter of their value.[460] Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth was down $14 trillion, but has since increased $14 trillion over 2006 levels.[461] At the end of 2014, household debt amounted to $11.8 trillion,[462] down from $13.8 trillion at the end of 2008.[463]
+
+There were about 578,424 sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in the US in January 2014, with almost two-thirds staying in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program.[464] In 2011, 16.7 million children lived in food-insecure households, about 35% more than 2007 levels, though only 1.1% of U.S. children, or 845,000, saw reduced food intake or disrupted eating patterns at some point during the year, and most cases were not chronic.[465] As of June 2018[update], 40 million people, roughly 12.7% of the U.S. population, were living in poverty, with 18.5 million of those living in deep poverty (a family income below one-half of the poverty threshold) and over five million live "in 'Third World' conditions." In 2016, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, which made up 32.6% of the impoverished population.[466] In 2017, the U.S. state or territory with the lowest poverty rate was New Hampshire (7.6%), and the one with the highest was American Samoa (65%).[467][468][469]
+
+Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of public roads.[471] The United States has the world's second-largest automobile market,[472] and has the highest rate of per-capita vehicle ownership in the world, with 765 vehicles per 1,000 Americans (1996).[473][needs update] In 2017, there were 255,009,283 non-two wheel motor vehicles, or about 910 vehicles per 1,000 people.[474]
+
+The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned and has been largely deregulated since 1978, while most major airports are publicly owned.[475] The three largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are US-based; American Airlines is number one after its 2013 acquisition by US Airways.[476] Of the world's 50 busiest passenger airports, 16 are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.[477]
+
+The United States energy market is about 29,000 terawatt hours per year.[478] In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear and renewable energy sources.[479]
+
+Since 2007, the total greenhouse gas emissions by the United States are the second highest by country, exceeded only by China.[480] The United States has historically been the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gas emissions per capita remain high.[481]
+
+The United States is home to many cultures and a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.[483][484] Aside from the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors settled or immigrated within the past five centuries.[485] Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.[483][486] More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.[483]
+
+Americans have traditionally been characterized by a strong work ethic, competitiveness, and individualism,[487] as well as a unifying belief in an "American creed" emphasizing liberty, equality, private property, democracy, rule of law, and a preference for limited government.[488] Americans are extremely charitable by global standards. According to a 2006 British study, Americans gave 1.67% of GDP to charity, more than any other nation studied.[489][490][491]
+
+The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants.[492] Whether this perception is accurate has been a topic of debate.[493][494][495][496][420][497] While mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,[498] scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.[499] While Americans tend  to greatly value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is also generally seen as a positive attribute.[500]
+
+In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.[501] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."[502]
+
+Twelve U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Bob Dylan in 2016. William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[503] Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.[504]
+
+The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty, and later Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of American philosophical academia. John Rawls and Robert Nozick also led a revival of political philosophy.
+
+In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.[505] Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new, individualistic styles. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.[506] Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.[507]
+
+Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain with about three-quarters of grain products made of wheat flour[508] and many dishes use indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers.[509] These homegrown foods are part of a shared national menu on one of America's most popular holidays, Thanksgiving, when some Americans make traditional foods to celebrate the occasion.[510]
+
+The American fast food industry, the world's largest,[511] pioneered the drive-through format in the 1940s.[512] Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[513] Americans drink three times as much coffee as tea.[514] Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.[515][516]
+
+Although little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music.
+
+The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European and African traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s.[517]
+
+Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. Rock bands such as Metallica, the Eagles, and Aerosmith are among the highest grossing in worldwide sales.[518][519][520] In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk.
+
+More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities,[517] as have contemporary musical artists such as Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West, and Ariana Grande.[521]
+
+Hollywood, a northern district of Los Angeles, California, is one of the leaders in motion picture production.[522] The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope.[523] Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, although in the 21st century an increasing number of films are not made there, and film companies have been subject to the forces of globalization.[524]
+
+Director D. W. Griffith, the top American filmmaker during the silent film period, was central to the development of film grammar, and producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising.[525] Directors such as John Ford redefined the image of the American Old West, and, like others such as John Huston, broadened the possibilities of cinema with location shooting. The industry enjoyed its golden years, in what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood," from the early sound period until the early 1960s,[526] with screen actors such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe becoming iconic figures.[527][528] In the 1970s, "New Hollywood" or the "Hollywood Renaissance"[529] was defined by grittier films influenced by French and Italian realist pictures of the post-war period.[530] In more recent times, directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron have gained renown for their blockbuster films, often characterized by high production costs and earnings.
+
+Notable films topping the American Film Institute's AFI 100 list include Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time,[531][532] Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Graduate (1967), On the Waterfront (1954), Schindler's List (1993), Singin' in the Rain (1952), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).[533] The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, have been held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1929,[534] and the Golden Globe Awards have been held annually since January 1944.[535]
+
+American football is by several measures the most popular spectator sport;[537] the National Football League (NFL) has the highest average attendance of any sports league in the world, and the Super Bowl is watched by tens of millions globally. Baseball has been regarded as the U.S. national sport since the late 19th century, with Major League Baseball (MLB) being the top league. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports, with the top leagues being the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL). College football and basketball attract large audiences.[538] In soccer, the country hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the men's national soccer team qualified for ten World Cups and the women's team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup four times; Major League Soccer is the sport's highest league in the United States (featuring 23 American and three Canadian teams). The market for professional sports in the United States is roughly $69 billion, roughly 50% larger than that of all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined.[539]
+
+Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri were the first ever Olympic Games held outside of Europe.[540] As of 2017[update], the United States has won 2,522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 305 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.[541]
+While most major U.S. sports such as baseball and American football have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, some of which have become popular worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.[542] The most watched individual sports are golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR.[543][544]
+
+The four major broadcasters in the U.S. are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX). The four major broadcast television networks are all commercial entities. Cable television offers hundreds of channels catering to a variety of niches.[545] Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercial, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.[546]
+
+In 1998, the number of U.S. commercial radio stations had grown to 4,793 AM stations and 5,662 FM stations. In addition, there are 1,460 public radio stations. Most of these stations are run by universities and public authorities for educational purposes and are financed by public or private funds, subscriptions, and corporate underwriting. Much public-radio broadcasting is supplied by NPR. NPR was incorporated in February 1970 under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967; its television counterpart, PBS, was created by the same legislation. As of September 30, 2014[update], there are 15,433 licensed full-power radio stations in the U.S. according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).[547]
+
+Well-known newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.[548] Although the cost of publishing has increased over the years, the price of newspapers has generally remained low, forcing newspapers to rely more on advertising revenue and on articles provided by a major wire service, such as the Associated Press or Reuters, for their national and world coverage. With very few exceptions, all the newspapers in the U.S. are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families. Major cities often have "alternative weeklies" to complement the mainstream daily papers, such as New York City's The Village Voice or Los Angeles' LA Weekly. Major cities may also support a local business journal, trade papers relating to local industries, and papers for local ethnic and social groups. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Twitter.[549]
+
+More than 800 publications are produced in Spanish, the second most commonly used language in the United States behind English.[550][551]
+
+Internet sources
+

en/1868.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,332 @@
+
+
+Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100
+
+The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country mostly located in central North America, between Canada and Mexico. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions.[i] At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), it is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area.[e] With a 2019 estimated population of over 328 million,[7] the U.S. is the third most populous country in the world. The Americans are a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been shaped through centuries of immigration. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City.
+
+Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago,[19] and European colonization began in the 16th century. The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolutionary War lasting between 1775 and 1783, leading to independence.[20] Beginning in the late 18th century, the United States vigorously expanded across North America, gradually acquiring new territories,[21] killing and displacing Native Americans, and admitting new states. By 1848, the United States spanned the continent.[21]
+Slavery was legal in much of the United States until the second half of the 19th century, when the American Civil War led to its abolition.[22][23]
+
+The Spanish–American War and World War I entrenched the U.S. as a world power, a status confirmed by the outcome of World War II. It was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.[24]
+
+The United States is a federal republic and a representative democracy. It is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), NATO, and other international organizations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
+
+A highly developed country, the United States is the world's largest economy and accounts for approximately a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP).[25] The United States is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter of goods, by value.[26][27] Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total,[28] it holds 29.4% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share held by any country.[29] Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, median income, median wealth, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity.[30][31] It is the foremost military power in the world, making up more than a third of global military spending,[32] and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.[33]
+
+The first known use of the name "America" dates back to 1507, when it appeared on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. On this map, the name applied to South America in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.[34] After returning from his expeditions, Vespucci first postulated that the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern limit, as initially thought by Christopher Columbus, but instead were part of an entirely separate landmass thus far unknown to the Europeans.[35] In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator used the name "America" on his own world map, applying it to the entire Western Hemisphere.[36]
+
+The first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written by Stephen Moylan, Esq., to Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort.[37][38][39] The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.[40]
+
+The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed no later than June 17, 1776, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'".[41] The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'".[42] In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence.[41] This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.[41]
+
+The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms are the "U.S.," the "USA," and "America." Colloquial names are the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States." "Columbia," a name popular in poetry and songs of the late 18th century, derives its origin from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia." Many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.[43]
+
+The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865.[44] The singular form—e.g., "the United States is"—became popular after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States." The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.[45]
+
+A citizen of the United States is an "American." "United States," "American" and "U.S." refer to the country adjectivally ("American values," "U.S. forces"). In English, the word "American" rarely refers to topics or subjects not directly connected with the United States.[46]
+
+It has been generally accepted that the first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 12,000 years ago; however, increasing evidence suggests an even earlier arrival.[19][47][48] After crossing the land bridge, the Paleo-Indians moved southward along the Pacific coast[49] and through an interior ice-free corridor.[50] The Clovis culture, which appeared around 11,000 BC, was initially believed to represent the first wave of human settlement of the Americas.[51][52] It is likely these represent the first of three major waves of migration into North America.[53]
+
+Over time, indigenous cultures in North America grew increasingly complex, and some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture in the southeast, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies.[54] The Mississippian culture flourished in the south from 800 to 1600 AD, extending from the Mexican border down through Florida.[55] Its city state Cahokia is the largest, most complex pre-Columbian archaeological site in the modern-day United States.[56] In the Four Corners region, Ancestral Puebloan culture developed from centuries of agricultural experimentation.[57]
+
+Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Taos Pueblo.[58][59] The earthworks constructed by Native Americans of the Poverty Point culture have also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the southern Great Lakes region, the Iroquois Confederacy was established at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.[60] Most prominent along the Atlantic coast were the Algonquian tribes, who practiced hunting and trapping, along with limited cultivation.
+
+With the progress of European colonization in the territories of the contemporary United States, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[61] The native population of America declined after European arrival for various reasons,[62][63] primarily diseases such as smallpox and measles.[64][65]
+
+Estimating the native population of North America at the time of European contact is difficult.[66][67] Douglas H. Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution estimated that there was a population of 92,916 in the south Atlantic states and a population of 473,616 in the Gulf states,[68] but most academics regard this figure as too low.[66] Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns believed the populations were much higher, suggesting 1,100,000 along the shores of the gulf of Mexico, 2,211,000 people living between Florida and Massachusetts, 5,250,000 in the Mississippi Valley and tributaries and 697,000 people in the Florida peninsula.[66][67]
+
+In the early days of colonization, many European settlers were subject to food shortages, disease, and attacks from Native Americans. Native Americans were also often at war with neighboring tribes and allied with Europeans in their colonial wars. In many cases, however, natives and settlers came to depend on each other. Settlers traded for food and animal pelts; natives for guns, ammunition and other European goods.[69] Natives taught many settlers to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. European missionaries and others felt it was important to "civilize" the Native Americans and urged them to adopt European agricultural techniques and lifestyles.[70][71]
+
+With the advancement of European colonization in North America, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[72] The first Europeans to arrive in the contiguous United States were Spanish conquistadors such as Juan Ponce de León, who made his first visit to Florida in 1513. Even earlier, Christopher Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his 1493 voyage. The Spanish set up the first settlements in Florida and New Mexico such as Saint Augustine[73] and Santa Fe. The French established their own as well along the Mississippi River. Successful English settlement on the eastern coast of North America began with the Virginia Colony in 1607 at Jamestown and with the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. Many settlers were dissenting Christian groups who came seeking religious freedom. The continent's first elected legislative assembly, Virginia's House of Burgesses, was created in 1619. The Mayflower Compact, signed by the Pilgrims before disembarking, and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, established precedents for the pattern of representative self-government and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies.[74][75]
+
+Most settlers in every colony were small farmers, though other industries were formed. Cash crops included tobacco, rice, and wheat. Extraction industries grew up in furs, fishing and lumber. Manufacturers produced rum and ships, and by the late colonial period, Americans were producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply.[76] Cities eventually dotted the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs. English colonists were supplemented by waves of Scotch-Irish immigrants and other groups. As coastal land grew more expensive, freed indentured servants claimed lands further west.[77]
+
+A large-scale slave trade with English privateers began.[78] Because of less disease and better food and treatment, the life expectancy of slaves was much higher in North America than further south, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.[79][80] Colonial society was largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, and colonies passed acts for and against the practice.[81][82] But by the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in the South.[83]
+
+With the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were administered by the British as overseas dependencies.[84] All nonetheless had local governments with elections open to most free men.[85] With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grew rapidly. Relatively small Native American populations were eclipsed.[86] The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest both in religion and in religious liberty.[87]
+
+During the Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans, who were being conquered and displaced, the 13 British colonies had a population of over 2.1 million in 1770, about a third that of Britain. Despite continuing, new arrivals, the rate of natural increase was such that by the 1770s only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas.[88] The colonies' distance from Britain had allowed the development of self-government, but their unprecedented success motivated monarchs to periodically seek to reassert royal authority.[89]
+
+In 1774, the Spanish Navy ship Santiago, under Juan Pérez, entered and anchored in an inlet of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, in present-day British Columbia. Although the Spanish did not land, natives paddled to the ship to trade furs for abalone shells from California.[90] At the time, the Spanish were able to monopolize the trade between Asia and North America, granting limited licenses to the Portuguese. When the Russians began establishing a growing fur trading system in Alaska, the Spanish began to challenge the Russians, with Pérez's voyage being the first of many to the Pacific Northwest.[91][j]
+
+During his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook became the first European to begin formal contact with Hawaii.[93] Captain Cook's last voyage included sailing along the coast of North America and Alaska searching for a Northwest Passage for approximately nine months.[94]
+
+The American Revolutionary War was the first successful colonial war of independence against a European power. Americans had developed an ideology of "republicanism" asserting that government rested on the will of the people as expressed in their local legislatures. They demanded their rights as Englishmen and "no taxation without representation". The British insisted on administering the empire through Parliament, and the conflict escalated into war.[95]
+
+The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that Great Britain was not protecting Americans' unalienable rights. July 4 is celebrated annually as Independence Day.[96] In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a decentralized government that operated until 1789.[96]
+
+Following the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781,[97] Britain signed the peace treaty of 1783, and American sovereignty was internationally recognized and the country was granted all lands east of the Mississippi River. Nationalists led the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788. The federal government was reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789. George Washington, who had led the Continental Army to victory, was the first president elected under the new constitution. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.[98]
+
+Although the federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808, after 1820, cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and along with it, the slave population.[99][100][101] The Second Great Awakening, especially 1800–1840, converted millions to evangelical Protestantism. In the North, it energized multiple social reform movements, including abolitionism;[102] in the South, Methodists and Baptists proselytized among slave populations.[103]
+
+Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of American Indian Wars.[104] The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation's area.[105] The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism.[106] A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819.[107] The expansion was aided by steam power, when steamboats began traveling along America's large water systems, many of which were connected by new canals, such as the Erie and the I&M; then, even faster railroads began their stretch across the nation's land.[108]
+
+From 1820 to 1850, Jacksonian democracy began a set of reforms which included wider white male suffrage; it led to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that forcibly resettled Indians into the west on Indian reservations. The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 during a period of expansionist Manifest destiny.[109] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest.[110] Victory in the Mexican–American War resulted in the 1848 Mexican Cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest.[111]
+The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 spurred migration to the Pacific coast, which led to the California Genocide[112][113][114][115] and the creation of additional western states.[116] After the Civil War, new transcontinental railways made relocation easier for settlers, expanded internal trade and increased conflicts with Native Americans.[117] In 1869, a new Peace Policy nominally promised to protect Native Americans from abuses, avoid further war, and secure their eventual U.S. citizenship. Nonetheless, large-scale conflicts continued throughout the West into the 1900s.
+
+Irreconcilable sectional conflict regarding the slavery of Africans and African Americans ultimately led to the American Civil War.[118] Initially, states entering the Union had alternated between slave and free states, keeping a sectional balance in the Senate, while free states outstripped slave states in population and in the House of Representatives. But with additional western territory and more free-soil states, tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over federalism and disposition of the territories, as well as whether to expand or restrict slavery.[119]
+
+With the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, conventions in thirteen slave states ultimately declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "South" or the "Confederacy"), while the federal government (the "Union") maintained that secession was illegal.[119] In order to bring about this secession, military action was initiated by the secessionists, and the Union responded in kind. The ensuing war would become the deadliest military conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of approximately 618,000 soldiers as well as many civilians.[120] The Union initially simply fought to keep the country united. Nevertheless, as casualties mounted after 1863 and Lincoln delivered his Emancipation Proclamation, the main purpose of the war from the Union's viewpoint became the abolition of slavery. Indeed, when the Union ultimately won the war in April 1865, each of the states in the defeated South was required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery.
+
+The government enacted three constitutional amendments in the years after the war: the aforementioned Thirteenth as well as the Fourteenth Amendment providing citizenship to the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves,[121] and the Fifteenth Amendment ensuring in theory that African Americans had the right to vote. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power[122] aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the South while guaranteeing the rights of the newly freed slaves.
+
+Reconstruction began in earnest following the war. While President Lincoln attempted to foster friendship and forgiveness between the Union and the former Confederacy, his assassination on April 14, 1865, drove a wedge between North and South again. Republicans in the federal government made it their goal to oversee the rebuilding of the South and to ensure the rights of African Americans. They persisted until the Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to cease protecting the rights of African Americans in the South in order for Democrats to concede the presidential election of 1876.
+
+Southern white Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers," took control of the South after the end of Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1910 the Redeemers established so-called Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising most blacks and some poor whites throughout the region. Blacks faced racial segregation, especially in the South.[123] They also occasionally experienced vigilante violence, including lynching.[124]
+
+In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe supplied a surplus of labor for the country's industrialization and transformed its culture.[126] National infrastructure including telegraph and transcontinental railroads spurred economic growth and greater settlement and development of the American Old West. The later invention of electric light and the telephone would also affect communication and urban life.[127]
+
+The United States fought Indian Wars west of the Mississippi River from 1810 to at least 1890.[128] Most of these conflicts ended with the cession of Native American territory and their confinement to Indian reservations. This further expanded acreage under mechanical cultivation, increasing surpluses for international markets.[129] Mainland expansion also included the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.[130] In 1893, pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the monarchy and formed the Republic of Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were ceded by Spain in the same year, following the Spanish–American War.[131] American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the end of the Second Samoan Civil War.[132] The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.[133]
+
+Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. Tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie led the nation's progress in railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. Banking became a major part of the economy, with J. P. Morgan playing a notable role. The American economy boomed, becoming the world's largest, and the United States achieved great power status.[134] These dramatic changes were accompanied by social unrest and the rise of populist, socialist, and anarchist movements.[135] This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which saw significant reforms including women's suffrage, alcohol prohibition, regulation of consumer goods, greater antitrust measures to ensure competition and attention to worker conditions.[136][137][138]
+
+The United States remained neutral from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 until 1917, when it joined the war as an "associated power," alongside the formal Allies of World War I, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson took a leading diplomatic role at the Paris Peace Conference and advocated strongly for the U.S. to join the League of Nations. However, the Senate refused to approve this and did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles that established the League of Nations.[139]
+
+In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage.[140] The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of radio for mass communication and the invention of early television.[141] The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal.[142] The Great Migration of millions of African Americans out of the American South began before World War I and extended through the 1960s;[143] whereas the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration.[144]
+
+At first effectively neutral during World War II, the United States began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers.[145] Although Japan attacked the United States first, the U.S. nonetheless pursued a "Europe first" defense policy.[146] The United States thus left its vast Asian colony, the Philippines, isolated and fighting a losing struggle against Japanese invasion and occupation, as military resources were devoted to the European theater. During the war, the United States was referred to as one of the "Four Policemen"[147] of Allies power who met to plan the postwar world, along with Britain, the Soviet Union and China.[148][149] Although the nation lost around 400,000 military personnel,[150] it emerged relatively undamaged from the war with even greater economic and military influence.[151]
+
+The United States played a leading role in the Bretton Woods and Yalta conferences with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and other Allies, which signed agreements on new international financial institutions and Europe's postwar reorganization. As an Allied victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war.[152] The United States and Japan then fought each other in the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.[153][154] The United States eventually developed the first nuclear weapons and used them on Japan in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese surrendered on September 2, ending World War II.[155][156]
+
+After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for power, influence, and prestige during what became known as the Cold War, driven by an ideological divide between capitalism and communism.[157] They dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its NATO allies on one side and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other. The U.S. developed a policy of containment towards the expansion of communist influence. While the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict.[citation needed]
+
+The United States often opposed Third World movements that it viewed as Soviet-sponsored, and occasionally pursued direct action for regime change against left-wing governments, even supporting right-wing authoritarian governments at times.[158] American troops fought communist Chinese and North Korean forces in the Korean War of 1950–53.[159] The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite and its 1961 launch of the first manned spaceflight initiated a "Space Race" in which the United States became the first nation to land a man on the moon in 1969.[159] A proxy war in Southeast Asia eventually evolved into full American participation, as the Vietnam War.[citation needed]
+
+At home, the U.S. experienced sustained economic expansion and a rapid growth of its population and middle class. Construction of an Interstate Highway System transformed the nation's infrastructure over the following decades. Millions moved from farms and inner cities to large suburban housing developments.[160][161] In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th and last U.S. state added to the country.[162] The growing Civil Rights Movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader and figurehead. A combination of court decisions and legislation, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, sought to end racial discrimination.[163][164][165] Meanwhile, a counterculture movement grew which was fueled by opposition to the Vietnam war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution.
+
+The launch of a "War on Poverty" expanded entitlements and welfare spending, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that provide health coverage to the elderly and poor, respectively, and the means-tested Food Stamp Program and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.[166]
+
+The 1970s and early 1980s saw the onset of stagflation. After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan responded to economic stagnation with free-market oriented reforms. Following the collapse of détente, he abandoned "containment" and initiated the more aggressive "rollback" strategy towards the USSR.[167][168][169][170][171] After a surge in female labor participation over the previous decade, by 1985 the majority of women aged 16 and over were employed.[172]
+
+The late 1980s brought a "thaw" in relations with the USSR, and its collapse in 1991 finally ended the Cold War.[173][174][175][176] This brought about unipolarity[177] with the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The concept of Pax Americana, which had appeared in the post-World War II period, gained wide popularity as a term for the post-Cold War new world order.[citation needed]
+
+After the Cold War, the conflict in the Middle East triggered a crisis in 1990, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, an ally of the United States. Fearing the instability would spread to other regions, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Shield, a defensive force buildup in Saudi Arabia, and Operation Desert Storm, in a staging titled the Gulf War; waged by coalition forces from 34 nations, led by the United States against Iraq ending in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restoration of the monarchy.[178]
+
+Originating within U.S. military defense networks, the Internet spread to international academic platforms and then to the public in the 1990s, greatly affecting the global economy, society, and culture.[179] Due to the dot-com boom, stable monetary policy, and reduced social welfare spending, the 1990s saw the longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history.[180] Beginning in 1994, the U.S. entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), prompting trade among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to soar.[181]
+
+On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people.[182] In response, the United States launched the War on Terror, which included a war in Afghanistan and the 2003–11 Iraq War.[183][184]
+
+Government policy designed to promote affordable housing,[185] widespread failures in corporate and regulatory governance,[186] and historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve[187] led to the mid-2000s housing bubble, which culminated with the 2008 financial crisis, the nation's largest economic contraction since the Great Depression.[188] Barack Obama, the first African-American[189] and multiracial[190] president, was elected in 2008 amid the crisis,[191] and subsequently passed stimulus measures and the Dodd–Frank Act in an attempt to mitigate its negative effects and ensure there would not be a repeat of the crisis. In 2010, the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, which made the most sweeping reforms to the nation's healthcare system in nearly five decades, including mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges.[citation needed]
+
+American forces in Iraq were withdrawn in large numbers in 2009 and 2010, and the war in the region was declared formally over in December 2011.[192] But months earlier, Operation Neptune Spear led to the death of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.[193] In the presidential election of 2016, Republican Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States. On January 20, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed.[194] As of July 2020, the United States has over 4 million COVID-19 cases and over 145,000 deaths.[195] The United States is, by far, the country with the most cases of COVID-19 since April 11, 2020.[196]
+
+The 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia occupy a combined area of 3,119,884.69 square miles (8,080,464.3 km2). Of this area, 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2) is contiguous land, composing 83.65% of total U.S. land area.[197][198] Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, is 10,931 square miles (28,311 km2) in area. The populated territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands together cover 9,185 square miles (23,789 km2).[199] Measured by only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.[200]
+
+The United States is the world's third- or fourth-largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and nearly equal to China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted, and how the total size of the United States is measured.[e][201][202]
+
+The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont.[203] The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest.[204] The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast.[204]
+
+The Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking around 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado.[205] Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Chihuahua and Mojave.[206] The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast, both ranges reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m). The lowest and highest points in the contiguous United States are in the state of California,[207] and only about 84 miles (135 km) apart.[208] At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali is the highest peak in the country and in North America.[209] Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature.[210]
+
+The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.[211] The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains have an alpine climate. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Hawaii and the southern tip of Florida are tropical, as well as its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.[212] States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur in the country, mainly in Tornado Alley areas in the Midwest and South.[213] Overall, the United States has the world's most violent weather, receiving more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world.[214]
+
+The U.S. ecology is megadiverse: about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and more than 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland.[216] The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 bird species, 311 reptile species, and 295 amphibian species,[217] as well as about 91,000 insect species.[218]
+
+There are 62 national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas.[219] Altogether, the government owns about 28% of the country's land area,[220] mostly in the western states.[221] Most of this land is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching, and about .86% is used for military purposes.[222][223]
+
+Environmental issues include debates on oil and nuclear energy, dealing with air and water pollution, the economic costs of protecting wildlife, logging and deforestation,[224][225] and international responses to global warming.[226][227] The most prominent environmental agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by presidential order in 1970.[228] The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act.[229] The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is intended to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.[230]
+
+The U.S. Census Bureau officially estimated the country's population to be 328,239,523 as of July 1, 2019.[231] In addition, the Census Bureau provides a continuously updated U.S. Population Clock that approximates the latest population of the 50 states and District of Columbia based on the Bureau's most recent demographic trends.[234] According to the clock, on May 23, 2020, the U.S. population exceeded 329 million residents, with a net gain of one person every 19 seconds, or about 4,547 people per day. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world, after China and India. In 2018 the median age of the United States population was 38.1 years.[235]
+
+In 2018, there were almost 90 million immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrants (second-generation Americans) in the United States, accounting for 28% of the overall U.S. population.[236] The United States has a very diverse population; 37 ancestry groups have more than one million members.[237] German Americans are the largest ethnic group (more than 50 million)—followed by Irish Americans (circa 37 million), Mexican Americans (circa 31 million) and English Americans (circa 28 million).[238][239]
+
+White Americans (mostly European ancestry) are the largest racial group at 73.1% of the population; African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third-largest ancestry group.[237] Asian Americans are the country's second-largest racial minority; the three largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans.[237] The largest American community with European ancestry is German Americans, which consists of more than 14% of the total population.[240] In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively).[241] The census counted more than 19 million people of "Some Other Race" who were "unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories in 2010, more than 18.5 million (97%) of whom are of Hispanic ethnicity.[241]
+
+In 2017, out of the U.S. foreign-born population, some 45% (20.7 million) were naturalized citizens, 27% (12.3 million) were lawful permanent residents (including many eligible to become citizens), 6% (2.2 million) were temporary lawful residents, and 23% (10.5 million) were unauthorized immigrants.[242] Among current living immigrants to the U.S., the top five countries of birth are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and El Salvador. Until 2017 and 2018, the United States led the world in refugee resettlement for decades, admitted more refugees than the rest of the world combined.[243] From fiscal year 1980 until 2017, 55% of refugees came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 13% from Africa, and 4% from Latin America.[243]
+
+A 2017 United Nations report projected that the U.S. would be one of nine countries in which world population growth through 2050 would be concentrated.[244] A 2020 U.S. Census Bureau report projected the population of the country could be anywhere between 320 million and 447 million by 2060, depending on the rate of in-migration; in all projected scenarios, a lower fertility rate and increases in life expectancy would result in an aging population.[245] The United States has an annual birth rate of 13 per 1,000, which is five births per 1,000 below the world average.[246] Its population growth rate is positive at 0.7%, higher than that of many developed nations.[247]
+
+About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (including suburbs);[202] about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000.[248] In 2008, 273 incorporated municipalities had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than one million residents, and four cities had over two million (namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston).[249] Estimates for the year 2018 show that 53 metropolitan areas have populations greater than one million. Many metros in the South, Southwest and West grew significantly between 2010 and 2018. The Dallas and Houston metros increased by more than a million people, while the Washington, D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and Phoenix metros all grew by more than 500,000 people.
+
+English (specifically, American English) is the de facto national language of the United States. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2010, about 230 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. 12% of the population speaks Spanish at home, making it the second most common language. Spanish is also the most widely taught second language.[250][251]
+
+Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii.[252] In addition to English, Alaska recognizes twenty official Native languages,[253][k] and South Dakota recognizes Sioux.[254] While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French.[255] Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms.[256]
+
+Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan[257] is officially recognized by American Samoa and Chamorro[258] is an official language of Guam. Both Carolinian and Chamorro have official recognition in the Northern Mariana Islands.[259]
+Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico and is more widely spoken than English there.[260]
+
+The most widely taught foreign languages in the United States, in terms of enrollment numbers from kindergarten through university undergraduate education, are Spanish (around 7.2 million students), French (1.5 million), and German (500,000). Other commonly taught languages include Latin, Japanese, ASL, Italian, and Chinese.[261][262] 18% of all Americans claim to speak both English and another language.[263]
+
+Religion in the United States (2017)[266]
+
+The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids Congress from passing laws respecting its establishment.
+
+In a 2013 survey, 56% of Americans said religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other Western nation.[267] In a 2009 Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they attended church weekly or almost weekly; the figures ranged from a low of 23% in Vermont to a high of 63% in Mississippi.[268]
+
+In a 2014 survey, 70.6% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians;[269] Protestants accounted for 46.5%, while Roman Catholics, at 20.8%, formed the largest single Christian group.[270] In 2014, 5.9% of the U.S. adult population claimed a non-Christian religion.[271] These include Judaism (1.9%), Islam (0.9%), Hinduism (0.7%), and Buddhism (0.7%).[271] The survey also reported that 22.8% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist or simply having no religion—up from 8.2% in 1990.[270][272][273] There are also Unitarian Universalist, Scientologist, Baha'i, Sikh, Jain, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Satanist, Taoist, Druid, Native American, Afro-American, traditional African, Wiccan, Gnostic, humanist and deist communities.[274][275]
+
+Protestantism is the largest Christian religious grouping in the United States, accounting for almost half of all Americans. Baptists collectively form the largest branch of Protestantism at 15.4%,[276] and the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest individual Protestant denomination at 5.3% of the U.S. population.[276] Apart from Baptists, other Protestant categories include nondenominational Protestants, Methodists, Pentecostals, unspecified Protestants, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, other Reformed, Episcopalians/Anglicans, Quakers, Adventists, Holiness, Christian fundamentalists, Anabaptists, Pietists, and multiple others.[276]
+
+As with other Western countries, the U.S. is becoming less religious. Irreligion is growing rapidly among Americans under 30.[277] Polls show that overall American confidence in organized religion has been declining since the mid to late 1980s,[278] and that younger Americans, in particular, are becoming increasingly irreligious.[271][279] In a 2012 study, the Protestant share of the U.S. population had dropped to 48%, thus ending its status as religious category of the majority for the first time.[280][281] Americans with no religion have 1.7 children compared to 2.2 among Christians. The unaffiliated are less likely to marry with 37% marrying compared to 52% of Christians.[282]
+
+The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. By contrast, religion plays the least important role in New England and in the Western United States.[268]
+
+As of 2018[update], 52% of Americans age 15 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 32% had never been married.[283] Women now work mostly outside the home and receive the majority of bachelor's degrees.[284]
+
+The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is 26.5 per 1,000 women. The rate has declined by 57% since 1991.[285] Abortion is legal throughout the country. Abortion rates, currently 241 per 1,000 live births and 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, are falling but remain higher than most Western nations.[286] In 2013, the average age at first birth was 26 and 41% of births were to unmarried women.[287]
+
+The total fertility rate in 2016 was 1820.5 births per 1000 women.[288] Adoption in the United States is common and relatively easy from a legal point of view (compared to other Western countries).[289] As of 2001[update], with more than 127,000 adoptions, the U.S. accounted for nearly half of the total number of adoptions worldwide.[needs update][290] Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, and it is legal for same-sex couples to adopt. Polygamy is illegal throughout the U.S.[291]
+
+In 2019, the U.S. had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.[292]
+
+The United States had a life expectancy of 78.6 years at birth in 2017, which was the third year of declines in life expectancy following decades of continuous increase. The recent decline, primarily among the age group 25 to 64, is largely due to sharp increases in the drug overdose and suicide rates; the country has one of the highest suicide rates among wealthy countries.[293][294] Life expectancy was highest among Asians and Hispanics and lowest among blacks.[295][296] According to CDC and Census Bureau data, deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug overdoses hit record highs in 2017.[297]
+
+Increasing obesity in the United States and health improvements elsewhere contributed to lowering the country's rank in life expectancy from 11th in the world in 1987, to 42nd in 2007, and as of 2017 the country had the lowest life expectancy among Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and seven countries of western Europe.[298][299] Obesity rates have more than doubled in the last 30 years and are the highest in the industrialized world.[300][301] Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight.[302] Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.[303]
+
+In 2010, coronary artery disease, lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and traffic accidents caused the most years of life lost in the U.S. Low back pain, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety caused the most years lost to disability. The most harmful risk factors were poor diet, tobacco smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, physical inactivity, and alcohol use. Alzheimer's disease, drug abuse, kidney disease, cancer, and falls caused the most additional years of life lost over their age-adjusted 1990 per-capita rates.[304] U.S. teenage pregnancy and abortion rates are substantially higher than in other Western nations, especially among blacks and Hispanics.[305]
+
+Health-care coverage in the United States is a combination of public and private efforts and is not universal. In 2017, 12.2% of the population did not carry health insurance.[306] The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue.[307][308] Federal legislation, passed in early 2010, roughly halved the uninsured share of the population, though the bill and its ultimate effect are issues of controversy.[309][310] The U.S. health-care system far outspends any other nation, measured both in per capita spending and as percentage of GDP.[311] At the same time, the U.S. is a global leader in medical innovation.[312]
+
+American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. In most states, children are required to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn 18 (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at 16 or 17.[313]
+
+About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.[314] The U.S. spends more on education per student than any nation in the world, spending more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student.[315][needs update] Some 80% of U.S. college students attend public universities.[316]
+
+Of Americans 25 and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees.[317] The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.[202][318] The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.[319]
+
+The United States has many private and public institutions of higher education. The majority of the world's top universities, as listed by various ranking organizations, are in the U.S.[320][321][322] There are also local community colleges with generally more open admission policies, shorter academic programs, and lower tuition.
+
+In 2018, U21, a network of research-intensive universities, ranked the United States first in the world for breadth and quality of higher education, and 15th when GDP was a factor.[323] As for public expenditures on higher education, the U.S. trails some other OECD nations but spends more per student than the OECD average, and more than all nations in combined public and private spending.[315][324] As of 2018[update], student loan debt exceeded 1.5 trillion dollars.[325][326]
+
+The United States is a federal republic of 50 states, a federal district, five territories and several uninhabited island possessions.[327][328][329] It is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law."[330] For 2018, the U.S. ranked 25th on the Democracy Index.[331] On Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index its public sector position deteriorated from a score of 76 in 2015 to 69 in 2019.[332]
+
+In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government: federal, state, and local. The local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district.
+
+The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document.[333] The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus. The Constitution has been amended 27 times;[334] the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights. All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review and any law ruled by the courts to be in violation of the Constitution is voided. The principle of judicial review, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was established by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison (1803)[335] in a decision handed down by Chief Justice John Marshall.[336]
+
+The federal government comprises three branches:
+
+The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population. Each state then draws single-member districts to conform with the census apportionment. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories each have one member of Congress—these members are not allowed to vote.[341]
+
+The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one-third of Senate seats are up for election every two years. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories do not have senators.[341] The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia.[342] The Supreme Court, led by the chief justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.[343]
+
+The state governments are structured in a roughly similar fashion, though Nebraska has a unicameral legislature.[344] The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.
+
+The 50 states are the principal administrative divisions in the country. These are subdivided into counties or county equivalents and further divided into municipalities. The District of Columbia is a federal district that contains the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C.[345] The states and the District of Columbia choose the president of the United States. Each state has presidential electors equal to the number of their representatives and senators in Congress; the District of Columbia has three (because of the 23rd Amendment).[346] Territories of the United States such as Puerto Rico do not have presidential electors, and so people in those territories cannot vote for the president.[341]
+
+The United States also observes tribal sovereignty of the American Indian nations to a limited degree, as it does with the states' sovereignty. American Indians are U.S. citizens and tribal lands are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress and the federal courts. Like the states they have a great deal of autonomy, but also like the states, tribes are not allowed to make war, engage in their own foreign relations, or print and issue currency.[347]
+
+Citizenship is granted at birth in all states, the District of Columbia, and all major U.S. territories except American Samoa.[348][349][m]
+
+The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history.[352] For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote. The president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College.[353]
+
+In American political culture, the center-right Republican Party is considered "conservative" and the center-left Democratic Party is considered "liberal."[354][355] The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states," are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.
+
+Republican Donald Trump, the winner of the 2016 presidential election, is serving as the 45th president of the United States.[356] Leadership in the Senate includes Republican vice president Mike Pence, Republican president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.[357] Leadership in the House includes Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.[358]
+
+In the 116th United States Congress, the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democratic Party and the Senate is controlled by the Republican Party, giving the U.S. a split Congress. The Senate consists of 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats; the House consists of 233 Democrats, 196 Republicans, and 1 Libertarian.[359] Of state governors, there are 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. Among the D.C. mayor and the five territorial governors, there are two Republicans, one Democrat, one New Progressive, and two Independents.[360]
+
+The United States has an established structure of foreign relations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. New York City is home to the United Nations Headquarters. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States (although the U.S. still maintains unofficial relations with Bhutan and Taiwan).[361] It is a member of the G7,[362] G20, and OECD.
+
+The United States has a "Special Relationship" with the United Kingdom[363] and strong ties with India, Canada,[364] Australia,[365] New Zealand,[366] the Philippines,[367] Japan,[368] South Korea,[369] Israel,[370] and several European Union countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.[371] It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Colombia is traditionally considered by the United States as its most loyal ally in South America.[372][373]
+
+The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau through the Compact of Free Association.[374]
+
+Taxation in the United States is levied at the federal, state, and local government levels. This includes taxes on income, payroll, property, sales, imports, estates, and gifts, as well as various fees. Taxation in the United States is based on citizenship, not residency.[375] Both non-resident citizens and Green Card holders living abroad are taxed on their income irrespective of where they live or where their income is earned. The United States is one of the only countries in the world to do so.[376]
+
+In 2010 taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP.[377] Based on CBO estimates,[378] under 2013 tax law the top 1% will be paying the highest average tax rates since 1979, while other income groups will remain at historic lows.[379] For 2018, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 400 households was 23%, compared to 24.2% for the bottom half of U.S. households.[380]
+
+
+
+During fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $3.54 trillion on a budget or cash basis, down $60 billion or 1.7% vs. fiscal year 2011 spending of $3.60 trillion. Major categories of fiscal year 2012 spending included: Medicare & Medicaid (23%), Social Security (22%), Defense Department (19%), non-defense discretionary (17%), other mandatory (13%) and interest (6%).[382]
+
+The total national debt of the United States in the United States was $18.527 trillion (106% of the GDP) in 2014.[383][n] The United States has the largest external debt in the world[387] and the 34th largest government debt as a % of GDP in the world.[388]
+
+The president is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and by the Department of the Navy during times of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.[389]
+
+Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System.[390] American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's 11 active aircraft carriers, and Marine expeditionary units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad,[391] and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries.[392]
+
+The military budget of the United States in 2011 was more than $700 billion, 41% of global military spending. At 4.7% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top 15 military spenders, after Saudi Arabia.[393]  Defense spending plays a major role in science and technology investment, with roughly half of U.S. federal research and development funded by the Department of Defense.[394] Defense's share of the overall U.S. economy has generally declined in recent decades, from Cold War peaks of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 and 69.5% of federal outlays in 1954 to 4.7% of GDP and 18.8% of federal outlays in 2011.[395]
+
+The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.[396] More than 90% of the world's 14,000 nuclear weapons are owned by Russia and the United States.[397]
+
+Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police departments and sheriff's offices, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties, including protecting civil rights, national security and enforcing U.S. federal courts' rulings and federal laws.[398] State courts conduct most criminal trials while federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state criminal courts.
+
+A cross-sectional analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed that United States "homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher."[399] In 2016, the US murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000.[400] Gun ownership rights, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, continue to be the subject of contention.
+
+The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world.[401] As of 2020, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that there were some 2.3 million people incarcerated.[402]  The imprisonment rate for all prisoners sentenced to more than a year in state or federal facilities is 478 per 100,000 in 2013.[403] According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of inmates held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses.[404] About 9% of prisoners are held in privatized prisons.[402] The practice of privately operated prisons began in the 1980s and has been a subject of contention.[405]
+
+Capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and at the state level in 30 states.[406][407] No executions took place from 1967 to 1977, owing in part to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Since the decision there have been more than 1,300 executions, a majority of these taking place in three states: Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.[408] Meanwhile, several states have either abolished or struck down death penalty laws. In 2019, the country had the sixth-highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.[409]
+
+According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $16.8 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 19% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).[417] The United States is the largest importer of goods and second-largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2010, the total U.S. trade deficit was $635 billion.[418] Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners.[419]
+
+From 1983 to 2008, U.S. real compounded annual GDP growth was 3.3%, compared to a 2.3% weighted average for the rest of the G7.[420] The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita[421] and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP.[417] The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.[422]
+
+In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 86.4% of the economy.[425] While its economy has reached a postindustrial level of development, the United States remains an industrial power.[426] Consumer spending comprised 68% of the U.S. economy in 2015.[427] In August 2010, the American labor force consisted of 154.1 million people (50%). With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people. It has a smaller welfare state and redistributes less income through government action than most European nations.[428]
+
+The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation[429] and is one of a few countries in the world without paid family leave as a legal right.[430] While federal law does not require sick leave, it is a common benefit for government workers and full-time employees at corporations.[431] 74% of full-time American workers get paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although only 24% of part-time workers get the same benefits.[431] In 2009, the United States had the third-highest workforce productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands.[432]
+
+
+
+The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. Methods for producing interchangeable parts were developed by the U.S. War Department by the Federal Armories during the first half of the 19th century. This technology, along with the establishment of a machine tool industry, enabled the U.S. to have large-scale manufacturing of sewing machines, bicycles, and other items in the late 19th century and became known as the American system of manufacturing. Factory electrification in the early 20th century and introduction of the assembly line and other labor-saving techniques created the system of mass production.[433] In the 21st century, approximately two-thirds of research and development funding comes from the private sector.[434] The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor.[435][436]
+
+In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's research laboratory, one of the first of its kind, developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera.[437] The latter led to emergence of the worldwide entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.[438]
+
+The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann, to immigrate to the United States.[439] During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age, while the Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and aeronautics.[440][441]
+
+The invention of the transistor in the 1950s, a key active component in practically all modern electronics, led to many technological developments and a significant expansion of the U.S. technology industry.[442] This, in turn, led to the establishment of many new technology companies and regions around the country such as Silicon Valley in California. Advancements by American microprocessor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel along with both computer software and hardware companies that include Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems created and popularized the personal computer. The ARPANET was developed in the 1960s to meet Defense Department requirements, and became the first of a series of networks which evolved into the Internet.[443]
+
+Accounting for 4.24% of the global population, Americans collectively possess 29.4% of the world's total wealth, and Americans make up roughly half of the world's population of millionaires.[444] The Global Food Security Index ranked the U.S. number one for food affordability and overall food security in March 2013.[445] Americans on average have more than twice as much living space per dwelling and per person as European Union residents, and more than every EU nation.[446] For 2017 the United Nations Development Programme ranked the United States 13th among 189 countries in its Human Development Index and 25th among 151 countries in its inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI).[447]
+
+Wealth, like income and taxes, is highly concentrated; the richest 10% of the adult population possess 72% of the country's household wealth, while the bottom half claim only 2%.[448] According to a September 2017 report by the Federal Reserve, the top 1% controlled 38.6% of the country's wealth in 2016.[449] According to a 2018 study by the OECD, the United States has a larger percentage of low-income workers than almost any other developed nation. This is largely because at-risk workers get almost no government support and are further set back by a very weak collective bargaining system.[450] The top one percent of income-earners accounted for 52 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2015, where income is defined as market income excluding government transfers.[451] In 2018, U.S. income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau.[452]
+
+After years of stagnation, median household income reached a record high in 2016 following two consecutive years of record growth. Income inequality remains at record highs however, with the top fifth of earners taking home more than half of all overall income.[454] The rise in the share of total annual income received by the top one percent, which has more than doubled from nine percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2011, has significantly affected income inequality,[455] leaving the United States with one of the widest income distributions among OECD nations.[456]  The extent and relevance of income inequality is a matter of debate.[457][458][459]
+
+Between June 2007 and November 2008, the global recession led to falling asset prices around the world. Assets owned by Americans lost about a quarter of their value.[460] Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth was down $14 trillion, but has since increased $14 trillion over 2006 levels.[461] At the end of 2014, household debt amounted to $11.8 trillion,[462] down from $13.8 trillion at the end of 2008.[463]
+
+There were about 578,424 sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in the US in January 2014, with almost two-thirds staying in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program.[464] In 2011, 16.7 million children lived in food-insecure households, about 35% more than 2007 levels, though only 1.1% of U.S. children, or 845,000, saw reduced food intake or disrupted eating patterns at some point during the year, and most cases were not chronic.[465] As of June 2018[update], 40 million people, roughly 12.7% of the U.S. population, were living in poverty, with 18.5 million of those living in deep poverty (a family income below one-half of the poverty threshold) and over five million live "in 'Third World' conditions." In 2016, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, which made up 32.6% of the impoverished population.[466] In 2017, the U.S. state or territory with the lowest poverty rate was New Hampshire (7.6%), and the one with the highest was American Samoa (65%).[467][468][469]
+
+Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of public roads.[471] The United States has the world's second-largest automobile market,[472] and has the highest rate of per-capita vehicle ownership in the world, with 765 vehicles per 1,000 Americans (1996).[473][needs update] In 2017, there were 255,009,283 non-two wheel motor vehicles, or about 910 vehicles per 1,000 people.[474]
+
+The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned and has been largely deregulated since 1978, while most major airports are publicly owned.[475] The three largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are US-based; American Airlines is number one after its 2013 acquisition by US Airways.[476] Of the world's 50 busiest passenger airports, 16 are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.[477]
+
+The United States energy market is about 29,000 terawatt hours per year.[478] In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear and renewable energy sources.[479]
+
+Since 2007, the total greenhouse gas emissions by the United States are the second highest by country, exceeded only by China.[480] The United States has historically been the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gas emissions per capita remain high.[481]
+
+The United States is home to many cultures and a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.[483][484] Aside from the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors settled or immigrated within the past five centuries.[485] Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.[483][486] More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.[483]
+
+Americans have traditionally been characterized by a strong work ethic, competitiveness, and individualism,[487] as well as a unifying belief in an "American creed" emphasizing liberty, equality, private property, democracy, rule of law, and a preference for limited government.[488] Americans are extremely charitable by global standards. According to a 2006 British study, Americans gave 1.67% of GDP to charity, more than any other nation studied.[489][490][491]
+
+The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants.[492] Whether this perception is accurate has been a topic of debate.[493][494][495][496][420][497] While mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,[498] scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.[499] While Americans tend  to greatly value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is also generally seen as a positive attribute.[500]
+
+In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.[501] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."[502]
+
+Twelve U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Bob Dylan in 2016. William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[503] Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.[504]
+
+The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty, and later Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of American philosophical academia. John Rawls and Robert Nozick also led a revival of political philosophy.
+
+In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.[505] Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new, individualistic styles. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.[506] Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.[507]
+
+Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain with about three-quarters of grain products made of wheat flour[508] and many dishes use indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers.[509] These homegrown foods are part of a shared national menu on one of America's most popular holidays, Thanksgiving, when some Americans make traditional foods to celebrate the occasion.[510]
+
+The American fast food industry, the world's largest,[511] pioneered the drive-through format in the 1940s.[512] Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[513] Americans drink three times as much coffee as tea.[514] Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.[515][516]
+
+Although little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music.
+
+The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European and African traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s.[517]
+
+Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. Rock bands such as Metallica, the Eagles, and Aerosmith are among the highest grossing in worldwide sales.[518][519][520] In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk.
+
+More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities,[517] as have contemporary musical artists such as Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West, and Ariana Grande.[521]
+
+Hollywood, a northern district of Los Angeles, California, is one of the leaders in motion picture production.[522] The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope.[523] Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, although in the 21st century an increasing number of films are not made there, and film companies have been subject to the forces of globalization.[524]
+
+Director D. W. Griffith, the top American filmmaker during the silent film period, was central to the development of film grammar, and producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising.[525] Directors such as John Ford redefined the image of the American Old West, and, like others such as John Huston, broadened the possibilities of cinema with location shooting. The industry enjoyed its golden years, in what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood," from the early sound period until the early 1960s,[526] with screen actors such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe becoming iconic figures.[527][528] In the 1970s, "New Hollywood" or the "Hollywood Renaissance"[529] was defined by grittier films influenced by French and Italian realist pictures of the post-war period.[530] In more recent times, directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron have gained renown for their blockbuster films, often characterized by high production costs and earnings.
+
+Notable films topping the American Film Institute's AFI 100 list include Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time,[531][532] Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Graduate (1967), On the Waterfront (1954), Schindler's List (1993), Singin' in the Rain (1952), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).[533] The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, have been held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1929,[534] and the Golden Globe Awards have been held annually since January 1944.[535]
+
+American football is by several measures the most popular spectator sport;[537] the National Football League (NFL) has the highest average attendance of any sports league in the world, and the Super Bowl is watched by tens of millions globally. Baseball has been regarded as the U.S. national sport since the late 19th century, with Major League Baseball (MLB) being the top league. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports, with the top leagues being the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL). College football and basketball attract large audiences.[538] In soccer, the country hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the men's national soccer team qualified for ten World Cups and the women's team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup four times; Major League Soccer is the sport's highest league in the United States (featuring 23 American and three Canadian teams). The market for professional sports in the United States is roughly $69 billion, roughly 50% larger than that of all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined.[539]
+
+Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri were the first ever Olympic Games held outside of Europe.[540] As of 2017[update], the United States has won 2,522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 305 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.[541]
+While most major U.S. sports such as baseball and American football have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, some of which have become popular worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.[542] The most watched individual sports are golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR.[543][544]
+
+The four major broadcasters in the U.S. are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX). The four major broadcast television networks are all commercial entities. Cable television offers hundreds of channels catering to a variety of niches.[545] Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercial, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.[546]
+
+In 1998, the number of U.S. commercial radio stations had grown to 4,793 AM stations and 5,662 FM stations. In addition, there are 1,460 public radio stations. Most of these stations are run by universities and public authorities for educational purposes and are financed by public or private funds, subscriptions, and corporate underwriting. Much public-radio broadcasting is supplied by NPR. NPR was incorporated in February 1970 under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967; its television counterpart, PBS, was created by the same legislation. As of September 30, 2014[update], there are 15,433 licensed full-power radio stations in the U.S. according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).[547]
+
+Well-known newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.[548] Although the cost of publishing has increased over the years, the price of newspapers has generally remained low, forcing newspapers to rely more on advertising revenue and on articles provided by a major wire service, such as the Associated Press or Reuters, for their national and world coverage. With very few exceptions, all the newspapers in the U.S. are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families. Major cities often have "alternative weeklies" to complement the mainstream daily papers, such as New York City's The Village Voice or Los Angeles' LA Weekly. Major cities may also support a local business journal, trade papers relating to local industries, and papers for local ethnic and social groups. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Twitter.[549]
+
+More than 800 publications are produced in Spanish, the second most commonly used language in the United States behind English.[550][551]
+
+Internet sources
+

en/1869.html.txt

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+
+
+Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100
+
+The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country mostly located in central North America, between Canada and Mexico. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions.[i] At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), it is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area.[e] With a 2019 estimated population of over 328 million,[7] the U.S. is the third most populous country in the world. The Americans are a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been shaped through centuries of immigration. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City.
+
+Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago,[19] and European colonization began in the 16th century. The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolutionary War lasting between 1775 and 1783, leading to independence.[20] Beginning in the late 18th century, the United States vigorously expanded across North America, gradually acquiring new territories,[21] killing and displacing Native Americans, and admitting new states. By 1848, the United States spanned the continent.[21]
+Slavery was legal in much of the United States until the second half of the 19th century, when the American Civil War led to its abolition.[22][23]
+
+The Spanish–American War and World War I entrenched the U.S. as a world power, a status confirmed by the outcome of World War II. It was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.[24]
+
+The United States is a federal republic and a representative democracy. It is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), NATO, and other international organizations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
+
+A highly developed country, the United States is the world's largest economy and accounts for approximately a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP).[25] The United States is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter of goods, by value.[26][27] Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total,[28] it holds 29.4% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share held by any country.[29] Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, median income, median wealth, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity.[30][31] It is the foremost military power in the world, making up more than a third of global military spending,[32] and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.[33]
+
+The first known use of the name "America" dates back to 1507, when it appeared on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. On this map, the name applied to South America in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.[34] After returning from his expeditions, Vespucci first postulated that the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern limit, as initially thought by Christopher Columbus, but instead were part of an entirely separate landmass thus far unknown to the Europeans.[35] In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator used the name "America" on his own world map, applying it to the entire Western Hemisphere.[36]
+
+The first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written by Stephen Moylan, Esq., to Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort.[37][38][39] The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.[40]
+
+The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed no later than June 17, 1776, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'".[41] The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'".[42] In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence.[41] This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.[41]
+
+The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms are the "U.S.," the "USA," and "America." Colloquial names are the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States." "Columbia," a name popular in poetry and songs of the late 18th century, derives its origin from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia." Many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.[43]
+
+The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865.[44] The singular form—e.g., "the United States is"—became popular after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States." The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.[45]
+
+A citizen of the United States is an "American." "United States," "American" and "U.S." refer to the country adjectivally ("American values," "U.S. forces"). In English, the word "American" rarely refers to topics or subjects not directly connected with the United States.[46]
+
+It has been generally accepted that the first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 12,000 years ago; however, increasing evidence suggests an even earlier arrival.[19][47][48] After crossing the land bridge, the Paleo-Indians moved southward along the Pacific coast[49] and through an interior ice-free corridor.[50] The Clovis culture, which appeared around 11,000 BC, was initially believed to represent the first wave of human settlement of the Americas.[51][52] It is likely these represent the first of three major waves of migration into North America.[53]
+
+Over time, indigenous cultures in North America grew increasingly complex, and some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture in the southeast, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies.[54] The Mississippian culture flourished in the south from 800 to 1600 AD, extending from the Mexican border down through Florida.[55] Its city state Cahokia is the largest, most complex pre-Columbian archaeological site in the modern-day United States.[56] In the Four Corners region, Ancestral Puebloan culture developed from centuries of agricultural experimentation.[57]
+
+Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Taos Pueblo.[58][59] The earthworks constructed by Native Americans of the Poverty Point culture have also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the southern Great Lakes region, the Iroquois Confederacy was established at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.[60] Most prominent along the Atlantic coast were the Algonquian tribes, who practiced hunting and trapping, along with limited cultivation.
+
+With the progress of European colonization in the territories of the contemporary United States, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[61] The native population of America declined after European arrival for various reasons,[62][63] primarily diseases such as smallpox and measles.[64][65]
+
+Estimating the native population of North America at the time of European contact is difficult.[66][67] Douglas H. Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution estimated that there was a population of 92,916 in the south Atlantic states and a population of 473,616 in the Gulf states,[68] but most academics regard this figure as too low.[66] Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns believed the populations were much higher, suggesting 1,100,000 along the shores of the gulf of Mexico, 2,211,000 people living between Florida and Massachusetts, 5,250,000 in the Mississippi Valley and tributaries and 697,000 people in the Florida peninsula.[66][67]
+
+In the early days of colonization, many European settlers were subject to food shortages, disease, and attacks from Native Americans. Native Americans were also often at war with neighboring tribes and allied with Europeans in their colonial wars. In many cases, however, natives and settlers came to depend on each other. Settlers traded for food and animal pelts; natives for guns, ammunition and other European goods.[69] Natives taught many settlers to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. European missionaries and others felt it was important to "civilize" the Native Americans and urged them to adopt European agricultural techniques and lifestyles.[70][71]
+
+With the advancement of European colonization in North America, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[72] The first Europeans to arrive in the contiguous United States were Spanish conquistadors such as Juan Ponce de León, who made his first visit to Florida in 1513. Even earlier, Christopher Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his 1493 voyage. The Spanish set up the first settlements in Florida and New Mexico such as Saint Augustine[73] and Santa Fe. The French established their own as well along the Mississippi River. Successful English settlement on the eastern coast of North America began with the Virginia Colony in 1607 at Jamestown and with the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. Many settlers were dissenting Christian groups who came seeking religious freedom. The continent's first elected legislative assembly, Virginia's House of Burgesses, was created in 1619. The Mayflower Compact, signed by the Pilgrims before disembarking, and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, established precedents for the pattern of representative self-government and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies.[74][75]
+
+Most settlers in every colony were small farmers, though other industries were formed. Cash crops included tobacco, rice, and wheat. Extraction industries grew up in furs, fishing and lumber. Manufacturers produced rum and ships, and by the late colonial period, Americans were producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply.[76] Cities eventually dotted the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs. English colonists were supplemented by waves of Scotch-Irish immigrants and other groups. As coastal land grew more expensive, freed indentured servants claimed lands further west.[77]
+
+A large-scale slave trade with English privateers began.[78] Because of less disease and better food and treatment, the life expectancy of slaves was much higher in North America than further south, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.[79][80] Colonial society was largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, and colonies passed acts for and against the practice.[81][82] But by the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in the South.[83]
+
+With the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were administered by the British as overseas dependencies.[84] All nonetheless had local governments with elections open to most free men.[85] With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grew rapidly. Relatively small Native American populations were eclipsed.[86] The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest both in religion and in religious liberty.[87]
+
+During the Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans, who were being conquered and displaced, the 13 British colonies had a population of over 2.1 million in 1770, about a third that of Britain. Despite continuing, new arrivals, the rate of natural increase was such that by the 1770s only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas.[88] The colonies' distance from Britain had allowed the development of self-government, but their unprecedented success motivated monarchs to periodically seek to reassert royal authority.[89]
+
+In 1774, the Spanish Navy ship Santiago, under Juan Pérez, entered and anchored in an inlet of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, in present-day British Columbia. Although the Spanish did not land, natives paddled to the ship to trade furs for abalone shells from California.[90] At the time, the Spanish were able to monopolize the trade between Asia and North America, granting limited licenses to the Portuguese. When the Russians began establishing a growing fur trading system in Alaska, the Spanish began to challenge the Russians, with Pérez's voyage being the first of many to the Pacific Northwest.[91][j]
+
+During his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook became the first European to begin formal contact with Hawaii.[93] Captain Cook's last voyage included sailing along the coast of North America and Alaska searching for a Northwest Passage for approximately nine months.[94]
+
+The American Revolutionary War was the first successful colonial war of independence against a European power. Americans had developed an ideology of "republicanism" asserting that government rested on the will of the people as expressed in their local legislatures. They demanded their rights as Englishmen and "no taxation without representation". The British insisted on administering the empire through Parliament, and the conflict escalated into war.[95]
+
+The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that Great Britain was not protecting Americans' unalienable rights. July 4 is celebrated annually as Independence Day.[96] In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a decentralized government that operated until 1789.[96]
+
+Following the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781,[97] Britain signed the peace treaty of 1783, and American sovereignty was internationally recognized and the country was granted all lands east of the Mississippi River. Nationalists led the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788. The federal government was reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789. George Washington, who had led the Continental Army to victory, was the first president elected under the new constitution. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.[98]
+
+Although the federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808, after 1820, cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and along with it, the slave population.[99][100][101] The Second Great Awakening, especially 1800–1840, converted millions to evangelical Protestantism. In the North, it energized multiple social reform movements, including abolitionism;[102] in the South, Methodists and Baptists proselytized among slave populations.[103]
+
+Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of American Indian Wars.[104] The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation's area.[105] The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism.[106] A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819.[107] The expansion was aided by steam power, when steamboats began traveling along America's large water systems, many of which were connected by new canals, such as the Erie and the I&M; then, even faster railroads began their stretch across the nation's land.[108]
+
+From 1820 to 1850, Jacksonian democracy began a set of reforms which included wider white male suffrage; it led to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that forcibly resettled Indians into the west on Indian reservations. The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 during a period of expansionist Manifest destiny.[109] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest.[110] Victory in the Mexican–American War resulted in the 1848 Mexican Cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest.[111]
+The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 spurred migration to the Pacific coast, which led to the California Genocide[112][113][114][115] and the creation of additional western states.[116] After the Civil War, new transcontinental railways made relocation easier for settlers, expanded internal trade and increased conflicts with Native Americans.[117] In 1869, a new Peace Policy nominally promised to protect Native Americans from abuses, avoid further war, and secure their eventual U.S. citizenship. Nonetheless, large-scale conflicts continued throughout the West into the 1900s.
+
+Irreconcilable sectional conflict regarding the slavery of Africans and African Americans ultimately led to the American Civil War.[118] Initially, states entering the Union had alternated between slave and free states, keeping a sectional balance in the Senate, while free states outstripped slave states in population and in the House of Representatives. But with additional western territory and more free-soil states, tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over federalism and disposition of the territories, as well as whether to expand or restrict slavery.[119]
+
+With the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, conventions in thirteen slave states ultimately declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "South" or the "Confederacy"), while the federal government (the "Union") maintained that secession was illegal.[119] In order to bring about this secession, military action was initiated by the secessionists, and the Union responded in kind. The ensuing war would become the deadliest military conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of approximately 618,000 soldiers as well as many civilians.[120] The Union initially simply fought to keep the country united. Nevertheless, as casualties mounted after 1863 and Lincoln delivered his Emancipation Proclamation, the main purpose of the war from the Union's viewpoint became the abolition of slavery. Indeed, when the Union ultimately won the war in April 1865, each of the states in the defeated South was required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery.
+
+The government enacted three constitutional amendments in the years after the war: the aforementioned Thirteenth as well as the Fourteenth Amendment providing citizenship to the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves,[121] and the Fifteenth Amendment ensuring in theory that African Americans had the right to vote. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power[122] aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the South while guaranteeing the rights of the newly freed slaves.
+
+Reconstruction began in earnest following the war. While President Lincoln attempted to foster friendship and forgiveness between the Union and the former Confederacy, his assassination on April 14, 1865, drove a wedge between North and South again. Republicans in the federal government made it their goal to oversee the rebuilding of the South and to ensure the rights of African Americans. They persisted until the Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to cease protecting the rights of African Americans in the South in order for Democrats to concede the presidential election of 1876.
+
+Southern white Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers," took control of the South after the end of Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1910 the Redeemers established so-called Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising most blacks and some poor whites throughout the region. Blacks faced racial segregation, especially in the South.[123] They also occasionally experienced vigilante violence, including lynching.[124]
+
+In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe supplied a surplus of labor for the country's industrialization and transformed its culture.[126] National infrastructure including telegraph and transcontinental railroads spurred economic growth and greater settlement and development of the American Old West. The later invention of electric light and the telephone would also affect communication and urban life.[127]
+
+The United States fought Indian Wars west of the Mississippi River from 1810 to at least 1890.[128] Most of these conflicts ended with the cession of Native American territory and their confinement to Indian reservations. This further expanded acreage under mechanical cultivation, increasing surpluses for international markets.[129] Mainland expansion also included the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.[130] In 1893, pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the monarchy and formed the Republic of Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were ceded by Spain in the same year, following the Spanish–American War.[131] American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the end of the Second Samoan Civil War.[132] The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.[133]
+
+Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. Tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie led the nation's progress in railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. Banking became a major part of the economy, with J. P. Morgan playing a notable role. The American economy boomed, becoming the world's largest, and the United States achieved great power status.[134] These dramatic changes were accompanied by social unrest and the rise of populist, socialist, and anarchist movements.[135] This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which saw significant reforms including women's suffrage, alcohol prohibition, regulation of consumer goods, greater antitrust measures to ensure competition and attention to worker conditions.[136][137][138]
+
+The United States remained neutral from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 until 1917, when it joined the war as an "associated power," alongside the formal Allies of World War I, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson took a leading diplomatic role at the Paris Peace Conference and advocated strongly for the U.S. to join the League of Nations. However, the Senate refused to approve this and did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles that established the League of Nations.[139]
+
+In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage.[140] The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of radio for mass communication and the invention of early television.[141] The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal.[142] The Great Migration of millions of African Americans out of the American South began before World War I and extended through the 1960s;[143] whereas the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration.[144]
+
+At first effectively neutral during World War II, the United States began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers.[145] Although Japan attacked the United States first, the U.S. nonetheless pursued a "Europe first" defense policy.[146] The United States thus left its vast Asian colony, the Philippines, isolated and fighting a losing struggle against Japanese invasion and occupation, as military resources were devoted to the European theater. During the war, the United States was referred to as one of the "Four Policemen"[147] of Allies power who met to plan the postwar world, along with Britain, the Soviet Union and China.[148][149] Although the nation lost around 400,000 military personnel,[150] it emerged relatively undamaged from the war with even greater economic and military influence.[151]
+
+The United States played a leading role in the Bretton Woods and Yalta conferences with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and other Allies, which signed agreements on new international financial institutions and Europe's postwar reorganization. As an Allied victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war.[152] The United States and Japan then fought each other in the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.[153][154] The United States eventually developed the first nuclear weapons and used them on Japan in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese surrendered on September 2, ending World War II.[155][156]
+
+After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for power, influence, and prestige during what became known as the Cold War, driven by an ideological divide between capitalism and communism.[157] They dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its NATO allies on one side and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other. The U.S. developed a policy of containment towards the expansion of communist influence. While the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict.[citation needed]
+
+The United States often opposed Third World movements that it viewed as Soviet-sponsored, and occasionally pursued direct action for regime change against left-wing governments, even supporting right-wing authoritarian governments at times.[158] American troops fought communist Chinese and North Korean forces in the Korean War of 1950–53.[159] The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite and its 1961 launch of the first manned spaceflight initiated a "Space Race" in which the United States became the first nation to land a man on the moon in 1969.[159] A proxy war in Southeast Asia eventually evolved into full American participation, as the Vietnam War.[citation needed]
+
+At home, the U.S. experienced sustained economic expansion and a rapid growth of its population and middle class. Construction of an Interstate Highway System transformed the nation's infrastructure over the following decades. Millions moved from farms and inner cities to large suburban housing developments.[160][161] In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th and last U.S. state added to the country.[162] The growing Civil Rights Movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader and figurehead. A combination of court decisions and legislation, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, sought to end racial discrimination.[163][164][165] Meanwhile, a counterculture movement grew which was fueled by opposition to the Vietnam war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution.
+
+The launch of a "War on Poverty" expanded entitlements and welfare spending, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that provide health coverage to the elderly and poor, respectively, and the means-tested Food Stamp Program and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.[166]
+
+The 1970s and early 1980s saw the onset of stagflation. After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan responded to economic stagnation with free-market oriented reforms. Following the collapse of détente, he abandoned "containment" and initiated the more aggressive "rollback" strategy towards the USSR.[167][168][169][170][171] After a surge in female labor participation over the previous decade, by 1985 the majority of women aged 16 and over were employed.[172]
+
+The late 1980s brought a "thaw" in relations with the USSR, and its collapse in 1991 finally ended the Cold War.[173][174][175][176] This brought about unipolarity[177] with the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The concept of Pax Americana, which had appeared in the post-World War II period, gained wide popularity as a term for the post-Cold War new world order.[citation needed]
+
+After the Cold War, the conflict in the Middle East triggered a crisis in 1990, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, an ally of the United States. Fearing the instability would spread to other regions, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Shield, a defensive force buildup in Saudi Arabia, and Operation Desert Storm, in a staging titled the Gulf War; waged by coalition forces from 34 nations, led by the United States against Iraq ending in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restoration of the monarchy.[178]
+
+Originating within U.S. military defense networks, the Internet spread to international academic platforms and then to the public in the 1990s, greatly affecting the global economy, society, and culture.[179] Due to the dot-com boom, stable monetary policy, and reduced social welfare spending, the 1990s saw the longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history.[180] Beginning in 1994, the U.S. entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), prompting trade among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to soar.[181]
+
+On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people.[182] In response, the United States launched the War on Terror, which included a war in Afghanistan and the 2003–11 Iraq War.[183][184]
+
+Government policy designed to promote affordable housing,[185] widespread failures in corporate and regulatory governance,[186] and historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve[187] led to the mid-2000s housing bubble, which culminated with the 2008 financial crisis, the nation's largest economic contraction since the Great Depression.[188] Barack Obama, the first African-American[189] and multiracial[190] president, was elected in 2008 amid the crisis,[191] and subsequently passed stimulus measures and the Dodd–Frank Act in an attempt to mitigate its negative effects and ensure there would not be a repeat of the crisis. In 2010, the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, which made the most sweeping reforms to the nation's healthcare system in nearly five decades, including mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges.[citation needed]
+
+American forces in Iraq were withdrawn in large numbers in 2009 and 2010, and the war in the region was declared formally over in December 2011.[192] But months earlier, Operation Neptune Spear led to the death of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.[193] In the presidential election of 2016, Republican Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States. On January 20, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed.[194] As of July 2020, the United States has over 4 million COVID-19 cases and over 145,000 deaths.[195] The United States is, by far, the country with the most cases of COVID-19 since April 11, 2020.[196]
+
+The 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia occupy a combined area of 3,119,884.69 square miles (8,080,464.3 km2). Of this area, 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2) is contiguous land, composing 83.65% of total U.S. land area.[197][198] Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, is 10,931 square miles (28,311 km2) in area. The populated territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands together cover 9,185 square miles (23,789 km2).[199] Measured by only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.[200]
+
+The United States is the world's third- or fourth-largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and nearly equal to China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted, and how the total size of the United States is measured.[e][201][202]
+
+The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont.[203] The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest.[204] The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast.[204]
+
+The Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking around 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado.[205] Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Chihuahua and Mojave.[206] The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast, both ranges reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m). The lowest and highest points in the contiguous United States are in the state of California,[207] and only about 84 miles (135 km) apart.[208] At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali is the highest peak in the country and in North America.[209] Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature.[210]
+
+The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.[211] The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains have an alpine climate. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Hawaii and the southern tip of Florida are tropical, as well as its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.[212] States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur in the country, mainly in Tornado Alley areas in the Midwest and South.[213] Overall, the United States has the world's most violent weather, receiving more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world.[214]
+
+The U.S. ecology is megadiverse: about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and more than 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland.[216] The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 bird species, 311 reptile species, and 295 amphibian species,[217] as well as about 91,000 insect species.[218]
+
+There are 62 national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas.[219] Altogether, the government owns about 28% of the country's land area,[220] mostly in the western states.[221] Most of this land is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching, and about .86% is used for military purposes.[222][223]
+
+Environmental issues include debates on oil and nuclear energy, dealing with air and water pollution, the economic costs of protecting wildlife, logging and deforestation,[224][225] and international responses to global warming.[226][227] The most prominent environmental agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by presidential order in 1970.[228] The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act.[229] The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is intended to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.[230]
+
+The U.S. Census Bureau officially estimated the country's population to be 328,239,523 as of July 1, 2019.[231] In addition, the Census Bureau provides a continuously updated U.S. Population Clock that approximates the latest population of the 50 states and District of Columbia based on the Bureau's most recent demographic trends.[234] According to the clock, on May 23, 2020, the U.S. population exceeded 329 million residents, with a net gain of one person every 19 seconds, or about 4,547 people per day. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world, after China and India. In 2018 the median age of the United States population was 38.1 years.[235]
+
+In 2018, there were almost 90 million immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrants (second-generation Americans) in the United States, accounting for 28% of the overall U.S. population.[236] The United States has a very diverse population; 37 ancestry groups have more than one million members.[237] German Americans are the largest ethnic group (more than 50 million)—followed by Irish Americans (circa 37 million), Mexican Americans (circa 31 million) and English Americans (circa 28 million).[238][239]
+
+White Americans (mostly European ancestry) are the largest racial group at 73.1% of the population; African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third-largest ancestry group.[237] Asian Americans are the country's second-largest racial minority; the three largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans.[237] The largest American community with European ancestry is German Americans, which consists of more than 14% of the total population.[240] In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively).[241] The census counted more than 19 million people of "Some Other Race" who were "unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories in 2010, more than 18.5 million (97%) of whom are of Hispanic ethnicity.[241]
+
+In 2017, out of the U.S. foreign-born population, some 45% (20.7 million) were naturalized citizens, 27% (12.3 million) were lawful permanent residents (including many eligible to become citizens), 6% (2.2 million) were temporary lawful residents, and 23% (10.5 million) were unauthorized immigrants.[242] Among current living immigrants to the U.S., the top five countries of birth are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and El Salvador. Until 2017 and 2018, the United States led the world in refugee resettlement for decades, admitted more refugees than the rest of the world combined.[243] From fiscal year 1980 until 2017, 55% of refugees came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 13% from Africa, and 4% from Latin America.[243]
+
+A 2017 United Nations report projected that the U.S. would be one of nine countries in which world population growth through 2050 would be concentrated.[244] A 2020 U.S. Census Bureau report projected the population of the country could be anywhere between 320 million and 447 million by 2060, depending on the rate of in-migration; in all projected scenarios, a lower fertility rate and increases in life expectancy would result in an aging population.[245] The United States has an annual birth rate of 13 per 1,000, which is five births per 1,000 below the world average.[246] Its population growth rate is positive at 0.7%, higher than that of many developed nations.[247]
+
+About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (including suburbs);[202] about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000.[248] In 2008, 273 incorporated municipalities had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than one million residents, and four cities had over two million (namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston).[249] Estimates for the year 2018 show that 53 metropolitan areas have populations greater than one million. Many metros in the South, Southwest and West grew significantly between 2010 and 2018. The Dallas and Houston metros increased by more than a million people, while the Washington, D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and Phoenix metros all grew by more than 500,000 people.
+
+English (specifically, American English) is the de facto national language of the United States. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2010, about 230 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. 12% of the population speaks Spanish at home, making it the second most common language. Spanish is also the most widely taught second language.[250][251]
+
+Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii.[252] In addition to English, Alaska recognizes twenty official Native languages,[253][k] and South Dakota recognizes Sioux.[254] While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French.[255] Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms.[256]
+
+Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan[257] is officially recognized by American Samoa and Chamorro[258] is an official language of Guam. Both Carolinian and Chamorro have official recognition in the Northern Mariana Islands.[259]
+Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico and is more widely spoken than English there.[260]
+
+The most widely taught foreign languages in the United States, in terms of enrollment numbers from kindergarten through university undergraduate education, are Spanish (around 7.2 million students), French (1.5 million), and German (500,000). Other commonly taught languages include Latin, Japanese, ASL, Italian, and Chinese.[261][262] 18% of all Americans claim to speak both English and another language.[263]
+
+Religion in the United States (2017)[266]
+
+The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids Congress from passing laws respecting its establishment.
+
+In a 2013 survey, 56% of Americans said religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other Western nation.[267] In a 2009 Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they attended church weekly or almost weekly; the figures ranged from a low of 23% in Vermont to a high of 63% in Mississippi.[268]
+
+In a 2014 survey, 70.6% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians;[269] Protestants accounted for 46.5%, while Roman Catholics, at 20.8%, formed the largest single Christian group.[270] In 2014, 5.9% of the U.S. adult population claimed a non-Christian religion.[271] These include Judaism (1.9%), Islam (0.9%), Hinduism (0.7%), and Buddhism (0.7%).[271] The survey also reported that 22.8% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist or simply having no religion—up from 8.2% in 1990.[270][272][273] There are also Unitarian Universalist, Scientologist, Baha'i, Sikh, Jain, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Satanist, Taoist, Druid, Native American, Afro-American, traditional African, Wiccan, Gnostic, humanist and deist communities.[274][275]
+
+Protestantism is the largest Christian religious grouping in the United States, accounting for almost half of all Americans. Baptists collectively form the largest branch of Protestantism at 15.4%,[276] and the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest individual Protestant denomination at 5.3% of the U.S. population.[276] Apart from Baptists, other Protestant categories include nondenominational Protestants, Methodists, Pentecostals, unspecified Protestants, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, other Reformed, Episcopalians/Anglicans, Quakers, Adventists, Holiness, Christian fundamentalists, Anabaptists, Pietists, and multiple others.[276]
+
+As with other Western countries, the U.S. is becoming less religious. Irreligion is growing rapidly among Americans under 30.[277] Polls show that overall American confidence in organized religion has been declining since the mid to late 1980s,[278] and that younger Americans, in particular, are becoming increasingly irreligious.[271][279] In a 2012 study, the Protestant share of the U.S. population had dropped to 48%, thus ending its status as religious category of the majority for the first time.[280][281] Americans with no religion have 1.7 children compared to 2.2 among Christians. The unaffiliated are less likely to marry with 37% marrying compared to 52% of Christians.[282]
+
+The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. By contrast, religion plays the least important role in New England and in the Western United States.[268]
+
+As of 2018[update], 52% of Americans age 15 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 32% had never been married.[283] Women now work mostly outside the home and receive the majority of bachelor's degrees.[284]
+
+The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is 26.5 per 1,000 women. The rate has declined by 57% since 1991.[285] Abortion is legal throughout the country. Abortion rates, currently 241 per 1,000 live births and 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, are falling but remain higher than most Western nations.[286] In 2013, the average age at first birth was 26 and 41% of births were to unmarried women.[287]
+
+The total fertility rate in 2016 was 1820.5 births per 1000 women.[288] Adoption in the United States is common and relatively easy from a legal point of view (compared to other Western countries).[289] As of 2001[update], with more than 127,000 adoptions, the U.S. accounted for nearly half of the total number of adoptions worldwide.[needs update][290] Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, and it is legal for same-sex couples to adopt. Polygamy is illegal throughout the U.S.[291]
+
+In 2019, the U.S. had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.[292]
+
+The United States had a life expectancy of 78.6 years at birth in 2017, which was the third year of declines in life expectancy following decades of continuous increase. The recent decline, primarily among the age group 25 to 64, is largely due to sharp increases in the drug overdose and suicide rates; the country has one of the highest suicide rates among wealthy countries.[293][294] Life expectancy was highest among Asians and Hispanics and lowest among blacks.[295][296] According to CDC and Census Bureau data, deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug overdoses hit record highs in 2017.[297]
+
+Increasing obesity in the United States and health improvements elsewhere contributed to lowering the country's rank in life expectancy from 11th in the world in 1987, to 42nd in 2007, and as of 2017 the country had the lowest life expectancy among Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and seven countries of western Europe.[298][299] Obesity rates have more than doubled in the last 30 years and are the highest in the industrialized world.[300][301] Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight.[302] Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.[303]
+
+In 2010, coronary artery disease, lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and traffic accidents caused the most years of life lost in the U.S. Low back pain, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety caused the most years lost to disability. The most harmful risk factors were poor diet, tobacco smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, physical inactivity, and alcohol use. Alzheimer's disease, drug abuse, kidney disease, cancer, and falls caused the most additional years of life lost over their age-adjusted 1990 per-capita rates.[304] U.S. teenage pregnancy and abortion rates are substantially higher than in other Western nations, especially among blacks and Hispanics.[305]
+
+Health-care coverage in the United States is a combination of public and private efforts and is not universal. In 2017, 12.2% of the population did not carry health insurance.[306] The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue.[307][308] Federal legislation, passed in early 2010, roughly halved the uninsured share of the population, though the bill and its ultimate effect are issues of controversy.[309][310] The U.S. health-care system far outspends any other nation, measured both in per capita spending and as percentage of GDP.[311] At the same time, the U.S. is a global leader in medical innovation.[312]
+
+American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. In most states, children are required to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn 18 (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at 16 or 17.[313]
+
+About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.[314] The U.S. spends more on education per student than any nation in the world, spending more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student.[315][needs update] Some 80% of U.S. college students attend public universities.[316]
+
+Of Americans 25 and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees.[317] The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.[202][318] The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.[319]
+
+The United States has many private and public institutions of higher education. The majority of the world's top universities, as listed by various ranking organizations, are in the U.S.[320][321][322] There are also local community colleges with generally more open admission policies, shorter academic programs, and lower tuition.
+
+In 2018, U21, a network of research-intensive universities, ranked the United States first in the world for breadth and quality of higher education, and 15th when GDP was a factor.[323] As for public expenditures on higher education, the U.S. trails some other OECD nations but spends more per student than the OECD average, and more than all nations in combined public and private spending.[315][324] As of 2018[update], student loan debt exceeded 1.5 trillion dollars.[325][326]
+
+The United States is a federal republic of 50 states, a federal district, five territories and several uninhabited island possessions.[327][328][329] It is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law."[330] For 2018, the U.S. ranked 25th on the Democracy Index.[331] On Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index its public sector position deteriorated from a score of 76 in 2015 to 69 in 2019.[332]
+
+In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government: federal, state, and local. The local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district.
+
+The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document.[333] The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus. The Constitution has been amended 27 times;[334] the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights. All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review and any law ruled by the courts to be in violation of the Constitution is voided. The principle of judicial review, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was established by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison (1803)[335] in a decision handed down by Chief Justice John Marshall.[336]
+
+The federal government comprises three branches:
+
+The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population. Each state then draws single-member districts to conform with the census apportionment. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories each have one member of Congress—these members are not allowed to vote.[341]
+
+The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one-third of Senate seats are up for election every two years. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories do not have senators.[341] The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia.[342] The Supreme Court, led by the chief justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.[343]
+
+The state governments are structured in a roughly similar fashion, though Nebraska has a unicameral legislature.[344] The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.
+
+The 50 states are the principal administrative divisions in the country. These are subdivided into counties or county equivalents and further divided into municipalities. The District of Columbia is a federal district that contains the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C.[345] The states and the District of Columbia choose the president of the United States. Each state has presidential electors equal to the number of their representatives and senators in Congress; the District of Columbia has three (because of the 23rd Amendment).[346] Territories of the United States such as Puerto Rico do not have presidential electors, and so people in those territories cannot vote for the president.[341]
+
+The United States also observes tribal sovereignty of the American Indian nations to a limited degree, as it does with the states' sovereignty. American Indians are U.S. citizens and tribal lands are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress and the federal courts. Like the states they have a great deal of autonomy, but also like the states, tribes are not allowed to make war, engage in their own foreign relations, or print and issue currency.[347]
+
+Citizenship is granted at birth in all states, the District of Columbia, and all major U.S. territories except American Samoa.[348][349][m]
+
+The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history.[352] For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote. The president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College.[353]
+
+In American political culture, the center-right Republican Party is considered "conservative" and the center-left Democratic Party is considered "liberal."[354][355] The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states," are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.
+
+Republican Donald Trump, the winner of the 2016 presidential election, is serving as the 45th president of the United States.[356] Leadership in the Senate includes Republican vice president Mike Pence, Republican president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.[357] Leadership in the House includes Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.[358]
+
+In the 116th United States Congress, the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democratic Party and the Senate is controlled by the Republican Party, giving the U.S. a split Congress. The Senate consists of 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats; the House consists of 233 Democrats, 196 Republicans, and 1 Libertarian.[359] Of state governors, there are 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. Among the D.C. mayor and the five territorial governors, there are two Republicans, one Democrat, one New Progressive, and two Independents.[360]
+
+The United States has an established structure of foreign relations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. New York City is home to the United Nations Headquarters. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States (although the U.S. still maintains unofficial relations with Bhutan and Taiwan).[361] It is a member of the G7,[362] G20, and OECD.
+
+The United States has a "Special Relationship" with the United Kingdom[363] and strong ties with India, Canada,[364] Australia,[365] New Zealand,[366] the Philippines,[367] Japan,[368] South Korea,[369] Israel,[370] and several European Union countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.[371] It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Colombia is traditionally considered by the United States as its most loyal ally in South America.[372][373]
+
+The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau through the Compact of Free Association.[374]
+
+Taxation in the United States is levied at the federal, state, and local government levels. This includes taxes on income, payroll, property, sales, imports, estates, and gifts, as well as various fees. Taxation in the United States is based on citizenship, not residency.[375] Both non-resident citizens and Green Card holders living abroad are taxed on their income irrespective of where they live or where their income is earned. The United States is one of the only countries in the world to do so.[376]
+
+In 2010 taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP.[377] Based on CBO estimates,[378] under 2013 tax law the top 1% will be paying the highest average tax rates since 1979, while other income groups will remain at historic lows.[379] For 2018, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 400 households was 23%, compared to 24.2% for the bottom half of U.S. households.[380]
+
+
+
+During fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $3.54 trillion on a budget or cash basis, down $60 billion or 1.7% vs. fiscal year 2011 spending of $3.60 trillion. Major categories of fiscal year 2012 spending included: Medicare & Medicaid (23%), Social Security (22%), Defense Department (19%), non-defense discretionary (17%), other mandatory (13%) and interest (6%).[382]
+
+The total national debt of the United States in the United States was $18.527 trillion (106% of the GDP) in 2014.[383][n] The United States has the largest external debt in the world[387] and the 34th largest government debt as a % of GDP in the world.[388]
+
+The president is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and by the Department of the Navy during times of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.[389]
+
+Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System.[390] American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's 11 active aircraft carriers, and Marine expeditionary units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad,[391] and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries.[392]
+
+The military budget of the United States in 2011 was more than $700 billion, 41% of global military spending. At 4.7% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top 15 military spenders, after Saudi Arabia.[393]  Defense spending plays a major role in science and technology investment, with roughly half of U.S. federal research and development funded by the Department of Defense.[394] Defense's share of the overall U.S. economy has generally declined in recent decades, from Cold War peaks of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 and 69.5% of federal outlays in 1954 to 4.7% of GDP and 18.8% of federal outlays in 2011.[395]
+
+The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.[396] More than 90% of the world's 14,000 nuclear weapons are owned by Russia and the United States.[397]
+
+Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police departments and sheriff's offices, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties, including protecting civil rights, national security and enforcing U.S. federal courts' rulings and federal laws.[398] State courts conduct most criminal trials while federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state criminal courts.
+
+A cross-sectional analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed that United States "homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher."[399] In 2016, the US murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000.[400] Gun ownership rights, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, continue to be the subject of contention.
+
+The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world.[401] As of 2020, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that there were some 2.3 million people incarcerated.[402]  The imprisonment rate for all prisoners sentenced to more than a year in state or federal facilities is 478 per 100,000 in 2013.[403] According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of inmates held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses.[404] About 9% of prisoners are held in privatized prisons.[402] The practice of privately operated prisons began in the 1980s and has been a subject of contention.[405]
+
+Capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and at the state level in 30 states.[406][407] No executions took place from 1967 to 1977, owing in part to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Since the decision there have been more than 1,300 executions, a majority of these taking place in three states: Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.[408] Meanwhile, several states have either abolished or struck down death penalty laws. In 2019, the country had the sixth-highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.[409]
+
+According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $16.8 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 19% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).[417] The United States is the largest importer of goods and second-largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2010, the total U.S. trade deficit was $635 billion.[418] Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners.[419]
+
+From 1983 to 2008, U.S. real compounded annual GDP growth was 3.3%, compared to a 2.3% weighted average for the rest of the G7.[420] The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita[421] and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP.[417] The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.[422]
+
+In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 86.4% of the economy.[425] While its economy has reached a postindustrial level of development, the United States remains an industrial power.[426] Consumer spending comprised 68% of the U.S. economy in 2015.[427] In August 2010, the American labor force consisted of 154.1 million people (50%). With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people. It has a smaller welfare state and redistributes less income through government action than most European nations.[428]
+
+The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation[429] and is one of a few countries in the world without paid family leave as a legal right.[430] While federal law does not require sick leave, it is a common benefit for government workers and full-time employees at corporations.[431] 74% of full-time American workers get paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although only 24% of part-time workers get the same benefits.[431] In 2009, the United States had the third-highest workforce productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands.[432]
+
+
+
+The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. Methods for producing interchangeable parts were developed by the U.S. War Department by the Federal Armories during the first half of the 19th century. This technology, along with the establishment of a machine tool industry, enabled the U.S. to have large-scale manufacturing of sewing machines, bicycles, and other items in the late 19th century and became known as the American system of manufacturing. Factory electrification in the early 20th century and introduction of the assembly line and other labor-saving techniques created the system of mass production.[433] In the 21st century, approximately two-thirds of research and development funding comes from the private sector.[434] The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor.[435][436]
+
+In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's research laboratory, one of the first of its kind, developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera.[437] The latter led to emergence of the worldwide entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.[438]
+
+The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann, to immigrate to the United States.[439] During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age, while the Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and aeronautics.[440][441]
+
+The invention of the transistor in the 1950s, a key active component in practically all modern electronics, led to many technological developments and a significant expansion of the U.S. technology industry.[442] This, in turn, led to the establishment of many new technology companies and regions around the country such as Silicon Valley in California. Advancements by American microprocessor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel along with both computer software and hardware companies that include Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems created and popularized the personal computer. The ARPANET was developed in the 1960s to meet Defense Department requirements, and became the first of a series of networks which evolved into the Internet.[443]
+
+Accounting for 4.24% of the global population, Americans collectively possess 29.4% of the world's total wealth, and Americans make up roughly half of the world's population of millionaires.[444] The Global Food Security Index ranked the U.S. number one for food affordability and overall food security in March 2013.[445] Americans on average have more than twice as much living space per dwelling and per person as European Union residents, and more than every EU nation.[446] For 2017 the United Nations Development Programme ranked the United States 13th among 189 countries in its Human Development Index and 25th among 151 countries in its inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI).[447]
+
+Wealth, like income and taxes, is highly concentrated; the richest 10% of the adult population possess 72% of the country's household wealth, while the bottom half claim only 2%.[448] According to a September 2017 report by the Federal Reserve, the top 1% controlled 38.6% of the country's wealth in 2016.[449] According to a 2018 study by the OECD, the United States has a larger percentage of low-income workers than almost any other developed nation. This is largely because at-risk workers get almost no government support and are further set back by a very weak collective bargaining system.[450] The top one percent of income-earners accounted for 52 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2015, where income is defined as market income excluding government transfers.[451] In 2018, U.S. income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau.[452]
+
+After years of stagnation, median household income reached a record high in 2016 following two consecutive years of record growth. Income inequality remains at record highs however, with the top fifth of earners taking home more than half of all overall income.[454] The rise in the share of total annual income received by the top one percent, which has more than doubled from nine percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2011, has significantly affected income inequality,[455] leaving the United States with one of the widest income distributions among OECD nations.[456]  The extent and relevance of income inequality is a matter of debate.[457][458][459]
+
+Between June 2007 and November 2008, the global recession led to falling asset prices around the world. Assets owned by Americans lost about a quarter of their value.[460] Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth was down $14 trillion, but has since increased $14 trillion over 2006 levels.[461] At the end of 2014, household debt amounted to $11.8 trillion,[462] down from $13.8 trillion at the end of 2008.[463]
+
+There were about 578,424 sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in the US in January 2014, with almost two-thirds staying in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program.[464] In 2011, 16.7 million children lived in food-insecure households, about 35% more than 2007 levels, though only 1.1% of U.S. children, or 845,000, saw reduced food intake or disrupted eating patterns at some point during the year, and most cases were not chronic.[465] As of June 2018[update], 40 million people, roughly 12.7% of the U.S. population, were living in poverty, with 18.5 million of those living in deep poverty (a family income below one-half of the poverty threshold) and over five million live "in 'Third World' conditions." In 2016, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, which made up 32.6% of the impoverished population.[466] In 2017, the U.S. state or territory with the lowest poverty rate was New Hampshire (7.6%), and the one with the highest was American Samoa (65%).[467][468][469]
+
+Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of public roads.[471] The United States has the world's second-largest automobile market,[472] and has the highest rate of per-capita vehicle ownership in the world, with 765 vehicles per 1,000 Americans (1996).[473][needs update] In 2017, there were 255,009,283 non-two wheel motor vehicles, or about 910 vehicles per 1,000 people.[474]
+
+The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned and has been largely deregulated since 1978, while most major airports are publicly owned.[475] The three largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are US-based; American Airlines is number one after its 2013 acquisition by US Airways.[476] Of the world's 50 busiest passenger airports, 16 are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.[477]
+
+The United States energy market is about 29,000 terawatt hours per year.[478] In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear and renewable energy sources.[479]
+
+Since 2007, the total greenhouse gas emissions by the United States are the second highest by country, exceeded only by China.[480] The United States has historically been the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gas emissions per capita remain high.[481]
+
+The United States is home to many cultures and a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.[483][484] Aside from the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors settled or immigrated within the past five centuries.[485] Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.[483][486] More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.[483]
+
+Americans have traditionally been characterized by a strong work ethic, competitiveness, and individualism,[487] as well as a unifying belief in an "American creed" emphasizing liberty, equality, private property, democracy, rule of law, and a preference for limited government.[488] Americans are extremely charitable by global standards. According to a 2006 British study, Americans gave 1.67% of GDP to charity, more than any other nation studied.[489][490][491]
+
+The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants.[492] Whether this perception is accurate has been a topic of debate.[493][494][495][496][420][497] While mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,[498] scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.[499] While Americans tend  to greatly value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is also generally seen as a positive attribute.[500]
+
+In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.[501] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."[502]
+
+Twelve U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Bob Dylan in 2016. William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[503] Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.[504]
+
+The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty, and later Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of American philosophical academia. John Rawls and Robert Nozick also led a revival of political philosophy.
+
+In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.[505] Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new, individualistic styles. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.[506] Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.[507]
+
+Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain with about three-quarters of grain products made of wheat flour[508] and many dishes use indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers.[509] These homegrown foods are part of a shared national menu on one of America's most popular holidays, Thanksgiving, when some Americans make traditional foods to celebrate the occasion.[510]
+
+The American fast food industry, the world's largest,[511] pioneered the drive-through format in the 1940s.[512] Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[513] Americans drink three times as much coffee as tea.[514] Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.[515][516]
+
+Although little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music.
+
+The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European and African traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s.[517]
+
+Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. Rock bands such as Metallica, the Eagles, and Aerosmith are among the highest grossing in worldwide sales.[518][519][520] In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk.
+
+More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities,[517] as have contemporary musical artists such as Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West, and Ariana Grande.[521]
+
+Hollywood, a northern district of Los Angeles, California, is one of the leaders in motion picture production.[522] The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope.[523] Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, although in the 21st century an increasing number of films are not made there, and film companies have been subject to the forces of globalization.[524]
+
+Director D. W. Griffith, the top American filmmaker during the silent film period, was central to the development of film grammar, and producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising.[525] Directors such as John Ford redefined the image of the American Old West, and, like others such as John Huston, broadened the possibilities of cinema with location shooting. The industry enjoyed its golden years, in what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood," from the early sound period until the early 1960s,[526] with screen actors such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe becoming iconic figures.[527][528] In the 1970s, "New Hollywood" or the "Hollywood Renaissance"[529] was defined by grittier films influenced by French and Italian realist pictures of the post-war period.[530] In more recent times, directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron have gained renown for their blockbuster films, often characterized by high production costs and earnings.
+
+Notable films topping the American Film Institute's AFI 100 list include Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time,[531][532] Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Graduate (1967), On the Waterfront (1954), Schindler's List (1993), Singin' in the Rain (1952), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).[533] The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, have been held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1929,[534] and the Golden Globe Awards have been held annually since January 1944.[535]
+
+American football is by several measures the most popular spectator sport;[537] the National Football League (NFL) has the highest average attendance of any sports league in the world, and the Super Bowl is watched by tens of millions globally. Baseball has been regarded as the U.S. national sport since the late 19th century, with Major League Baseball (MLB) being the top league. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports, with the top leagues being the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL). College football and basketball attract large audiences.[538] In soccer, the country hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the men's national soccer team qualified for ten World Cups and the women's team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup four times; Major League Soccer is the sport's highest league in the United States (featuring 23 American and three Canadian teams). The market for professional sports in the United States is roughly $69 billion, roughly 50% larger than that of all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined.[539]
+
+Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri were the first ever Olympic Games held outside of Europe.[540] As of 2017[update], the United States has won 2,522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 305 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.[541]
+While most major U.S. sports such as baseball and American football have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, some of which have become popular worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.[542] The most watched individual sports are golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR.[543][544]
+
+The four major broadcasters in the U.S. are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX). The four major broadcast television networks are all commercial entities. Cable television offers hundreds of channels catering to a variety of niches.[545] Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercial, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.[546]
+
+In 1998, the number of U.S. commercial radio stations had grown to 4,793 AM stations and 5,662 FM stations. In addition, there are 1,460 public radio stations. Most of these stations are run by universities and public authorities for educational purposes and are financed by public or private funds, subscriptions, and corporate underwriting. Much public-radio broadcasting is supplied by NPR. NPR was incorporated in February 1970 under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967; its television counterpart, PBS, was created by the same legislation. As of September 30, 2014[update], there are 15,433 licensed full-power radio stations in the U.S. according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).[547]
+
+Well-known newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.[548] Although the cost of publishing has increased over the years, the price of newspapers has generally remained low, forcing newspapers to rely more on advertising revenue and on articles provided by a major wire service, such as the Associated Press or Reuters, for their national and world coverage. With very few exceptions, all the newspapers in the U.S. are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families. Major cities often have "alternative weeklies" to complement the mainstream daily papers, such as New York City's The Village Voice or Los Angeles' LA Weekly. Major cities may also support a local business journal, trade papers relating to local industries, and papers for local ethnic and social groups. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Twitter.[549]
+
+More than 800 publications are produced in Spanish, the second most commonly used language in the United States behind English.[550][551]
+
+Internet sources
+

en/187.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,332 @@
+
+
+Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100
+
+The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country mostly located in central North America, between Canada and Mexico. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions.[i] At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), it is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area.[e] With a 2019 estimated population of over 328 million,[7] the U.S. is the third most populous country in the world. The Americans are a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been shaped through centuries of immigration. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City.
+
+Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago,[19] and European colonization began in the 16th century. The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolutionary War lasting between 1775 and 1783, leading to independence.[20] Beginning in the late 18th century, the United States vigorously expanded across North America, gradually acquiring new territories,[21] killing and displacing Native Americans, and admitting new states. By 1848, the United States spanned the continent.[21]
+Slavery was legal in much of the United States until the second half of the 19th century, when the American Civil War led to its abolition.[22][23]
+
+The Spanish–American War and World War I entrenched the U.S. as a world power, a status confirmed by the outcome of World War II. It was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.[24]
+
+The United States is a federal republic and a representative democracy. It is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), NATO, and other international organizations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
+
+A highly developed country, the United States is the world's largest economy and accounts for approximately a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP).[25] The United States is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter of goods, by value.[26][27] Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total,[28] it holds 29.4% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share held by any country.[29] Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, median income, median wealth, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity.[30][31] It is the foremost military power in the world, making up more than a third of global military spending,[32] and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.[33]
+
+The first known use of the name "America" dates back to 1507, when it appeared on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. On this map, the name applied to South America in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.[34] After returning from his expeditions, Vespucci first postulated that the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern limit, as initially thought by Christopher Columbus, but instead were part of an entirely separate landmass thus far unknown to the Europeans.[35] In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator used the name "America" on his own world map, applying it to the entire Western Hemisphere.[36]
+
+The first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written by Stephen Moylan, Esq., to Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort.[37][38][39] The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.[40]
+
+The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed no later than June 17, 1776, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'".[41] The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'".[42] In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence.[41] This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.[41]
+
+The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms are the "U.S.," the "USA," and "America." Colloquial names are the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States." "Columbia," a name popular in poetry and songs of the late 18th century, derives its origin from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia." Many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.[43]
+
+The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865.[44] The singular form—e.g., "the United States is"—became popular after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States." The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.[45]
+
+A citizen of the United States is an "American." "United States," "American" and "U.S." refer to the country adjectivally ("American values," "U.S. forces"). In English, the word "American" rarely refers to topics or subjects not directly connected with the United States.[46]
+
+It has been generally accepted that the first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 12,000 years ago; however, increasing evidence suggests an even earlier arrival.[19][47][48] After crossing the land bridge, the Paleo-Indians moved southward along the Pacific coast[49] and through an interior ice-free corridor.[50] The Clovis culture, which appeared around 11,000 BC, was initially believed to represent the first wave of human settlement of the Americas.[51][52] It is likely these represent the first of three major waves of migration into North America.[53]
+
+Over time, indigenous cultures in North America grew increasingly complex, and some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture in the southeast, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies.[54] The Mississippian culture flourished in the south from 800 to 1600 AD, extending from the Mexican border down through Florida.[55] Its city state Cahokia is the largest, most complex pre-Columbian archaeological site in the modern-day United States.[56] In the Four Corners region, Ancestral Puebloan culture developed from centuries of agricultural experimentation.[57]
+
+Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Taos Pueblo.[58][59] The earthworks constructed by Native Americans of the Poverty Point culture have also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the southern Great Lakes region, the Iroquois Confederacy was established at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.[60] Most prominent along the Atlantic coast were the Algonquian tribes, who practiced hunting and trapping, along with limited cultivation.
+
+With the progress of European colonization in the territories of the contemporary United States, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[61] The native population of America declined after European arrival for various reasons,[62][63] primarily diseases such as smallpox and measles.[64][65]
+
+Estimating the native population of North America at the time of European contact is difficult.[66][67] Douglas H. Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution estimated that there was a population of 92,916 in the south Atlantic states and a population of 473,616 in the Gulf states,[68] but most academics regard this figure as too low.[66] Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns believed the populations were much higher, suggesting 1,100,000 along the shores of the gulf of Mexico, 2,211,000 people living between Florida and Massachusetts, 5,250,000 in the Mississippi Valley and tributaries and 697,000 people in the Florida peninsula.[66][67]
+
+In the early days of colonization, many European settlers were subject to food shortages, disease, and attacks from Native Americans. Native Americans were also often at war with neighboring tribes and allied with Europeans in their colonial wars. In many cases, however, natives and settlers came to depend on each other. Settlers traded for food and animal pelts; natives for guns, ammunition and other European goods.[69] Natives taught many settlers to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. European missionaries and others felt it was important to "civilize" the Native Americans and urged them to adopt European agricultural techniques and lifestyles.[70][71]
+
+With the advancement of European colonization in North America, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[72] The first Europeans to arrive in the contiguous United States were Spanish conquistadors such as Juan Ponce de León, who made his first visit to Florida in 1513. Even earlier, Christopher Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his 1493 voyage. The Spanish set up the first settlements in Florida and New Mexico such as Saint Augustine[73] and Santa Fe. The French established their own as well along the Mississippi River. Successful English settlement on the eastern coast of North America began with the Virginia Colony in 1607 at Jamestown and with the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. Many settlers were dissenting Christian groups who came seeking religious freedom. The continent's first elected legislative assembly, Virginia's House of Burgesses, was created in 1619. The Mayflower Compact, signed by the Pilgrims before disembarking, and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, established precedents for the pattern of representative self-government and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies.[74][75]
+
+Most settlers in every colony were small farmers, though other industries were formed. Cash crops included tobacco, rice, and wheat. Extraction industries grew up in furs, fishing and lumber. Manufacturers produced rum and ships, and by the late colonial period, Americans were producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply.[76] Cities eventually dotted the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs. English colonists were supplemented by waves of Scotch-Irish immigrants and other groups. As coastal land grew more expensive, freed indentured servants claimed lands further west.[77]
+
+A large-scale slave trade with English privateers began.[78] Because of less disease and better food and treatment, the life expectancy of slaves was much higher in North America than further south, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.[79][80] Colonial society was largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, and colonies passed acts for and against the practice.[81][82] But by the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in the South.[83]
+
+With the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were administered by the British as overseas dependencies.[84] All nonetheless had local governments with elections open to most free men.[85] With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grew rapidly. Relatively small Native American populations were eclipsed.[86] The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest both in religion and in religious liberty.[87]
+
+During the Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans, who were being conquered and displaced, the 13 British colonies had a population of over 2.1 million in 1770, about a third that of Britain. Despite continuing, new arrivals, the rate of natural increase was such that by the 1770s only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas.[88] The colonies' distance from Britain had allowed the development of self-government, but their unprecedented success motivated monarchs to periodically seek to reassert royal authority.[89]
+
+In 1774, the Spanish Navy ship Santiago, under Juan Pérez, entered and anchored in an inlet of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, in present-day British Columbia. Although the Spanish did not land, natives paddled to the ship to trade furs for abalone shells from California.[90] At the time, the Spanish were able to monopolize the trade between Asia and North America, granting limited licenses to the Portuguese. When the Russians began establishing a growing fur trading system in Alaska, the Spanish began to challenge the Russians, with Pérez's voyage being the first of many to the Pacific Northwest.[91][j]
+
+During his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook became the first European to begin formal contact with Hawaii.[93] Captain Cook's last voyage included sailing along the coast of North America and Alaska searching for a Northwest Passage for approximately nine months.[94]
+
+The American Revolutionary War was the first successful colonial war of independence against a European power. Americans had developed an ideology of "republicanism" asserting that government rested on the will of the people as expressed in their local legislatures. They demanded their rights as Englishmen and "no taxation without representation". The British insisted on administering the empire through Parliament, and the conflict escalated into war.[95]
+
+The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that Great Britain was not protecting Americans' unalienable rights. July 4 is celebrated annually as Independence Day.[96] In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a decentralized government that operated until 1789.[96]
+
+Following the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781,[97] Britain signed the peace treaty of 1783, and American sovereignty was internationally recognized and the country was granted all lands east of the Mississippi River. Nationalists led the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788. The federal government was reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789. George Washington, who had led the Continental Army to victory, was the first president elected under the new constitution. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.[98]
+
+Although the federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808, after 1820, cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and along with it, the slave population.[99][100][101] The Second Great Awakening, especially 1800–1840, converted millions to evangelical Protestantism. In the North, it energized multiple social reform movements, including abolitionism;[102] in the South, Methodists and Baptists proselytized among slave populations.[103]
+
+Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of American Indian Wars.[104] The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation's area.[105] The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism.[106] A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819.[107] The expansion was aided by steam power, when steamboats began traveling along America's large water systems, many of which were connected by new canals, such as the Erie and the I&M; then, even faster railroads began their stretch across the nation's land.[108]
+
+From 1820 to 1850, Jacksonian democracy began a set of reforms which included wider white male suffrage; it led to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that forcibly resettled Indians into the west on Indian reservations. The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 during a period of expansionist Manifest destiny.[109] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest.[110] Victory in the Mexican–American War resulted in the 1848 Mexican Cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest.[111]
+The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 spurred migration to the Pacific coast, which led to the California Genocide[112][113][114][115] and the creation of additional western states.[116] After the Civil War, new transcontinental railways made relocation easier for settlers, expanded internal trade and increased conflicts with Native Americans.[117] In 1869, a new Peace Policy nominally promised to protect Native Americans from abuses, avoid further war, and secure their eventual U.S. citizenship. Nonetheless, large-scale conflicts continued throughout the West into the 1900s.
+
+Irreconcilable sectional conflict regarding the slavery of Africans and African Americans ultimately led to the American Civil War.[118] Initially, states entering the Union had alternated between slave and free states, keeping a sectional balance in the Senate, while free states outstripped slave states in population and in the House of Representatives. But with additional western territory and more free-soil states, tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over federalism and disposition of the territories, as well as whether to expand or restrict slavery.[119]
+
+With the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, conventions in thirteen slave states ultimately declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "South" or the "Confederacy"), while the federal government (the "Union") maintained that secession was illegal.[119] In order to bring about this secession, military action was initiated by the secessionists, and the Union responded in kind. The ensuing war would become the deadliest military conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of approximately 618,000 soldiers as well as many civilians.[120] The Union initially simply fought to keep the country united. Nevertheless, as casualties mounted after 1863 and Lincoln delivered his Emancipation Proclamation, the main purpose of the war from the Union's viewpoint became the abolition of slavery. Indeed, when the Union ultimately won the war in April 1865, each of the states in the defeated South was required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery.
+
+The government enacted three constitutional amendments in the years after the war: the aforementioned Thirteenth as well as the Fourteenth Amendment providing citizenship to the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves,[121] and the Fifteenth Amendment ensuring in theory that African Americans had the right to vote. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power[122] aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the South while guaranteeing the rights of the newly freed slaves.
+
+Reconstruction began in earnest following the war. While President Lincoln attempted to foster friendship and forgiveness between the Union and the former Confederacy, his assassination on April 14, 1865, drove a wedge between North and South again. Republicans in the federal government made it their goal to oversee the rebuilding of the South and to ensure the rights of African Americans. They persisted until the Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to cease protecting the rights of African Americans in the South in order for Democrats to concede the presidential election of 1876.
+
+Southern white Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers," took control of the South after the end of Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1910 the Redeemers established so-called Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising most blacks and some poor whites throughout the region. Blacks faced racial segregation, especially in the South.[123] They also occasionally experienced vigilante violence, including lynching.[124]
+
+In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe supplied a surplus of labor for the country's industrialization and transformed its culture.[126] National infrastructure including telegraph and transcontinental railroads spurred economic growth and greater settlement and development of the American Old West. The later invention of electric light and the telephone would also affect communication and urban life.[127]
+
+The United States fought Indian Wars west of the Mississippi River from 1810 to at least 1890.[128] Most of these conflicts ended with the cession of Native American territory and their confinement to Indian reservations. This further expanded acreage under mechanical cultivation, increasing surpluses for international markets.[129] Mainland expansion also included the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.[130] In 1893, pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the monarchy and formed the Republic of Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were ceded by Spain in the same year, following the Spanish–American War.[131] American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the end of the Second Samoan Civil War.[132] The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.[133]
+
+Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. Tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie led the nation's progress in railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. Banking became a major part of the economy, with J. P. Morgan playing a notable role. The American economy boomed, becoming the world's largest, and the United States achieved great power status.[134] These dramatic changes were accompanied by social unrest and the rise of populist, socialist, and anarchist movements.[135] This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which saw significant reforms including women's suffrage, alcohol prohibition, regulation of consumer goods, greater antitrust measures to ensure competition and attention to worker conditions.[136][137][138]
+
+The United States remained neutral from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 until 1917, when it joined the war as an "associated power," alongside the formal Allies of World War I, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson took a leading diplomatic role at the Paris Peace Conference and advocated strongly for the U.S. to join the League of Nations. However, the Senate refused to approve this and did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles that established the League of Nations.[139]
+
+In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage.[140] The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of radio for mass communication and the invention of early television.[141] The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal.[142] The Great Migration of millions of African Americans out of the American South began before World War I and extended through the 1960s;[143] whereas the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration.[144]
+
+At first effectively neutral during World War II, the United States began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers.[145] Although Japan attacked the United States first, the U.S. nonetheless pursued a "Europe first" defense policy.[146] The United States thus left its vast Asian colony, the Philippines, isolated and fighting a losing struggle against Japanese invasion and occupation, as military resources were devoted to the European theater. During the war, the United States was referred to as one of the "Four Policemen"[147] of Allies power who met to plan the postwar world, along with Britain, the Soviet Union and China.[148][149] Although the nation lost around 400,000 military personnel,[150] it emerged relatively undamaged from the war with even greater economic and military influence.[151]
+
+The United States played a leading role in the Bretton Woods and Yalta conferences with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and other Allies, which signed agreements on new international financial institutions and Europe's postwar reorganization. As an Allied victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war.[152] The United States and Japan then fought each other in the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.[153][154] The United States eventually developed the first nuclear weapons and used them on Japan in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese surrendered on September 2, ending World War II.[155][156]
+
+After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for power, influence, and prestige during what became known as the Cold War, driven by an ideological divide between capitalism and communism.[157] They dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its NATO allies on one side and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other. The U.S. developed a policy of containment towards the expansion of communist influence. While the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict.[citation needed]
+
+The United States often opposed Third World movements that it viewed as Soviet-sponsored, and occasionally pursued direct action for regime change against left-wing governments, even supporting right-wing authoritarian governments at times.[158] American troops fought communist Chinese and North Korean forces in the Korean War of 1950–53.[159] The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite and its 1961 launch of the first manned spaceflight initiated a "Space Race" in which the United States became the first nation to land a man on the moon in 1969.[159] A proxy war in Southeast Asia eventually evolved into full American participation, as the Vietnam War.[citation needed]
+
+At home, the U.S. experienced sustained economic expansion and a rapid growth of its population and middle class. Construction of an Interstate Highway System transformed the nation's infrastructure over the following decades. Millions moved from farms and inner cities to large suburban housing developments.[160][161] In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th and last U.S. state added to the country.[162] The growing Civil Rights Movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader and figurehead. A combination of court decisions and legislation, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, sought to end racial discrimination.[163][164][165] Meanwhile, a counterculture movement grew which was fueled by opposition to the Vietnam war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution.
+
+The launch of a "War on Poverty" expanded entitlements and welfare spending, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that provide health coverage to the elderly and poor, respectively, and the means-tested Food Stamp Program and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.[166]
+
+The 1970s and early 1980s saw the onset of stagflation. After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan responded to economic stagnation with free-market oriented reforms. Following the collapse of détente, he abandoned "containment" and initiated the more aggressive "rollback" strategy towards the USSR.[167][168][169][170][171] After a surge in female labor participation over the previous decade, by 1985 the majority of women aged 16 and over were employed.[172]
+
+The late 1980s brought a "thaw" in relations with the USSR, and its collapse in 1991 finally ended the Cold War.[173][174][175][176] This brought about unipolarity[177] with the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The concept of Pax Americana, which had appeared in the post-World War II period, gained wide popularity as a term for the post-Cold War new world order.[citation needed]
+
+After the Cold War, the conflict in the Middle East triggered a crisis in 1990, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, an ally of the United States. Fearing the instability would spread to other regions, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Shield, a defensive force buildup in Saudi Arabia, and Operation Desert Storm, in a staging titled the Gulf War; waged by coalition forces from 34 nations, led by the United States against Iraq ending in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restoration of the monarchy.[178]
+
+Originating within U.S. military defense networks, the Internet spread to international academic platforms and then to the public in the 1990s, greatly affecting the global economy, society, and culture.[179] Due to the dot-com boom, stable monetary policy, and reduced social welfare spending, the 1990s saw the longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history.[180] Beginning in 1994, the U.S. entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), prompting trade among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to soar.[181]
+
+On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people.[182] In response, the United States launched the War on Terror, which included a war in Afghanistan and the 2003–11 Iraq War.[183][184]
+
+Government policy designed to promote affordable housing,[185] widespread failures in corporate and regulatory governance,[186] and historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve[187] led to the mid-2000s housing bubble, which culminated with the 2008 financial crisis, the nation's largest economic contraction since the Great Depression.[188] Barack Obama, the first African-American[189] and multiracial[190] president, was elected in 2008 amid the crisis,[191] and subsequently passed stimulus measures and the Dodd–Frank Act in an attempt to mitigate its negative effects and ensure there would not be a repeat of the crisis. In 2010, the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, which made the most sweeping reforms to the nation's healthcare system in nearly five decades, including mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges.[citation needed]
+
+American forces in Iraq were withdrawn in large numbers in 2009 and 2010, and the war in the region was declared formally over in December 2011.[192] But months earlier, Operation Neptune Spear led to the death of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.[193] In the presidential election of 2016, Republican Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States. On January 20, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed.[194] As of July 2020, the United States has over 4 million COVID-19 cases and over 145,000 deaths.[195] The United States is, by far, the country with the most cases of COVID-19 since April 11, 2020.[196]
+
+The 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia occupy a combined area of 3,119,884.69 square miles (8,080,464.3 km2). Of this area, 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2) is contiguous land, composing 83.65% of total U.S. land area.[197][198] Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, is 10,931 square miles (28,311 km2) in area. The populated territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands together cover 9,185 square miles (23,789 km2).[199] Measured by only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.[200]
+
+The United States is the world's third- or fourth-largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and nearly equal to China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted, and how the total size of the United States is measured.[e][201][202]
+
+The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont.[203] The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest.[204] The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast.[204]
+
+The Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking around 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado.[205] Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Chihuahua and Mojave.[206] The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast, both ranges reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m). The lowest and highest points in the contiguous United States are in the state of California,[207] and only about 84 miles (135 km) apart.[208] At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali is the highest peak in the country and in North America.[209] Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature.[210]
+
+The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.[211] The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains have an alpine climate. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Hawaii and the southern tip of Florida are tropical, as well as its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.[212] States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur in the country, mainly in Tornado Alley areas in the Midwest and South.[213] Overall, the United States has the world's most violent weather, receiving more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world.[214]
+
+The U.S. ecology is megadiverse: about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and more than 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland.[216] The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 bird species, 311 reptile species, and 295 amphibian species,[217] as well as about 91,000 insect species.[218]
+
+There are 62 national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas.[219] Altogether, the government owns about 28% of the country's land area,[220] mostly in the western states.[221] Most of this land is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching, and about .86% is used for military purposes.[222][223]
+
+Environmental issues include debates on oil and nuclear energy, dealing with air and water pollution, the economic costs of protecting wildlife, logging and deforestation,[224][225] and international responses to global warming.[226][227] The most prominent environmental agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by presidential order in 1970.[228] The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act.[229] The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is intended to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.[230]
+
+The U.S. Census Bureau officially estimated the country's population to be 328,239,523 as of July 1, 2019.[231] In addition, the Census Bureau provides a continuously updated U.S. Population Clock that approximates the latest population of the 50 states and District of Columbia based on the Bureau's most recent demographic trends.[234] According to the clock, on May 23, 2020, the U.S. population exceeded 329 million residents, with a net gain of one person every 19 seconds, or about 4,547 people per day. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world, after China and India. In 2018 the median age of the United States population was 38.1 years.[235]
+
+In 2018, there were almost 90 million immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrants (second-generation Americans) in the United States, accounting for 28% of the overall U.S. population.[236] The United States has a very diverse population; 37 ancestry groups have more than one million members.[237] German Americans are the largest ethnic group (more than 50 million)—followed by Irish Americans (circa 37 million), Mexican Americans (circa 31 million) and English Americans (circa 28 million).[238][239]
+
+White Americans (mostly European ancestry) are the largest racial group at 73.1% of the population; African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third-largest ancestry group.[237] Asian Americans are the country's second-largest racial minority; the three largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans.[237] The largest American community with European ancestry is German Americans, which consists of more than 14% of the total population.[240] In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively).[241] The census counted more than 19 million people of "Some Other Race" who were "unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories in 2010, more than 18.5 million (97%) of whom are of Hispanic ethnicity.[241]
+
+In 2017, out of the U.S. foreign-born population, some 45% (20.7 million) were naturalized citizens, 27% (12.3 million) were lawful permanent residents (including many eligible to become citizens), 6% (2.2 million) were temporary lawful residents, and 23% (10.5 million) were unauthorized immigrants.[242] Among current living immigrants to the U.S., the top five countries of birth are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and El Salvador. Until 2017 and 2018, the United States led the world in refugee resettlement for decades, admitted more refugees than the rest of the world combined.[243] From fiscal year 1980 until 2017, 55% of refugees came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 13% from Africa, and 4% from Latin America.[243]
+
+A 2017 United Nations report projected that the U.S. would be one of nine countries in which world population growth through 2050 would be concentrated.[244] A 2020 U.S. Census Bureau report projected the population of the country could be anywhere between 320 million and 447 million by 2060, depending on the rate of in-migration; in all projected scenarios, a lower fertility rate and increases in life expectancy would result in an aging population.[245] The United States has an annual birth rate of 13 per 1,000, which is five births per 1,000 below the world average.[246] Its population growth rate is positive at 0.7%, higher than that of many developed nations.[247]
+
+About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (including suburbs);[202] about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000.[248] In 2008, 273 incorporated municipalities had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than one million residents, and four cities had over two million (namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston).[249] Estimates for the year 2018 show that 53 metropolitan areas have populations greater than one million. Many metros in the South, Southwest and West grew significantly between 2010 and 2018. The Dallas and Houston metros increased by more than a million people, while the Washington, D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and Phoenix metros all grew by more than 500,000 people.
+
+English (specifically, American English) is the de facto national language of the United States. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2010, about 230 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. 12% of the population speaks Spanish at home, making it the second most common language. Spanish is also the most widely taught second language.[250][251]
+
+Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii.[252] In addition to English, Alaska recognizes twenty official Native languages,[253][k] and South Dakota recognizes Sioux.[254] While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French.[255] Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms.[256]
+
+Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan[257] is officially recognized by American Samoa and Chamorro[258] is an official language of Guam. Both Carolinian and Chamorro have official recognition in the Northern Mariana Islands.[259]
+Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico and is more widely spoken than English there.[260]
+
+The most widely taught foreign languages in the United States, in terms of enrollment numbers from kindergarten through university undergraduate education, are Spanish (around 7.2 million students), French (1.5 million), and German (500,000). Other commonly taught languages include Latin, Japanese, ASL, Italian, and Chinese.[261][262] 18% of all Americans claim to speak both English and another language.[263]
+
+Religion in the United States (2017)[266]
+
+The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids Congress from passing laws respecting its establishment.
+
+In a 2013 survey, 56% of Americans said religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other Western nation.[267] In a 2009 Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they attended church weekly or almost weekly; the figures ranged from a low of 23% in Vermont to a high of 63% in Mississippi.[268]
+
+In a 2014 survey, 70.6% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians;[269] Protestants accounted for 46.5%, while Roman Catholics, at 20.8%, formed the largest single Christian group.[270] In 2014, 5.9% of the U.S. adult population claimed a non-Christian religion.[271] These include Judaism (1.9%), Islam (0.9%), Hinduism (0.7%), and Buddhism (0.7%).[271] The survey also reported that 22.8% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist or simply having no religion—up from 8.2% in 1990.[270][272][273] There are also Unitarian Universalist, Scientologist, Baha'i, Sikh, Jain, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Satanist, Taoist, Druid, Native American, Afro-American, traditional African, Wiccan, Gnostic, humanist and deist communities.[274][275]
+
+Protestantism is the largest Christian religious grouping in the United States, accounting for almost half of all Americans. Baptists collectively form the largest branch of Protestantism at 15.4%,[276] and the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest individual Protestant denomination at 5.3% of the U.S. population.[276] Apart from Baptists, other Protestant categories include nondenominational Protestants, Methodists, Pentecostals, unspecified Protestants, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, other Reformed, Episcopalians/Anglicans, Quakers, Adventists, Holiness, Christian fundamentalists, Anabaptists, Pietists, and multiple others.[276]
+
+As with other Western countries, the U.S. is becoming less religious. Irreligion is growing rapidly among Americans under 30.[277] Polls show that overall American confidence in organized religion has been declining since the mid to late 1980s,[278] and that younger Americans, in particular, are becoming increasingly irreligious.[271][279] In a 2012 study, the Protestant share of the U.S. population had dropped to 48%, thus ending its status as religious category of the majority for the first time.[280][281] Americans with no religion have 1.7 children compared to 2.2 among Christians. The unaffiliated are less likely to marry with 37% marrying compared to 52% of Christians.[282]
+
+The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. By contrast, religion plays the least important role in New England and in the Western United States.[268]
+
+As of 2018[update], 52% of Americans age 15 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 32% had never been married.[283] Women now work mostly outside the home and receive the majority of bachelor's degrees.[284]
+
+The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is 26.5 per 1,000 women. The rate has declined by 57% since 1991.[285] Abortion is legal throughout the country. Abortion rates, currently 241 per 1,000 live births and 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, are falling but remain higher than most Western nations.[286] In 2013, the average age at first birth was 26 and 41% of births were to unmarried women.[287]
+
+The total fertility rate in 2016 was 1820.5 births per 1000 women.[288] Adoption in the United States is common and relatively easy from a legal point of view (compared to other Western countries).[289] As of 2001[update], with more than 127,000 adoptions, the U.S. accounted for nearly half of the total number of adoptions worldwide.[needs update][290] Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, and it is legal for same-sex couples to adopt. Polygamy is illegal throughout the U.S.[291]
+
+In 2019, the U.S. had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.[292]
+
+The United States had a life expectancy of 78.6 years at birth in 2017, which was the third year of declines in life expectancy following decades of continuous increase. The recent decline, primarily among the age group 25 to 64, is largely due to sharp increases in the drug overdose and suicide rates; the country has one of the highest suicide rates among wealthy countries.[293][294] Life expectancy was highest among Asians and Hispanics and lowest among blacks.[295][296] According to CDC and Census Bureau data, deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug overdoses hit record highs in 2017.[297]
+
+Increasing obesity in the United States and health improvements elsewhere contributed to lowering the country's rank in life expectancy from 11th in the world in 1987, to 42nd in 2007, and as of 2017 the country had the lowest life expectancy among Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and seven countries of western Europe.[298][299] Obesity rates have more than doubled in the last 30 years and are the highest in the industrialized world.[300][301] Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight.[302] Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.[303]
+
+In 2010, coronary artery disease, lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and traffic accidents caused the most years of life lost in the U.S. Low back pain, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety caused the most years lost to disability. The most harmful risk factors were poor diet, tobacco smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, physical inactivity, and alcohol use. Alzheimer's disease, drug abuse, kidney disease, cancer, and falls caused the most additional years of life lost over their age-adjusted 1990 per-capita rates.[304] U.S. teenage pregnancy and abortion rates are substantially higher than in other Western nations, especially among blacks and Hispanics.[305]
+
+Health-care coverage in the United States is a combination of public and private efforts and is not universal. In 2017, 12.2% of the population did not carry health insurance.[306] The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue.[307][308] Federal legislation, passed in early 2010, roughly halved the uninsured share of the population, though the bill and its ultimate effect are issues of controversy.[309][310] The U.S. health-care system far outspends any other nation, measured both in per capita spending and as percentage of GDP.[311] At the same time, the U.S. is a global leader in medical innovation.[312]
+
+American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. In most states, children are required to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn 18 (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at 16 or 17.[313]
+
+About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.[314] The U.S. spends more on education per student than any nation in the world, spending more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student.[315][needs update] Some 80% of U.S. college students attend public universities.[316]
+
+Of Americans 25 and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees.[317] The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.[202][318] The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.[319]
+
+The United States has many private and public institutions of higher education. The majority of the world's top universities, as listed by various ranking organizations, are in the U.S.[320][321][322] There are also local community colleges with generally more open admission policies, shorter academic programs, and lower tuition.
+
+In 2018, U21, a network of research-intensive universities, ranked the United States first in the world for breadth and quality of higher education, and 15th when GDP was a factor.[323] As for public expenditures on higher education, the U.S. trails some other OECD nations but spends more per student than the OECD average, and more than all nations in combined public and private spending.[315][324] As of 2018[update], student loan debt exceeded 1.5 trillion dollars.[325][326]
+
+The United States is a federal republic of 50 states, a federal district, five territories and several uninhabited island possessions.[327][328][329] It is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law."[330] For 2018, the U.S. ranked 25th on the Democracy Index.[331] On Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index its public sector position deteriorated from a score of 76 in 2015 to 69 in 2019.[332]
+
+In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government: federal, state, and local. The local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district.
+
+The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document.[333] The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus. The Constitution has been amended 27 times;[334] the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights. All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review and any law ruled by the courts to be in violation of the Constitution is voided. The principle of judicial review, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was established by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison (1803)[335] in a decision handed down by Chief Justice John Marshall.[336]
+
+The federal government comprises three branches:
+
+The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population. Each state then draws single-member districts to conform with the census apportionment. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories each have one member of Congress—these members are not allowed to vote.[341]
+
+The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one-third of Senate seats are up for election every two years. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories do not have senators.[341] The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia.[342] The Supreme Court, led by the chief justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.[343]
+
+The state governments are structured in a roughly similar fashion, though Nebraska has a unicameral legislature.[344] The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.
+
+The 50 states are the principal administrative divisions in the country. These are subdivided into counties or county equivalents and further divided into municipalities. The District of Columbia is a federal district that contains the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C.[345] The states and the District of Columbia choose the president of the United States. Each state has presidential electors equal to the number of their representatives and senators in Congress; the District of Columbia has three (because of the 23rd Amendment).[346] Territories of the United States such as Puerto Rico do not have presidential electors, and so people in those territories cannot vote for the president.[341]
+
+The United States also observes tribal sovereignty of the American Indian nations to a limited degree, as it does with the states' sovereignty. American Indians are U.S. citizens and tribal lands are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress and the federal courts. Like the states they have a great deal of autonomy, but also like the states, tribes are not allowed to make war, engage in their own foreign relations, or print and issue currency.[347]
+
+Citizenship is granted at birth in all states, the District of Columbia, and all major U.S. territories except American Samoa.[348][349][m]
+
+The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history.[352] For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote. The president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College.[353]
+
+In American political culture, the center-right Republican Party is considered "conservative" and the center-left Democratic Party is considered "liberal."[354][355] The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states," are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.
+
+Republican Donald Trump, the winner of the 2016 presidential election, is serving as the 45th president of the United States.[356] Leadership in the Senate includes Republican vice president Mike Pence, Republican president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.[357] Leadership in the House includes Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.[358]
+
+In the 116th United States Congress, the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democratic Party and the Senate is controlled by the Republican Party, giving the U.S. a split Congress. The Senate consists of 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats; the House consists of 233 Democrats, 196 Republicans, and 1 Libertarian.[359] Of state governors, there are 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. Among the D.C. mayor and the five territorial governors, there are two Republicans, one Democrat, one New Progressive, and two Independents.[360]
+
+The United States has an established structure of foreign relations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. New York City is home to the United Nations Headquarters. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States (although the U.S. still maintains unofficial relations with Bhutan and Taiwan).[361] It is a member of the G7,[362] G20, and OECD.
+
+The United States has a "Special Relationship" with the United Kingdom[363] and strong ties with India, Canada,[364] Australia,[365] New Zealand,[366] the Philippines,[367] Japan,[368] South Korea,[369] Israel,[370] and several European Union countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.[371] It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Colombia is traditionally considered by the United States as its most loyal ally in South America.[372][373]
+
+The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau through the Compact of Free Association.[374]
+
+Taxation in the United States is levied at the federal, state, and local government levels. This includes taxes on income, payroll, property, sales, imports, estates, and gifts, as well as various fees. Taxation in the United States is based on citizenship, not residency.[375] Both non-resident citizens and Green Card holders living abroad are taxed on their income irrespective of where they live or where their income is earned. The United States is one of the only countries in the world to do so.[376]
+
+In 2010 taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP.[377] Based on CBO estimates,[378] under 2013 tax law the top 1% will be paying the highest average tax rates since 1979, while other income groups will remain at historic lows.[379] For 2018, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 400 households was 23%, compared to 24.2% for the bottom half of U.S. households.[380]
+
+
+
+During fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $3.54 trillion on a budget or cash basis, down $60 billion or 1.7% vs. fiscal year 2011 spending of $3.60 trillion. Major categories of fiscal year 2012 spending included: Medicare & Medicaid (23%), Social Security (22%), Defense Department (19%), non-defense discretionary (17%), other mandatory (13%) and interest (6%).[382]
+
+The total national debt of the United States in the United States was $18.527 trillion (106% of the GDP) in 2014.[383][n] The United States has the largest external debt in the world[387] and the 34th largest government debt as a % of GDP in the world.[388]
+
+The president is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and by the Department of the Navy during times of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.[389]
+
+Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System.[390] American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's 11 active aircraft carriers, and Marine expeditionary units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad,[391] and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries.[392]
+
+The military budget of the United States in 2011 was more than $700 billion, 41% of global military spending. At 4.7% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top 15 military spenders, after Saudi Arabia.[393]  Defense spending plays a major role in science and technology investment, with roughly half of U.S. federal research and development funded by the Department of Defense.[394] Defense's share of the overall U.S. economy has generally declined in recent decades, from Cold War peaks of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 and 69.5% of federal outlays in 1954 to 4.7% of GDP and 18.8% of federal outlays in 2011.[395]
+
+The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.[396] More than 90% of the world's 14,000 nuclear weapons are owned by Russia and the United States.[397]
+
+Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police departments and sheriff's offices, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties, including protecting civil rights, national security and enforcing U.S. federal courts' rulings and federal laws.[398] State courts conduct most criminal trials while federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state criminal courts.
+
+A cross-sectional analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed that United States "homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher."[399] In 2016, the US murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000.[400] Gun ownership rights, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, continue to be the subject of contention.
+
+The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world.[401] As of 2020, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that there were some 2.3 million people incarcerated.[402]  The imprisonment rate for all prisoners sentenced to more than a year in state or federal facilities is 478 per 100,000 in 2013.[403] According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of inmates held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses.[404] About 9% of prisoners are held in privatized prisons.[402] The practice of privately operated prisons began in the 1980s and has been a subject of contention.[405]
+
+Capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and at the state level in 30 states.[406][407] No executions took place from 1967 to 1977, owing in part to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Since the decision there have been more than 1,300 executions, a majority of these taking place in three states: Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.[408] Meanwhile, several states have either abolished or struck down death penalty laws. In 2019, the country had the sixth-highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.[409]
+
+According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $16.8 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 19% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).[417] The United States is the largest importer of goods and second-largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2010, the total U.S. trade deficit was $635 billion.[418] Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners.[419]
+
+From 1983 to 2008, U.S. real compounded annual GDP growth was 3.3%, compared to a 2.3% weighted average for the rest of the G7.[420] The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita[421] and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP.[417] The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.[422]
+
+In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 86.4% of the economy.[425] While its economy has reached a postindustrial level of development, the United States remains an industrial power.[426] Consumer spending comprised 68% of the U.S. economy in 2015.[427] In August 2010, the American labor force consisted of 154.1 million people (50%). With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people. It has a smaller welfare state and redistributes less income through government action than most European nations.[428]
+
+The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation[429] and is one of a few countries in the world without paid family leave as a legal right.[430] While federal law does not require sick leave, it is a common benefit for government workers and full-time employees at corporations.[431] 74% of full-time American workers get paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although only 24% of part-time workers get the same benefits.[431] In 2009, the United States had the third-highest workforce productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands.[432]
+
+
+
+The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. Methods for producing interchangeable parts were developed by the U.S. War Department by the Federal Armories during the first half of the 19th century. This technology, along with the establishment of a machine tool industry, enabled the U.S. to have large-scale manufacturing of sewing machines, bicycles, and other items in the late 19th century and became known as the American system of manufacturing. Factory electrification in the early 20th century and introduction of the assembly line and other labor-saving techniques created the system of mass production.[433] In the 21st century, approximately two-thirds of research and development funding comes from the private sector.[434] The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor.[435][436]
+
+In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's research laboratory, one of the first of its kind, developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera.[437] The latter led to emergence of the worldwide entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.[438]
+
+The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann, to immigrate to the United States.[439] During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age, while the Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and aeronautics.[440][441]
+
+The invention of the transistor in the 1950s, a key active component in practically all modern electronics, led to many technological developments and a significant expansion of the U.S. technology industry.[442] This, in turn, led to the establishment of many new technology companies and regions around the country such as Silicon Valley in California. Advancements by American microprocessor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel along with both computer software and hardware companies that include Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems created and popularized the personal computer. The ARPANET was developed in the 1960s to meet Defense Department requirements, and became the first of a series of networks which evolved into the Internet.[443]
+
+Accounting for 4.24% of the global population, Americans collectively possess 29.4% of the world's total wealth, and Americans make up roughly half of the world's population of millionaires.[444] The Global Food Security Index ranked the U.S. number one for food affordability and overall food security in March 2013.[445] Americans on average have more than twice as much living space per dwelling and per person as European Union residents, and more than every EU nation.[446] For 2017 the United Nations Development Programme ranked the United States 13th among 189 countries in its Human Development Index and 25th among 151 countries in its inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI).[447]
+
+Wealth, like income and taxes, is highly concentrated; the richest 10% of the adult population possess 72% of the country's household wealth, while the bottom half claim only 2%.[448] According to a September 2017 report by the Federal Reserve, the top 1% controlled 38.6% of the country's wealth in 2016.[449] According to a 2018 study by the OECD, the United States has a larger percentage of low-income workers than almost any other developed nation. This is largely because at-risk workers get almost no government support and are further set back by a very weak collective bargaining system.[450] The top one percent of income-earners accounted for 52 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2015, where income is defined as market income excluding government transfers.[451] In 2018, U.S. income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau.[452]
+
+After years of stagnation, median household income reached a record high in 2016 following two consecutive years of record growth. Income inequality remains at record highs however, with the top fifth of earners taking home more than half of all overall income.[454] The rise in the share of total annual income received by the top one percent, which has more than doubled from nine percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2011, has significantly affected income inequality,[455] leaving the United States with one of the widest income distributions among OECD nations.[456]  The extent and relevance of income inequality is a matter of debate.[457][458][459]
+
+Between June 2007 and November 2008, the global recession led to falling asset prices around the world. Assets owned by Americans lost about a quarter of their value.[460] Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth was down $14 trillion, but has since increased $14 trillion over 2006 levels.[461] At the end of 2014, household debt amounted to $11.8 trillion,[462] down from $13.8 trillion at the end of 2008.[463]
+
+There were about 578,424 sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in the US in January 2014, with almost two-thirds staying in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program.[464] In 2011, 16.7 million children lived in food-insecure households, about 35% more than 2007 levels, though only 1.1% of U.S. children, or 845,000, saw reduced food intake or disrupted eating patterns at some point during the year, and most cases were not chronic.[465] As of June 2018[update], 40 million people, roughly 12.7% of the U.S. population, were living in poverty, with 18.5 million of those living in deep poverty (a family income below one-half of the poverty threshold) and over five million live "in 'Third World' conditions." In 2016, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, which made up 32.6% of the impoverished population.[466] In 2017, the U.S. state or territory with the lowest poverty rate was New Hampshire (7.6%), and the one with the highest was American Samoa (65%).[467][468][469]
+
+Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of public roads.[471] The United States has the world's second-largest automobile market,[472] and has the highest rate of per-capita vehicle ownership in the world, with 765 vehicles per 1,000 Americans (1996).[473][needs update] In 2017, there were 255,009,283 non-two wheel motor vehicles, or about 910 vehicles per 1,000 people.[474]
+
+The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned and has been largely deregulated since 1978, while most major airports are publicly owned.[475] The three largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are US-based; American Airlines is number one after its 2013 acquisition by US Airways.[476] Of the world's 50 busiest passenger airports, 16 are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.[477]
+
+The United States energy market is about 29,000 terawatt hours per year.[478] In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear and renewable energy sources.[479]
+
+Since 2007, the total greenhouse gas emissions by the United States are the second highest by country, exceeded only by China.[480] The United States has historically been the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gas emissions per capita remain high.[481]
+
+The United States is home to many cultures and a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.[483][484] Aside from the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors settled or immigrated within the past five centuries.[485] Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.[483][486] More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.[483]
+
+Americans have traditionally been characterized by a strong work ethic, competitiveness, and individualism,[487] as well as a unifying belief in an "American creed" emphasizing liberty, equality, private property, democracy, rule of law, and a preference for limited government.[488] Americans are extremely charitable by global standards. According to a 2006 British study, Americans gave 1.67% of GDP to charity, more than any other nation studied.[489][490][491]
+
+The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants.[492] Whether this perception is accurate has been a topic of debate.[493][494][495][496][420][497] While mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,[498] scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.[499] While Americans tend  to greatly value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is also generally seen as a positive attribute.[500]
+
+In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.[501] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."[502]
+
+Twelve U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Bob Dylan in 2016. William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[503] Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.[504]
+
+The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty, and later Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of American philosophical academia. John Rawls and Robert Nozick also led a revival of political philosophy.
+
+In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.[505] Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new, individualistic styles. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.[506] Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.[507]
+
+Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain with about three-quarters of grain products made of wheat flour[508] and many dishes use indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers.[509] These homegrown foods are part of a shared national menu on one of America's most popular holidays, Thanksgiving, when some Americans make traditional foods to celebrate the occasion.[510]
+
+The American fast food industry, the world's largest,[511] pioneered the drive-through format in the 1940s.[512] Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[513] Americans drink three times as much coffee as tea.[514] Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.[515][516]
+
+Although little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music.
+
+The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European and African traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s.[517]
+
+Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. Rock bands such as Metallica, the Eagles, and Aerosmith are among the highest grossing in worldwide sales.[518][519][520] In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk.
+
+More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities,[517] as have contemporary musical artists such as Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West, and Ariana Grande.[521]
+
+Hollywood, a northern district of Los Angeles, California, is one of the leaders in motion picture production.[522] The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope.[523] Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, although in the 21st century an increasing number of films are not made there, and film companies have been subject to the forces of globalization.[524]
+
+Director D. W. Griffith, the top American filmmaker during the silent film period, was central to the development of film grammar, and producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising.[525] Directors such as John Ford redefined the image of the American Old West, and, like others such as John Huston, broadened the possibilities of cinema with location shooting. The industry enjoyed its golden years, in what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood," from the early sound period until the early 1960s,[526] with screen actors such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe becoming iconic figures.[527][528] In the 1970s, "New Hollywood" or the "Hollywood Renaissance"[529] was defined by grittier films influenced by French and Italian realist pictures of the post-war period.[530] In more recent times, directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron have gained renown for their blockbuster films, often characterized by high production costs and earnings.
+
+Notable films topping the American Film Institute's AFI 100 list include Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time,[531][532] Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Graduate (1967), On the Waterfront (1954), Schindler's List (1993), Singin' in the Rain (1952), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).[533] The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, have been held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1929,[534] and the Golden Globe Awards have been held annually since January 1944.[535]
+
+American football is by several measures the most popular spectator sport;[537] the National Football League (NFL) has the highest average attendance of any sports league in the world, and the Super Bowl is watched by tens of millions globally. Baseball has been regarded as the U.S. national sport since the late 19th century, with Major League Baseball (MLB) being the top league. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports, with the top leagues being the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL). College football and basketball attract large audiences.[538] In soccer, the country hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the men's national soccer team qualified for ten World Cups and the women's team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup four times; Major League Soccer is the sport's highest league in the United States (featuring 23 American and three Canadian teams). The market for professional sports in the United States is roughly $69 billion, roughly 50% larger than that of all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined.[539]
+
+Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri were the first ever Olympic Games held outside of Europe.[540] As of 2017[update], the United States has won 2,522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 305 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.[541]
+While most major U.S. sports such as baseball and American football have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, some of which have become popular worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.[542] The most watched individual sports are golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR.[543][544]
+
+The four major broadcasters in the U.S. are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX). The four major broadcast television networks are all commercial entities. Cable television offers hundreds of channels catering to a variety of niches.[545] Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercial, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.[546]
+
+In 1998, the number of U.S. commercial radio stations had grown to 4,793 AM stations and 5,662 FM stations. In addition, there are 1,460 public radio stations. Most of these stations are run by universities and public authorities for educational purposes and are financed by public or private funds, subscriptions, and corporate underwriting. Much public-radio broadcasting is supplied by NPR. NPR was incorporated in February 1970 under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967; its television counterpart, PBS, was created by the same legislation. As of September 30, 2014[update], there are 15,433 licensed full-power radio stations in the U.S. according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).[547]
+
+Well-known newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.[548] Although the cost of publishing has increased over the years, the price of newspapers has generally remained low, forcing newspapers to rely more on advertising revenue and on articles provided by a major wire service, such as the Associated Press or Reuters, for their national and world coverage. With very few exceptions, all the newspapers in the U.S. are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families. Major cities often have "alternative weeklies" to complement the mainstream daily papers, such as New York City's The Village Voice or Los Angeles' LA Weekly. Major cities may also support a local business journal, trade papers relating to local industries, and papers for local ethnic and social groups. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Twitter.[549]
+
+More than 800 publications are produced in Spanish, the second most commonly used language in the United States behind English.[550][551]
+
+Internet sources
+

en/1870.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,332 @@
+
+
+Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100
+
+The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country mostly located in central North America, between Canada and Mexico. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions.[i] At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), it is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area.[e] With a 2019 estimated population of over 328 million,[7] the U.S. is the third most populous country in the world. The Americans are a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been shaped through centuries of immigration. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City.
+
+Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago,[19] and European colonization began in the 16th century. The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolutionary War lasting between 1775 and 1783, leading to independence.[20] Beginning in the late 18th century, the United States vigorously expanded across North America, gradually acquiring new territories,[21] killing and displacing Native Americans, and admitting new states. By 1848, the United States spanned the continent.[21]
+Slavery was legal in much of the United States until the second half of the 19th century, when the American Civil War led to its abolition.[22][23]
+
+The Spanish–American War and World War I entrenched the U.S. as a world power, a status confirmed by the outcome of World War II. It was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.[24]
+
+The United States is a federal republic and a representative democracy. It is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), NATO, and other international organizations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
+
+A highly developed country, the United States is the world's largest economy and accounts for approximately a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP).[25] The United States is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter of goods, by value.[26][27] Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total,[28] it holds 29.4% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share held by any country.[29] Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, median income, median wealth, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity.[30][31] It is the foremost military power in the world, making up more than a third of global military spending,[32] and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.[33]
+
+The first known use of the name "America" dates back to 1507, when it appeared on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. On this map, the name applied to South America in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.[34] After returning from his expeditions, Vespucci first postulated that the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern limit, as initially thought by Christopher Columbus, but instead were part of an entirely separate landmass thus far unknown to the Europeans.[35] In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator used the name "America" on his own world map, applying it to the entire Western Hemisphere.[36]
+
+The first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written by Stephen Moylan, Esq., to Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort.[37][38][39] The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.[40]
+
+The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed no later than June 17, 1776, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'".[41] The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'".[42] In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence.[41] This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.[41]
+
+The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms are the "U.S.," the "USA," and "America." Colloquial names are the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States." "Columbia," a name popular in poetry and songs of the late 18th century, derives its origin from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia." Many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.[43]
+
+The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865.[44] The singular form—e.g., "the United States is"—became popular after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States." The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.[45]
+
+A citizen of the United States is an "American." "United States," "American" and "U.S." refer to the country adjectivally ("American values," "U.S. forces"). In English, the word "American" rarely refers to topics or subjects not directly connected with the United States.[46]
+
+It has been generally accepted that the first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 12,000 years ago; however, increasing evidence suggests an even earlier arrival.[19][47][48] After crossing the land bridge, the Paleo-Indians moved southward along the Pacific coast[49] and through an interior ice-free corridor.[50] The Clovis culture, which appeared around 11,000 BC, was initially believed to represent the first wave of human settlement of the Americas.[51][52] It is likely these represent the first of three major waves of migration into North America.[53]
+
+Over time, indigenous cultures in North America grew increasingly complex, and some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture in the southeast, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies.[54] The Mississippian culture flourished in the south from 800 to 1600 AD, extending from the Mexican border down through Florida.[55] Its city state Cahokia is the largest, most complex pre-Columbian archaeological site in the modern-day United States.[56] In the Four Corners region, Ancestral Puebloan culture developed from centuries of agricultural experimentation.[57]
+
+Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Taos Pueblo.[58][59] The earthworks constructed by Native Americans of the Poverty Point culture have also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the southern Great Lakes region, the Iroquois Confederacy was established at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.[60] Most prominent along the Atlantic coast were the Algonquian tribes, who practiced hunting and trapping, along with limited cultivation.
+
+With the progress of European colonization in the territories of the contemporary United States, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[61] The native population of America declined after European arrival for various reasons,[62][63] primarily diseases such as smallpox and measles.[64][65]
+
+Estimating the native population of North America at the time of European contact is difficult.[66][67] Douglas H. Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution estimated that there was a population of 92,916 in the south Atlantic states and a population of 473,616 in the Gulf states,[68] but most academics regard this figure as too low.[66] Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns believed the populations were much higher, suggesting 1,100,000 along the shores of the gulf of Mexico, 2,211,000 people living between Florida and Massachusetts, 5,250,000 in the Mississippi Valley and tributaries and 697,000 people in the Florida peninsula.[66][67]
+
+In the early days of colonization, many European settlers were subject to food shortages, disease, and attacks from Native Americans. Native Americans were also often at war with neighboring tribes and allied with Europeans in their colonial wars. In many cases, however, natives and settlers came to depend on each other. Settlers traded for food and animal pelts; natives for guns, ammunition and other European goods.[69] Natives taught many settlers to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. European missionaries and others felt it was important to "civilize" the Native Americans and urged them to adopt European agricultural techniques and lifestyles.[70][71]
+
+With the advancement of European colonization in North America, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[72] The first Europeans to arrive in the contiguous United States were Spanish conquistadors such as Juan Ponce de León, who made his first visit to Florida in 1513. Even earlier, Christopher Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his 1493 voyage. The Spanish set up the first settlements in Florida and New Mexico such as Saint Augustine[73] and Santa Fe. The French established their own as well along the Mississippi River. Successful English settlement on the eastern coast of North America began with the Virginia Colony in 1607 at Jamestown and with the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. Many settlers were dissenting Christian groups who came seeking religious freedom. The continent's first elected legislative assembly, Virginia's House of Burgesses, was created in 1619. The Mayflower Compact, signed by the Pilgrims before disembarking, and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, established precedents for the pattern of representative self-government and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies.[74][75]
+
+Most settlers in every colony were small farmers, though other industries were formed. Cash crops included tobacco, rice, and wheat. Extraction industries grew up in furs, fishing and lumber. Manufacturers produced rum and ships, and by the late colonial period, Americans were producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply.[76] Cities eventually dotted the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs. English colonists were supplemented by waves of Scotch-Irish immigrants and other groups. As coastal land grew more expensive, freed indentured servants claimed lands further west.[77]
+
+A large-scale slave trade with English privateers began.[78] Because of less disease and better food and treatment, the life expectancy of slaves was much higher in North America than further south, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.[79][80] Colonial society was largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, and colonies passed acts for and against the practice.[81][82] But by the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in the South.[83]
+
+With the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were administered by the British as overseas dependencies.[84] All nonetheless had local governments with elections open to most free men.[85] With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grew rapidly. Relatively small Native American populations were eclipsed.[86] The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest both in religion and in religious liberty.[87]
+
+During the Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans, who were being conquered and displaced, the 13 British colonies had a population of over 2.1 million in 1770, about a third that of Britain. Despite continuing, new arrivals, the rate of natural increase was such that by the 1770s only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas.[88] The colonies' distance from Britain had allowed the development of self-government, but their unprecedented success motivated monarchs to periodically seek to reassert royal authority.[89]
+
+In 1774, the Spanish Navy ship Santiago, under Juan Pérez, entered and anchored in an inlet of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, in present-day British Columbia. Although the Spanish did not land, natives paddled to the ship to trade furs for abalone shells from California.[90] At the time, the Spanish were able to monopolize the trade between Asia and North America, granting limited licenses to the Portuguese. When the Russians began establishing a growing fur trading system in Alaska, the Spanish began to challenge the Russians, with Pérez's voyage being the first of many to the Pacific Northwest.[91][j]
+
+During his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook became the first European to begin formal contact with Hawaii.[93] Captain Cook's last voyage included sailing along the coast of North America and Alaska searching for a Northwest Passage for approximately nine months.[94]
+
+The American Revolutionary War was the first successful colonial war of independence against a European power. Americans had developed an ideology of "republicanism" asserting that government rested on the will of the people as expressed in their local legislatures. They demanded their rights as Englishmen and "no taxation without representation". The British insisted on administering the empire through Parliament, and the conflict escalated into war.[95]
+
+The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that Great Britain was not protecting Americans' unalienable rights. July 4 is celebrated annually as Independence Day.[96] In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a decentralized government that operated until 1789.[96]
+
+Following the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781,[97] Britain signed the peace treaty of 1783, and American sovereignty was internationally recognized and the country was granted all lands east of the Mississippi River. Nationalists led the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788. The federal government was reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789. George Washington, who had led the Continental Army to victory, was the first president elected under the new constitution. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.[98]
+
+Although the federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808, after 1820, cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and along with it, the slave population.[99][100][101] The Second Great Awakening, especially 1800–1840, converted millions to evangelical Protestantism. In the North, it energized multiple social reform movements, including abolitionism;[102] in the South, Methodists and Baptists proselytized among slave populations.[103]
+
+Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of American Indian Wars.[104] The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation's area.[105] The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism.[106] A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819.[107] The expansion was aided by steam power, when steamboats began traveling along America's large water systems, many of which were connected by new canals, such as the Erie and the I&M; then, even faster railroads began their stretch across the nation's land.[108]
+
+From 1820 to 1850, Jacksonian democracy began a set of reforms which included wider white male suffrage; it led to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that forcibly resettled Indians into the west on Indian reservations. The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 during a period of expansionist Manifest destiny.[109] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest.[110] Victory in the Mexican–American War resulted in the 1848 Mexican Cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest.[111]
+The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 spurred migration to the Pacific coast, which led to the California Genocide[112][113][114][115] and the creation of additional western states.[116] After the Civil War, new transcontinental railways made relocation easier for settlers, expanded internal trade and increased conflicts with Native Americans.[117] In 1869, a new Peace Policy nominally promised to protect Native Americans from abuses, avoid further war, and secure their eventual U.S. citizenship. Nonetheless, large-scale conflicts continued throughout the West into the 1900s.
+
+Irreconcilable sectional conflict regarding the slavery of Africans and African Americans ultimately led to the American Civil War.[118] Initially, states entering the Union had alternated between slave and free states, keeping a sectional balance in the Senate, while free states outstripped slave states in population and in the House of Representatives. But with additional western territory and more free-soil states, tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over federalism and disposition of the territories, as well as whether to expand or restrict slavery.[119]
+
+With the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, conventions in thirteen slave states ultimately declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "South" or the "Confederacy"), while the federal government (the "Union") maintained that secession was illegal.[119] In order to bring about this secession, military action was initiated by the secessionists, and the Union responded in kind. The ensuing war would become the deadliest military conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of approximately 618,000 soldiers as well as many civilians.[120] The Union initially simply fought to keep the country united. Nevertheless, as casualties mounted after 1863 and Lincoln delivered his Emancipation Proclamation, the main purpose of the war from the Union's viewpoint became the abolition of slavery. Indeed, when the Union ultimately won the war in April 1865, each of the states in the defeated South was required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery.
+
+The government enacted three constitutional amendments in the years after the war: the aforementioned Thirteenth as well as the Fourteenth Amendment providing citizenship to the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves,[121] and the Fifteenth Amendment ensuring in theory that African Americans had the right to vote. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power[122] aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the South while guaranteeing the rights of the newly freed slaves.
+
+Reconstruction began in earnest following the war. While President Lincoln attempted to foster friendship and forgiveness between the Union and the former Confederacy, his assassination on April 14, 1865, drove a wedge between North and South again. Republicans in the federal government made it their goal to oversee the rebuilding of the South and to ensure the rights of African Americans. They persisted until the Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to cease protecting the rights of African Americans in the South in order for Democrats to concede the presidential election of 1876.
+
+Southern white Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers," took control of the South after the end of Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1910 the Redeemers established so-called Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising most blacks and some poor whites throughout the region. Blacks faced racial segregation, especially in the South.[123] They also occasionally experienced vigilante violence, including lynching.[124]
+
+In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe supplied a surplus of labor for the country's industrialization and transformed its culture.[126] National infrastructure including telegraph and transcontinental railroads spurred economic growth and greater settlement and development of the American Old West. The later invention of electric light and the telephone would also affect communication and urban life.[127]
+
+The United States fought Indian Wars west of the Mississippi River from 1810 to at least 1890.[128] Most of these conflicts ended with the cession of Native American territory and their confinement to Indian reservations. This further expanded acreage under mechanical cultivation, increasing surpluses for international markets.[129] Mainland expansion also included the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.[130] In 1893, pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the monarchy and formed the Republic of Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were ceded by Spain in the same year, following the Spanish–American War.[131] American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the end of the Second Samoan Civil War.[132] The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.[133]
+
+Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. Tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie led the nation's progress in railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. Banking became a major part of the economy, with J. P. Morgan playing a notable role. The American economy boomed, becoming the world's largest, and the United States achieved great power status.[134] These dramatic changes were accompanied by social unrest and the rise of populist, socialist, and anarchist movements.[135] This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which saw significant reforms including women's suffrage, alcohol prohibition, regulation of consumer goods, greater antitrust measures to ensure competition and attention to worker conditions.[136][137][138]
+
+The United States remained neutral from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 until 1917, when it joined the war as an "associated power," alongside the formal Allies of World War I, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson took a leading diplomatic role at the Paris Peace Conference and advocated strongly for the U.S. to join the League of Nations. However, the Senate refused to approve this and did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles that established the League of Nations.[139]
+
+In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage.[140] The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of radio for mass communication and the invention of early television.[141] The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal.[142] The Great Migration of millions of African Americans out of the American South began before World War I and extended through the 1960s;[143] whereas the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration.[144]
+
+At first effectively neutral during World War II, the United States began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers.[145] Although Japan attacked the United States first, the U.S. nonetheless pursued a "Europe first" defense policy.[146] The United States thus left its vast Asian colony, the Philippines, isolated and fighting a losing struggle against Japanese invasion and occupation, as military resources were devoted to the European theater. During the war, the United States was referred to as one of the "Four Policemen"[147] of Allies power who met to plan the postwar world, along with Britain, the Soviet Union and China.[148][149] Although the nation lost around 400,000 military personnel,[150] it emerged relatively undamaged from the war with even greater economic and military influence.[151]
+
+The United States played a leading role in the Bretton Woods and Yalta conferences with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and other Allies, which signed agreements on new international financial institutions and Europe's postwar reorganization. As an Allied victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war.[152] The United States and Japan then fought each other in the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.[153][154] The United States eventually developed the first nuclear weapons and used them on Japan in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese surrendered on September 2, ending World War II.[155][156]
+
+After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for power, influence, and prestige during what became known as the Cold War, driven by an ideological divide between capitalism and communism.[157] They dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its NATO allies on one side and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other. The U.S. developed a policy of containment towards the expansion of communist influence. While the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict.[citation needed]
+
+The United States often opposed Third World movements that it viewed as Soviet-sponsored, and occasionally pursued direct action for regime change against left-wing governments, even supporting right-wing authoritarian governments at times.[158] American troops fought communist Chinese and North Korean forces in the Korean War of 1950–53.[159] The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite and its 1961 launch of the first manned spaceflight initiated a "Space Race" in which the United States became the first nation to land a man on the moon in 1969.[159] A proxy war in Southeast Asia eventually evolved into full American participation, as the Vietnam War.[citation needed]
+
+At home, the U.S. experienced sustained economic expansion and a rapid growth of its population and middle class. Construction of an Interstate Highway System transformed the nation's infrastructure over the following decades. Millions moved from farms and inner cities to large suburban housing developments.[160][161] In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th and last U.S. state added to the country.[162] The growing Civil Rights Movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader and figurehead. A combination of court decisions and legislation, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, sought to end racial discrimination.[163][164][165] Meanwhile, a counterculture movement grew which was fueled by opposition to the Vietnam war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution.
+
+The launch of a "War on Poverty" expanded entitlements and welfare spending, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that provide health coverage to the elderly and poor, respectively, and the means-tested Food Stamp Program and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.[166]
+
+The 1970s and early 1980s saw the onset of stagflation. After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan responded to economic stagnation with free-market oriented reforms. Following the collapse of détente, he abandoned "containment" and initiated the more aggressive "rollback" strategy towards the USSR.[167][168][169][170][171] After a surge in female labor participation over the previous decade, by 1985 the majority of women aged 16 and over were employed.[172]
+
+The late 1980s brought a "thaw" in relations with the USSR, and its collapse in 1991 finally ended the Cold War.[173][174][175][176] This brought about unipolarity[177] with the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The concept of Pax Americana, which had appeared in the post-World War II period, gained wide popularity as a term for the post-Cold War new world order.[citation needed]
+
+After the Cold War, the conflict in the Middle East triggered a crisis in 1990, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, an ally of the United States. Fearing the instability would spread to other regions, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Shield, a defensive force buildup in Saudi Arabia, and Operation Desert Storm, in a staging titled the Gulf War; waged by coalition forces from 34 nations, led by the United States against Iraq ending in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restoration of the monarchy.[178]
+
+Originating within U.S. military defense networks, the Internet spread to international academic platforms and then to the public in the 1990s, greatly affecting the global economy, society, and culture.[179] Due to the dot-com boom, stable monetary policy, and reduced social welfare spending, the 1990s saw the longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history.[180] Beginning in 1994, the U.S. entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), prompting trade among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to soar.[181]
+
+On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people.[182] In response, the United States launched the War on Terror, which included a war in Afghanistan and the 2003–11 Iraq War.[183][184]
+
+Government policy designed to promote affordable housing,[185] widespread failures in corporate and regulatory governance,[186] and historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve[187] led to the mid-2000s housing bubble, which culminated with the 2008 financial crisis, the nation's largest economic contraction since the Great Depression.[188] Barack Obama, the first African-American[189] and multiracial[190] president, was elected in 2008 amid the crisis,[191] and subsequently passed stimulus measures and the Dodd–Frank Act in an attempt to mitigate its negative effects and ensure there would not be a repeat of the crisis. In 2010, the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, which made the most sweeping reforms to the nation's healthcare system in nearly five decades, including mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges.[citation needed]
+
+American forces in Iraq were withdrawn in large numbers in 2009 and 2010, and the war in the region was declared formally over in December 2011.[192] But months earlier, Operation Neptune Spear led to the death of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.[193] In the presidential election of 2016, Republican Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States. On January 20, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed.[194] As of July 2020, the United States has over 4 million COVID-19 cases and over 145,000 deaths.[195] The United States is, by far, the country with the most cases of COVID-19 since April 11, 2020.[196]
+
+The 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia occupy a combined area of 3,119,884.69 square miles (8,080,464.3 km2). Of this area, 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2) is contiguous land, composing 83.65% of total U.S. land area.[197][198] Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, is 10,931 square miles (28,311 km2) in area. The populated territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands together cover 9,185 square miles (23,789 km2).[199] Measured by only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.[200]
+
+The United States is the world's third- or fourth-largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and nearly equal to China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted, and how the total size of the United States is measured.[e][201][202]
+
+The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont.[203] The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest.[204] The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast.[204]
+
+The Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking around 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado.[205] Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Chihuahua and Mojave.[206] The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast, both ranges reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m). The lowest and highest points in the contiguous United States are in the state of California,[207] and only about 84 miles (135 km) apart.[208] At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali is the highest peak in the country and in North America.[209] Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature.[210]
+
+The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.[211] The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains have an alpine climate. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Hawaii and the southern tip of Florida are tropical, as well as its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.[212] States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur in the country, mainly in Tornado Alley areas in the Midwest and South.[213] Overall, the United States has the world's most violent weather, receiving more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world.[214]
+
+The U.S. ecology is megadiverse: about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and more than 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland.[216] The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 bird species, 311 reptile species, and 295 amphibian species,[217] as well as about 91,000 insect species.[218]
+
+There are 62 national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas.[219] Altogether, the government owns about 28% of the country's land area,[220] mostly in the western states.[221] Most of this land is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching, and about .86% is used for military purposes.[222][223]
+
+Environmental issues include debates on oil and nuclear energy, dealing with air and water pollution, the economic costs of protecting wildlife, logging and deforestation,[224][225] and international responses to global warming.[226][227] The most prominent environmental agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by presidential order in 1970.[228] The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act.[229] The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is intended to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.[230]
+
+The U.S. Census Bureau officially estimated the country's population to be 328,239,523 as of July 1, 2019.[231] In addition, the Census Bureau provides a continuously updated U.S. Population Clock that approximates the latest population of the 50 states and District of Columbia based on the Bureau's most recent demographic trends.[234] According to the clock, on May 23, 2020, the U.S. population exceeded 329 million residents, with a net gain of one person every 19 seconds, or about 4,547 people per day. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world, after China and India. In 2018 the median age of the United States population was 38.1 years.[235]
+
+In 2018, there were almost 90 million immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrants (second-generation Americans) in the United States, accounting for 28% of the overall U.S. population.[236] The United States has a very diverse population; 37 ancestry groups have more than one million members.[237] German Americans are the largest ethnic group (more than 50 million)—followed by Irish Americans (circa 37 million), Mexican Americans (circa 31 million) and English Americans (circa 28 million).[238][239]
+
+White Americans (mostly European ancestry) are the largest racial group at 73.1% of the population; African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third-largest ancestry group.[237] Asian Americans are the country's second-largest racial minority; the three largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans.[237] The largest American community with European ancestry is German Americans, which consists of more than 14% of the total population.[240] In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively).[241] The census counted more than 19 million people of "Some Other Race" who were "unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories in 2010, more than 18.5 million (97%) of whom are of Hispanic ethnicity.[241]
+
+In 2017, out of the U.S. foreign-born population, some 45% (20.7 million) were naturalized citizens, 27% (12.3 million) were lawful permanent residents (including many eligible to become citizens), 6% (2.2 million) were temporary lawful residents, and 23% (10.5 million) were unauthorized immigrants.[242] Among current living immigrants to the U.S., the top five countries of birth are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and El Salvador. Until 2017 and 2018, the United States led the world in refugee resettlement for decades, admitted more refugees than the rest of the world combined.[243] From fiscal year 1980 until 2017, 55% of refugees came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 13% from Africa, and 4% from Latin America.[243]
+
+A 2017 United Nations report projected that the U.S. would be one of nine countries in which world population growth through 2050 would be concentrated.[244] A 2020 U.S. Census Bureau report projected the population of the country could be anywhere between 320 million and 447 million by 2060, depending on the rate of in-migration; in all projected scenarios, a lower fertility rate and increases in life expectancy would result in an aging population.[245] The United States has an annual birth rate of 13 per 1,000, which is five births per 1,000 below the world average.[246] Its population growth rate is positive at 0.7%, higher than that of many developed nations.[247]
+
+About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (including suburbs);[202] about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000.[248] In 2008, 273 incorporated municipalities had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than one million residents, and four cities had over two million (namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston).[249] Estimates for the year 2018 show that 53 metropolitan areas have populations greater than one million. Many metros in the South, Southwest and West grew significantly between 2010 and 2018. The Dallas and Houston metros increased by more than a million people, while the Washington, D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and Phoenix metros all grew by more than 500,000 people.
+
+English (specifically, American English) is the de facto national language of the United States. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2010, about 230 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. 12% of the population speaks Spanish at home, making it the second most common language. Spanish is also the most widely taught second language.[250][251]
+
+Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii.[252] In addition to English, Alaska recognizes twenty official Native languages,[253][k] and South Dakota recognizes Sioux.[254] While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French.[255] Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms.[256]
+
+Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan[257] is officially recognized by American Samoa and Chamorro[258] is an official language of Guam. Both Carolinian and Chamorro have official recognition in the Northern Mariana Islands.[259]
+Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico and is more widely spoken than English there.[260]
+
+The most widely taught foreign languages in the United States, in terms of enrollment numbers from kindergarten through university undergraduate education, are Spanish (around 7.2 million students), French (1.5 million), and German (500,000). Other commonly taught languages include Latin, Japanese, ASL, Italian, and Chinese.[261][262] 18% of all Americans claim to speak both English and another language.[263]
+
+Religion in the United States (2017)[266]
+
+The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids Congress from passing laws respecting its establishment.
+
+In a 2013 survey, 56% of Americans said religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other Western nation.[267] In a 2009 Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they attended church weekly or almost weekly; the figures ranged from a low of 23% in Vermont to a high of 63% in Mississippi.[268]
+
+In a 2014 survey, 70.6% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians;[269] Protestants accounted for 46.5%, while Roman Catholics, at 20.8%, formed the largest single Christian group.[270] In 2014, 5.9% of the U.S. adult population claimed a non-Christian religion.[271] These include Judaism (1.9%), Islam (0.9%), Hinduism (0.7%), and Buddhism (0.7%).[271] The survey also reported that 22.8% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist or simply having no religion—up from 8.2% in 1990.[270][272][273] There are also Unitarian Universalist, Scientologist, Baha'i, Sikh, Jain, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Satanist, Taoist, Druid, Native American, Afro-American, traditional African, Wiccan, Gnostic, humanist and deist communities.[274][275]
+
+Protestantism is the largest Christian religious grouping in the United States, accounting for almost half of all Americans. Baptists collectively form the largest branch of Protestantism at 15.4%,[276] and the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest individual Protestant denomination at 5.3% of the U.S. population.[276] Apart from Baptists, other Protestant categories include nondenominational Protestants, Methodists, Pentecostals, unspecified Protestants, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, other Reformed, Episcopalians/Anglicans, Quakers, Adventists, Holiness, Christian fundamentalists, Anabaptists, Pietists, and multiple others.[276]
+
+As with other Western countries, the U.S. is becoming less religious. Irreligion is growing rapidly among Americans under 30.[277] Polls show that overall American confidence in organized religion has been declining since the mid to late 1980s,[278] and that younger Americans, in particular, are becoming increasingly irreligious.[271][279] In a 2012 study, the Protestant share of the U.S. population had dropped to 48%, thus ending its status as religious category of the majority for the first time.[280][281] Americans with no religion have 1.7 children compared to 2.2 among Christians. The unaffiliated are less likely to marry with 37% marrying compared to 52% of Christians.[282]
+
+The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. By contrast, religion plays the least important role in New England and in the Western United States.[268]
+
+As of 2018[update], 52% of Americans age 15 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 32% had never been married.[283] Women now work mostly outside the home and receive the majority of bachelor's degrees.[284]
+
+The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is 26.5 per 1,000 women. The rate has declined by 57% since 1991.[285] Abortion is legal throughout the country. Abortion rates, currently 241 per 1,000 live births and 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, are falling but remain higher than most Western nations.[286] In 2013, the average age at first birth was 26 and 41% of births were to unmarried women.[287]
+
+The total fertility rate in 2016 was 1820.5 births per 1000 women.[288] Adoption in the United States is common and relatively easy from a legal point of view (compared to other Western countries).[289] As of 2001[update], with more than 127,000 adoptions, the U.S. accounted for nearly half of the total number of adoptions worldwide.[needs update][290] Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, and it is legal for same-sex couples to adopt. Polygamy is illegal throughout the U.S.[291]
+
+In 2019, the U.S. had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.[292]
+
+The United States had a life expectancy of 78.6 years at birth in 2017, which was the third year of declines in life expectancy following decades of continuous increase. The recent decline, primarily among the age group 25 to 64, is largely due to sharp increases in the drug overdose and suicide rates; the country has one of the highest suicide rates among wealthy countries.[293][294] Life expectancy was highest among Asians and Hispanics and lowest among blacks.[295][296] According to CDC and Census Bureau data, deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug overdoses hit record highs in 2017.[297]
+
+Increasing obesity in the United States and health improvements elsewhere contributed to lowering the country's rank in life expectancy from 11th in the world in 1987, to 42nd in 2007, and as of 2017 the country had the lowest life expectancy among Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and seven countries of western Europe.[298][299] Obesity rates have more than doubled in the last 30 years and are the highest in the industrialized world.[300][301] Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight.[302] Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.[303]
+
+In 2010, coronary artery disease, lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and traffic accidents caused the most years of life lost in the U.S. Low back pain, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety caused the most years lost to disability. The most harmful risk factors were poor diet, tobacco smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, physical inactivity, and alcohol use. Alzheimer's disease, drug abuse, kidney disease, cancer, and falls caused the most additional years of life lost over their age-adjusted 1990 per-capita rates.[304] U.S. teenage pregnancy and abortion rates are substantially higher than in other Western nations, especially among blacks and Hispanics.[305]
+
+Health-care coverage in the United States is a combination of public and private efforts and is not universal. In 2017, 12.2% of the population did not carry health insurance.[306] The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue.[307][308] Federal legislation, passed in early 2010, roughly halved the uninsured share of the population, though the bill and its ultimate effect are issues of controversy.[309][310] The U.S. health-care system far outspends any other nation, measured both in per capita spending and as percentage of GDP.[311] At the same time, the U.S. is a global leader in medical innovation.[312]
+
+American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. In most states, children are required to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn 18 (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at 16 or 17.[313]
+
+About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.[314] The U.S. spends more on education per student than any nation in the world, spending more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student.[315][needs update] Some 80% of U.S. college students attend public universities.[316]
+
+Of Americans 25 and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees.[317] The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.[202][318] The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.[319]
+
+The United States has many private and public institutions of higher education. The majority of the world's top universities, as listed by various ranking organizations, are in the U.S.[320][321][322] There are also local community colleges with generally more open admission policies, shorter academic programs, and lower tuition.
+
+In 2018, U21, a network of research-intensive universities, ranked the United States first in the world for breadth and quality of higher education, and 15th when GDP was a factor.[323] As for public expenditures on higher education, the U.S. trails some other OECD nations but spends more per student than the OECD average, and more than all nations in combined public and private spending.[315][324] As of 2018[update], student loan debt exceeded 1.5 trillion dollars.[325][326]
+
+The United States is a federal republic of 50 states, a federal district, five territories and several uninhabited island possessions.[327][328][329] It is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law."[330] For 2018, the U.S. ranked 25th on the Democracy Index.[331] On Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index its public sector position deteriorated from a score of 76 in 2015 to 69 in 2019.[332]
+
+In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government: federal, state, and local. The local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district.
+
+The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document.[333] The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus. The Constitution has been amended 27 times;[334] the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights. All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review and any law ruled by the courts to be in violation of the Constitution is voided. The principle of judicial review, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was established by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison (1803)[335] in a decision handed down by Chief Justice John Marshall.[336]
+
+The federal government comprises three branches:
+
+The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population. Each state then draws single-member districts to conform with the census apportionment. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories each have one member of Congress—these members are not allowed to vote.[341]
+
+The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one-third of Senate seats are up for election every two years. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories do not have senators.[341] The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia.[342] The Supreme Court, led by the chief justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.[343]
+
+The state governments are structured in a roughly similar fashion, though Nebraska has a unicameral legislature.[344] The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.
+
+The 50 states are the principal administrative divisions in the country. These are subdivided into counties or county equivalents and further divided into municipalities. The District of Columbia is a federal district that contains the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C.[345] The states and the District of Columbia choose the president of the United States. Each state has presidential electors equal to the number of their representatives and senators in Congress; the District of Columbia has three (because of the 23rd Amendment).[346] Territories of the United States such as Puerto Rico do not have presidential electors, and so people in those territories cannot vote for the president.[341]
+
+The United States also observes tribal sovereignty of the American Indian nations to a limited degree, as it does with the states' sovereignty. American Indians are U.S. citizens and tribal lands are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress and the federal courts. Like the states they have a great deal of autonomy, but also like the states, tribes are not allowed to make war, engage in their own foreign relations, or print and issue currency.[347]
+
+Citizenship is granted at birth in all states, the District of Columbia, and all major U.S. territories except American Samoa.[348][349][m]
+
+The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history.[352] For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote. The president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College.[353]
+
+In American political culture, the center-right Republican Party is considered "conservative" and the center-left Democratic Party is considered "liberal."[354][355] The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states," are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.
+
+Republican Donald Trump, the winner of the 2016 presidential election, is serving as the 45th president of the United States.[356] Leadership in the Senate includes Republican vice president Mike Pence, Republican president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.[357] Leadership in the House includes Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.[358]
+
+In the 116th United States Congress, the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democratic Party and the Senate is controlled by the Republican Party, giving the U.S. a split Congress. The Senate consists of 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats; the House consists of 233 Democrats, 196 Republicans, and 1 Libertarian.[359] Of state governors, there are 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. Among the D.C. mayor and the five territorial governors, there are two Republicans, one Democrat, one New Progressive, and two Independents.[360]
+
+The United States has an established structure of foreign relations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. New York City is home to the United Nations Headquarters. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States (although the U.S. still maintains unofficial relations with Bhutan and Taiwan).[361] It is a member of the G7,[362] G20, and OECD.
+
+The United States has a "Special Relationship" with the United Kingdom[363] and strong ties with India, Canada,[364] Australia,[365] New Zealand,[366] the Philippines,[367] Japan,[368] South Korea,[369] Israel,[370] and several European Union countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.[371] It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Colombia is traditionally considered by the United States as its most loyal ally in South America.[372][373]
+
+The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau through the Compact of Free Association.[374]
+
+Taxation in the United States is levied at the federal, state, and local government levels. This includes taxes on income, payroll, property, sales, imports, estates, and gifts, as well as various fees. Taxation in the United States is based on citizenship, not residency.[375] Both non-resident citizens and Green Card holders living abroad are taxed on their income irrespective of where they live or where their income is earned. The United States is one of the only countries in the world to do so.[376]
+
+In 2010 taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP.[377] Based on CBO estimates,[378] under 2013 tax law the top 1% will be paying the highest average tax rates since 1979, while other income groups will remain at historic lows.[379] For 2018, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 400 households was 23%, compared to 24.2% for the bottom half of U.S. households.[380]
+
+
+
+During fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $3.54 trillion on a budget or cash basis, down $60 billion or 1.7% vs. fiscal year 2011 spending of $3.60 trillion. Major categories of fiscal year 2012 spending included: Medicare & Medicaid (23%), Social Security (22%), Defense Department (19%), non-defense discretionary (17%), other mandatory (13%) and interest (6%).[382]
+
+The total national debt of the United States in the United States was $18.527 trillion (106% of the GDP) in 2014.[383][n] The United States has the largest external debt in the world[387] and the 34th largest government debt as a % of GDP in the world.[388]
+
+The president is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and by the Department of the Navy during times of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.[389]
+
+Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System.[390] American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's 11 active aircraft carriers, and Marine expeditionary units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad,[391] and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries.[392]
+
+The military budget of the United States in 2011 was more than $700 billion, 41% of global military spending. At 4.7% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top 15 military spenders, after Saudi Arabia.[393]  Defense spending plays a major role in science and technology investment, with roughly half of U.S. federal research and development funded by the Department of Defense.[394] Defense's share of the overall U.S. economy has generally declined in recent decades, from Cold War peaks of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 and 69.5% of federal outlays in 1954 to 4.7% of GDP and 18.8% of federal outlays in 2011.[395]
+
+The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.[396] More than 90% of the world's 14,000 nuclear weapons are owned by Russia and the United States.[397]
+
+Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police departments and sheriff's offices, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties, including protecting civil rights, national security and enforcing U.S. federal courts' rulings and federal laws.[398] State courts conduct most criminal trials while federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state criminal courts.
+
+A cross-sectional analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed that United States "homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher."[399] In 2016, the US murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000.[400] Gun ownership rights, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, continue to be the subject of contention.
+
+The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world.[401] As of 2020, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that there were some 2.3 million people incarcerated.[402]  The imprisonment rate for all prisoners sentenced to more than a year in state or federal facilities is 478 per 100,000 in 2013.[403] According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of inmates held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses.[404] About 9% of prisoners are held in privatized prisons.[402] The practice of privately operated prisons began in the 1980s and has been a subject of contention.[405]
+
+Capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and at the state level in 30 states.[406][407] No executions took place from 1967 to 1977, owing in part to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Since the decision there have been more than 1,300 executions, a majority of these taking place in three states: Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.[408] Meanwhile, several states have either abolished or struck down death penalty laws. In 2019, the country had the sixth-highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.[409]
+
+According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $16.8 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 19% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).[417] The United States is the largest importer of goods and second-largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2010, the total U.S. trade deficit was $635 billion.[418] Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners.[419]
+
+From 1983 to 2008, U.S. real compounded annual GDP growth was 3.3%, compared to a 2.3% weighted average for the rest of the G7.[420] The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita[421] and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP.[417] The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.[422]
+
+In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 86.4% of the economy.[425] While its economy has reached a postindustrial level of development, the United States remains an industrial power.[426] Consumer spending comprised 68% of the U.S. economy in 2015.[427] In August 2010, the American labor force consisted of 154.1 million people (50%). With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people. It has a smaller welfare state and redistributes less income through government action than most European nations.[428]
+
+The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation[429] and is one of a few countries in the world without paid family leave as a legal right.[430] While federal law does not require sick leave, it is a common benefit for government workers and full-time employees at corporations.[431] 74% of full-time American workers get paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although only 24% of part-time workers get the same benefits.[431] In 2009, the United States had the third-highest workforce productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands.[432]
+
+
+
+The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. Methods for producing interchangeable parts were developed by the U.S. War Department by the Federal Armories during the first half of the 19th century. This technology, along with the establishment of a machine tool industry, enabled the U.S. to have large-scale manufacturing of sewing machines, bicycles, and other items in the late 19th century and became known as the American system of manufacturing. Factory electrification in the early 20th century and introduction of the assembly line and other labor-saving techniques created the system of mass production.[433] In the 21st century, approximately two-thirds of research and development funding comes from the private sector.[434] The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor.[435][436]
+
+In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's research laboratory, one of the first of its kind, developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera.[437] The latter led to emergence of the worldwide entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.[438]
+
+The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann, to immigrate to the United States.[439] During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age, while the Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and aeronautics.[440][441]
+
+The invention of the transistor in the 1950s, a key active component in practically all modern electronics, led to many technological developments and a significant expansion of the U.S. technology industry.[442] This, in turn, led to the establishment of many new technology companies and regions around the country such as Silicon Valley in California. Advancements by American microprocessor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel along with both computer software and hardware companies that include Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems created and popularized the personal computer. The ARPANET was developed in the 1960s to meet Defense Department requirements, and became the first of a series of networks which evolved into the Internet.[443]
+
+Accounting for 4.24% of the global population, Americans collectively possess 29.4% of the world's total wealth, and Americans make up roughly half of the world's population of millionaires.[444] The Global Food Security Index ranked the U.S. number one for food affordability and overall food security in March 2013.[445] Americans on average have more than twice as much living space per dwelling and per person as European Union residents, and more than every EU nation.[446] For 2017 the United Nations Development Programme ranked the United States 13th among 189 countries in its Human Development Index and 25th among 151 countries in its inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI).[447]
+
+Wealth, like income and taxes, is highly concentrated; the richest 10% of the adult population possess 72% of the country's household wealth, while the bottom half claim only 2%.[448] According to a September 2017 report by the Federal Reserve, the top 1% controlled 38.6% of the country's wealth in 2016.[449] According to a 2018 study by the OECD, the United States has a larger percentage of low-income workers than almost any other developed nation. This is largely because at-risk workers get almost no government support and are further set back by a very weak collective bargaining system.[450] The top one percent of income-earners accounted for 52 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2015, where income is defined as market income excluding government transfers.[451] In 2018, U.S. income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau.[452]
+
+After years of stagnation, median household income reached a record high in 2016 following two consecutive years of record growth. Income inequality remains at record highs however, with the top fifth of earners taking home more than half of all overall income.[454] The rise in the share of total annual income received by the top one percent, which has more than doubled from nine percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2011, has significantly affected income inequality,[455] leaving the United States with one of the widest income distributions among OECD nations.[456]  The extent and relevance of income inequality is a matter of debate.[457][458][459]
+
+Between June 2007 and November 2008, the global recession led to falling asset prices around the world. Assets owned by Americans lost about a quarter of their value.[460] Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth was down $14 trillion, but has since increased $14 trillion over 2006 levels.[461] At the end of 2014, household debt amounted to $11.8 trillion,[462] down from $13.8 trillion at the end of 2008.[463]
+
+There were about 578,424 sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in the US in January 2014, with almost two-thirds staying in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program.[464] In 2011, 16.7 million children lived in food-insecure households, about 35% more than 2007 levels, though only 1.1% of U.S. children, or 845,000, saw reduced food intake or disrupted eating patterns at some point during the year, and most cases were not chronic.[465] As of June 2018[update], 40 million people, roughly 12.7% of the U.S. population, were living in poverty, with 18.5 million of those living in deep poverty (a family income below one-half of the poverty threshold) and over five million live "in 'Third World' conditions." In 2016, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, which made up 32.6% of the impoverished population.[466] In 2017, the U.S. state or territory with the lowest poverty rate was New Hampshire (7.6%), and the one with the highest was American Samoa (65%).[467][468][469]
+
+Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of public roads.[471] The United States has the world's second-largest automobile market,[472] and has the highest rate of per-capita vehicle ownership in the world, with 765 vehicles per 1,000 Americans (1996).[473][needs update] In 2017, there were 255,009,283 non-two wheel motor vehicles, or about 910 vehicles per 1,000 people.[474]
+
+The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned and has been largely deregulated since 1978, while most major airports are publicly owned.[475] The three largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are US-based; American Airlines is number one after its 2013 acquisition by US Airways.[476] Of the world's 50 busiest passenger airports, 16 are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.[477]
+
+The United States energy market is about 29,000 terawatt hours per year.[478] In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear and renewable energy sources.[479]
+
+Since 2007, the total greenhouse gas emissions by the United States are the second highest by country, exceeded only by China.[480] The United States has historically been the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gas emissions per capita remain high.[481]
+
+The United States is home to many cultures and a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.[483][484] Aside from the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors settled or immigrated within the past five centuries.[485] Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.[483][486] More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.[483]
+
+Americans have traditionally been characterized by a strong work ethic, competitiveness, and individualism,[487] as well as a unifying belief in an "American creed" emphasizing liberty, equality, private property, democracy, rule of law, and a preference for limited government.[488] Americans are extremely charitable by global standards. According to a 2006 British study, Americans gave 1.67% of GDP to charity, more than any other nation studied.[489][490][491]
+
+The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants.[492] Whether this perception is accurate has been a topic of debate.[493][494][495][496][420][497] While mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,[498] scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.[499] While Americans tend  to greatly value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is also generally seen as a positive attribute.[500]
+
+In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.[501] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."[502]
+
+Twelve U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Bob Dylan in 2016. William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[503] Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.[504]
+
+The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty, and later Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of American philosophical academia. John Rawls and Robert Nozick also led a revival of political philosophy.
+
+In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.[505] Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new, individualistic styles. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.[506] Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.[507]
+
+Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain with about three-quarters of grain products made of wheat flour[508] and many dishes use indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers.[509] These homegrown foods are part of a shared national menu on one of America's most popular holidays, Thanksgiving, when some Americans make traditional foods to celebrate the occasion.[510]
+
+The American fast food industry, the world's largest,[511] pioneered the drive-through format in the 1940s.[512] Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[513] Americans drink three times as much coffee as tea.[514] Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.[515][516]
+
+Although little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music.
+
+The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European and African traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s.[517]
+
+Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. Rock bands such as Metallica, the Eagles, and Aerosmith are among the highest grossing in worldwide sales.[518][519][520] In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk.
+
+More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities,[517] as have contemporary musical artists such as Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West, and Ariana Grande.[521]
+
+Hollywood, a northern district of Los Angeles, California, is one of the leaders in motion picture production.[522] The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope.[523] Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, although in the 21st century an increasing number of films are not made there, and film companies have been subject to the forces of globalization.[524]
+
+Director D. W. Griffith, the top American filmmaker during the silent film period, was central to the development of film grammar, and producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising.[525] Directors such as John Ford redefined the image of the American Old West, and, like others such as John Huston, broadened the possibilities of cinema with location shooting. The industry enjoyed its golden years, in what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood," from the early sound period until the early 1960s,[526] with screen actors such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe becoming iconic figures.[527][528] In the 1970s, "New Hollywood" or the "Hollywood Renaissance"[529] was defined by grittier films influenced by French and Italian realist pictures of the post-war period.[530] In more recent times, directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron have gained renown for their blockbuster films, often characterized by high production costs and earnings.
+
+Notable films topping the American Film Institute's AFI 100 list include Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time,[531][532] Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Graduate (1967), On the Waterfront (1954), Schindler's List (1993), Singin' in the Rain (1952), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).[533] The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, have been held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1929,[534] and the Golden Globe Awards have been held annually since January 1944.[535]
+
+American football is by several measures the most popular spectator sport;[537] the National Football League (NFL) has the highest average attendance of any sports league in the world, and the Super Bowl is watched by tens of millions globally. Baseball has been regarded as the U.S. national sport since the late 19th century, with Major League Baseball (MLB) being the top league. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports, with the top leagues being the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL). College football and basketball attract large audiences.[538] In soccer, the country hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the men's national soccer team qualified for ten World Cups and the women's team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup four times; Major League Soccer is the sport's highest league in the United States (featuring 23 American and three Canadian teams). The market for professional sports in the United States is roughly $69 billion, roughly 50% larger than that of all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined.[539]
+
+Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri were the first ever Olympic Games held outside of Europe.[540] As of 2017[update], the United States has won 2,522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 305 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.[541]
+While most major U.S. sports such as baseball and American football have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, some of which have become popular worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.[542] The most watched individual sports are golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR.[543][544]
+
+The four major broadcasters in the U.S. are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX). The four major broadcast television networks are all commercial entities. Cable television offers hundreds of channels catering to a variety of niches.[545] Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercial, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.[546]
+
+In 1998, the number of U.S. commercial radio stations had grown to 4,793 AM stations and 5,662 FM stations. In addition, there are 1,460 public radio stations. Most of these stations are run by universities and public authorities for educational purposes and are financed by public or private funds, subscriptions, and corporate underwriting. Much public-radio broadcasting is supplied by NPR. NPR was incorporated in February 1970 under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967; its television counterpart, PBS, was created by the same legislation. As of September 30, 2014[update], there are 15,433 licensed full-power radio stations in the U.S. according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).[547]
+
+Well-known newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.[548] Although the cost of publishing has increased over the years, the price of newspapers has generally remained low, forcing newspapers to rely more on advertising revenue and on articles provided by a major wire service, such as the Associated Press or Reuters, for their national and world coverage. With very few exceptions, all the newspapers in the U.S. are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families. Major cities often have "alternative weeklies" to complement the mainstream daily papers, such as New York City's The Village Voice or Los Angeles' LA Weekly. Major cities may also support a local business journal, trade papers relating to local industries, and papers for local ethnic and social groups. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Twitter.[549]
+
+More than 800 publications are produced in Spanish, the second most commonly used language in the United States behind English.[550][551]
+
+Internet sources
+

en/1871.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,332 @@
+
+
+Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100
+
+The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country mostly located in central North America, between Canada and Mexico. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions.[i] At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), it is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area.[e] With a 2019 estimated population of over 328 million,[7] the U.S. is the third most populous country in the world. The Americans are a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been shaped through centuries of immigration. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City.
+
+Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago,[19] and European colonization began in the 16th century. The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolutionary War lasting between 1775 and 1783, leading to independence.[20] Beginning in the late 18th century, the United States vigorously expanded across North America, gradually acquiring new territories,[21] killing and displacing Native Americans, and admitting new states. By 1848, the United States spanned the continent.[21]
+Slavery was legal in much of the United States until the second half of the 19th century, when the American Civil War led to its abolition.[22][23]
+
+The Spanish–American War and World War I entrenched the U.S. as a world power, a status confirmed by the outcome of World War II. It was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.[24]
+
+The United States is a federal republic and a representative democracy. It is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), NATO, and other international organizations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
+
+A highly developed country, the United States is the world's largest economy and accounts for approximately a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP).[25] The United States is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter of goods, by value.[26][27] Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total,[28] it holds 29.4% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share held by any country.[29] Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, median income, median wealth, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity.[30][31] It is the foremost military power in the world, making up more than a third of global military spending,[32] and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.[33]
+
+The first known use of the name "America" dates back to 1507, when it appeared on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. On this map, the name applied to South America in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.[34] After returning from his expeditions, Vespucci first postulated that the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern limit, as initially thought by Christopher Columbus, but instead were part of an entirely separate landmass thus far unknown to the Europeans.[35] In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator used the name "America" on his own world map, applying it to the entire Western Hemisphere.[36]
+
+The first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written by Stephen Moylan, Esq., to Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort.[37][38][39] The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.[40]
+
+The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed no later than June 17, 1776, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'".[41] The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'".[42] In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence.[41] This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.[41]
+
+The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms are the "U.S.," the "USA," and "America." Colloquial names are the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States." "Columbia," a name popular in poetry and songs of the late 18th century, derives its origin from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia." Many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.[43]
+
+The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865.[44] The singular form—e.g., "the United States is"—became popular after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States." The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.[45]
+
+A citizen of the United States is an "American." "United States," "American" and "U.S." refer to the country adjectivally ("American values," "U.S. forces"). In English, the word "American" rarely refers to topics or subjects not directly connected with the United States.[46]
+
+It has been generally accepted that the first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 12,000 years ago; however, increasing evidence suggests an even earlier arrival.[19][47][48] After crossing the land bridge, the Paleo-Indians moved southward along the Pacific coast[49] and through an interior ice-free corridor.[50] The Clovis culture, which appeared around 11,000 BC, was initially believed to represent the first wave of human settlement of the Americas.[51][52] It is likely these represent the first of three major waves of migration into North America.[53]
+
+Over time, indigenous cultures in North America grew increasingly complex, and some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture in the southeast, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies.[54] The Mississippian culture flourished in the south from 800 to 1600 AD, extending from the Mexican border down through Florida.[55] Its city state Cahokia is the largest, most complex pre-Columbian archaeological site in the modern-day United States.[56] In the Four Corners region, Ancestral Puebloan culture developed from centuries of agricultural experimentation.[57]
+
+Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Taos Pueblo.[58][59] The earthworks constructed by Native Americans of the Poverty Point culture have also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the southern Great Lakes region, the Iroquois Confederacy was established at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.[60] Most prominent along the Atlantic coast were the Algonquian tribes, who practiced hunting and trapping, along with limited cultivation.
+
+With the progress of European colonization in the territories of the contemporary United States, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[61] The native population of America declined after European arrival for various reasons,[62][63] primarily diseases such as smallpox and measles.[64][65]
+
+Estimating the native population of North America at the time of European contact is difficult.[66][67] Douglas H. Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution estimated that there was a population of 92,916 in the south Atlantic states and a population of 473,616 in the Gulf states,[68] but most academics regard this figure as too low.[66] Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns believed the populations were much higher, suggesting 1,100,000 along the shores of the gulf of Mexico, 2,211,000 people living between Florida and Massachusetts, 5,250,000 in the Mississippi Valley and tributaries and 697,000 people in the Florida peninsula.[66][67]
+
+In the early days of colonization, many European settlers were subject to food shortages, disease, and attacks from Native Americans. Native Americans were also often at war with neighboring tribes and allied with Europeans in their colonial wars. In many cases, however, natives and settlers came to depend on each other. Settlers traded for food and animal pelts; natives for guns, ammunition and other European goods.[69] Natives taught many settlers to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. European missionaries and others felt it was important to "civilize" the Native Americans and urged them to adopt European agricultural techniques and lifestyles.[70][71]
+
+With the advancement of European colonization in North America, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[72] The first Europeans to arrive in the contiguous United States were Spanish conquistadors such as Juan Ponce de León, who made his first visit to Florida in 1513. Even earlier, Christopher Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his 1493 voyage. The Spanish set up the first settlements in Florida and New Mexico such as Saint Augustine[73] and Santa Fe. The French established their own as well along the Mississippi River. Successful English settlement on the eastern coast of North America began with the Virginia Colony in 1607 at Jamestown and with the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. Many settlers were dissenting Christian groups who came seeking religious freedom. The continent's first elected legislative assembly, Virginia's House of Burgesses, was created in 1619. The Mayflower Compact, signed by the Pilgrims before disembarking, and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, established precedents for the pattern of representative self-government and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies.[74][75]
+
+Most settlers in every colony were small farmers, though other industries were formed. Cash crops included tobacco, rice, and wheat. Extraction industries grew up in furs, fishing and lumber. Manufacturers produced rum and ships, and by the late colonial period, Americans were producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply.[76] Cities eventually dotted the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs. English colonists were supplemented by waves of Scotch-Irish immigrants and other groups. As coastal land grew more expensive, freed indentured servants claimed lands further west.[77]
+
+A large-scale slave trade with English privateers began.[78] Because of less disease and better food and treatment, the life expectancy of slaves was much higher in North America than further south, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.[79][80] Colonial society was largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, and colonies passed acts for and against the practice.[81][82] But by the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in the South.[83]
+
+With the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were administered by the British as overseas dependencies.[84] All nonetheless had local governments with elections open to most free men.[85] With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grew rapidly. Relatively small Native American populations were eclipsed.[86] The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest both in religion and in religious liberty.[87]
+
+During the Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans, who were being conquered and displaced, the 13 British colonies had a population of over 2.1 million in 1770, about a third that of Britain. Despite continuing, new arrivals, the rate of natural increase was such that by the 1770s only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas.[88] The colonies' distance from Britain had allowed the development of self-government, but their unprecedented success motivated monarchs to periodically seek to reassert royal authority.[89]
+
+In 1774, the Spanish Navy ship Santiago, under Juan Pérez, entered and anchored in an inlet of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, in present-day British Columbia. Although the Spanish did not land, natives paddled to the ship to trade furs for abalone shells from California.[90] At the time, the Spanish were able to monopolize the trade between Asia and North America, granting limited licenses to the Portuguese. When the Russians began establishing a growing fur trading system in Alaska, the Spanish began to challenge the Russians, with Pérez's voyage being the first of many to the Pacific Northwest.[91][j]
+
+During his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook became the first European to begin formal contact with Hawaii.[93] Captain Cook's last voyage included sailing along the coast of North America and Alaska searching for a Northwest Passage for approximately nine months.[94]
+
+The American Revolutionary War was the first successful colonial war of independence against a European power. Americans had developed an ideology of "republicanism" asserting that government rested on the will of the people as expressed in their local legislatures. They demanded their rights as Englishmen and "no taxation without representation". The British insisted on administering the empire through Parliament, and the conflict escalated into war.[95]
+
+The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that Great Britain was not protecting Americans' unalienable rights. July 4 is celebrated annually as Independence Day.[96] In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a decentralized government that operated until 1789.[96]
+
+Following the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781,[97] Britain signed the peace treaty of 1783, and American sovereignty was internationally recognized and the country was granted all lands east of the Mississippi River. Nationalists led the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788. The federal government was reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789. George Washington, who had led the Continental Army to victory, was the first president elected under the new constitution. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.[98]
+
+Although the federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808, after 1820, cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and along with it, the slave population.[99][100][101] The Second Great Awakening, especially 1800–1840, converted millions to evangelical Protestantism. In the North, it energized multiple social reform movements, including abolitionism;[102] in the South, Methodists and Baptists proselytized among slave populations.[103]
+
+Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of American Indian Wars.[104] The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation's area.[105] The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism.[106] A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819.[107] The expansion was aided by steam power, when steamboats began traveling along America's large water systems, many of which were connected by new canals, such as the Erie and the I&M; then, even faster railroads began their stretch across the nation's land.[108]
+
+From 1820 to 1850, Jacksonian democracy began a set of reforms which included wider white male suffrage; it led to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that forcibly resettled Indians into the west on Indian reservations. The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 during a period of expansionist Manifest destiny.[109] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest.[110] Victory in the Mexican–American War resulted in the 1848 Mexican Cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest.[111]
+The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 spurred migration to the Pacific coast, which led to the California Genocide[112][113][114][115] and the creation of additional western states.[116] After the Civil War, new transcontinental railways made relocation easier for settlers, expanded internal trade and increased conflicts with Native Americans.[117] In 1869, a new Peace Policy nominally promised to protect Native Americans from abuses, avoid further war, and secure their eventual U.S. citizenship. Nonetheless, large-scale conflicts continued throughout the West into the 1900s.
+
+Irreconcilable sectional conflict regarding the slavery of Africans and African Americans ultimately led to the American Civil War.[118] Initially, states entering the Union had alternated between slave and free states, keeping a sectional balance in the Senate, while free states outstripped slave states in population and in the House of Representatives. But with additional western territory and more free-soil states, tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over federalism and disposition of the territories, as well as whether to expand or restrict slavery.[119]
+
+With the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, conventions in thirteen slave states ultimately declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "South" or the "Confederacy"), while the federal government (the "Union") maintained that secession was illegal.[119] In order to bring about this secession, military action was initiated by the secessionists, and the Union responded in kind. The ensuing war would become the deadliest military conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of approximately 618,000 soldiers as well as many civilians.[120] The Union initially simply fought to keep the country united. Nevertheless, as casualties mounted after 1863 and Lincoln delivered his Emancipation Proclamation, the main purpose of the war from the Union's viewpoint became the abolition of slavery. Indeed, when the Union ultimately won the war in April 1865, each of the states in the defeated South was required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery.
+
+The government enacted three constitutional amendments in the years after the war: the aforementioned Thirteenth as well as the Fourteenth Amendment providing citizenship to the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves,[121] and the Fifteenth Amendment ensuring in theory that African Americans had the right to vote. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power[122] aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the South while guaranteeing the rights of the newly freed slaves.
+
+Reconstruction began in earnest following the war. While President Lincoln attempted to foster friendship and forgiveness between the Union and the former Confederacy, his assassination on April 14, 1865, drove a wedge between North and South again. Republicans in the federal government made it their goal to oversee the rebuilding of the South and to ensure the rights of African Americans. They persisted until the Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to cease protecting the rights of African Americans in the South in order for Democrats to concede the presidential election of 1876.
+
+Southern white Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers," took control of the South after the end of Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1910 the Redeemers established so-called Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising most blacks and some poor whites throughout the region. Blacks faced racial segregation, especially in the South.[123] They also occasionally experienced vigilante violence, including lynching.[124]
+
+In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe supplied a surplus of labor for the country's industrialization and transformed its culture.[126] National infrastructure including telegraph and transcontinental railroads spurred economic growth and greater settlement and development of the American Old West. The later invention of electric light and the telephone would also affect communication and urban life.[127]
+
+The United States fought Indian Wars west of the Mississippi River from 1810 to at least 1890.[128] Most of these conflicts ended with the cession of Native American territory and their confinement to Indian reservations. This further expanded acreage under mechanical cultivation, increasing surpluses for international markets.[129] Mainland expansion also included the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.[130] In 1893, pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the monarchy and formed the Republic of Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were ceded by Spain in the same year, following the Spanish–American War.[131] American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the end of the Second Samoan Civil War.[132] The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.[133]
+
+Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. Tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie led the nation's progress in railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. Banking became a major part of the economy, with J. P. Morgan playing a notable role. The American economy boomed, becoming the world's largest, and the United States achieved great power status.[134] These dramatic changes were accompanied by social unrest and the rise of populist, socialist, and anarchist movements.[135] This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which saw significant reforms including women's suffrage, alcohol prohibition, regulation of consumer goods, greater antitrust measures to ensure competition and attention to worker conditions.[136][137][138]
+
+The United States remained neutral from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 until 1917, when it joined the war as an "associated power," alongside the formal Allies of World War I, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson took a leading diplomatic role at the Paris Peace Conference and advocated strongly for the U.S. to join the League of Nations. However, the Senate refused to approve this and did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles that established the League of Nations.[139]
+
+In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage.[140] The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of radio for mass communication and the invention of early television.[141] The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal.[142] The Great Migration of millions of African Americans out of the American South began before World War I and extended through the 1960s;[143] whereas the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration.[144]
+
+At first effectively neutral during World War II, the United States began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers.[145] Although Japan attacked the United States first, the U.S. nonetheless pursued a "Europe first" defense policy.[146] The United States thus left its vast Asian colony, the Philippines, isolated and fighting a losing struggle against Japanese invasion and occupation, as military resources were devoted to the European theater. During the war, the United States was referred to as one of the "Four Policemen"[147] of Allies power who met to plan the postwar world, along with Britain, the Soviet Union and China.[148][149] Although the nation lost around 400,000 military personnel,[150] it emerged relatively undamaged from the war with even greater economic and military influence.[151]
+
+The United States played a leading role in the Bretton Woods and Yalta conferences with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and other Allies, which signed agreements on new international financial institutions and Europe's postwar reorganization. As an Allied victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war.[152] The United States and Japan then fought each other in the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.[153][154] The United States eventually developed the first nuclear weapons and used them on Japan in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese surrendered on September 2, ending World War II.[155][156]
+
+After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for power, influence, and prestige during what became known as the Cold War, driven by an ideological divide between capitalism and communism.[157] They dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its NATO allies on one side and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other. The U.S. developed a policy of containment towards the expansion of communist influence. While the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict.[citation needed]
+
+The United States often opposed Third World movements that it viewed as Soviet-sponsored, and occasionally pursued direct action for regime change against left-wing governments, even supporting right-wing authoritarian governments at times.[158] American troops fought communist Chinese and North Korean forces in the Korean War of 1950–53.[159] The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite and its 1961 launch of the first manned spaceflight initiated a "Space Race" in which the United States became the first nation to land a man on the moon in 1969.[159] A proxy war in Southeast Asia eventually evolved into full American participation, as the Vietnam War.[citation needed]
+
+At home, the U.S. experienced sustained economic expansion and a rapid growth of its population and middle class. Construction of an Interstate Highway System transformed the nation's infrastructure over the following decades. Millions moved from farms and inner cities to large suburban housing developments.[160][161] In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th and last U.S. state added to the country.[162] The growing Civil Rights Movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader and figurehead. A combination of court decisions and legislation, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, sought to end racial discrimination.[163][164][165] Meanwhile, a counterculture movement grew which was fueled by opposition to the Vietnam war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution.
+
+The launch of a "War on Poverty" expanded entitlements and welfare spending, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that provide health coverage to the elderly and poor, respectively, and the means-tested Food Stamp Program and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.[166]
+
+The 1970s and early 1980s saw the onset of stagflation. After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan responded to economic stagnation with free-market oriented reforms. Following the collapse of détente, he abandoned "containment" and initiated the more aggressive "rollback" strategy towards the USSR.[167][168][169][170][171] After a surge in female labor participation over the previous decade, by 1985 the majority of women aged 16 and over were employed.[172]
+
+The late 1980s brought a "thaw" in relations with the USSR, and its collapse in 1991 finally ended the Cold War.[173][174][175][176] This brought about unipolarity[177] with the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The concept of Pax Americana, which had appeared in the post-World War II period, gained wide popularity as a term for the post-Cold War new world order.[citation needed]
+
+After the Cold War, the conflict in the Middle East triggered a crisis in 1990, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, an ally of the United States. Fearing the instability would spread to other regions, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Shield, a defensive force buildup in Saudi Arabia, and Operation Desert Storm, in a staging titled the Gulf War; waged by coalition forces from 34 nations, led by the United States against Iraq ending in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restoration of the monarchy.[178]
+
+Originating within U.S. military defense networks, the Internet spread to international academic platforms and then to the public in the 1990s, greatly affecting the global economy, society, and culture.[179] Due to the dot-com boom, stable monetary policy, and reduced social welfare spending, the 1990s saw the longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history.[180] Beginning in 1994, the U.S. entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), prompting trade among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to soar.[181]
+
+On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people.[182] In response, the United States launched the War on Terror, which included a war in Afghanistan and the 2003–11 Iraq War.[183][184]
+
+Government policy designed to promote affordable housing,[185] widespread failures in corporate and regulatory governance,[186] and historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve[187] led to the mid-2000s housing bubble, which culminated with the 2008 financial crisis, the nation's largest economic contraction since the Great Depression.[188] Barack Obama, the first African-American[189] and multiracial[190] president, was elected in 2008 amid the crisis,[191] and subsequently passed stimulus measures and the Dodd–Frank Act in an attempt to mitigate its negative effects and ensure there would not be a repeat of the crisis. In 2010, the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, which made the most sweeping reforms to the nation's healthcare system in nearly five decades, including mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges.[citation needed]
+
+American forces in Iraq were withdrawn in large numbers in 2009 and 2010, and the war in the region was declared formally over in December 2011.[192] But months earlier, Operation Neptune Spear led to the death of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.[193] In the presidential election of 2016, Republican Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States. On January 20, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed.[194] As of July 2020, the United States has over 4 million COVID-19 cases and over 145,000 deaths.[195] The United States is, by far, the country with the most cases of COVID-19 since April 11, 2020.[196]
+
+The 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia occupy a combined area of 3,119,884.69 square miles (8,080,464.3 km2). Of this area, 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2) is contiguous land, composing 83.65% of total U.S. land area.[197][198] Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, is 10,931 square miles (28,311 km2) in area. The populated territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands together cover 9,185 square miles (23,789 km2).[199] Measured by only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.[200]
+
+The United States is the world's third- or fourth-largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and nearly equal to China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted, and how the total size of the United States is measured.[e][201][202]
+
+The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont.[203] The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest.[204] The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast.[204]
+
+The Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking around 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado.[205] Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Chihuahua and Mojave.[206] The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast, both ranges reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m). The lowest and highest points in the contiguous United States are in the state of California,[207] and only about 84 miles (135 km) apart.[208] At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali is the highest peak in the country and in North America.[209] Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature.[210]
+
+The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.[211] The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains have an alpine climate. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Hawaii and the southern tip of Florida are tropical, as well as its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.[212] States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur in the country, mainly in Tornado Alley areas in the Midwest and South.[213] Overall, the United States has the world's most violent weather, receiving more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world.[214]
+
+The U.S. ecology is megadiverse: about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and more than 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland.[216] The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 bird species, 311 reptile species, and 295 amphibian species,[217] as well as about 91,000 insect species.[218]
+
+There are 62 national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas.[219] Altogether, the government owns about 28% of the country's land area,[220] mostly in the western states.[221] Most of this land is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching, and about .86% is used for military purposes.[222][223]
+
+Environmental issues include debates on oil and nuclear energy, dealing with air and water pollution, the economic costs of protecting wildlife, logging and deforestation,[224][225] and international responses to global warming.[226][227] The most prominent environmental agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by presidential order in 1970.[228] The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act.[229] The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is intended to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.[230]
+
+The U.S. Census Bureau officially estimated the country's population to be 328,239,523 as of July 1, 2019.[231] In addition, the Census Bureau provides a continuously updated U.S. Population Clock that approximates the latest population of the 50 states and District of Columbia based on the Bureau's most recent demographic trends.[234] According to the clock, on May 23, 2020, the U.S. population exceeded 329 million residents, with a net gain of one person every 19 seconds, or about 4,547 people per day. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world, after China and India. In 2018 the median age of the United States population was 38.1 years.[235]
+
+In 2018, there were almost 90 million immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrants (second-generation Americans) in the United States, accounting for 28% of the overall U.S. population.[236] The United States has a very diverse population; 37 ancestry groups have more than one million members.[237] German Americans are the largest ethnic group (more than 50 million)—followed by Irish Americans (circa 37 million), Mexican Americans (circa 31 million) and English Americans (circa 28 million).[238][239]
+
+White Americans (mostly European ancestry) are the largest racial group at 73.1% of the population; African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third-largest ancestry group.[237] Asian Americans are the country's second-largest racial minority; the three largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans.[237] The largest American community with European ancestry is German Americans, which consists of more than 14% of the total population.[240] In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively).[241] The census counted more than 19 million people of "Some Other Race" who were "unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories in 2010, more than 18.5 million (97%) of whom are of Hispanic ethnicity.[241]
+
+In 2017, out of the U.S. foreign-born population, some 45% (20.7 million) were naturalized citizens, 27% (12.3 million) were lawful permanent residents (including many eligible to become citizens), 6% (2.2 million) were temporary lawful residents, and 23% (10.5 million) were unauthorized immigrants.[242] Among current living immigrants to the U.S., the top five countries of birth are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and El Salvador. Until 2017 and 2018, the United States led the world in refugee resettlement for decades, admitted more refugees than the rest of the world combined.[243] From fiscal year 1980 until 2017, 55% of refugees came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 13% from Africa, and 4% from Latin America.[243]
+
+A 2017 United Nations report projected that the U.S. would be one of nine countries in which world population growth through 2050 would be concentrated.[244] A 2020 U.S. Census Bureau report projected the population of the country could be anywhere between 320 million and 447 million by 2060, depending on the rate of in-migration; in all projected scenarios, a lower fertility rate and increases in life expectancy would result in an aging population.[245] The United States has an annual birth rate of 13 per 1,000, which is five births per 1,000 below the world average.[246] Its population growth rate is positive at 0.7%, higher than that of many developed nations.[247]
+
+About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (including suburbs);[202] about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000.[248] In 2008, 273 incorporated municipalities had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than one million residents, and four cities had over two million (namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston).[249] Estimates for the year 2018 show that 53 metropolitan areas have populations greater than one million. Many metros in the South, Southwest and West grew significantly between 2010 and 2018. The Dallas and Houston metros increased by more than a million people, while the Washington, D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and Phoenix metros all grew by more than 500,000 people.
+
+English (specifically, American English) is the de facto national language of the United States. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2010, about 230 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. 12% of the population speaks Spanish at home, making it the second most common language. Spanish is also the most widely taught second language.[250][251]
+
+Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii.[252] In addition to English, Alaska recognizes twenty official Native languages,[253][k] and South Dakota recognizes Sioux.[254] While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French.[255] Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms.[256]
+
+Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan[257] is officially recognized by American Samoa and Chamorro[258] is an official language of Guam. Both Carolinian and Chamorro have official recognition in the Northern Mariana Islands.[259]
+Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico and is more widely spoken than English there.[260]
+
+The most widely taught foreign languages in the United States, in terms of enrollment numbers from kindergarten through university undergraduate education, are Spanish (around 7.2 million students), French (1.5 million), and German (500,000). Other commonly taught languages include Latin, Japanese, ASL, Italian, and Chinese.[261][262] 18% of all Americans claim to speak both English and another language.[263]
+
+Religion in the United States (2017)[266]
+
+The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids Congress from passing laws respecting its establishment.
+
+In a 2013 survey, 56% of Americans said religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other Western nation.[267] In a 2009 Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they attended church weekly or almost weekly; the figures ranged from a low of 23% in Vermont to a high of 63% in Mississippi.[268]
+
+In a 2014 survey, 70.6% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians;[269] Protestants accounted for 46.5%, while Roman Catholics, at 20.8%, formed the largest single Christian group.[270] In 2014, 5.9% of the U.S. adult population claimed a non-Christian religion.[271] These include Judaism (1.9%), Islam (0.9%), Hinduism (0.7%), and Buddhism (0.7%).[271] The survey also reported that 22.8% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist or simply having no religion—up from 8.2% in 1990.[270][272][273] There are also Unitarian Universalist, Scientologist, Baha'i, Sikh, Jain, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Satanist, Taoist, Druid, Native American, Afro-American, traditional African, Wiccan, Gnostic, humanist and deist communities.[274][275]
+
+Protestantism is the largest Christian religious grouping in the United States, accounting for almost half of all Americans. Baptists collectively form the largest branch of Protestantism at 15.4%,[276] and the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest individual Protestant denomination at 5.3% of the U.S. population.[276] Apart from Baptists, other Protestant categories include nondenominational Protestants, Methodists, Pentecostals, unspecified Protestants, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, other Reformed, Episcopalians/Anglicans, Quakers, Adventists, Holiness, Christian fundamentalists, Anabaptists, Pietists, and multiple others.[276]
+
+As with other Western countries, the U.S. is becoming less religious. Irreligion is growing rapidly among Americans under 30.[277] Polls show that overall American confidence in organized religion has been declining since the mid to late 1980s,[278] and that younger Americans, in particular, are becoming increasingly irreligious.[271][279] In a 2012 study, the Protestant share of the U.S. population had dropped to 48%, thus ending its status as religious category of the majority for the first time.[280][281] Americans with no religion have 1.7 children compared to 2.2 among Christians. The unaffiliated are less likely to marry with 37% marrying compared to 52% of Christians.[282]
+
+The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. By contrast, religion plays the least important role in New England and in the Western United States.[268]
+
+As of 2018[update], 52% of Americans age 15 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 32% had never been married.[283] Women now work mostly outside the home and receive the majority of bachelor's degrees.[284]
+
+The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is 26.5 per 1,000 women. The rate has declined by 57% since 1991.[285] Abortion is legal throughout the country. Abortion rates, currently 241 per 1,000 live births and 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, are falling but remain higher than most Western nations.[286] In 2013, the average age at first birth was 26 and 41% of births were to unmarried women.[287]
+
+The total fertility rate in 2016 was 1820.5 births per 1000 women.[288] Adoption in the United States is common and relatively easy from a legal point of view (compared to other Western countries).[289] As of 2001[update], with more than 127,000 adoptions, the U.S. accounted for nearly half of the total number of adoptions worldwide.[needs update][290] Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, and it is legal for same-sex couples to adopt. Polygamy is illegal throughout the U.S.[291]
+
+In 2019, the U.S. had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.[292]
+
+The United States had a life expectancy of 78.6 years at birth in 2017, which was the third year of declines in life expectancy following decades of continuous increase. The recent decline, primarily among the age group 25 to 64, is largely due to sharp increases in the drug overdose and suicide rates; the country has one of the highest suicide rates among wealthy countries.[293][294] Life expectancy was highest among Asians and Hispanics and lowest among blacks.[295][296] According to CDC and Census Bureau data, deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug overdoses hit record highs in 2017.[297]
+
+Increasing obesity in the United States and health improvements elsewhere contributed to lowering the country's rank in life expectancy from 11th in the world in 1987, to 42nd in 2007, and as of 2017 the country had the lowest life expectancy among Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and seven countries of western Europe.[298][299] Obesity rates have more than doubled in the last 30 years and are the highest in the industrialized world.[300][301] Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight.[302] Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.[303]
+
+In 2010, coronary artery disease, lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and traffic accidents caused the most years of life lost in the U.S. Low back pain, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety caused the most years lost to disability. The most harmful risk factors were poor diet, tobacco smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, physical inactivity, and alcohol use. Alzheimer's disease, drug abuse, kidney disease, cancer, and falls caused the most additional years of life lost over their age-adjusted 1990 per-capita rates.[304] U.S. teenage pregnancy and abortion rates are substantially higher than in other Western nations, especially among blacks and Hispanics.[305]
+
+Health-care coverage in the United States is a combination of public and private efforts and is not universal. In 2017, 12.2% of the population did not carry health insurance.[306] The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue.[307][308] Federal legislation, passed in early 2010, roughly halved the uninsured share of the population, though the bill and its ultimate effect are issues of controversy.[309][310] The U.S. health-care system far outspends any other nation, measured both in per capita spending and as percentage of GDP.[311] At the same time, the U.S. is a global leader in medical innovation.[312]
+
+American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. In most states, children are required to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn 18 (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at 16 or 17.[313]
+
+About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.[314] The U.S. spends more on education per student than any nation in the world, spending more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student.[315][needs update] Some 80% of U.S. college students attend public universities.[316]
+
+Of Americans 25 and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees.[317] The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.[202][318] The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.[319]
+
+The United States has many private and public institutions of higher education. The majority of the world's top universities, as listed by various ranking organizations, are in the U.S.[320][321][322] There are also local community colleges with generally more open admission policies, shorter academic programs, and lower tuition.
+
+In 2018, U21, a network of research-intensive universities, ranked the United States first in the world for breadth and quality of higher education, and 15th when GDP was a factor.[323] As for public expenditures on higher education, the U.S. trails some other OECD nations but spends more per student than the OECD average, and more than all nations in combined public and private spending.[315][324] As of 2018[update], student loan debt exceeded 1.5 trillion dollars.[325][326]
+
+The United States is a federal republic of 50 states, a federal district, five territories and several uninhabited island possessions.[327][328][329] It is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law."[330] For 2018, the U.S. ranked 25th on the Democracy Index.[331] On Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index its public sector position deteriorated from a score of 76 in 2015 to 69 in 2019.[332]
+
+In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government: federal, state, and local. The local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district.
+
+The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document.[333] The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus. The Constitution has been amended 27 times;[334] the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights. All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review and any law ruled by the courts to be in violation of the Constitution is voided. The principle of judicial review, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was established by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison (1803)[335] in a decision handed down by Chief Justice John Marshall.[336]
+
+The federal government comprises three branches:
+
+The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population. Each state then draws single-member districts to conform with the census apportionment. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories each have one member of Congress—these members are not allowed to vote.[341]
+
+The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one-third of Senate seats are up for election every two years. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories do not have senators.[341] The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia.[342] The Supreme Court, led by the chief justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.[343]
+
+The state governments are structured in a roughly similar fashion, though Nebraska has a unicameral legislature.[344] The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.
+
+The 50 states are the principal administrative divisions in the country. These are subdivided into counties or county equivalents and further divided into municipalities. The District of Columbia is a federal district that contains the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C.[345] The states and the District of Columbia choose the president of the United States. Each state has presidential electors equal to the number of their representatives and senators in Congress; the District of Columbia has three (because of the 23rd Amendment).[346] Territories of the United States such as Puerto Rico do not have presidential electors, and so people in those territories cannot vote for the president.[341]
+
+The United States also observes tribal sovereignty of the American Indian nations to a limited degree, as it does with the states' sovereignty. American Indians are U.S. citizens and tribal lands are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress and the federal courts. Like the states they have a great deal of autonomy, but also like the states, tribes are not allowed to make war, engage in their own foreign relations, or print and issue currency.[347]
+
+Citizenship is granted at birth in all states, the District of Columbia, and all major U.S. territories except American Samoa.[348][349][m]
+
+The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history.[352] For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote. The president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College.[353]
+
+In American political culture, the center-right Republican Party is considered "conservative" and the center-left Democratic Party is considered "liberal."[354][355] The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states," are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.
+
+Republican Donald Trump, the winner of the 2016 presidential election, is serving as the 45th president of the United States.[356] Leadership in the Senate includes Republican vice president Mike Pence, Republican president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.[357] Leadership in the House includes Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.[358]
+
+In the 116th United States Congress, the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democratic Party and the Senate is controlled by the Republican Party, giving the U.S. a split Congress. The Senate consists of 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats; the House consists of 233 Democrats, 196 Republicans, and 1 Libertarian.[359] Of state governors, there are 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. Among the D.C. mayor and the five territorial governors, there are two Republicans, one Democrat, one New Progressive, and two Independents.[360]
+
+The United States has an established structure of foreign relations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. New York City is home to the United Nations Headquarters. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States (although the U.S. still maintains unofficial relations with Bhutan and Taiwan).[361] It is a member of the G7,[362] G20, and OECD.
+
+The United States has a "Special Relationship" with the United Kingdom[363] and strong ties with India, Canada,[364] Australia,[365] New Zealand,[366] the Philippines,[367] Japan,[368] South Korea,[369] Israel,[370] and several European Union countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.[371] It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Colombia is traditionally considered by the United States as its most loyal ally in South America.[372][373]
+
+The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau through the Compact of Free Association.[374]
+
+Taxation in the United States is levied at the federal, state, and local government levels. This includes taxes on income, payroll, property, sales, imports, estates, and gifts, as well as various fees. Taxation in the United States is based on citizenship, not residency.[375] Both non-resident citizens and Green Card holders living abroad are taxed on their income irrespective of where they live or where their income is earned. The United States is one of the only countries in the world to do so.[376]
+
+In 2010 taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP.[377] Based on CBO estimates,[378] under 2013 tax law the top 1% will be paying the highest average tax rates since 1979, while other income groups will remain at historic lows.[379] For 2018, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 400 households was 23%, compared to 24.2% for the bottom half of U.S. households.[380]
+
+
+
+During fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $3.54 trillion on a budget or cash basis, down $60 billion or 1.7% vs. fiscal year 2011 spending of $3.60 trillion. Major categories of fiscal year 2012 spending included: Medicare & Medicaid (23%), Social Security (22%), Defense Department (19%), non-defense discretionary (17%), other mandatory (13%) and interest (6%).[382]
+
+The total national debt of the United States in the United States was $18.527 trillion (106% of the GDP) in 2014.[383][n] The United States has the largest external debt in the world[387] and the 34th largest government debt as a % of GDP in the world.[388]
+
+The president is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and by the Department of the Navy during times of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.[389]
+
+Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System.[390] American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's 11 active aircraft carriers, and Marine expeditionary units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad,[391] and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries.[392]
+
+The military budget of the United States in 2011 was more than $700 billion, 41% of global military spending. At 4.7% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top 15 military spenders, after Saudi Arabia.[393]  Defense spending plays a major role in science and technology investment, with roughly half of U.S. federal research and development funded by the Department of Defense.[394] Defense's share of the overall U.S. economy has generally declined in recent decades, from Cold War peaks of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 and 69.5% of federal outlays in 1954 to 4.7% of GDP and 18.8% of federal outlays in 2011.[395]
+
+The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.[396] More than 90% of the world's 14,000 nuclear weapons are owned by Russia and the United States.[397]
+
+Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police departments and sheriff's offices, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties, including protecting civil rights, national security and enforcing U.S. federal courts' rulings and federal laws.[398] State courts conduct most criminal trials while federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state criminal courts.
+
+A cross-sectional analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed that United States "homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher."[399] In 2016, the US murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000.[400] Gun ownership rights, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, continue to be the subject of contention.
+
+The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world.[401] As of 2020, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that there were some 2.3 million people incarcerated.[402]  The imprisonment rate for all prisoners sentenced to more than a year in state or federal facilities is 478 per 100,000 in 2013.[403] According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of inmates held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses.[404] About 9% of prisoners are held in privatized prisons.[402] The practice of privately operated prisons began in the 1980s and has been a subject of contention.[405]
+
+Capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and at the state level in 30 states.[406][407] No executions took place from 1967 to 1977, owing in part to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Since the decision there have been more than 1,300 executions, a majority of these taking place in three states: Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.[408] Meanwhile, several states have either abolished or struck down death penalty laws. In 2019, the country had the sixth-highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.[409]
+
+According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $16.8 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 19% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).[417] The United States is the largest importer of goods and second-largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2010, the total U.S. trade deficit was $635 billion.[418] Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners.[419]
+
+From 1983 to 2008, U.S. real compounded annual GDP growth was 3.3%, compared to a 2.3% weighted average for the rest of the G7.[420] The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita[421] and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP.[417] The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.[422]
+
+In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 86.4% of the economy.[425] While its economy has reached a postindustrial level of development, the United States remains an industrial power.[426] Consumer spending comprised 68% of the U.S. economy in 2015.[427] In August 2010, the American labor force consisted of 154.1 million people (50%). With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people. It has a smaller welfare state and redistributes less income through government action than most European nations.[428]
+
+The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation[429] and is one of a few countries in the world without paid family leave as a legal right.[430] While federal law does not require sick leave, it is a common benefit for government workers and full-time employees at corporations.[431] 74% of full-time American workers get paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although only 24% of part-time workers get the same benefits.[431] In 2009, the United States had the third-highest workforce productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands.[432]
+
+
+
+The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. Methods for producing interchangeable parts were developed by the U.S. War Department by the Federal Armories during the first half of the 19th century. This technology, along with the establishment of a machine tool industry, enabled the U.S. to have large-scale manufacturing of sewing machines, bicycles, and other items in the late 19th century and became known as the American system of manufacturing. Factory electrification in the early 20th century and introduction of the assembly line and other labor-saving techniques created the system of mass production.[433] In the 21st century, approximately two-thirds of research and development funding comes from the private sector.[434] The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor.[435][436]
+
+In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's research laboratory, one of the first of its kind, developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera.[437] The latter led to emergence of the worldwide entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.[438]
+
+The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann, to immigrate to the United States.[439] During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age, while the Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and aeronautics.[440][441]
+
+The invention of the transistor in the 1950s, a key active component in practically all modern electronics, led to many technological developments and a significant expansion of the U.S. technology industry.[442] This, in turn, led to the establishment of many new technology companies and regions around the country such as Silicon Valley in California. Advancements by American microprocessor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel along with both computer software and hardware companies that include Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems created and popularized the personal computer. The ARPANET was developed in the 1960s to meet Defense Department requirements, and became the first of a series of networks which evolved into the Internet.[443]
+
+Accounting for 4.24% of the global population, Americans collectively possess 29.4% of the world's total wealth, and Americans make up roughly half of the world's population of millionaires.[444] The Global Food Security Index ranked the U.S. number one for food affordability and overall food security in March 2013.[445] Americans on average have more than twice as much living space per dwelling and per person as European Union residents, and more than every EU nation.[446] For 2017 the United Nations Development Programme ranked the United States 13th among 189 countries in its Human Development Index and 25th among 151 countries in its inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI).[447]
+
+Wealth, like income and taxes, is highly concentrated; the richest 10% of the adult population possess 72% of the country's household wealth, while the bottom half claim only 2%.[448] According to a September 2017 report by the Federal Reserve, the top 1% controlled 38.6% of the country's wealth in 2016.[449] According to a 2018 study by the OECD, the United States has a larger percentage of low-income workers than almost any other developed nation. This is largely because at-risk workers get almost no government support and are further set back by a very weak collective bargaining system.[450] The top one percent of income-earners accounted for 52 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2015, where income is defined as market income excluding government transfers.[451] In 2018, U.S. income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau.[452]
+
+After years of stagnation, median household income reached a record high in 2016 following two consecutive years of record growth. Income inequality remains at record highs however, with the top fifth of earners taking home more than half of all overall income.[454] The rise in the share of total annual income received by the top one percent, which has more than doubled from nine percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2011, has significantly affected income inequality,[455] leaving the United States with one of the widest income distributions among OECD nations.[456]  The extent and relevance of income inequality is a matter of debate.[457][458][459]
+
+Between June 2007 and November 2008, the global recession led to falling asset prices around the world. Assets owned by Americans lost about a quarter of their value.[460] Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth was down $14 trillion, but has since increased $14 trillion over 2006 levels.[461] At the end of 2014, household debt amounted to $11.8 trillion,[462] down from $13.8 trillion at the end of 2008.[463]
+
+There were about 578,424 sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in the US in January 2014, with almost two-thirds staying in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program.[464] In 2011, 16.7 million children lived in food-insecure households, about 35% more than 2007 levels, though only 1.1% of U.S. children, or 845,000, saw reduced food intake or disrupted eating patterns at some point during the year, and most cases were not chronic.[465] As of June 2018[update], 40 million people, roughly 12.7% of the U.S. population, were living in poverty, with 18.5 million of those living in deep poverty (a family income below one-half of the poverty threshold) and over five million live "in 'Third World' conditions." In 2016, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, which made up 32.6% of the impoverished population.[466] In 2017, the U.S. state or territory with the lowest poverty rate was New Hampshire (7.6%), and the one with the highest was American Samoa (65%).[467][468][469]
+
+Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of public roads.[471] The United States has the world's second-largest automobile market,[472] and has the highest rate of per-capita vehicle ownership in the world, with 765 vehicles per 1,000 Americans (1996).[473][needs update] In 2017, there were 255,009,283 non-two wheel motor vehicles, or about 910 vehicles per 1,000 people.[474]
+
+The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned and has been largely deregulated since 1978, while most major airports are publicly owned.[475] The three largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are US-based; American Airlines is number one after its 2013 acquisition by US Airways.[476] Of the world's 50 busiest passenger airports, 16 are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.[477]
+
+The United States energy market is about 29,000 terawatt hours per year.[478] In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear and renewable energy sources.[479]
+
+Since 2007, the total greenhouse gas emissions by the United States are the second highest by country, exceeded only by China.[480] The United States has historically been the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gas emissions per capita remain high.[481]
+
+The United States is home to many cultures and a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.[483][484] Aside from the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors settled or immigrated within the past five centuries.[485] Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.[483][486] More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.[483]
+
+Americans have traditionally been characterized by a strong work ethic, competitiveness, and individualism,[487] as well as a unifying belief in an "American creed" emphasizing liberty, equality, private property, democracy, rule of law, and a preference for limited government.[488] Americans are extremely charitable by global standards. According to a 2006 British study, Americans gave 1.67% of GDP to charity, more than any other nation studied.[489][490][491]
+
+The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants.[492] Whether this perception is accurate has been a topic of debate.[493][494][495][496][420][497] While mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,[498] scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.[499] While Americans tend  to greatly value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is also generally seen as a positive attribute.[500]
+
+In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.[501] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."[502]
+
+Twelve U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Bob Dylan in 2016. William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[503] Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.[504]
+
+The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty, and later Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of American philosophical academia. John Rawls and Robert Nozick also led a revival of political philosophy.
+
+In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.[505] Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new, individualistic styles. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.[506] Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.[507]
+
+Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain with about three-quarters of grain products made of wheat flour[508] and many dishes use indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers.[509] These homegrown foods are part of a shared national menu on one of America's most popular holidays, Thanksgiving, when some Americans make traditional foods to celebrate the occasion.[510]
+
+The American fast food industry, the world's largest,[511] pioneered the drive-through format in the 1940s.[512] Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[513] Americans drink three times as much coffee as tea.[514] Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.[515][516]
+
+Although little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music.
+
+The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European and African traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s.[517]
+
+Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. Rock bands such as Metallica, the Eagles, and Aerosmith are among the highest grossing in worldwide sales.[518][519][520] In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk.
+
+More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities,[517] as have contemporary musical artists such as Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West, and Ariana Grande.[521]
+
+Hollywood, a northern district of Los Angeles, California, is one of the leaders in motion picture production.[522] The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope.[523] Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, although in the 21st century an increasing number of films are not made there, and film companies have been subject to the forces of globalization.[524]
+
+Director D. W. Griffith, the top American filmmaker during the silent film period, was central to the development of film grammar, and producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising.[525] Directors such as John Ford redefined the image of the American Old West, and, like others such as John Huston, broadened the possibilities of cinema with location shooting. The industry enjoyed its golden years, in what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood," from the early sound period until the early 1960s,[526] with screen actors such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe becoming iconic figures.[527][528] In the 1970s, "New Hollywood" or the "Hollywood Renaissance"[529] was defined by grittier films influenced by French and Italian realist pictures of the post-war period.[530] In more recent times, directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron have gained renown for their blockbuster films, often characterized by high production costs and earnings.
+
+Notable films topping the American Film Institute's AFI 100 list include Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time,[531][532] Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Graduate (1967), On the Waterfront (1954), Schindler's List (1993), Singin' in the Rain (1952), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).[533] The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, have been held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1929,[534] and the Golden Globe Awards have been held annually since January 1944.[535]
+
+American football is by several measures the most popular spectator sport;[537] the National Football League (NFL) has the highest average attendance of any sports league in the world, and the Super Bowl is watched by tens of millions globally. Baseball has been regarded as the U.S. national sport since the late 19th century, with Major League Baseball (MLB) being the top league. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports, with the top leagues being the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL). College football and basketball attract large audiences.[538] In soccer, the country hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the men's national soccer team qualified for ten World Cups and the women's team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup four times; Major League Soccer is the sport's highest league in the United States (featuring 23 American and three Canadian teams). The market for professional sports in the United States is roughly $69 billion, roughly 50% larger than that of all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined.[539]
+
+Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri were the first ever Olympic Games held outside of Europe.[540] As of 2017[update], the United States has won 2,522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 305 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.[541]
+While most major U.S. sports such as baseball and American football have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, some of which have become popular worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.[542] The most watched individual sports are golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR.[543][544]
+
+The four major broadcasters in the U.S. are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX). The four major broadcast television networks are all commercial entities. Cable television offers hundreds of channels catering to a variety of niches.[545] Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercial, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.[546]
+
+In 1998, the number of U.S. commercial radio stations had grown to 4,793 AM stations and 5,662 FM stations. In addition, there are 1,460 public radio stations. Most of these stations are run by universities and public authorities for educational purposes and are financed by public or private funds, subscriptions, and corporate underwriting. Much public-radio broadcasting is supplied by NPR. NPR was incorporated in February 1970 under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967; its television counterpart, PBS, was created by the same legislation. As of September 30, 2014[update], there are 15,433 licensed full-power radio stations in the U.S. according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).[547]
+
+Well-known newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.[548] Although the cost of publishing has increased over the years, the price of newspapers has generally remained low, forcing newspapers to rely more on advertising revenue and on articles provided by a major wire service, such as the Associated Press or Reuters, for their national and world coverage. With very few exceptions, all the newspapers in the U.S. are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families. Major cities often have "alternative weeklies" to complement the mainstream daily papers, such as New York City's The Village Voice or Los Angeles' LA Weekly. Major cities may also support a local business journal, trade papers relating to local industries, and papers for local ethnic and social groups. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Twitter.[549]
+
+More than 800 publications are produced in Spanish, the second most commonly used language in the United States behind English.[550][551]
+
+Internet sources
+

en/1872.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,332 @@
+
+
+Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100
+
+The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country mostly located in central North America, between Canada and Mexico. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions.[i] At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), it is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area.[e] With a 2019 estimated population of over 328 million,[7] the U.S. is the third most populous country in the world. The Americans are a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been shaped through centuries of immigration. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City.
+
+Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago,[19] and European colonization began in the 16th century. The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolutionary War lasting between 1775 and 1783, leading to independence.[20] Beginning in the late 18th century, the United States vigorously expanded across North America, gradually acquiring new territories,[21] killing and displacing Native Americans, and admitting new states. By 1848, the United States spanned the continent.[21]
+Slavery was legal in much of the United States until the second half of the 19th century, when the American Civil War led to its abolition.[22][23]
+
+The Spanish–American War and World War I entrenched the U.S. as a world power, a status confirmed by the outcome of World War II. It was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.[24]
+
+The United States is a federal republic and a representative democracy. It is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), NATO, and other international organizations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
+
+A highly developed country, the United States is the world's largest economy and accounts for approximately a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP).[25] The United States is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter of goods, by value.[26][27] Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total,[28] it holds 29.4% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share held by any country.[29] Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, median income, median wealth, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity.[30][31] It is the foremost military power in the world, making up more than a third of global military spending,[32] and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.[33]
+
+The first known use of the name "America" dates back to 1507, when it appeared on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. On this map, the name applied to South America in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.[34] After returning from his expeditions, Vespucci first postulated that the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern limit, as initially thought by Christopher Columbus, but instead were part of an entirely separate landmass thus far unknown to the Europeans.[35] In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator used the name "America" on his own world map, applying it to the entire Western Hemisphere.[36]
+
+The first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written by Stephen Moylan, Esq., to Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort.[37][38][39] The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.[40]
+
+The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed no later than June 17, 1776, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'".[41] The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'".[42] In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence.[41] This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.[41]
+
+The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms are the "U.S.," the "USA," and "America." Colloquial names are the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States." "Columbia," a name popular in poetry and songs of the late 18th century, derives its origin from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia." Many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.[43]
+
+The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865.[44] The singular form—e.g., "the United States is"—became popular after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States." The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.[45]
+
+A citizen of the United States is an "American." "United States," "American" and "U.S." refer to the country adjectivally ("American values," "U.S. forces"). In English, the word "American" rarely refers to topics or subjects not directly connected with the United States.[46]
+
+It has been generally accepted that the first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 12,000 years ago; however, increasing evidence suggests an even earlier arrival.[19][47][48] After crossing the land bridge, the Paleo-Indians moved southward along the Pacific coast[49] and through an interior ice-free corridor.[50] The Clovis culture, which appeared around 11,000 BC, was initially believed to represent the first wave of human settlement of the Americas.[51][52] It is likely these represent the first of three major waves of migration into North America.[53]
+
+Over time, indigenous cultures in North America grew increasingly complex, and some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture in the southeast, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies.[54] The Mississippian culture flourished in the south from 800 to 1600 AD, extending from the Mexican border down through Florida.[55] Its city state Cahokia is the largest, most complex pre-Columbian archaeological site in the modern-day United States.[56] In the Four Corners region, Ancestral Puebloan culture developed from centuries of agricultural experimentation.[57]
+
+Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Taos Pueblo.[58][59] The earthworks constructed by Native Americans of the Poverty Point culture have also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the southern Great Lakes region, the Iroquois Confederacy was established at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.[60] Most prominent along the Atlantic coast were the Algonquian tribes, who practiced hunting and trapping, along with limited cultivation.
+
+With the progress of European colonization in the territories of the contemporary United States, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[61] The native population of America declined after European arrival for various reasons,[62][63] primarily diseases such as smallpox and measles.[64][65]
+
+Estimating the native population of North America at the time of European contact is difficult.[66][67] Douglas H. Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution estimated that there was a population of 92,916 in the south Atlantic states and a population of 473,616 in the Gulf states,[68] but most academics regard this figure as too low.[66] Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns believed the populations were much higher, suggesting 1,100,000 along the shores of the gulf of Mexico, 2,211,000 people living between Florida and Massachusetts, 5,250,000 in the Mississippi Valley and tributaries and 697,000 people in the Florida peninsula.[66][67]
+
+In the early days of colonization, many European settlers were subject to food shortages, disease, and attacks from Native Americans. Native Americans were also often at war with neighboring tribes and allied with Europeans in their colonial wars. In many cases, however, natives and settlers came to depend on each other. Settlers traded for food and animal pelts; natives for guns, ammunition and other European goods.[69] Natives taught many settlers to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. European missionaries and others felt it was important to "civilize" the Native Americans and urged them to adopt European agricultural techniques and lifestyles.[70][71]
+
+With the advancement of European colonization in North America, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[72] The first Europeans to arrive in the contiguous United States were Spanish conquistadors such as Juan Ponce de León, who made his first visit to Florida in 1513. Even earlier, Christopher Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his 1493 voyage. The Spanish set up the first settlements in Florida and New Mexico such as Saint Augustine[73] and Santa Fe. The French established their own as well along the Mississippi River. Successful English settlement on the eastern coast of North America began with the Virginia Colony in 1607 at Jamestown and with the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. Many settlers were dissenting Christian groups who came seeking religious freedom. The continent's first elected legislative assembly, Virginia's House of Burgesses, was created in 1619. The Mayflower Compact, signed by the Pilgrims before disembarking, and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, established precedents for the pattern of representative self-government and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies.[74][75]
+
+Most settlers in every colony were small farmers, though other industries were formed. Cash crops included tobacco, rice, and wheat. Extraction industries grew up in furs, fishing and lumber. Manufacturers produced rum and ships, and by the late colonial period, Americans were producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply.[76] Cities eventually dotted the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs. English colonists were supplemented by waves of Scotch-Irish immigrants and other groups. As coastal land grew more expensive, freed indentured servants claimed lands further west.[77]
+
+A large-scale slave trade with English privateers began.[78] Because of less disease and better food and treatment, the life expectancy of slaves was much higher in North America than further south, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.[79][80] Colonial society was largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, and colonies passed acts for and against the practice.[81][82] But by the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in the South.[83]
+
+With the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were administered by the British as overseas dependencies.[84] All nonetheless had local governments with elections open to most free men.[85] With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grew rapidly. Relatively small Native American populations were eclipsed.[86] The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest both in religion and in religious liberty.[87]
+
+During the Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans, who were being conquered and displaced, the 13 British colonies had a population of over 2.1 million in 1770, about a third that of Britain. Despite continuing, new arrivals, the rate of natural increase was such that by the 1770s only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas.[88] The colonies' distance from Britain had allowed the development of self-government, but their unprecedented success motivated monarchs to periodically seek to reassert royal authority.[89]
+
+In 1774, the Spanish Navy ship Santiago, under Juan Pérez, entered and anchored in an inlet of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, in present-day British Columbia. Although the Spanish did not land, natives paddled to the ship to trade furs for abalone shells from California.[90] At the time, the Spanish were able to monopolize the trade between Asia and North America, granting limited licenses to the Portuguese. When the Russians began establishing a growing fur trading system in Alaska, the Spanish began to challenge the Russians, with Pérez's voyage being the first of many to the Pacific Northwest.[91][j]
+
+During his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook became the first European to begin formal contact with Hawaii.[93] Captain Cook's last voyage included sailing along the coast of North America and Alaska searching for a Northwest Passage for approximately nine months.[94]
+
+The American Revolutionary War was the first successful colonial war of independence against a European power. Americans had developed an ideology of "republicanism" asserting that government rested on the will of the people as expressed in their local legislatures. They demanded their rights as Englishmen and "no taxation without representation". The British insisted on administering the empire through Parliament, and the conflict escalated into war.[95]
+
+The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that Great Britain was not protecting Americans' unalienable rights. July 4 is celebrated annually as Independence Day.[96] In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a decentralized government that operated until 1789.[96]
+
+Following the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781,[97] Britain signed the peace treaty of 1783, and American sovereignty was internationally recognized and the country was granted all lands east of the Mississippi River. Nationalists led the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788. The federal government was reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789. George Washington, who had led the Continental Army to victory, was the first president elected under the new constitution. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.[98]
+
+Although the federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808, after 1820, cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and along with it, the slave population.[99][100][101] The Second Great Awakening, especially 1800–1840, converted millions to evangelical Protestantism. In the North, it energized multiple social reform movements, including abolitionism;[102] in the South, Methodists and Baptists proselytized among slave populations.[103]
+
+Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of American Indian Wars.[104] The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation's area.[105] The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism.[106] A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819.[107] The expansion was aided by steam power, when steamboats began traveling along America's large water systems, many of which were connected by new canals, such as the Erie and the I&M; then, even faster railroads began their stretch across the nation's land.[108]
+
+From 1820 to 1850, Jacksonian democracy began a set of reforms which included wider white male suffrage; it led to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that forcibly resettled Indians into the west on Indian reservations. The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 during a period of expansionist Manifest destiny.[109] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest.[110] Victory in the Mexican–American War resulted in the 1848 Mexican Cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest.[111]
+The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 spurred migration to the Pacific coast, which led to the California Genocide[112][113][114][115] and the creation of additional western states.[116] After the Civil War, new transcontinental railways made relocation easier for settlers, expanded internal trade and increased conflicts with Native Americans.[117] In 1869, a new Peace Policy nominally promised to protect Native Americans from abuses, avoid further war, and secure their eventual U.S. citizenship. Nonetheless, large-scale conflicts continued throughout the West into the 1900s.
+
+Irreconcilable sectional conflict regarding the slavery of Africans and African Americans ultimately led to the American Civil War.[118] Initially, states entering the Union had alternated between slave and free states, keeping a sectional balance in the Senate, while free states outstripped slave states in population and in the House of Representatives. But with additional western territory and more free-soil states, tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over federalism and disposition of the territories, as well as whether to expand or restrict slavery.[119]
+
+With the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, conventions in thirteen slave states ultimately declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "South" or the "Confederacy"), while the federal government (the "Union") maintained that secession was illegal.[119] In order to bring about this secession, military action was initiated by the secessionists, and the Union responded in kind. The ensuing war would become the deadliest military conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of approximately 618,000 soldiers as well as many civilians.[120] The Union initially simply fought to keep the country united. Nevertheless, as casualties mounted after 1863 and Lincoln delivered his Emancipation Proclamation, the main purpose of the war from the Union's viewpoint became the abolition of slavery. Indeed, when the Union ultimately won the war in April 1865, each of the states in the defeated South was required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery.
+
+The government enacted three constitutional amendments in the years after the war: the aforementioned Thirteenth as well as the Fourteenth Amendment providing citizenship to the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves,[121] and the Fifteenth Amendment ensuring in theory that African Americans had the right to vote. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power[122] aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the South while guaranteeing the rights of the newly freed slaves.
+
+Reconstruction began in earnest following the war. While President Lincoln attempted to foster friendship and forgiveness between the Union and the former Confederacy, his assassination on April 14, 1865, drove a wedge between North and South again. Republicans in the federal government made it their goal to oversee the rebuilding of the South and to ensure the rights of African Americans. They persisted until the Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to cease protecting the rights of African Americans in the South in order for Democrats to concede the presidential election of 1876.
+
+Southern white Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers," took control of the South after the end of Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1910 the Redeemers established so-called Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising most blacks and some poor whites throughout the region. Blacks faced racial segregation, especially in the South.[123] They also occasionally experienced vigilante violence, including lynching.[124]
+
+In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe supplied a surplus of labor for the country's industrialization and transformed its culture.[126] National infrastructure including telegraph and transcontinental railroads spurred economic growth and greater settlement and development of the American Old West. The later invention of electric light and the telephone would also affect communication and urban life.[127]
+
+The United States fought Indian Wars west of the Mississippi River from 1810 to at least 1890.[128] Most of these conflicts ended with the cession of Native American territory and their confinement to Indian reservations. This further expanded acreage under mechanical cultivation, increasing surpluses for international markets.[129] Mainland expansion also included the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.[130] In 1893, pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the monarchy and formed the Republic of Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were ceded by Spain in the same year, following the Spanish–American War.[131] American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the end of the Second Samoan Civil War.[132] The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.[133]
+
+Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. Tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie led the nation's progress in railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. Banking became a major part of the economy, with J. P. Morgan playing a notable role. The American economy boomed, becoming the world's largest, and the United States achieved great power status.[134] These dramatic changes were accompanied by social unrest and the rise of populist, socialist, and anarchist movements.[135] This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which saw significant reforms including women's suffrage, alcohol prohibition, regulation of consumer goods, greater antitrust measures to ensure competition and attention to worker conditions.[136][137][138]
+
+The United States remained neutral from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 until 1917, when it joined the war as an "associated power," alongside the formal Allies of World War I, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson took a leading diplomatic role at the Paris Peace Conference and advocated strongly for the U.S. to join the League of Nations. However, the Senate refused to approve this and did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles that established the League of Nations.[139]
+
+In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage.[140] The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of radio for mass communication and the invention of early television.[141] The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal.[142] The Great Migration of millions of African Americans out of the American South began before World War I and extended through the 1960s;[143] whereas the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration.[144]
+
+At first effectively neutral during World War II, the United States began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers.[145] Although Japan attacked the United States first, the U.S. nonetheless pursued a "Europe first" defense policy.[146] The United States thus left its vast Asian colony, the Philippines, isolated and fighting a losing struggle against Japanese invasion and occupation, as military resources were devoted to the European theater. During the war, the United States was referred to as one of the "Four Policemen"[147] of Allies power who met to plan the postwar world, along with Britain, the Soviet Union and China.[148][149] Although the nation lost around 400,000 military personnel,[150] it emerged relatively undamaged from the war with even greater economic and military influence.[151]
+
+The United States played a leading role in the Bretton Woods and Yalta conferences with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and other Allies, which signed agreements on new international financial institutions and Europe's postwar reorganization. As an Allied victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war.[152] The United States and Japan then fought each other in the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.[153][154] The United States eventually developed the first nuclear weapons and used them on Japan in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese surrendered on September 2, ending World War II.[155][156]
+
+After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for power, influence, and prestige during what became known as the Cold War, driven by an ideological divide between capitalism and communism.[157] They dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its NATO allies on one side and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other. The U.S. developed a policy of containment towards the expansion of communist influence. While the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict.[citation needed]
+
+The United States often opposed Third World movements that it viewed as Soviet-sponsored, and occasionally pursued direct action for regime change against left-wing governments, even supporting right-wing authoritarian governments at times.[158] American troops fought communist Chinese and North Korean forces in the Korean War of 1950–53.[159] The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite and its 1961 launch of the first manned spaceflight initiated a "Space Race" in which the United States became the first nation to land a man on the moon in 1969.[159] A proxy war in Southeast Asia eventually evolved into full American participation, as the Vietnam War.[citation needed]
+
+At home, the U.S. experienced sustained economic expansion and a rapid growth of its population and middle class. Construction of an Interstate Highway System transformed the nation's infrastructure over the following decades. Millions moved from farms and inner cities to large suburban housing developments.[160][161] In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th and last U.S. state added to the country.[162] The growing Civil Rights Movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader and figurehead. A combination of court decisions and legislation, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, sought to end racial discrimination.[163][164][165] Meanwhile, a counterculture movement grew which was fueled by opposition to the Vietnam war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution.
+
+The launch of a "War on Poverty" expanded entitlements and welfare spending, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that provide health coverage to the elderly and poor, respectively, and the means-tested Food Stamp Program and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.[166]
+
+The 1970s and early 1980s saw the onset of stagflation. After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan responded to economic stagnation with free-market oriented reforms. Following the collapse of détente, he abandoned "containment" and initiated the more aggressive "rollback" strategy towards the USSR.[167][168][169][170][171] After a surge in female labor participation over the previous decade, by 1985 the majority of women aged 16 and over were employed.[172]
+
+The late 1980s brought a "thaw" in relations with the USSR, and its collapse in 1991 finally ended the Cold War.[173][174][175][176] This brought about unipolarity[177] with the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The concept of Pax Americana, which had appeared in the post-World War II period, gained wide popularity as a term for the post-Cold War new world order.[citation needed]
+
+After the Cold War, the conflict in the Middle East triggered a crisis in 1990, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, an ally of the United States. Fearing the instability would spread to other regions, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Shield, a defensive force buildup in Saudi Arabia, and Operation Desert Storm, in a staging titled the Gulf War; waged by coalition forces from 34 nations, led by the United States against Iraq ending in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restoration of the monarchy.[178]
+
+Originating within U.S. military defense networks, the Internet spread to international academic platforms and then to the public in the 1990s, greatly affecting the global economy, society, and culture.[179] Due to the dot-com boom, stable monetary policy, and reduced social welfare spending, the 1990s saw the longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history.[180] Beginning in 1994, the U.S. entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), prompting trade among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to soar.[181]
+
+On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people.[182] In response, the United States launched the War on Terror, which included a war in Afghanistan and the 2003–11 Iraq War.[183][184]
+
+Government policy designed to promote affordable housing,[185] widespread failures in corporate and regulatory governance,[186] and historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve[187] led to the mid-2000s housing bubble, which culminated with the 2008 financial crisis, the nation's largest economic contraction since the Great Depression.[188] Barack Obama, the first African-American[189] and multiracial[190] president, was elected in 2008 amid the crisis,[191] and subsequently passed stimulus measures and the Dodd–Frank Act in an attempt to mitigate its negative effects and ensure there would not be a repeat of the crisis. In 2010, the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, which made the most sweeping reforms to the nation's healthcare system in nearly five decades, including mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges.[citation needed]
+
+American forces in Iraq were withdrawn in large numbers in 2009 and 2010, and the war in the region was declared formally over in December 2011.[192] But months earlier, Operation Neptune Spear led to the death of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.[193] In the presidential election of 2016, Republican Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States. On January 20, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed.[194] As of July 2020, the United States has over 4 million COVID-19 cases and over 145,000 deaths.[195] The United States is, by far, the country with the most cases of COVID-19 since April 11, 2020.[196]
+
+The 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia occupy a combined area of 3,119,884.69 square miles (8,080,464.3 km2). Of this area, 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2) is contiguous land, composing 83.65% of total U.S. land area.[197][198] Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, is 10,931 square miles (28,311 km2) in area. The populated territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands together cover 9,185 square miles (23,789 km2).[199] Measured by only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.[200]
+
+The United States is the world's third- or fourth-largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and nearly equal to China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted, and how the total size of the United States is measured.[e][201][202]
+
+The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont.[203] The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest.[204] The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast.[204]
+
+The Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking around 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado.[205] Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Chihuahua and Mojave.[206] The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast, both ranges reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m). The lowest and highest points in the contiguous United States are in the state of California,[207] and only about 84 miles (135 km) apart.[208] At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali is the highest peak in the country and in North America.[209] Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature.[210]
+
+The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.[211] The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains have an alpine climate. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Hawaii and the southern tip of Florida are tropical, as well as its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.[212] States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur in the country, mainly in Tornado Alley areas in the Midwest and South.[213] Overall, the United States has the world's most violent weather, receiving more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world.[214]
+
+The U.S. ecology is megadiverse: about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and more than 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland.[216] The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 bird species, 311 reptile species, and 295 amphibian species,[217] as well as about 91,000 insect species.[218]
+
+There are 62 national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas.[219] Altogether, the government owns about 28% of the country's land area,[220] mostly in the western states.[221] Most of this land is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching, and about .86% is used for military purposes.[222][223]
+
+Environmental issues include debates on oil and nuclear energy, dealing with air and water pollution, the economic costs of protecting wildlife, logging and deforestation,[224][225] and international responses to global warming.[226][227] The most prominent environmental agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by presidential order in 1970.[228] The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act.[229] The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is intended to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.[230]
+
+The U.S. Census Bureau officially estimated the country's population to be 328,239,523 as of July 1, 2019.[231] In addition, the Census Bureau provides a continuously updated U.S. Population Clock that approximates the latest population of the 50 states and District of Columbia based on the Bureau's most recent demographic trends.[234] According to the clock, on May 23, 2020, the U.S. population exceeded 329 million residents, with a net gain of one person every 19 seconds, or about 4,547 people per day. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world, after China and India. In 2018 the median age of the United States population was 38.1 years.[235]
+
+In 2018, there were almost 90 million immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrants (second-generation Americans) in the United States, accounting for 28% of the overall U.S. population.[236] The United States has a very diverse population; 37 ancestry groups have more than one million members.[237] German Americans are the largest ethnic group (more than 50 million)—followed by Irish Americans (circa 37 million), Mexican Americans (circa 31 million) and English Americans (circa 28 million).[238][239]
+
+White Americans (mostly European ancestry) are the largest racial group at 73.1% of the population; African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third-largest ancestry group.[237] Asian Americans are the country's second-largest racial minority; the three largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans.[237] The largest American community with European ancestry is German Americans, which consists of more than 14% of the total population.[240] In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively).[241] The census counted more than 19 million people of "Some Other Race" who were "unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories in 2010, more than 18.5 million (97%) of whom are of Hispanic ethnicity.[241]
+
+In 2017, out of the U.S. foreign-born population, some 45% (20.7 million) were naturalized citizens, 27% (12.3 million) were lawful permanent residents (including many eligible to become citizens), 6% (2.2 million) were temporary lawful residents, and 23% (10.5 million) were unauthorized immigrants.[242] Among current living immigrants to the U.S., the top five countries of birth are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and El Salvador. Until 2017 and 2018, the United States led the world in refugee resettlement for decades, admitted more refugees than the rest of the world combined.[243] From fiscal year 1980 until 2017, 55% of refugees came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 13% from Africa, and 4% from Latin America.[243]
+
+A 2017 United Nations report projected that the U.S. would be one of nine countries in which world population growth through 2050 would be concentrated.[244] A 2020 U.S. Census Bureau report projected the population of the country could be anywhere between 320 million and 447 million by 2060, depending on the rate of in-migration; in all projected scenarios, a lower fertility rate and increases in life expectancy would result in an aging population.[245] The United States has an annual birth rate of 13 per 1,000, which is five births per 1,000 below the world average.[246] Its population growth rate is positive at 0.7%, higher than that of many developed nations.[247]
+
+About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (including suburbs);[202] about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000.[248] In 2008, 273 incorporated municipalities had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than one million residents, and four cities had over two million (namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston).[249] Estimates for the year 2018 show that 53 metropolitan areas have populations greater than one million. Many metros in the South, Southwest and West grew significantly between 2010 and 2018. The Dallas and Houston metros increased by more than a million people, while the Washington, D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and Phoenix metros all grew by more than 500,000 people.
+
+English (specifically, American English) is the de facto national language of the United States. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2010, about 230 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. 12% of the population speaks Spanish at home, making it the second most common language. Spanish is also the most widely taught second language.[250][251]
+
+Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii.[252] In addition to English, Alaska recognizes twenty official Native languages,[253][k] and South Dakota recognizes Sioux.[254] While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French.[255] Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms.[256]
+
+Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan[257] is officially recognized by American Samoa and Chamorro[258] is an official language of Guam. Both Carolinian and Chamorro have official recognition in the Northern Mariana Islands.[259]
+Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico and is more widely spoken than English there.[260]
+
+The most widely taught foreign languages in the United States, in terms of enrollment numbers from kindergarten through university undergraduate education, are Spanish (around 7.2 million students), French (1.5 million), and German (500,000). Other commonly taught languages include Latin, Japanese, ASL, Italian, and Chinese.[261][262] 18% of all Americans claim to speak both English and another language.[263]
+
+Religion in the United States (2017)[266]
+
+The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids Congress from passing laws respecting its establishment.
+
+In a 2013 survey, 56% of Americans said religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other Western nation.[267] In a 2009 Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they attended church weekly or almost weekly; the figures ranged from a low of 23% in Vermont to a high of 63% in Mississippi.[268]
+
+In a 2014 survey, 70.6% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians;[269] Protestants accounted for 46.5%, while Roman Catholics, at 20.8%, formed the largest single Christian group.[270] In 2014, 5.9% of the U.S. adult population claimed a non-Christian religion.[271] These include Judaism (1.9%), Islam (0.9%), Hinduism (0.7%), and Buddhism (0.7%).[271] The survey also reported that 22.8% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist or simply having no religion—up from 8.2% in 1990.[270][272][273] There are also Unitarian Universalist, Scientologist, Baha'i, Sikh, Jain, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Satanist, Taoist, Druid, Native American, Afro-American, traditional African, Wiccan, Gnostic, humanist and deist communities.[274][275]
+
+Protestantism is the largest Christian religious grouping in the United States, accounting for almost half of all Americans. Baptists collectively form the largest branch of Protestantism at 15.4%,[276] and the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest individual Protestant denomination at 5.3% of the U.S. population.[276] Apart from Baptists, other Protestant categories include nondenominational Protestants, Methodists, Pentecostals, unspecified Protestants, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, other Reformed, Episcopalians/Anglicans, Quakers, Adventists, Holiness, Christian fundamentalists, Anabaptists, Pietists, and multiple others.[276]
+
+As with other Western countries, the U.S. is becoming less religious. Irreligion is growing rapidly among Americans under 30.[277] Polls show that overall American confidence in organized religion has been declining since the mid to late 1980s,[278] and that younger Americans, in particular, are becoming increasingly irreligious.[271][279] In a 2012 study, the Protestant share of the U.S. population had dropped to 48%, thus ending its status as religious category of the majority for the first time.[280][281] Americans with no religion have 1.7 children compared to 2.2 among Christians. The unaffiliated are less likely to marry with 37% marrying compared to 52% of Christians.[282]
+
+The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. By contrast, religion plays the least important role in New England and in the Western United States.[268]
+
+As of 2018[update], 52% of Americans age 15 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 32% had never been married.[283] Women now work mostly outside the home and receive the majority of bachelor's degrees.[284]
+
+The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is 26.5 per 1,000 women. The rate has declined by 57% since 1991.[285] Abortion is legal throughout the country. Abortion rates, currently 241 per 1,000 live births and 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, are falling but remain higher than most Western nations.[286] In 2013, the average age at first birth was 26 and 41% of births were to unmarried women.[287]
+
+The total fertility rate in 2016 was 1820.5 births per 1000 women.[288] Adoption in the United States is common and relatively easy from a legal point of view (compared to other Western countries).[289] As of 2001[update], with more than 127,000 adoptions, the U.S. accounted for nearly half of the total number of adoptions worldwide.[needs update][290] Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, and it is legal for same-sex couples to adopt. Polygamy is illegal throughout the U.S.[291]
+
+In 2019, the U.S. had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.[292]
+
+The United States had a life expectancy of 78.6 years at birth in 2017, which was the third year of declines in life expectancy following decades of continuous increase. The recent decline, primarily among the age group 25 to 64, is largely due to sharp increases in the drug overdose and suicide rates; the country has one of the highest suicide rates among wealthy countries.[293][294] Life expectancy was highest among Asians and Hispanics and lowest among blacks.[295][296] According to CDC and Census Bureau data, deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug overdoses hit record highs in 2017.[297]
+
+Increasing obesity in the United States and health improvements elsewhere contributed to lowering the country's rank in life expectancy from 11th in the world in 1987, to 42nd in 2007, and as of 2017 the country had the lowest life expectancy among Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and seven countries of western Europe.[298][299] Obesity rates have more than doubled in the last 30 years and are the highest in the industrialized world.[300][301] Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight.[302] Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.[303]
+
+In 2010, coronary artery disease, lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and traffic accidents caused the most years of life lost in the U.S. Low back pain, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety caused the most years lost to disability. The most harmful risk factors were poor diet, tobacco smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, physical inactivity, and alcohol use. Alzheimer's disease, drug abuse, kidney disease, cancer, and falls caused the most additional years of life lost over their age-adjusted 1990 per-capita rates.[304] U.S. teenage pregnancy and abortion rates are substantially higher than in other Western nations, especially among blacks and Hispanics.[305]
+
+Health-care coverage in the United States is a combination of public and private efforts and is not universal. In 2017, 12.2% of the population did not carry health insurance.[306] The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue.[307][308] Federal legislation, passed in early 2010, roughly halved the uninsured share of the population, though the bill and its ultimate effect are issues of controversy.[309][310] The U.S. health-care system far outspends any other nation, measured both in per capita spending and as percentage of GDP.[311] At the same time, the U.S. is a global leader in medical innovation.[312]
+
+American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. In most states, children are required to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn 18 (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at 16 or 17.[313]
+
+About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.[314] The U.S. spends more on education per student than any nation in the world, spending more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student.[315][needs update] Some 80% of U.S. college students attend public universities.[316]
+
+Of Americans 25 and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees.[317] The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.[202][318] The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.[319]
+
+The United States has many private and public institutions of higher education. The majority of the world's top universities, as listed by various ranking organizations, are in the U.S.[320][321][322] There are also local community colleges with generally more open admission policies, shorter academic programs, and lower tuition.
+
+In 2018, U21, a network of research-intensive universities, ranked the United States first in the world for breadth and quality of higher education, and 15th when GDP was a factor.[323] As for public expenditures on higher education, the U.S. trails some other OECD nations but spends more per student than the OECD average, and more than all nations in combined public and private spending.[315][324] As of 2018[update], student loan debt exceeded 1.5 trillion dollars.[325][326]
+
+The United States is a federal republic of 50 states, a federal district, five territories and several uninhabited island possessions.[327][328][329] It is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law."[330] For 2018, the U.S. ranked 25th on the Democracy Index.[331] On Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index its public sector position deteriorated from a score of 76 in 2015 to 69 in 2019.[332]
+
+In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government: federal, state, and local. The local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district.
+
+The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document.[333] The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus. The Constitution has been amended 27 times;[334] the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights. All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review and any law ruled by the courts to be in violation of the Constitution is voided. The principle of judicial review, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was established by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison (1803)[335] in a decision handed down by Chief Justice John Marshall.[336]
+
+The federal government comprises three branches:
+
+The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population. Each state then draws single-member districts to conform with the census apportionment. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories each have one member of Congress—these members are not allowed to vote.[341]
+
+The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one-third of Senate seats are up for election every two years. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories do not have senators.[341] The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia.[342] The Supreme Court, led by the chief justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.[343]
+
+The state governments are structured in a roughly similar fashion, though Nebraska has a unicameral legislature.[344] The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.
+
+The 50 states are the principal administrative divisions in the country. These are subdivided into counties or county equivalents and further divided into municipalities. The District of Columbia is a federal district that contains the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C.[345] The states and the District of Columbia choose the president of the United States. Each state has presidential electors equal to the number of their representatives and senators in Congress; the District of Columbia has three (because of the 23rd Amendment).[346] Territories of the United States such as Puerto Rico do not have presidential electors, and so people in those territories cannot vote for the president.[341]
+
+The United States also observes tribal sovereignty of the American Indian nations to a limited degree, as it does with the states' sovereignty. American Indians are U.S. citizens and tribal lands are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress and the federal courts. Like the states they have a great deal of autonomy, but also like the states, tribes are not allowed to make war, engage in their own foreign relations, or print and issue currency.[347]
+
+Citizenship is granted at birth in all states, the District of Columbia, and all major U.S. territories except American Samoa.[348][349][m]
+
+The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history.[352] For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote. The president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College.[353]
+
+In American political culture, the center-right Republican Party is considered "conservative" and the center-left Democratic Party is considered "liberal."[354][355] The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states," are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.
+
+Republican Donald Trump, the winner of the 2016 presidential election, is serving as the 45th president of the United States.[356] Leadership in the Senate includes Republican vice president Mike Pence, Republican president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.[357] Leadership in the House includes Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.[358]
+
+In the 116th United States Congress, the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democratic Party and the Senate is controlled by the Republican Party, giving the U.S. a split Congress. The Senate consists of 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats; the House consists of 233 Democrats, 196 Republicans, and 1 Libertarian.[359] Of state governors, there are 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. Among the D.C. mayor and the five territorial governors, there are two Republicans, one Democrat, one New Progressive, and two Independents.[360]
+
+The United States has an established structure of foreign relations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. New York City is home to the United Nations Headquarters. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States (although the U.S. still maintains unofficial relations with Bhutan and Taiwan).[361] It is a member of the G7,[362] G20, and OECD.
+
+The United States has a "Special Relationship" with the United Kingdom[363] and strong ties with India, Canada,[364] Australia,[365] New Zealand,[366] the Philippines,[367] Japan,[368] South Korea,[369] Israel,[370] and several European Union countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.[371] It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Colombia is traditionally considered by the United States as its most loyal ally in South America.[372][373]
+
+The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau through the Compact of Free Association.[374]
+
+Taxation in the United States is levied at the federal, state, and local government levels. This includes taxes on income, payroll, property, sales, imports, estates, and gifts, as well as various fees. Taxation in the United States is based on citizenship, not residency.[375] Both non-resident citizens and Green Card holders living abroad are taxed on their income irrespective of where they live or where their income is earned. The United States is one of the only countries in the world to do so.[376]
+
+In 2010 taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP.[377] Based on CBO estimates,[378] under 2013 tax law the top 1% will be paying the highest average tax rates since 1979, while other income groups will remain at historic lows.[379] For 2018, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 400 households was 23%, compared to 24.2% for the bottom half of U.S. households.[380]
+
+
+
+During fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $3.54 trillion on a budget or cash basis, down $60 billion or 1.7% vs. fiscal year 2011 spending of $3.60 trillion. Major categories of fiscal year 2012 spending included: Medicare & Medicaid (23%), Social Security (22%), Defense Department (19%), non-defense discretionary (17%), other mandatory (13%) and interest (6%).[382]
+
+The total national debt of the United States in the United States was $18.527 trillion (106% of the GDP) in 2014.[383][n] The United States has the largest external debt in the world[387] and the 34th largest government debt as a % of GDP in the world.[388]
+
+The president is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and by the Department of the Navy during times of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.[389]
+
+Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System.[390] American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's 11 active aircraft carriers, and Marine expeditionary units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad,[391] and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries.[392]
+
+The military budget of the United States in 2011 was more than $700 billion, 41% of global military spending. At 4.7% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top 15 military spenders, after Saudi Arabia.[393]  Defense spending plays a major role in science and technology investment, with roughly half of U.S. federal research and development funded by the Department of Defense.[394] Defense's share of the overall U.S. economy has generally declined in recent decades, from Cold War peaks of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 and 69.5% of federal outlays in 1954 to 4.7% of GDP and 18.8% of federal outlays in 2011.[395]
+
+The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.[396] More than 90% of the world's 14,000 nuclear weapons are owned by Russia and the United States.[397]
+
+Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police departments and sheriff's offices, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties, including protecting civil rights, national security and enforcing U.S. federal courts' rulings and federal laws.[398] State courts conduct most criminal trials while federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state criminal courts.
+
+A cross-sectional analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed that United States "homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher."[399] In 2016, the US murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000.[400] Gun ownership rights, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, continue to be the subject of contention.
+
+The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world.[401] As of 2020, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that there were some 2.3 million people incarcerated.[402]  The imprisonment rate for all prisoners sentenced to more than a year in state or federal facilities is 478 per 100,000 in 2013.[403] According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of inmates held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses.[404] About 9% of prisoners are held in privatized prisons.[402] The practice of privately operated prisons began in the 1980s and has been a subject of contention.[405]
+
+Capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and at the state level in 30 states.[406][407] No executions took place from 1967 to 1977, owing in part to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Since the decision there have been more than 1,300 executions, a majority of these taking place in three states: Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.[408] Meanwhile, several states have either abolished or struck down death penalty laws. In 2019, the country had the sixth-highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.[409]
+
+According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $16.8 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 19% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).[417] The United States is the largest importer of goods and second-largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2010, the total U.S. trade deficit was $635 billion.[418] Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners.[419]
+
+From 1983 to 2008, U.S. real compounded annual GDP growth was 3.3%, compared to a 2.3% weighted average for the rest of the G7.[420] The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita[421] and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP.[417] The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.[422]
+
+In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 86.4% of the economy.[425] While its economy has reached a postindustrial level of development, the United States remains an industrial power.[426] Consumer spending comprised 68% of the U.S. economy in 2015.[427] In August 2010, the American labor force consisted of 154.1 million people (50%). With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people. It has a smaller welfare state and redistributes less income through government action than most European nations.[428]
+
+The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation[429] and is one of a few countries in the world without paid family leave as a legal right.[430] While federal law does not require sick leave, it is a common benefit for government workers and full-time employees at corporations.[431] 74% of full-time American workers get paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although only 24% of part-time workers get the same benefits.[431] In 2009, the United States had the third-highest workforce productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands.[432]
+
+
+
+The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. Methods for producing interchangeable parts were developed by the U.S. War Department by the Federal Armories during the first half of the 19th century. This technology, along with the establishment of a machine tool industry, enabled the U.S. to have large-scale manufacturing of sewing machines, bicycles, and other items in the late 19th century and became known as the American system of manufacturing. Factory electrification in the early 20th century and introduction of the assembly line and other labor-saving techniques created the system of mass production.[433] In the 21st century, approximately two-thirds of research and development funding comes from the private sector.[434] The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor.[435][436]
+
+In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's research laboratory, one of the first of its kind, developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera.[437] The latter led to emergence of the worldwide entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.[438]
+
+The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann, to immigrate to the United States.[439] During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age, while the Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and aeronautics.[440][441]
+
+The invention of the transistor in the 1950s, a key active component in practically all modern electronics, led to many technological developments and a significant expansion of the U.S. technology industry.[442] This, in turn, led to the establishment of many new technology companies and regions around the country such as Silicon Valley in California. Advancements by American microprocessor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel along with both computer software and hardware companies that include Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems created and popularized the personal computer. The ARPANET was developed in the 1960s to meet Defense Department requirements, and became the first of a series of networks which evolved into the Internet.[443]
+
+Accounting for 4.24% of the global population, Americans collectively possess 29.4% of the world's total wealth, and Americans make up roughly half of the world's population of millionaires.[444] The Global Food Security Index ranked the U.S. number one for food affordability and overall food security in March 2013.[445] Americans on average have more than twice as much living space per dwelling and per person as European Union residents, and more than every EU nation.[446] For 2017 the United Nations Development Programme ranked the United States 13th among 189 countries in its Human Development Index and 25th among 151 countries in its inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI).[447]
+
+Wealth, like income and taxes, is highly concentrated; the richest 10% of the adult population possess 72% of the country's household wealth, while the bottom half claim only 2%.[448] According to a September 2017 report by the Federal Reserve, the top 1% controlled 38.6% of the country's wealth in 2016.[449] According to a 2018 study by the OECD, the United States has a larger percentage of low-income workers than almost any other developed nation. This is largely because at-risk workers get almost no government support and are further set back by a very weak collective bargaining system.[450] The top one percent of income-earners accounted for 52 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2015, where income is defined as market income excluding government transfers.[451] In 2018, U.S. income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau.[452]
+
+After years of stagnation, median household income reached a record high in 2016 following two consecutive years of record growth. Income inequality remains at record highs however, with the top fifth of earners taking home more than half of all overall income.[454] The rise in the share of total annual income received by the top one percent, which has more than doubled from nine percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2011, has significantly affected income inequality,[455] leaving the United States with one of the widest income distributions among OECD nations.[456]  The extent and relevance of income inequality is a matter of debate.[457][458][459]
+
+Between June 2007 and November 2008, the global recession led to falling asset prices around the world. Assets owned by Americans lost about a quarter of their value.[460] Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth was down $14 trillion, but has since increased $14 trillion over 2006 levels.[461] At the end of 2014, household debt amounted to $11.8 trillion,[462] down from $13.8 trillion at the end of 2008.[463]
+
+There were about 578,424 sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in the US in January 2014, with almost two-thirds staying in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program.[464] In 2011, 16.7 million children lived in food-insecure households, about 35% more than 2007 levels, though only 1.1% of U.S. children, or 845,000, saw reduced food intake or disrupted eating patterns at some point during the year, and most cases were not chronic.[465] As of June 2018[update], 40 million people, roughly 12.7% of the U.S. population, were living in poverty, with 18.5 million of those living in deep poverty (a family income below one-half of the poverty threshold) and over five million live "in 'Third World' conditions." In 2016, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, which made up 32.6% of the impoverished population.[466] In 2017, the U.S. state or territory with the lowest poverty rate was New Hampshire (7.6%), and the one with the highest was American Samoa (65%).[467][468][469]
+
+Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of public roads.[471] The United States has the world's second-largest automobile market,[472] and has the highest rate of per-capita vehicle ownership in the world, with 765 vehicles per 1,000 Americans (1996).[473][needs update] In 2017, there were 255,009,283 non-two wheel motor vehicles, or about 910 vehicles per 1,000 people.[474]
+
+The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned and has been largely deregulated since 1978, while most major airports are publicly owned.[475] The three largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are US-based; American Airlines is number one after its 2013 acquisition by US Airways.[476] Of the world's 50 busiest passenger airports, 16 are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.[477]
+
+The United States energy market is about 29,000 terawatt hours per year.[478] In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear and renewable energy sources.[479]
+
+Since 2007, the total greenhouse gas emissions by the United States are the second highest by country, exceeded only by China.[480] The United States has historically been the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gas emissions per capita remain high.[481]
+
+The United States is home to many cultures and a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.[483][484] Aside from the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors settled or immigrated within the past five centuries.[485] Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.[483][486] More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.[483]
+
+Americans have traditionally been characterized by a strong work ethic, competitiveness, and individualism,[487] as well as a unifying belief in an "American creed" emphasizing liberty, equality, private property, democracy, rule of law, and a preference for limited government.[488] Americans are extremely charitable by global standards. According to a 2006 British study, Americans gave 1.67% of GDP to charity, more than any other nation studied.[489][490][491]
+
+The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants.[492] Whether this perception is accurate has been a topic of debate.[493][494][495][496][420][497] While mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,[498] scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.[499] While Americans tend  to greatly value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is also generally seen as a positive attribute.[500]
+
+In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.[501] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."[502]
+
+Twelve U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Bob Dylan in 2016. William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[503] Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.[504]
+
+The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty, and later Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of American philosophical academia. John Rawls and Robert Nozick also led a revival of political philosophy.
+
+In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.[505] Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new, individualistic styles. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.[506] Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.[507]
+
+Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain with about three-quarters of grain products made of wheat flour[508] and many dishes use indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers.[509] These homegrown foods are part of a shared national menu on one of America's most popular holidays, Thanksgiving, when some Americans make traditional foods to celebrate the occasion.[510]
+
+The American fast food industry, the world's largest,[511] pioneered the drive-through format in the 1940s.[512] Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[513] Americans drink three times as much coffee as tea.[514] Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.[515][516]
+
+Although little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music.
+
+The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European and African traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s.[517]
+
+Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. Rock bands such as Metallica, the Eagles, and Aerosmith are among the highest grossing in worldwide sales.[518][519][520] In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk.
+
+More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities,[517] as have contemporary musical artists such as Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West, and Ariana Grande.[521]
+
+Hollywood, a northern district of Los Angeles, California, is one of the leaders in motion picture production.[522] The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope.[523] Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, although in the 21st century an increasing number of films are not made there, and film companies have been subject to the forces of globalization.[524]
+
+Director D. W. Griffith, the top American filmmaker during the silent film period, was central to the development of film grammar, and producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising.[525] Directors such as John Ford redefined the image of the American Old West, and, like others such as John Huston, broadened the possibilities of cinema with location shooting. The industry enjoyed its golden years, in what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood," from the early sound period until the early 1960s,[526] with screen actors such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe becoming iconic figures.[527][528] In the 1970s, "New Hollywood" or the "Hollywood Renaissance"[529] was defined by grittier films influenced by French and Italian realist pictures of the post-war period.[530] In more recent times, directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron have gained renown for their blockbuster films, often characterized by high production costs and earnings.
+
+Notable films topping the American Film Institute's AFI 100 list include Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time,[531][532] Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Graduate (1967), On the Waterfront (1954), Schindler's List (1993), Singin' in the Rain (1952), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).[533] The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, have been held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1929,[534] and the Golden Globe Awards have been held annually since January 1944.[535]
+
+American football is by several measures the most popular spectator sport;[537] the National Football League (NFL) has the highest average attendance of any sports league in the world, and the Super Bowl is watched by tens of millions globally. Baseball has been regarded as the U.S. national sport since the late 19th century, with Major League Baseball (MLB) being the top league. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports, with the top leagues being the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL). College football and basketball attract large audiences.[538] In soccer, the country hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the men's national soccer team qualified for ten World Cups and the women's team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup four times; Major League Soccer is the sport's highest league in the United States (featuring 23 American and three Canadian teams). The market for professional sports in the United States is roughly $69 billion, roughly 50% larger than that of all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined.[539]
+
+Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri were the first ever Olympic Games held outside of Europe.[540] As of 2017[update], the United States has won 2,522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 305 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.[541]
+While most major U.S. sports such as baseball and American football have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, some of which have become popular worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.[542] The most watched individual sports are golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR.[543][544]
+
+The four major broadcasters in the U.S. are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX). The four major broadcast television networks are all commercial entities. Cable television offers hundreds of channels catering to a variety of niches.[545] Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercial, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.[546]
+
+In 1998, the number of U.S. commercial radio stations had grown to 4,793 AM stations and 5,662 FM stations. In addition, there are 1,460 public radio stations. Most of these stations are run by universities and public authorities for educational purposes and are financed by public or private funds, subscriptions, and corporate underwriting. Much public-radio broadcasting is supplied by NPR. NPR was incorporated in February 1970 under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967; its television counterpart, PBS, was created by the same legislation. As of September 30, 2014[update], there are 15,433 licensed full-power radio stations in the U.S. according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).[547]
+
+Well-known newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.[548] Although the cost of publishing has increased over the years, the price of newspapers has generally remained low, forcing newspapers to rely more on advertising revenue and on articles provided by a major wire service, such as the Associated Press or Reuters, for their national and world coverage. With very few exceptions, all the newspapers in the U.S. are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families. Major cities often have "alternative weeklies" to complement the mainstream daily papers, such as New York City's The Village Voice or Los Angeles' LA Weekly. Major cities may also support a local business journal, trade papers relating to local industries, and papers for local ethnic and social groups. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Twitter.[549]
+
+More than 800 publications are produced in Spanish, the second most commonly used language in the United States behind English.[550][551]
+
+Internet sources
+

en/1873.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,332 @@
+
+
+Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100
+
+The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country mostly located in central North America, between Canada and Mexico. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions.[i] At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), it is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area.[e] With a 2019 estimated population of over 328 million,[7] the U.S. is the third most populous country in the world. The Americans are a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been shaped through centuries of immigration. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City.
+
+Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago,[19] and European colonization began in the 16th century. The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolutionary War lasting between 1775 and 1783, leading to independence.[20] Beginning in the late 18th century, the United States vigorously expanded across North America, gradually acquiring new territories,[21] killing and displacing Native Americans, and admitting new states. By 1848, the United States spanned the continent.[21]
+Slavery was legal in much of the United States until the second half of the 19th century, when the American Civil War led to its abolition.[22][23]
+
+The Spanish–American War and World War I entrenched the U.S. as a world power, a status confirmed by the outcome of World War II. It was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.[24]
+
+The United States is a federal republic and a representative democracy. It is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), NATO, and other international organizations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
+
+A highly developed country, the United States is the world's largest economy and accounts for approximately a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP).[25] The United States is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter of goods, by value.[26][27] Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total,[28] it holds 29.4% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share held by any country.[29] Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, median income, median wealth, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity.[30][31] It is the foremost military power in the world, making up more than a third of global military spending,[32] and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.[33]
+
+The first known use of the name "America" dates back to 1507, when it appeared on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. On this map, the name applied to South America in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.[34] After returning from his expeditions, Vespucci first postulated that the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern limit, as initially thought by Christopher Columbus, but instead were part of an entirely separate landmass thus far unknown to the Europeans.[35] In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator used the name "America" on his own world map, applying it to the entire Western Hemisphere.[36]
+
+The first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written by Stephen Moylan, Esq., to Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort.[37][38][39] The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.[40]
+
+The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed no later than June 17, 1776, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'".[41] The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'".[42] In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence.[41] This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.[41]
+
+The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms are the "U.S.," the "USA," and "America." Colloquial names are the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States." "Columbia," a name popular in poetry and songs of the late 18th century, derives its origin from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia." Many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.[43]
+
+The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865.[44] The singular form—e.g., "the United States is"—became popular after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States." The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.[45]
+
+A citizen of the United States is an "American." "United States," "American" and "U.S." refer to the country adjectivally ("American values," "U.S. forces"). In English, the word "American" rarely refers to topics or subjects not directly connected with the United States.[46]
+
+It has been generally accepted that the first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 12,000 years ago; however, increasing evidence suggests an even earlier arrival.[19][47][48] After crossing the land bridge, the Paleo-Indians moved southward along the Pacific coast[49] and through an interior ice-free corridor.[50] The Clovis culture, which appeared around 11,000 BC, was initially believed to represent the first wave of human settlement of the Americas.[51][52] It is likely these represent the first of three major waves of migration into North America.[53]
+
+Over time, indigenous cultures in North America grew increasingly complex, and some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture in the southeast, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies.[54] The Mississippian culture flourished in the south from 800 to 1600 AD, extending from the Mexican border down through Florida.[55] Its city state Cahokia is the largest, most complex pre-Columbian archaeological site in the modern-day United States.[56] In the Four Corners region, Ancestral Puebloan culture developed from centuries of agricultural experimentation.[57]
+
+Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Taos Pueblo.[58][59] The earthworks constructed by Native Americans of the Poverty Point culture have also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the southern Great Lakes region, the Iroquois Confederacy was established at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.[60] Most prominent along the Atlantic coast were the Algonquian tribes, who practiced hunting and trapping, along with limited cultivation.
+
+With the progress of European colonization in the territories of the contemporary United States, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[61] The native population of America declined after European arrival for various reasons,[62][63] primarily diseases such as smallpox and measles.[64][65]
+
+Estimating the native population of North America at the time of European contact is difficult.[66][67] Douglas H. Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution estimated that there was a population of 92,916 in the south Atlantic states and a population of 473,616 in the Gulf states,[68] but most academics regard this figure as too low.[66] Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns believed the populations were much higher, suggesting 1,100,000 along the shores of the gulf of Mexico, 2,211,000 people living between Florida and Massachusetts, 5,250,000 in the Mississippi Valley and tributaries and 697,000 people in the Florida peninsula.[66][67]
+
+In the early days of colonization, many European settlers were subject to food shortages, disease, and attacks from Native Americans. Native Americans were also often at war with neighboring tribes and allied with Europeans in their colonial wars. In many cases, however, natives and settlers came to depend on each other. Settlers traded for food and animal pelts; natives for guns, ammunition and other European goods.[69] Natives taught many settlers to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. European missionaries and others felt it was important to "civilize" the Native Americans and urged them to adopt European agricultural techniques and lifestyles.[70][71]
+
+With the advancement of European colonization in North America, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[72] The first Europeans to arrive in the contiguous United States were Spanish conquistadors such as Juan Ponce de León, who made his first visit to Florida in 1513. Even earlier, Christopher Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his 1493 voyage. The Spanish set up the first settlements in Florida and New Mexico such as Saint Augustine[73] and Santa Fe. The French established their own as well along the Mississippi River. Successful English settlement on the eastern coast of North America began with the Virginia Colony in 1607 at Jamestown and with the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. Many settlers were dissenting Christian groups who came seeking religious freedom. The continent's first elected legislative assembly, Virginia's House of Burgesses, was created in 1619. The Mayflower Compact, signed by the Pilgrims before disembarking, and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, established precedents for the pattern of representative self-government and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies.[74][75]
+
+Most settlers in every colony were small farmers, though other industries were formed. Cash crops included tobacco, rice, and wheat. Extraction industries grew up in furs, fishing and lumber. Manufacturers produced rum and ships, and by the late colonial period, Americans were producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply.[76] Cities eventually dotted the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs. English colonists were supplemented by waves of Scotch-Irish immigrants and other groups. As coastal land grew more expensive, freed indentured servants claimed lands further west.[77]
+
+A large-scale slave trade with English privateers began.[78] Because of less disease and better food and treatment, the life expectancy of slaves was much higher in North America than further south, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.[79][80] Colonial society was largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, and colonies passed acts for and against the practice.[81][82] But by the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in the South.[83]
+
+With the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were administered by the British as overseas dependencies.[84] All nonetheless had local governments with elections open to most free men.[85] With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grew rapidly. Relatively small Native American populations were eclipsed.[86] The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest both in religion and in religious liberty.[87]
+
+During the Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans, who were being conquered and displaced, the 13 British colonies had a population of over 2.1 million in 1770, about a third that of Britain. Despite continuing, new arrivals, the rate of natural increase was such that by the 1770s only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas.[88] The colonies' distance from Britain had allowed the development of self-government, but their unprecedented success motivated monarchs to periodically seek to reassert royal authority.[89]
+
+In 1774, the Spanish Navy ship Santiago, under Juan Pérez, entered and anchored in an inlet of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, in present-day British Columbia. Although the Spanish did not land, natives paddled to the ship to trade furs for abalone shells from California.[90] At the time, the Spanish were able to monopolize the trade between Asia and North America, granting limited licenses to the Portuguese. When the Russians began establishing a growing fur trading system in Alaska, the Spanish began to challenge the Russians, with Pérez's voyage being the first of many to the Pacific Northwest.[91][j]
+
+During his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook became the first European to begin formal contact with Hawaii.[93] Captain Cook's last voyage included sailing along the coast of North America and Alaska searching for a Northwest Passage for approximately nine months.[94]
+
+The American Revolutionary War was the first successful colonial war of independence against a European power. Americans had developed an ideology of "republicanism" asserting that government rested on the will of the people as expressed in their local legislatures. They demanded their rights as Englishmen and "no taxation without representation". The British insisted on administering the empire through Parliament, and the conflict escalated into war.[95]
+
+The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that Great Britain was not protecting Americans' unalienable rights. July 4 is celebrated annually as Independence Day.[96] In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a decentralized government that operated until 1789.[96]
+
+Following the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781,[97] Britain signed the peace treaty of 1783, and American sovereignty was internationally recognized and the country was granted all lands east of the Mississippi River. Nationalists led the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788. The federal government was reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789. George Washington, who had led the Continental Army to victory, was the first president elected under the new constitution. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.[98]
+
+Although the federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808, after 1820, cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and along with it, the slave population.[99][100][101] The Second Great Awakening, especially 1800–1840, converted millions to evangelical Protestantism. In the North, it energized multiple social reform movements, including abolitionism;[102] in the South, Methodists and Baptists proselytized among slave populations.[103]
+
+Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of American Indian Wars.[104] The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation's area.[105] The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism.[106] A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819.[107] The expansion was aided by steam power, when steamboats began traveling along America's large water systems, many of which were connected by new canals, such as the Erie and the I&M; then, even faster railroads began their stretch across the nation's land.[108]
+
+From 1820 to 1850, Jacksonian democracy began a set of reforms which included wider white male suffrage; it led to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that forcibly resettled Indians into the west on Indian reservations. The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 during a period of expansionist Manifest destiny.[109] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest.[110] Victory in the Mexican–American War resulted in the 1848 Mexican Cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest.[111]
+The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 spurred migration to the Pacific coast, which led to the California Genocide[112][113][114][115] and the creation of additional western states.[116] After the Civil War, new transcontinental railways made relocation easier for settlers, expanded internal trade and increased conflicts with Native Americans.[117] In 1869, a new Peace Policy nominally promised to protect Native Americans from abuses, avoid further war, and secure their eventual U.S. citizenship. Nonetheless, large-scale conflicts continued throughout the West into the 1900s.
+
+Irreconcilable sectional conflict regarding the slavery of Africans and African Americans ultimately led to the American Civil War.[118] Initially, states entering the Union had alternated between slave and free states, keeping a sectional balance in the Senate, while free states outstripped slave states in population and in the House of Representatives. But with additional western territory and more free-soil states, tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over federalism and disposition of the territories, as well as whether to expand or restrict slavery.[119]
+
+With the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, conventions in thirteen slave states ultimately declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "South" or the "Confederacy"), while the federal government (the "Union") maintained that secession was illegal.[119] In order to bring about this secession, military action was initiated by the secessionists, and the Union responded in kind. The ensuing war would become the deadliest military conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of approximately 618,000 soldiers as well as many civilians.[120] The Union initially simply fought to keep the country united. Nevertheless, as casualties mounted after 1863 and Lincoln delivered his Emancipation Proclamation, the main purpose of the war from the Union's viewpoint became the abolition of slavery. Indeed, when the Union ultimately won the war in April 1865, each of the states in the defeated South was required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery.
+
+The government enacted three constitutional amendments in the years after the war: the aforementioned Thirteenth as well as the Fourteenth Amendment providing citizenship to the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves,[121] and the Fifteenth Amendment ensuring in theory that African Americans had the right to vote. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power[122] aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the South while guaranteeing the rights of the newly freed slaves.
+
+Reconstruction began in earnest following the war. While President Lincoln attempted to foster friendship and forgiveness between the Union and the former Confederacy, his assassination on April 14, 1865, drove a wedge between North and South again. Republicans in the federal government made it their goal to oversee the rebuilding of the South and to ensure the rights of African Americans. They persisted until the Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to cease protecting the rights of African Americans in the South in order for Democrats to concede the presidential election of 1876.
+
+Southern white Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers," took control of the South after the end of Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1910 the Redeemers established so-called Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising most blacks and some poor whites throughout the region. Blacks faced racial segregation, especially in the South.[123] They also occasionally experienced vigilante violence, including lynching.[124]
+
+In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe supplied a surplus of labor for the country's industrialization and transformed its culture.[126] National infrastructure including telegraph and transcontinental railroads spurred economic growth and greater settlement and development of the American Old West. The later invention of electric light and the telephone would also affect communication and urban life.[127]
+
+The United States fought Indian Wars west of the Mississippi River from 1810 to at least 1890.[128] Most of these conflicts ended with the cession of Native American territory and their confinement to Indian reservations. This further expanded acreage under mechanical cultivation, increasing surpluses for international markets.[129] Mainland expansion also included the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.[130] In 1893, pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the monarchy and formed the Republic of Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were ceded by Spain in the same year, following the Spanish–American War.[131] American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the end of the Second Samoan Civil War.[132] The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.[133]
+
+Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. Tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie led the nation's progress in railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. Banking became a major part of the economy, with J. P. Morgan playing a notable role. The American economy boomed, becoming the world's largest, and the United States achieved great power status.[134] These dramatic changes were accompanied by social unrest and the rise of populist, socialist, and anarchist movements.[135] This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which saw significant reforms including women's suffrage, alcohol prohibition, regulation of consumer goods, greater antitrust measures to ensure competition and attention to worker conditions.[136][137][138]
+
+The United States remained neutral from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 until 1917, when it joined the war as an "associated power," alongside the formal Allies of World War I, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson took a leading diplomatic role at the Paris Peace Conference and advocated strongly for the U.S. to join the League of Nations. However, the Senate refused to approve this and did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles that established the League of Nations.[139]
+
+In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage.[140] The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of radio for mass communication and the invention of early television.[141] The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal.[142] The Great Migration of millions of African Americans out of the American South began before World War I and extended through the 1960s;[143] whereas the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration.[144]
+
+At first effectively neutral during World War II, the United States began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers.[145] Although Japan attacked the United States first, the U.S. nonetheless pursued a "Europe first" defense policy.[146] The United States thus left its vast Asian colony, the Philippines, isolated and fighting a losing struggle against Japanese invasion and occupation, as military resources were devoted to the European theater. During the war, the United States was referred to as one of the "Four Policemen"[147] of Allies power who met to plan the postwar world, along with Britain, the Soviet Union and China.[148][149] Although the nation lost around 400,000 military personnel,[150] it emerged relatively undamaged from the war with even greater economic and military influence.[151]
+
+The United States played a leading role in the Bretton Woods and Yalta conferences with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and other Allies, which signed agreements on new international financial institutions and Europe's postwar reorganization. As an Allied victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war.[152] The United States and Japan then fought each other in the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.[153][154] The United States eventually developed the first nuclear weapons and used them on Japan in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese surrendered on September 2, ending World War II.[155][156]
+
+After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for power, influence, and prestige during what became known as the Cold War, driven by an ideological divide between capitalism and communism.[157] They dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its NATO allies on one side and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other. The U.S. developed a policy of containment towards the expansion of communist influence. While the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict.[citation needed]
+
+The United States often opposed Third World movements that it viewed as Soviet-sponsored, and occasionally pursued direct action for regime change against left-wing governments, even supporting right-wing authoritarian governments at times.[158] American troops fought communist Chinese and North Korean forces in the Korean War of 1950–53.[159] The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite and its 1961 launch of the first manned spaceflight initiated a "Space Race" in which the United States became the first nation to land a man on the moon in 1969.[159] A proxy war in Southeast Asia eventually evolved into full American participation, as the Vietnam War.[citation needed]
+
+At home, the U.S. experienced sustained economic expansion and a rapid growth of its population and middle class. Construction of an Interstate Highway System transformed the nation's infrastructure over the following decades. Millions moved from farms and inner cities to large suburban housing developments.[160][161] In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th and last U.S. state added to the country.[162] The growing Civil Rights Movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader and figurehead. A combination of court decisions and legislation, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, sought to end racial discrimination.[163][164][165] Meanwhile, a counterculture movement grew which was fueled by opposition to the Vietnam war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution.
+
+The launch of a "War on Poverty" expanded entitlements and welfare spending, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that provide health coverage to the elderly and poor, respectively, and the means-tested Food Stamp Program and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.[166]
+
+The 1970s and early 1980s saw the onset of stagflation. After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan responded to economic stagnation with free-market oriented reforms. Following the collapse of détente, he abandoned "containment" and initiated the more aggressive "rollback" strategy towards the USSR.[167][168][169][170][171] After a surge in female labor participation over the previous decade, by 1985 the majority of women aged 16 and over were employed.[172]
+
+The late 1980s brought a "thaw" in relations with the USSR, and its collapse in 1991 finally ended the Cold War.[173][174][175][176] This brought about unipolarity[177] with the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The concept of Pax Americana, which had appeared in the post-World War II period, gained wide popularity as a term for the post-Cold War new world order.[citation needed]
+
+After the Cold War, the conflict in the Middle East triggered a crisis in 1990, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, an ally of the United States. Fearing the instability would spread to other regions, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Shield, a defensive force buildup in Saudi Arabia, and Operation Desert Storm, in a staging titled the Gulf War; waged by coalition forces from 34 nations, led by the United States against Iraq ending in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restoration of the monarchy.[178]
+
+Originating within U.S. military defense networks, the Internet spread to international academic platforms and then to the public in the 1990s, greatly affecting the global economy, society, and culture.[179] Due to the dot-com boom, stable monetary policy, and reduced social welfare spending, the 1990s saw the longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history.[180] Beginning in 1994, the U.S. entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), prompting trade among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to soar.[181]
+
+On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people.[182] In response, the United States launched the War on Terror, which included a war in Afghanistan and the 2003–11 Iraq War.[183][184]
+
+Government policy designed to promote affordable housing,[185] widespread failures in corporate and regulatory governance,[186] and historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve[187] led to the mid-2000s housing bubble, which culminated with the 2008 financial crisis, the nation's largest economic contraction since the Great Depression.[188] Barack Obama, the first African-American[189] and multiracial[190] president, was elected in 2008 amid the crisis,[191] and subsequently passed stimulus measures and the Dodd–Frank Act in an attempt to mitigate its negative effects and ensure there would not be a repeat of the crisis. In 2010, the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, which made the most sweeping reforms to the nation's healthcare system in nearly five decades, including mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges.[citation needed]
+
+American forces in Iraq were withdrawn in large numbers in 2009 and 2010, and the war in the region was declared formally over in December 2011.[192] But months earlier, Operation Neptune Spear led to the death of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.[193] In the presidential election of 2016, Republican Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States. On January 20, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed.[194] As of July 2020, the United States has over 4 million COVID-19 cases and over 145,000 deaths.[195] The United States is, by far, the country with the most cases of COVID-19 since April 11, 2020.[196]
+
+The 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia occupy a combined area of 3,119,884.69 square miles (8,080,464.3 km2). Of this area, 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2) is contiguous land, composing 83.65% of total U.S. land area.[197][198] Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, is 10,931 square miles (28,311 km2) in area. The populated territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands together cover 9,185 square miles (23,789 km2).[199] Measured by only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.[200]
+
+The United States is the world's third- or fourth-largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and nearly equal to China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted, and how the total size of the United States is measured.[e][201][202]
+
+The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont.[203] The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest.[204] The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast.[204]
+
+The Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking around 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado.[205] Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Chihuahua and Mojave.[206] The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast, both ranges reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m). The lowest and highest points in the contiguous United States are in the state of California,[207] and only about 84 miles (135 km) apart.[208] At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali is the highest peak in the country and in North America.[209] Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature.[210]
+
+The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.[211] The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains have an alpine climate. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Hawaii and the southern tip of Florida are tropical, as well as its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.[212] States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur in the country, mainly in Tornado Alley areas in the Midwest and South.[213] Overall, the United States has the world's most violent weather, receiving more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world.[214]
+
+The U.S. ecology is megadiverse: about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and more than 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland.[216] The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 bird species, 311 reptile species, and 295 amphibian species,[217] as well as about 91,000 insect species.[218]
+
+There are 62 national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas.[219] Altogether, the government owns about 28% of the country's land area,[220] mostly in the western states.[221] Most of this land is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching, and about .86% is used for military purposes.[222][223]
+
+Environmental issues include debates on oil and nuclear energy, dealing with air and water pollution, the economic costs of protecting wildlife, logging and deforestation,[224][225] and international responses to global warming.[226][227] The most prominent environmental agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by presidential order in 1970.[228] The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act.[229] The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is intended to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.[230]
+
+The U.S. Census Bureau officially estimated the country's population to be 328,239,523 as of July 1, 2019.[231] In addition, the Census Bureau provides a continuously updated U.S. Population Clock that approximates the latest population of the 50 states and District of Columbia based on the Bureau's most recent demographic trends.[234] According to the clock, on May 23, 2020, the U.S. population exceeded 329 million residents, with a net gain of one person every 19 seconds, or about 4,547 people per day. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world, after China and India. In 2018 the median age of the United States population was 38.1 years.[235]
+
+In 2018, there were almost 90 million immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrants (second-generation Americans) in the United States, accounting for 28% of the overall U.S. population.[236] The United States has a very diverse population; 37 ancestry groups have more than one million members.[237] German Americans are the largest ethnic group (more than 50 million)—followed by Irish Americans (circa 37 million), Mexican Americans (circa 31 million) and English Americans (circa 28 million).[238][239]
+
+White Americans (mostly European ancestry) are the largest racial group at 73.1% of the population; African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third-largest ancestry group.[237] Asian Americans are the country's second-largest racial minority; the three largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans.[237] The largest American community with European ancestry is German Americans, which consists of more than 14% of the total population.[240] In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively).[241] The census counted more than 19 million people of "Some Other Race" who were "unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories in 2010, more than 18.5 million (97%) of whom are of Hispanic ethnicity.[241]
+
+In 2017, out of the U.S. foreign-born population, some 45% (20.7 million) were naturalized citizens, 27% (12.3 million) were lawful permanent residents (including many eligible to become citizens), 6% (2.2 million) were temporary lawful residents, and 23% (10.5 million) were unauthorized immigrants.[242] Among current living immigrants to the U.S., the top five countries of birth are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and El Salvador. Until 2017 and 2018, the United States led the world in refugee resettlement for decades, admitted more refugees than the rest of the world combined.[243] From fiscal year 1980 until 2017, 55% of refugees came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 13% from Africa, and 4% from Latin America.[243]
+
+A 2017 United Nations report projected that the U.S. would be one of nine countries in which world population growth through 2050 would be concentrated.[244] A 2020 U.S. Census Bureau report projected the population of the country could be anywhere between 320 million and 447 million by 2060, depending on the rate of in-migration; in all projected scenarios, a lower fertility rate and increases in life expectancy would result in an aging population.[245] The United States has an annual birth rate of 13 per 1,000, which is five births per 1,000 below the world average.[246] Its population growth rate is positive at 0.7%, higher than that of many developed nations.[247]
+
+About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (including suburbs);[202] about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000.[248] In 2008, 273 incorporated municipalities had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than one million residents, and four cities had over two million (namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston).[249] Estimates for the year 2018 show that 53 metropolitan areas have populations greater than one million. Many metros in the South, Southwest and West grew significantly between 2010 and 2018. The Dallas and Houston metros increased by more than a million people, while the Washington, D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and Phoenix metros all grew by more than 500,000 people.
+
+English (specifically, American English) is the de facto national language of the United States. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2010, about 230 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. 12% of the population speaks Spanish at home, making it the second most common language. Spanish is also the most widely taught second language.[250][251]
+
+Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii.[252] In addition to English, Alaska recognizes twenty official Native languages,[253][k] and South Dakota recognizes Sioux.[254] While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French.[255] Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms.[256]
+
+Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan[257] is officially recognized by American Samoa and Chamorro[258] is an official language of Guam. Both Carolinian and Chamorro have official recognition in the Northern Mariana Islands.[259]
+Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico and is more widely spoken than English there.[260]
+
+The most widely taught foreign languages in the United States, in terms of enrollment numbers from kindergarten through university undergraduate education, are Spanish (around 7.2 million students), French (1.5 million), and German (500,000). Other commonly taught languages include Latin, Japanese, ASL, Italian, and Chinese.[261][262] 18% of all Americans claim to speak both English and another language.[263]
+
+Religion in the United States (2017)[266]
+
+The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids Congress from passing laws respecting its establishment.
+
+In a 2013 survey, 56% of Americans said religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other Western nation.[267] In a 2009 Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they attended church weekly or almost weekly; the figures ranged from a low of 23% in Vermont to a high of 63% in Mississippi.[268]
+
+In a 2014 survey, 70.6% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians;[269] Protestants accounted for 46.5%, while Roman Catholics, at 20.8%, formed the largest single Christian group.[270] In 2014, 5.9% of the U.S. adult population claimed a non-Christian religion.[271] These include Judaism (1.9%), Islam (0.9%), Hinduism (0.7%), and Buddhism (0.7%).[271] The survey also reported that 22.8% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist or simply having no religion—up from 8.2% in 1990.[270][272][273] There are also Unitarian Universalist, Scientologist, Baha'i, Sikh, Jain, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Satanist, Taoist, Druid, Native American, Afro-American, traditional African, Wiccan, Gnostic, humanist and deist communities.[274][275]
+
+Protestantism is the largest Christian religious grouping in the United States, accounting for almost half of all Americans. Baptists collectively form the largest branch of Protestantism at 15.4%,[276] and the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest individual Protestant denomination at 5.3% of the U.S. population.[276] Apart from Baptists, other Protestant categories include nondenominational Protestants, Methodists, Pentecostals, unspecified Protestants, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, other Reformed, Episcopalians/Anglicans, Quakers, Adventists, Holiness, Christian fundamentalists, Anabaptists, Pietists, and multiple others.[276]
+
+As with other Western countries, the U.S. is becoming less religious. Irreligion is growing rapidly among Americans under 30.[277] Polls show that overall American confidence in organized religion has been declining since the mid to late 1980s,[278] and that younger Americans, in particular, are becoming increasingly irreligious.[271][279] In a 2012 study, the Protestant share of the U.S. population had dropped to 48%, thus ending its status as religious category of the majority for the first time.[280][281] Americans with no religion have 1.7 children compared to 2.2 among Christians. The unaffiliated are less likely to marry with 37% marrying compared to 52% of Christians.[282]
+
+The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. By contrast, religion plays the least important role in New England and in the Western United States.[268]
+
+As of 2018[update], 52% of Americans age 15 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 32% had never been married.[283] Women now work mostly outside the home and receive the majority of bachelor's degrees.[284]
+
+The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is 26.5 per 1,000 women. The rate has declined by 57% since 1991.[285] Abortion is legal throughout the country. Abortion rates, currently 241 per 1,000 live births and 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, are falling but remain higher than most Western nations.[286] In 2013, the average age at first birth was 26 and 41% of births were to unmarried women.[287]
+
+The total fertility rate in 2016 was 1820.5 births per 1000 women.[288] Adoption in the United States is common and relatively easy from a legal point of view (compared to other Western countries).[289] As of 2001[update], with more than 127,000 adoptions, the U.S. accounted for nearly half of the total number of adoptions worldwide.[needs update][290] Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, and it is legal for same-sex couples to adopt. Polygamy is illegal throughout the U.S.[291]
+
+In 2019, the U.S. had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.[292]
+
+The United States had a life expectancy of 78.6 years at birth in 2017, which was the third year of declines in life expectancy following decades of continuous increase. The recent decline, primarily among the age group 25 to 64, is largely due to sharp increases in the drug overdose and suicide rates; the country has one of the highest suicide rates among wealthy countries.[293][294] Life expectancy was highest among Asians and Hispanics and lowest among blacks.[295][296] According to CDC and Census Bureau data, deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug overdoses hit record highs in 2017.[297]
+
+Increasing obesity in the United States and health improvements elsewhere contributed to lowering the country's rank in life expectancy from 11th in the world in 1987, to 42nd in 2007, and as of 2017 the country had the lowest life expectancy among Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and seven countries of western Europe.[298][299] Obesity rates have more than doubled in the last 30 years and are the highest in the industrialized world.[300][301] Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight.[302] Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.[303]
+
+In 2010, coronary artery disease, lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and traffic accidents caused the most years of life lost in the U.S. Low back pain, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety caused the most years lost to disability. The most harmful risk factors were poor diet, tobacco smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, physical inactivity, and alcohol use. Alzheimer's disease, drug abuse, kidney disease, cancer, and falls caused the most additional years of life lost over their age-adjusted 1990 per-capita rates.[304] U.S. teenage pregnancy and abortion rates are substantially higher than in other Western nations, especially among blacks and Hispanics.[305]
+
+Health-care coverage in the United States is a combination of public and private efforts and is not universal. In 2017, 12.2% of the population did not carry health insurance.[306] The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue.[307][308] Federal legislation, passed in early 2010, roughly halved the uninsured share of the population, though the bill and its ultimate effect are issues of controversy.[309][310] The U.S. health-care system far outspends any other nation, measured both in per capita spending and as percentage of GDP.[311] At the same time, the U.S. is a global leader in medical innovation.[312]
+
+American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. In most states, children are required to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn 18 (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at 16 or 17.[313]
+
+About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.[314] The U.S. spends more on education per student than any nation in the world, spending more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student.[315][needs update] Some 80% of U.S. college students attend public universities.[316]
+
+Of Americans 25 and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees.[317] The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.[202][318] The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.[319]
+
+The United States has many private and public institutions of higher education. The majority of the world's top universities, as listed by various ranking organizations, are in the U.S.[320][321][322] There are also local community colleges with generally more open admission policies, shorter academic programs, and lower tuition.
+
+In 2018, U21, a network of research-intensive universities, ranked the United States first in the world for breadth and quality of higher education, and 15th when GDP was a factor.[323] As for public expenditures on higher education, the U.S. trails some other OECD nations but spends more per student than the OECD average, and more than all nations in combined public and private spending.[315][324] As of 2018[update], student loan debt exceeded 1.5 trillion dollars.[325][326]
+
+The United States is a federal republic of 50 states, a federal district, five territories and several uninhabited island possessions.[327][328][329] It is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law."[330] For 2018, the U.S. ranked 25th on the Democracy Index.[331] On Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index its public sector position deteriorated from a score of 76 in 2015 to 69 in 2019.[332]
+
+In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government: federal, state, and local. The local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district.
+
+The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document.[333] The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus. The Constitution has been amended 27 times;[334] the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights. All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review and any law ruled by the courts to be in violation of the Constitution is voided. The principle of judicial review, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was established by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison (1803)[335] in a decision handed down by Chief Justice John Marshall.[336]
+
+The federal government comprises three branches:
+
+The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population. Each state then draws single-member districts to conform with the census apportionment. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories each have one member of Congress—these members are not allowed to vote.[341]
+
+The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one-third of Senate seats are up for election every two years. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories do not have senators.[341] The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia.[342] The Supreme Court, led by the chief justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.[343]
+
+The state governments are structured in a roughly similar fashion, though Nebraska has a unicameral legislature.[344] The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.
+
+The 50 states are the principal administrative divisions in the country. These are subdivided into counties or county equivalents and further divided into municipalities. The District of Columbia is a federal district that contains the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C.[345] The states and the District of Columbia choose the president of the United States. Each state has presidential electors equal to the number of their representatives and senators in Congress; the District of Columbia has three (because of the 23rd Amendment).[346] Territories of the United States such as Puerto Rico do not have presidential electors, and so people in those territories cannot vote for the president.[341]
+
+The United States also observes tribal sovereignty of the American Indian nations to a limited degree, as it does with the states' sovereignty. American Indians are U.S. citizens and tribal lands are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress and the federal courts. Like the states they have a great deal of autonomy, but also like the states, tribes are not allowed to make war, engage in their own foreign relations, or print and issue currency.[347]
+
+Citizenship is granted at birth in all states, the District of Columbia, and all major U.S. territories except American Samoa.[348][349][m]
+
+The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history.[352] For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote. The president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College.[353]
+
+In American political culture, the center-right Republican Party is considered "conservative" and the center-left Democratic Party is considered "liberal."[354][355] The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states," are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.
+
+Republican Donald Trump, the winner of the 2016 presidential election, is serving as the 45th president of the United States.[356] Leadership in the Senate includes Republican vice president Mike Pence, Republican president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.[357] Leadership in the House includes Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.[358]
+
+In the 116th United States Congress, the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democratic Party and the Senate is controlled by the Republican Party, giving the U.S. a split Congress. The Senate consists of 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats; the House consists of 233 Democrats, 196 Republicans, and 1 Libertarian.[359] Of state governors, there are 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. Among the D.C. mayor and the five territorial governors, there are two Republicans, one Democrat, one New Progressive, and two Independents.[360]
+
+The United States has an established structure of foreign relations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. New York City is home to the United Nations Headquarters. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States (although the U.S. still maintains unofficial relations with Bhutan and Taiwan).[361] It is a member of the G7,[362] G20, and OECD.
+
+The United States has a "Special Relationship" with the United Kingdom[363] and strong ties with India, Canada,[364] Australia,[365] New Zealand,[366] the Philippines,[367] Japan,[368] South Korea,[369] Israel,[370] and several European Union countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.[371] It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Colombia is traditionally considered by the United States as its most loyal ally in South America.[372][373]
+
+The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau through the Compact of Free Association.[374]
+
+Taxation in the United States is levied at the federal, state, and local government levels. This includes taxes on income, payroll, property, sales, imports, estates, and gifts, as well as various fees. Taxation in the United States is based on citizenship, not residency.[375] Both non-resident citizens and Green Card holders living abroad are taxed on their income irrespective of where they live or where their income is earned. The United States is one of the only countries in the world to do so.[376]
+
+In 2010 taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP.[377] Based on CBO estimates,[378] under 2013 tax law the top 1% will be paying the highest average tax rates since 1979, while other income groups will remain at historic lows.[379] For 2018, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 400 households was 23%, compared to 24.2% for the bottom half of U.S. households.[380]
+
+
+
+During fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $3.54 trillion on a budget or cash basis, down $60 billion or 1.7% vs. fiscal year 2011 spending of $3.60 trillion. Major categories of fiscal year 2012 spending included: Medicare & Medicaid (23%), Social Security (22%), Defense Department (19%), non-defense discretionary (17%), other mandatory (13%) and interest (6%).[382]
+
+The total national debt of the United States in the United States was $18.527 trillion (106% of the GDP) in 2014.[383][n] The United States has the largest external debt in the world[387] and the 34th largest government debt as a % of GDP in the world.[388]
+
+The president is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and by the Department of the Navy during times of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.[389]
+
+Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System.[390] American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's 11 active aircraft carriers, and Marine expeditionary units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad,[391] and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries.[392]
+
+The military budget of the United States in 2011 was more than $700 billion, 41% of global military spending. At 4.7% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top 15 military spenders, after Saudi Arabia.[393]  Defense spending plays a major role in science and technology investment, with roughly half of U.S. federal research and development funded by the Department of Defense.[394] Defense's share of the overall U.S. economy has generally declined in recent decades, from Cold War peaks of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 and 69.5% of federal outlays in 1954 to 4.7% of GDP and 18.8% of federal outlays in 2011.[395]
+
+The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.[396] More than 90% of the world's 14,000 nuclear weapons are owned by Russia and the United States.[397]
+
+Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police departments and sheriff's offices, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties, including protecting civil rights, national security and enforcing U.S. federal courts' rulings and federal laws.[398] State courts conduct most criminal trials while federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state criminal courts.
+
+A cross-sectional analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed that United States "homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher."[399] In 2016, the US murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000.[400] Gun ownership rights, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, continue to be the subject of contention.
+
+The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world.[401] As of 2020, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that there were some 2.3 million people incarcerated.[402]  The imprisonment rate for all prisoners sentenced to more than a year in state or federal facilities is 478 per 100,000 in 2013.[403] According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of inmates held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses.[404] About 9% of prisoners are held in privatized prisons.[402] The practice of privately operated prisons began in the 1980s and has been a subject of contention.[405]
+
+Capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and at the state level in 30 states.[406][407] No executions took place from 1967 to 1977, owing in part to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Since the decision there have been more than 1,300 executions, a majority of these taking place in three states: Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.[408] Meanwhile, several states have either abolished or struck down death penalty laws. In 2019, the country had the sixth-highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.[409]
+
+According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $16.8 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 19% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).[417] The United States is the largest importer of goods and second-largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2010, the total U.S. trade deficit was $635 billion.[418] Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners.[419]
+
+From 1983 to 2008, U.S. real compounded annual GDP growth was 3.3%, compared to a 2.3% weighted average for the rest of the G7.[420] The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita[421] and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP.[417] The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.[422]
+
+In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 86.4% of the economy.[425] While its economy has reached a postindustrial level of development, the United States remains an industrial power.[426] Consumer spending comprised 68% of the U.S. economy in 2015.[427] In August 2010, the American labor force consisted of 154.1 million people (50%). With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people. It has a smaller welfare state and redistributes less income through government action than most European nations.[428]
+
+The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation[429] and is one of a few countries in the world without paid family leave as a legal right.[430] While federal law does not require sick leave, it is a common benefit for government workers and full-time employees at corporations.[431] 74% of full-time American workers get paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although only 24% of part-time workers get the same benefits.[431] In 2009, the United States had the third-highest workforce productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands.[432]
+
+
+
+The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. Methods for producing interchangeable parts were developed by the U.S. War Department by the Federal Armories during the first half of the 19th century. This technology, along with the establishment of a machine tool industry, enabled the U.S. to have large-scale manufacturing of sewing machines, bicycles, and other items in the late 19th century and became known as the American system of manufacturing. Factory electrification in the early 20th century and introduction of the assembly line and other labor-saving techniques created the system of mass production.[433] In the 21st century, approximately two-thirds of research and development funding comes from the private sector.[434] The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor.[435][436]
+
+In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's research laboratory, one of the first of its kind, developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera.[437] The latter led to emergence of the worldwide entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.[438]
+
+The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann, to immigrate to the United States.[439] During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age, while the Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and aeronautics.[440][441]
+
+The invention of the transistor in the 1950s, a key active component in practically all modern electronics, led to many technological developments and a significant expansion of the U.S. technology industry.[442] This, in turn, led to the establishment of many new technology companies and regions around the country such as Silicon Valley in California. Advancements by American microprocessor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel along with both computer software and hardware companies that include Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems created and popularized the personal computer. The ARPANET was developed in the 1960s to meet Defense Department requirements, and became the first of a series of networks which evolved into the Internet.[443]
+
+Accounting for 4.24% of the global population, Americans collectively possess 29.4% of the world's total wealth, and Americans make up roughly half of the world's population of millionaires.[444] The Global Food Security Index ranked the U.S. number one for food affordability and overall food security in March 2013.[445] Americans on average have more than twice as much living space per dwelling and per person as European Union residents, and more than every EU nation.[446] For 2017 the United Nations Development Programme ranked the United States 13th among 189 countries in its Human Development Index and 25th among 151 countries in its inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI).[447]
+
+Wealth, like income and taxes, is highly concentrated; the richest 10% of the adult population possess 72% of the country's household wealth, while the bottom half claim only 2%.[448] According to a September 2017 report by the Federal Reserve, the top 1% controlled 38.6% of the country's wealth in 2016.[449] According to a 2018 study by the OECD, the United States has a larger percentage of low-income workers than almost any other developed nation. This is largely because at-risk workers get almost no government support and are further set back by a very weak collective bargaining system.[450] The top one percent of income-earners accounted for 52 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2015, where income is defined as market income excluding government transfers.[451] In 2018, U.S. income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau.[452]
+
+After years of stagnation, median household income reached a record high in 2016 following two consecutive years of record growth. Income inequality remains at record highs however, with the top fifth of earners taking home more than half of all overall income.[454] The rise in the share of total annual income received by the top one percent, which has more than doubled from nine percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2011, has significantly affected income inequality,[455] leaving the United States with one of the widest income distributions among OECD nations.[456]  The extent and relevance of income inequality is a matter of debate.[457][458][459]
+
+Between June 2007 and November 2008, the global recession led to falling asset prices around the world. Assets owned by Americans lost about a quarter of their value.[460] Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth was down $14 trillion, but has since increased $14 trillion over 2006 levels.[461] At the end of 2014, household debt amounted to $11.8 trillion,[462] down from $13.8 trillion at the end of 2008.[463]
+
+There were about 578,424 sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in the US in January 2014, with almost two-thirds staying in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program.[464] In 2011, 16.7 million children lived in food-insecure households, about 35% more than 2007 levels, though only 1.1% of U.S. children, or 845,000, saw reduced food intake or disrupted eating patterns at some point during the year, and most cases were not chronic.[465] As of June 2018[update], 40 million people, roughly 12.7% of the U.S. population, were living in poverty, with 18.5 million of those living in deep poverty (a family income below one-half of the poverty threshold) and over five million live "in 'Third World' conditions." In 2016, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, which made up 32.6% of the impoverished population.[466] In 2017, the U.S. state or territory with the lowest poverty rate was New Hampshire (7.6%), and the one with the highest was American Samoa (65%).[467][468][469]
+
+Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of public roads.[471] The United States has the world's second-largest automobile market,[472] and has the highest rate of per-capita vehicle ownership in the world, with 765 vehicles per 1,000 Americans (1996).[473][needs update] In 2017, there were 255,009,283 non-two wheel motor vehicles, or about 910 vehicles per 1,000 people.[474]
+
+The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned and has been largely deregulated since 1978, while most major airports are publicly owned.[475] The three largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are US-based; American Airlines is number one after its 2013 acquisition by US Airways.[476] Of the world's 50 busiest passenger airports, 16 are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.[477]
+
+The United States energy market is about 29,000 terawatt hours per year.[478] In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear and renewable energy sources.[479]
+
+Since 2007, the total greenhouse gas emissions by the United States are the second highest by country, exceeded only by China.[480] The United States has historically been the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gas emissions per capita remain high.[481]
+
+The United States is home to many cultures and a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.[483][484] Aside from the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors settled or immigrated within the past five centuries.[485] Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.[483][486] More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.[483]
+
+Americans have traditionally been characterized by a strong work ethic, competitiveness, and individualism,[487] as well as a unifying belief in an "American creed" emphasizing liberty, equality, private property, democracy, rule of law, and a preference for limited government.[488] Americans are extremely charitable by global standards. According to a 2006 British study, Americans gave 1.67% of GDP to charity, more than any other nation studied.[489][490][491]
+
+The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants.[492] Whether this perception is accurate has been a topic of debate.[493][494][495][496][420][497] While mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,[498] scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.[499] While Americans tend  to greatly value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is also generally seen as a positive attribute.[500]
+
+In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.[501] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."[502]
+
+Twelve U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Bob Dylan in 2016. William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[503] Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.[504]
+
+The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty, and later Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of American philosophical academia. John Rawls and Robert Nozick also led a revival of political philosophy.
+
+In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.[505] Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new, individualistic styles. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.[506] Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.[507]
+
+Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain with about three-quarters of grain products made of wheat flour[508] and many dishes use indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers.[509] These homegrown foods are part of a shared national menu on one of America's most popular holidays, Thanksgiving, when some Americans make traditional foods to celebrate the occasion.[510]
+
+The American fast food industry, the world's largest,[511] pioneered the drive-through format in the 1940s.[512] Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[513] Americans drink three times as much coffee as tea.[514] Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.[515][516]
+
+Although little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music.
+
+The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European and African traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s.[517]
+
+Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. Rock bands such as Metallica, the Eagles, and Aerosmith are among the highest grossing in worldwide sales.[518][519][520] In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk.
+
+More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities,[517] as have contemporary musical artists such as Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West, and Ariana Grande.[521]
+
+Hollywood, a northern district of Los Angeles, California, is one of the leaders in motion picture production.[522] The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope.[523] Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, although in the 21st century an increasing number of films are not made there, and film companies have been subject to the forces of globalization.[524]
+
+Director D. W. Griffith, the top American filmmaker during the silent film period, was central to the development of film grammar, and producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising.[525] Directors such as John Ford redefined the image of the American Old West, and, like others such as John Huston, broadened the possibilities of cinema with location shooting. The industry enjoyed its golden years, in what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood," from the early sound period until the early 1960s,[526] with screen actors such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe becoming iconic figures.[527][528] In the 1970s, "New Hollywood" or the "Hollywood Renaissance"[529] was defined by grittier films influenced by French and Italian realist pictures of the post-war period.[530] In more recent times, directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron have gained renown for their blockbuster films, often characterized by high production costs and earnings.
+
+Notable films topping the American Film Institute's AFI 100 list include Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time,[531][532] Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Graduate (1967), On the Waterfront (1954), Schindler's List (1993), Singin' in the Rain (1952), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).[533] The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, have been held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1929,[534] and the Golden Globe Awards have been held annually since January 1944.[535]
+
+American football is by several measures the most popular spectator sport;[537] the National Football League (NFL) has the highest average attendance of any sports league in the world, and the Super Bowl is watched by tens of millions globally. Baseball has been regarded as the U.S. national sport since the late 19th century, with Major League Baseball (MLB) being the top league. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports, with the top leagues being the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL). College football and basketball attract large audiences.[538] In soccer, the country hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the men's national soccer team qualified for ten World Cups and the women's team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup four times; Major League Soccer is the sport's highest league in the United States (featuring 23 American and three Canadian teams). The market for professional sports in the United States is roughly $69 billion, roughly 50% larger than that of all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined.[539]
+
+Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri were the first ever Olympic Games held outside of Europe.[540] As of 2017[update], the United States has won 2,522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 305 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.[541]
+While most major U.S. sports such as baseball and American football have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, some of which have become popular worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.[542] The most watched individual sports are golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR.[543][544]
+
+The four major broadcasters in the U.S. are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX). The four major broadcast television networks are all commercial entities. Cable television offers hundreds of channels catering to a variety of niches.[545] Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercial, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.[546]
+
+In 1998, the number of U.S. commercial radio stations had grown to 4,793 AM stations and 5,662 FM stations. In addition, there are 1,460 public radio stations. Most of these stations are run by universities and public authorities for educational purposes and are financed by public or private funds, subscriptions, and corporate underwriting. Much public-radio broadcasting is supplied by NPR. NPR was incorporated in February 1970 under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967; its television counterpart, PBS, was created by the same legislation. As of September 30, 2014[update], there are 15,433 licensed full-power radio stations in the U.S. according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).[547]
+
+Well-known newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.[548] Although the cost of publishing has increased over the years, the price of newspapers has generally remained low, forcing newspapers to rely more on advertising revenue and on articles provided by a major wire service, such as the Associated Press or Reuters, for their national and world coverage. With very few exceptions, all the newspapers in the U.S. are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families. Major cities often have "alternative weeklies" to complement the mainstream daily papers, such as New York City's The Village Voice or Los Angeles' LA Weekly. Major cities may also support a local business journal, trade papers relating to local industries, and papers for local ethnic and social groups. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Twitter.[549]
+
+More than 800 publications are produced in Spanish, the second most commonly used language in the United States behind English.[550][551]
+
+Internet sources
+

en/1874.html.txt

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+
+
+Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100
+
+The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country mostly located in central North America, between Canada and Mexico. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions.[i] At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), it is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area.[e] With a 2019 estimated population of over 328 million,[7] the U.S. is the third most populous country in the world. The Americans are a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been shaped through centuries of immigration. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City.
+
+Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago,[19] and European colonization began in the 16th century. The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolutionary War lasting between 1775 and 1783, leading to independence.[20] Beginning in the late 18th century, the United States vigorously expanded across North America, gradually acquiring new territories,[21] killing and displacing Native Americans, and admitting new states. By 1848, the United States spanned the continent.[21]
+Slavery was legal in much of the United States until the second half of the 19th century, when the American Civil War led to its abolition.[22][23]
+
+The Spanish–American War and World War I entrenched the U.S. as a world power, a status confirmed by the outcome of World War II. It was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.[24]
+
+The United States is a federal republic and a representative democracy. It is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), NATO, and other international organizations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
+
+A highly developed country, the United States is the world's largest economy and accounts for approximately a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP).[25] The United States is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter of goods, by value.[26][27] Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total,[28] it holds 29.4% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share held by any country.[29] Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, median income, median wealth, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity.[30][31] It is the foremost military power in the world, making up more than a third of global military spending,[32] and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.[33]
+
+The first known use of the name "America" dates back to 1507, when it appeared on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. On this map, the name applied to South America in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.[34] After returning from his expeditions, Vespucci first postulated that the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern limit, as initially thought by Christopher Columbus, but instead were part of an entirely separate landmass thus far unknown to the Europeans.[35] In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator used the name "America" on his own world map, applying it to the entire Western Hemisphere.[36]
+
+The first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written by Stephen Moylan, Esq., to Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort.[37][38][39] The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.[40]
+
+The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed no later than June 17, 1776, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'".[41] The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'".[42] In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence.[41] This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.[41]
+
+The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms are the "U.S.," the "USA," and "America." Colloquial names are the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States." "Columbia," a name popular in poetry and songs of the late 18th century, derives its origin from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia." Many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.[43]
+
+The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865.[44] The singular form—e.g., "the United States is"—became popular after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States." The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.[45]
+
+A citizen of the United States is an "American." "United States," "American" and "U.S." refer to the country adjectivally ("American values," "U.S. forces"). In English, the word "American" rarely refers to topics or subjects not directly connected with the United States.[46]
+
+It has been generally accepted that the first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 12,000 years ago; however, increasing evidence suggests an even earlier arrival.[19][47][48] After crossing the land bridge, the Paleo-Indians moved southward along the Pacific coast[49] and through an interior ice-free corridor.[50] The Clovis culture, which appeared around 11,000 BC, was initially believed to represent the first wave of human settlement of the Americas.[51][52] It is likely these represent the first of three major waves of migration into North America.[53]
+
+Over time, indigenous cultures in North America grew increasingly complex, and some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture in the southeast, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies.[54] The Mississippian culture flourished in the south from 800 to 1600 AD, extending from the Mexican border down through Florida.[55] Its city state Cahokia is the largest, most complex pre-Columbian archaeological site in the modern-day United States.[56] In the Four Corners region, Ancestral Puebloan culture developed from centuries of agricultural experimentation.[57]
+
+Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Taos Pueblo.[58][59] The earthworks constructed by Native Americans of the Poverty Point culture have also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the southern Great Lakes region, the Iroquois Confederacy was established at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.[60] Most prominent along the Atlantic coast were the Algonquian tribes, who practiced hunting and trapping, along with limited cultivation.
+
+With the progress of European colonization in the territories of the contemporary United States, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[61] The native population of America declined after European arrival for various reasons,[62][63] primarily diseases such as smallpox and measles.[64][65]
+
+Estimating the native population of North America at the time of European contact is difficult.[66][67] Douglas H. Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution estimated that there was a population of 92,916 in the south Atlantic states and a population of 473,616 in the Gulf states,[68] but most academics regard this figure as too low.[66] Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns believed the populations were much higher, suggesting 1,100,000 along the shores of the gulf of Mexico, 2,211,000 people living between Florida and Massachusetts, 5,250,000 in the Mississippi Valley and tributaries and 697,000 people in the Florida peninsula.[66][67]
+
+In the early days of colonization, many European settlers were subject to food shortages, disease, and attacks from Native Americans. Native Americans were also often at war with neighboring tribes and allied with Europeans in their colonial wars. In many cases, however, natives and settlers came to depend on each other. Settlers traded for food and animal pelts; natives for guns, ammunition and other European goods.[69] Natives taught many settlers to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. European missionaries and others felt it was important to "civilize" the Native Americans and urged them to adopt European agricultural techniques and lifestyles.[70][71]
+
+With the advancement of European colonization in North America, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[72] The first Europeans to arrive in the contiguous United States were Spanish conquistadors such as Juan Ponce de León, who made his first visit to Florida in 1513. Even earlier, Christopher Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his 1493 voyage. The Spanish set up the first settlements in Florida and New Mexico such as Saint Augustine[73] and Santa Fe. The French established their own as well along the Mississippi River. Successful English settlement on the eastern coast of North America began with the Virginia Colony in 1607 at Jamestown and with the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. Many settlers were dissenting Christian groups who came seeking religious freedom. The continent's first elected legislative assembly, Virginia's House of Burgesses, was created in 1619. The Mayflower Compact, signed by the Pilgrims before disembarking, and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, established precedents for the pattern of representative self-government and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies.[74][75]
+
+Most settlers in every colony were small farmers, though other industries were formed. Cash crops included tobacco, rice, and wheat. Extraction industries grew up in furs, fishing and lumber. Manufacturers produced rum and ships, and by the late colonial period, Americans were producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply.[76] Cities eventually dotted the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs. English colonists were supplemented by waves of Scotch-Irish immigrants and other groups. As coastal land grew more expensive, freed indentured servants claimed lands further west.[77]
+
+A large-scale slave trade with English privateers began.[78] Because of less disease and better food and treatment, the life expectancy of slaves was much higher in North America than further south, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.[79][80] Colonial society was largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, and colonies passed acts for and against the practice.[81][82] But by the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in the South.[83]
+
+With the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were administered by the British as overseas dependencies.[84] All nonetheless had local governments with elections open to most free men.[85] With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grew rapidly. Relatively small Native American populations were eclipsed.[86] The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest both in religion and in religious liberty.[87]
+
+During the Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans, who were being conquered and displaced, the 13 British colonies had a population of over 2.1 million in 1770, about a third that of Britain. Despite continuing, new arrivals, the rate of natural increase was such that by the 1770s only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas.[88] The colonies' distance from Britain had allowed the development of self-government, but their unprecedented success motivated monarchs to periodically seek to reassert royal authority.[89]
+
+In 1774, the Spanish Navy ship Santiago, under Juan Pérez, entered and anchored in an inlet of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, in present-day British Columbia. Although the Spanish did not land, natives paddled to the ship to trade furs for abalone shells from California.[90] At the time, the Spanish were able to monopolize the trade between Asia and North America, granting limited licenses to the Portuguese. When the Russians began establishing a growing fur trading system in Alaska, the Spanish began to challenge the Russians, with Pérez's voyage being the first of many to the Pacific Northwest.[91][j]
+
+During his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook became the first European to begin formal contact with Hawaii.[93] Captain Cook's last voyage included sailing along the coast of North America and Alaska searching for a Northwest Passage for approximately nine months.[94]
+
+The American Revolutionary War was the first successful colonial war of independence against a European power. Americans had developed an ideology of "republicanism" asserting that government rested on the will of the people as expressed in their local legislatures. They demanded their rights as Englishmen and "no taxation without representation". The British insisted on administering the empire through Parliament, and the conflict escalated into war.[95]
+
+The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that Great Britain was not protecting Americans' unalienable rights. July 4 is celebrated annually as Independence Day.[96] In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a decentralized government that operated until 1789.[96]
+
+Following the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781,[97] Britain signed the peace treaty of 1783, and American sovereignty was internationally recognized and the country was granted all lands east of the Mississippi River. Nationalists led the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788. The federal government was reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789. George Washington, who had led the Continental Army to victory, was the first president elected under the new constitution. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.[98]
+
+Although the federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808, after 1820, cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and along with it, the slave population.[99][100][101] The Second Great Awakening, especially 1800–1840, converted millions to evangelical Protestantism. In the North, it energized multiple social reform movements, including abolitionism;[102] in the South, Methodists and Baptists proselytized among slave populations.[103]
+
+Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of American Indian Wars.[104] The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation's area.[105] The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism.[106] A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819.[107] The expansion was aided by steam power, when steamboats began traveling along America's large water systems, many of which were connected by new canals, such as the Erie and the I&M; then, even faster railroads began their stretch across the nation's land.[108]
+
+From 1820 to 1850, Jacksonian democracy began a set of reforms which included wider white male suffrage; it led to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that forcibly resettled Indians into the west on Indian reservations. The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 during a period of expansionist Manifest destiny.[109] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest.[110] Victory in the Mexican–American War resulted in the 1848 Mexican Cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest.[111]
+The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 spurred migration to the Pacific coast, which led to the California Genocide[112][113][114][115] and the creation of additional western states.[116] After the Civil War, new transcontinental railways made relocation easier for settlers, expanded internal trade and increased conflicts with Native Americans.[117] In 1869, a new Peace Policy nominally promised to protect Native Americans from abuses, avoid further war, and secure their eventual U.S. citizenship. Nonetheless, large-scale conflicts continued throughout the West into the 1900s.
+
+Irreconcilable sectional conflict regarding the slavery of Africans and African Americans ultimately led to the American Civil War.[118] Initially, states entering the Union had alternated between slave and free states, keeping a sectional balance in the Senate, while free states outstripped slave states in population and in the House of Representatives. But with additional western territory and more free-soil states, tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over federalism and disposition of the territories, as well as whether to expand or restrict slavery.[119]
+
+With the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, conventions in thirteen slave states ultimately declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "South" or the "Confederacy"), while the federal government (the "Union") maintained that secession was illegal.[119] In order to bring about this secession, military action was initiated by the secessionists, and the Union responded in kind. The ensuing war would become the deadliest military conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of approximately 618,000 soldiers as well as many civilians.[120] The Union initially simply fought to keep the country united. Nevertheless, as casualties mounted after 1863 and Lincoln delivered his Emancipation Proclamation, the main purpose of the war from the Union's viewpoint became the abolition of slavery. Indeed, when the Union ultimately won the war in April 1865, each of the states in the defeated South was required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery.
+
+The government enacted three constitutional amendments in the years after the war: the aforementioned Thirteenth as well as the Fourteenth Amendment providing citizenship to the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves,[121] and the Fifteenth Amendment ensuring in theory that African Americans had the right to vote. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power[122] aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the South while guaranteeing the rights of the newly freed slaves.
+
+Reconstruction began in earnest following the war. While President Lincoln attempted to foster friendship and forgiveness between the Union and the former Confederacy, his assassination on April 14, 1865, drove a wedge between North and South again. Republicans in the federal government made it their goal to oversee the rebuilding of the South and to ensure the rights of African Americans. They persisted until the Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to cease protecting the rights of African Americans in the South in order for Democrats to concede the presidential election of 1876.
+
+Southern white Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers," took control of the South after the end of Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1910 the Redeemers established so-called Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising most blacks and some poor whites throughout the region. Blacks faced racial segregation, especially in the South.[123] They also occasionally experienced vigilante violence, including lynching.[124]
+
+In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe supplied a surplus of labor for the country's industrialization and transformed its culture.[126] National infrastructure including telegraph and transcontinental railroads spurred economic growth and greater settlement and development of the American Old West. The later invention of electric light and the telephone would also affect communication and urban life.[127]
+
+The United States fought Indian Wars west of the Mississippi River from 1810 to at least 1890.[128] Most of these conflicts ended with the cession of Native American territory and their confinement to Indian reservations. This further expanded acreage under mechanical cultivation, increasing surpluses for international markets.[129] Mainland expansion also included the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.[130] In 1893, pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the monarchy and formed the Republic of Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were ceded by Spain in the same year, following the Spanish–American War.[131] American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the end of the Second Samoan Civil War.[132] The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.[133]
+
+Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. Tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie led the nation's progress in railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. Banking became a major part of the economy, with J. P. Morgan playing a notable role. The American economy boomed, becoming the world's largest, and the United States achieved great power status.[134] These dramatic changes were accompanied by social unrest and the rise of populist, socialist, and anarchist movements.[135] This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which saw significant reforms including women's suffrage, alcohol prohibition, regulation of consumer goods, greater antitrust measures to ensure competition and attention to worker conditions.[136][137][138]
+
+The United States remained neutral from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 until 1917, when it joined the war as an "associated power," alongside the formal Allies of World War I, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson took a leading diplomatic role at the Paris Peace Conference and advocated strongly for the U.S. to join the League of Nations. However, the Senate refused to approve this and did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles that established the League of Nations.[139]
+
+In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage.[140] The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of radio for mass communication and the invention of early television.[141] The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal.[142] The Great Migration of millions of African Americans out of the American South began before World War I and extended through the 1960s;[143] whereas the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration.[144]
+
+At first effectively neutral during World War II, the United States began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers.[145] Although Japan attacked the United States first, the U.S. nonetheless pursued a "Europe first" defense policy.[146] The United States thus left its vast Asian colony, the Philippines, isolated and fighting a losing struggle against Japanese invasion and occupation, as military resources were devoted to the European theater. During the war, the United States was referred to as one of the "Four Policemen"[147] of Allies power who met to plan the postwar world, along with Britain, the Soviet Union and China.[148][149] Although the nation lost around 400,000 military personnel,[150] it emerged relatively undamaged from the war with even greater economic and military influence.[151]
+
+The United States played a leading role in the Bretton Woods and Yalta conferences with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and other Allies, which signed agreements on new international financial institutions and Europe's postwar reorganization. As an Allied victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war.[152] The United States and Japan then fought each other in the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.[153][154] The United States eventually developed the first nuclear weapons and used them on Japan in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese surrendered on September 2, ending World War II.[155][156]
+
+After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for power, influence, and prestige during what became known as the Cold War, driven by an ideological divide between capitalism and communism.[157] They dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its NATO allies on one side and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other. The U.S. developed a policy of containment towards the expansion of communist influence. While the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict.[citation needed]
+
+The United States often opposed Third World movements that it viewed as Soviet-sponsored, and occasionally pursued direct action for regime change against left-wing governments, even supporting right-wing authoritarian governments at times.[158] American troops fought communist Chinese and North Korean forces in the Korean War of 1950–53.[159] The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite and its 1961 launch of the first manned spaceflight initiated a "Space Race" in which the United States became the first nation to land a man on the moon in 1969.[159] A proxy war in Southeast Asia eventually evolved into full American participation, as the Vietnam War.[citation needed]
+
+At home, the U.S. experienced sustained economic expansion and a rapid growth of its population and middle class. Construction of an Interstate Highway System transformed the nation's infrastructure over the following decades. Millions moved from farms and inner cities to large suburban housing developments.[160][161] In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th and last U.S. state added to the country.[162] The growing Civil Rights Movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader and figurehead. A combination of court decisions and legislation, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, sought to end racial discrimination.[163][164][165] Meanwhile, a counterculture movement grew which was fueled by opposition to the Vietnam war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution.
+
+The launch of a "War on Poverty" expanded entitlements and welfare spending, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that provide health coverage to the elderly and poor, respectively, and the means-tested Food Stamp Program and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.[166]
+
+The 1970s and early 1980s saw the onset of stagflation. After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan responded to economic stagnation with free-market oriented reforms. Following the collapse of détente, he abandoned "containment" and initiated the more aggressive "rollback" strategy towards the USSR.[167][168][169][170][171] After a surge in female labor participation over the previous decade, by 1985 the majority of women aged 16 and over were employed.[172]
+
+The late 1980s brought a "thaw" in relations with the USSR, and its collapse in 1991 finally ended the Cold War.[173][174][175][176] This brought about unipolarity[177] with the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The concept of Pax Americana, which had appeared in the post-World War II period, gained wide popularity as a term for the post-Cold War new world order.[citation needed]
+
+After the Cold War, the conflict in the Middle East triggered a crisis in 1990, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, an ally of the United States. Fearing the instability would spread to other regions, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Shield, a defensive force buildup in Saudi Arabia, and Operation Desert Storm, in a staging titled the Gulf War; waged by coalition forces from 34 nations, led by the United States against Iraq ending in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restoration of the monarchy.[178]
+
+Originating within U.S. military defense networks, the Internet spread to international academic platforms and then to the public in the 1990s, greatly affecting the global economy, society, and culture.[179] Due to the dot-com boom, stable monetary policy, and reduced social welfare spending, the 1990s saw the longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history.[180] Beginning in 1994, the U.S. entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), prompting trade among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to soar.[181]
+
+On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people.[182] In response, the United States launched the War on Terror, which included a war in Afghanistan and the 2003–11 Iraq War.[183][184]
+
+Government policy designed to promote affordable housing,[185] widespread failures in corporate and regulatory governance,[186] and historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve[187] led to the mid-2000s housing bubble, which culminated with the 2008 financial crisis, the nation's largest economic contraction since the Great Depression.[188] Barack Obama, the first African-American[189] and multiracial[190] president, was elected in 2008 amid the crisis,[191] and subsequently passed stimulus measures and the Dodd–Frank Act in an attempt to mitigate its negative effects and ensure there would not be a repeat of the crisis. In 2010, the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, which made the most sweeping reforms to the nation's healthcare system in nearly five decades, including mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges.[citation needed]
+
+American forces in Iraq were withdrawn in large numbers in 2009 and 2010, and the war in the region was declared formally over in December 2011.[192] But months earlier, Operation Neptune Spear led to the death of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.[193] In the presidential election of 2016, Republican Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States. On January 20, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed.[194] As of July 2020, the United States has over 4 million COVID-19 cases and over 145,000 deaths.[195] The United States is, by far, the country with the most cases of COVID-19 since April 11, 2020.[196]
+
+The 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia occupy a combined area of 3,119,884.69 square miles (8,080,464.3 km2). Of this area, 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2) is contiguous land, composing 83.65% of total U.S. land area.[197][198] Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, is 10,931 square miles (28,311 km2) in area. The populated territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands together cover 9,185 square miles (23,789 km2).[199] Measured by only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.[200]
+
+The United States is the world's third- or fourth-largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and nearly equal to China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted, and how the total size of the United States is measured.[e][201][202]
+
+The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont.[203] The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest.[204] The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast.[204]
+
+The Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking around 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado.[205] Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Chihuahua and Mojave.[206] The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast, both ranges reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m). The lowest and highest points in the contiguous United States are in the state of California,[207] and only about 84 miles (135 km) apart.[208] At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali is the highest peak in the country and in North America.[209] Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature.[210]
+
+The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.[211] The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains have an alpine climate. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Hawaii and the southern tip of Florida are tropical, as well as its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.[212] States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur in the country, mainly in Tornado Alley areas in the Midwest and South.[213] Overall, the United States has the world's most violent weather, receiving more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world.[214]
+
+The U.S. ecology is megadiverse: about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and more than 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland.[216] The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 bird species, 311 reptile species, and 295 amphibian species,[217] as well as about 91,000 insect species.[218]
+
+There are 62 national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas.[219] Altogether, the government owns about 28% of the country's land area,[220] mostly in the western states.[221] Most of this land is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching, and about .86% is used for military purposes.[222][223]
+
+Environmental issues include debates on oil and nuclear energy, dealing with air and water pollution, the economic costs of protecting wildlife, logging and deforestation,[224][225] and international responses to global warming.[226][227] The most prominent environmental agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by presidential order in 1970.[228] The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act.[229] The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is intended to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.[230]
+
+The U.S. Census Bureau officially estimated the country's population to be 328,239,523 as of July 1, 2019.[231] In addition, the Census Bureau provides a continuously updated U.S. Population Clock that approximates the latest population of the 50 states and District of Columbia based on the Bureau's most recent demographic trends.[234] According to the clock, on May 23, 2020, the U.S. population exceeded 329 million residents, with a net gain of one person every 19 seconds, or about 4,547 people per day. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world, after China and India. In 2018 the median age of the United States population was 38.1 years.[235]
+
+In 2018, there were almost 90 million immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrants (second-generation Americans) in the United States, accounting for 28% of the overall U.S. population.[236] The United States has a very diverse population; 37 ancestry groups have more than one million members.[237] German Americans are the largest ethnic group (more than 50 million)—followed by Irish Americans (circa 37 million), Mexican Americans (circa 31 million) and English Americans (circa 28 million).[238][239]
+
+White Americans (mostly European ancestry) are the largest racial group at 73.1% of the population; African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third-largest ancestry group.[237] Asian Americans are the country's second-largest racial minority; the three largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans.[237] The largest American community with European ancestry is German Americans, which consists of more than 14% of the total population.[240] In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively).[241] The census counted more than 19 million people of "Some Other Race" who were "unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories in 2010, more than 18.5 million (97%) of whom are of Hispanic ethnicity.[241]
+
+In 2017, out of the U.S. foreign-born population, some 45% (20.7 million) were naturalized citizens, 27% (12.3 million) were lawful permanent residents (including many eligible to become citizens), 6% (2.2 million) were temporary lawful residents, and 23% (10.5 million) were unauthorized immigrants.[242] Among current living immigrants to the U.S., the top five countries of birth are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and El Salvador. Until 2017 and 2018, the United States led the world in refugee resettlement for decades, admitted more refugees than the rest of the world combined.[243] From fiscal year 1980 until 2017, 55% of refugees came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 13% from Africa, and 4% from Latin America.[243]
+
+A 2017 United Nations report projected that the U.S. would be one of nine countries in which world population growth through 2050 would be concentrated.[244] A 2020 U.S. Census Bureau report projected the population of the country could be anywhere between 320 million and 447 million by 2060, depending on the rate of in-migration; in all projected scenarios, a lower fertility rate and increases in life expectancy would result in an aging population.[245] The United States has an annual birth rate of 13 per 1,000, which is five births per 1,000 below the world average.[246] Its population growth rate is positive at 0.7%, higher than that of many developed nations.[247]
+
+About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (including suburbs);[202] about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000.[248] In 2008, 273 incorporated municipalities had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than one million residents, and four cities had over two million (namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston).[249] Estimates for the year 2018 show that 53 metropolitan areas have populations greater than one million. Many metros in the South, Southwest and West grew significantly between 2010 and 2018. The Dallas and Houston metros increased by more than a million people, while the Washington, D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and Phoenix metros all grew by more than 500,000 people.
+
+English (specifically, American English) is the de facto national language of the United States. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2010, about 230 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. 12% of the population speaks Spanish at home, making it the second most common language. Spanish is also the most widely taught second language.[250][251]
+
+Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii.[252] In addition to English, Alaska recognizes twenty official Native languages,[253][k] and South Dakota recognizes Sioux.[254] While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French.[255] Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms.[256]
+
+Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan[257] is officially recognized by American Samoa and Chamorro[258] is an official language of Guam. Both Carolinian and Chamorro have official recognition in the Northern Mariana Islands.[259]
+Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico and is more widely spoken than English there.[260]
+
+The most widely taught foreign languages in the United States, in terms of enrollment numbers from kindergarten through university undergraduate education, are Spanish (around 7.2 million students), French (1.5 million), and German (500,000). Other commonly taught languages include Latin, Japanese, ASL, Italian, and Chinese.[261][262] 18% of all Americans claim to speak both English and another language.[263]
+
+Religion in the United States (2017)[266]
+
+The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids Congress from passing laws respecting its establishment.
+
+In a 2013 survey, 56% of Americans said religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other Western nation.[267] In a 2009 Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they attended church weekly or almost weekly; the figures ranged from a low of 23% in Vermont to a high of 63% in Mississippi.[268]
+
+In a 2014 survey, 70.6% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians;[269] Protestants accounted for 46.5%, while Roman Catholics, at 20.8%, formed the largest single Christian group.[270] In 2014, 5.9% of the U.S. adult population claimed a non-Christian religion.[271] These include Judaism (1.9%), Islam (0.9%), Hinduism (0.7%), and Buddhism (0.7%).[271] The survey also reported that 22.8% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist or simply having no religion—up from 8.2% in 1990.[270][272][273] There are also Unitarian Universalist, Scientologist, Baha'i, Sikh, Jain, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Satanist, Taoist, Druid, Native American, Afro-American, traditional African, Wiccan, Gnostic, humanist and deist communities.[274][275]
+
+Protestantism is the largest Christian religious grouping in the United States, accounting for almost half of all Americans. Baptists collectively form the largest branch of Protestantism at 15.4%,[276] and the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest individual Protestant denomination at 5.3% of the U.S. population.[276] Apart from Baptists, other Protestant categories include nondenominational Protestants, Methodists, Pentecostals, unspecified Protestants, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, other Reformed, Episcopalians/Anglicans, Quakers, Adventists, Holiness, Christian fundamentalists, Anabaptists, Pietists, and multiple others.[276]
+
+As with other Western countries, the U.S. is becoming less religious. Irreligion is growing rapidly among Americans under 30.[277] Polls show that overall American confidence in organized religion has been declining since the mid to late 1980s,[278] and that younger Americans, in particular, are becoming increasingly irreligious.[271][279] In a 2012 study, the Protestant share of the U.S. population had dropped to 48%, thus ending its status as religious category of the majority for the first time.[280][281] Americans with no religion have 1.7 children compared to 2.2 among Christians. The unaffiliated are less likely to marry with 37% marrying compared to 52% of Christians.[282]
+
+The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. By contrast, religion plays the least important role in New England and in the Western United States.[268]
+
+As of 2018[update], 52% of Americans age 15 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 32% had never been married.[283] Women now work mostly outside the home and receive the majority of bachelor's degrees.[284]
+
+The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is 26.5 per 1,000 women. The rate has declined by 57% since 1991.[285] Abortion is legal throughout the country. Abortion rates, currently 241 per 1,000 live births and 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, are falling but remain higher than most Western nations.[286] In 2013, the average age at first birth was 26 and 41% of births were to unmarried women.[287]
+
+The total fertility rate in 2016 was 1820.5 births per 1000 women.[288] Adoption in the United States is common and relatively easy from a legal point of view (compared to other Western countries).[289] As of 2001[update], with more than 127,000 adoptions, the U.S. accounted for nearly half of the total number of adoptions worldwide.[needs update][290] Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, and it is legal for same-sex couples to adopt. Polygamy is illegal throughout the U.S.[291]
+
+In 2019, the U.S. had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.[292]
+
+The United States had a life expectancy of 78.6 years at birth in 2017, which was the third year of declines in life expectancy following decades of continuous increase. The recent decline, primarily among the age group 25 to 64, is largely due to sharp increases in the drug overdose and suicide rates; the country has one of the highest suicide rates among wealthy countries.[293][294] Life expectancy was highest among Asians and Hispanics and lowest among blacks.[295][296] According to CDC and Census Bureau data, deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug overdoses hit record highs in 2017.[297]
+
+Increasing obesity in the United States and health improvements elsewhere contributed to lowering the country's rank in life expectancy from 11th in the world in 1987, to 42nd in 2007, and as of 2017 the country had the lowest life expectancy among Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and seven countries of western Europe.[298][299] Obesity rates have more than doubled in the last 30 years and are the highest in the industrialized world.[300][301] Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight.[302] Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.[303]
+
+In 2010, coronary artery disease, lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and traffic accidents caused the most years of life lost in the U.S. Low back pain, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety caused the most years lost to disability. The most harmful risk factors were poor diet, tobacco smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, physical inactivity, and alcohol use. Alzheimer's disease, drug abuse, kidney disease, cancer, and falls caused the most additional years of life lost over their age-adjusted 1990 per-capita rates.[304] U.S. teenage pregnancy and abortion rates are substantially higher than in other Western nations, especially among blacks and Hispanics.[305]
+
+Health-care coverage in the United States is a combination of public and private efforts and is not universal. In 2017, 12.2% of the population did not carry health insurance.[306] The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue.[307][308] Federal legislation, passed in early 2010, roughly halved the uninsured share of the population, though the bill and its ultimate effect are issues of controversy.[309][310] The U.S. health-care system far outspends any other nation, measured both in per capita spending and as percentage of GDP.[311] At the same time, the U.S. is a global leader in medical innovation.[312]
+
+American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. In most states, children are required to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn 18 (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at 16 or 17.[313]
+
+About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.[314] The U.S. spends more on education per student than any nation in the world, spending more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student.[315][needs update] Some 80% of U.S. college students attend public universities.[316]
+
+Of Americans 25 and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees.[317] The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.[202][318] The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.[319]
+
+The United States has many private and public institutions of higher education. The majority of the world's top universities, as listed by various ranking organizations, are in the U.S.[320][321][322] There are also local community colleges with generally more open admission policies, shorter academic programs, and lower tuition.
+
+In 2018, U21, a network of research-intensive universities, ranked the United States first in the world for breadth and quality of higher education, and 15th when GDP was a factor.[323] As for public expenditures on higher education, the U.S. trails some other OECD nations but spends more per student than the OECD average, and more than all nations in combined public and private spending.[315][324] As of 2018[update], student loan debt exceeded 1.5 trillion dollars.[325][326]
+
+The United States is a federal republic of 50 states, a federal district, five territories and several uninhabited island possessions.[327][328][329] It is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law."[330] For 2018, the U.S. ranked 25th on the Democracy Index.[331] On Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index its public sector position deteriorated from a score of 76 in 2015 to 69 in 2019.[332]
+
+In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government: federal, state, and local. The local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district.
+
+The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document.[333] The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus. The Constitution has been amended 27 times;[334] the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights. All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review and any law ruled by the courts to be in violation of the Constitution is voided. The principle of judicial review, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was established by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison (1803)[335] in a decision handed down by Chief Justice John Marshall.[336]
+
+The federal government comprises three branches:
+
+The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population. Each state then draws single-member districts to conform with the census apportionment. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories each have one member of Congress—these members are not allowed to vote.[341]
+
+The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one-third of Senate seats are up for election every two years. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories do not have senators.[341] The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia.[342] The Supreme Court, led by the chief justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.[343]
+
+The state governments are structured in a roughly similar fashion, though Nebraska has a unicameral legislature.[344] The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.
+
+The 50 states are the principal administrative divisions in the country. These are subdivided into counties or county equivalents and further divided into municipalities. The District of Columbia is a federal district that contains the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C.[345] The states and the District of Columbia choose the president of the United States. Each state has presidential electors equal to the number of their representatives and senators in Congress; the District of Columbia has three (because of the 23rd Amendment).[346] Territories of the United States such as Puerto Rico do not have presidential electors, and so people in those territories cannot vote for the president.[341]
+
+The United States also observes tribal sovereignty of the American Indian nations to a limited degree, as it does with the states' sovereignty. American Indians are U.S. citizens and tribal lands are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress and the federal courts. Like the states they have a great deal of autonomy, but also like the states, tribes are not allowed to make war, engage in their own foreign relations, or print and issue currency.[347]
+
+Citizenship is granted at birth in all states, the District of Columbia, and all major U.S. territories except American Samoa.[348][349][m]
+
+The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history.[352] For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote. The president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College.[353]
+
+In American political culture, the center-right Republican Party is considered "conservative" and the center-left Democratic Party is considered "liberal."[354][355] The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states," are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.
+
+Republican Donald Trump, the winner of the 2016 presidential election, is serving as the 45th president of the United States.[356] Leadership in the Senate includes Republican vice president Mike Pence, Republican president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.[357] Leadership in the House includes Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.[358]
+
+In the 116th United States Congress, the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democratic Party and the Senate is controlled by the Republican Party, giving the U.S. a split Congress. The Senate consists of 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats; the House consists of 233 Democrats, 196 Republicans, and 1 Libertarian.[359] Of state governors, there are 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. Among the D.C. mayor and the five territorial governors, there are two Republicans, one Democrat, one New Progressive, and two Independents.[360]
+
+The United States has an established structure of foreign relations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. New York City is home to the United Nations Headquarters. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States (although the U.S. still maintains unofficial relations with Bhutan and Taiwan).[361] It is a member of the G7,[362] G20, and OECD.
+
+The United States has a "Special Relationship" with the United Kingdom[363] and strong ties with India, Canada,[364] Australia,[365] New Zealand,[366] the Philippines,[367] Japan,[368] South Korea,[369] Israel,[370] and several European Union countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.[371] It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Colombia is traditionally considered by the United States as its most loyal ally in South America.[372][373]
+
+The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau through the Compact of Free Association.[374]
+
+Taxation in the United States is levied at the federal, state, and local government levels. This includes taxes on income, payroll, property, sales, imports, estates, and gifts, as well as various fees. Taxation in the United States is based on citizenship, not residency.[375] Both non-resident citizens and Green Card holders living abroad are taxed on their income irrespective of where they live or where their income is earned. The United States is one of the only countries in the world to do so.[376]
+
+In 2010 taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP.[377] Based on CBO estimates,[378] under 2013 tax law the top 1% will be paying the highest average tax rates since 1979, while other income groups will remain at historic lows.[379] For 2018, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 400 households was 23%, compared to 24.2% for the bottom half of U.S. households.[380]
+
+
+
+During fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $3.54 trillion on a budget or cash basis, down $60 billion or 1.7% vs. fiscal year 2011 spending of $3.60 trillion. Major categories of fiscal year 2012 spending included: Medicare & Medicaid (23%), Social Security (22%), Defense Department (19%), non-defense discretionary (17%), other mandatory (13%) and interest (6%).[382]
+
+The total national debt of the United States in the United States was $18.527 trillion (106% of the GDP) in 2014.[383][n] The United States has the largest external debt in the world[387] and the 34th largest government debt as a % of GDP in the world.[388]
+
+The president is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and by the Department of the Navy during times of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.[389]
+
+Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System.[390] American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's 11 active aircraft carriers, and Marine expeditionary units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad,[391] and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries.[392]
+
+The military budget of the United States in 2011 was more than $700 billion, 41% of global military spending. At 4.7% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top 15 military spenders, after Saudi Arabia.[393]  Defense spending plays a major role in science and technology investment, with roughly half of U.S. federal research and development funded by the Department of Defense.[394] Defense's share of the overall U.S. economy has generally declined in recent decades, from Cold War peaks of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 and 69.5% of federal outlays in 1954 to 4.7% of GDP and 18.8% of federal outlays in 2011.[395]
+
+The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.[396] More than 90% of the world's 14,000 nuclear weapons are owned by Russia and the United States.[397]
+
+Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police departments and sheriff's offices, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties, including protecting civil rights, national security and enforcing U.S. federal courts' rulings and federal laws.[398] State courts conduct most criminal trials while federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state criminal courts.
+
+A cross-sectional analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed that United States "homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher."[399] In 2016, the US murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000.[400] Gun ownership rights, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, continue to be the subject of contention.
+
+The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world.[401] As of 2020, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that there were some 2.3 million people incarcerated.[402]  The imprisonment rate for all prisoners sentenced to more than a year in state or federal facilities is 478 per 100,000 in 2013.[403] According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of inmates held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses.[404] About 9% of prisoners are held in privatized prisons.[402] The practice of privately operated prisons began in the 1980s and has been a subject of contention.[405]
+
+Capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and at the state level in 30 states.[406][407] No executions took place from 1967 to 1977, owing in part to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Since the decision there have been more than 1,300 executions, a majority of these taking place in three states: Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.[408] Meanwhile, several states have either abolished or struck down death penalty laws. In 2019, the country had the sixth-highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.[409]
+
+According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $16.8 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 19% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).[417] The United States is the largest importer of goods and second-largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2010, the total U.S. trade deficit was $635 billion.[418] Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners.[419]
+
+From 1983 to 2008, U.S. real compounded annual GDP growth was 3.3%, compared to a 2.3% weighted average for the rest of the G7.[420] The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita[421] and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP.[417] The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.[422]
+
+In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 86.4% of the economy.[425] While its economy has reached a postindustrial level of development, the United States remains an industrial power.[426] Consumer spending comprised 68% of the U.S. economy in 2015.[427] In August 2010, the American labor force consisted of 154.1 million people (50%). With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people. It has a smaller welfare state and redistributes less income through government action than most European nations.[428]
+
+The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation[429] and is one of a few countries in the world without paid family leave as a legal right.[430] While federal law does not require sick leave, it is a common benefit for government workers and full-time employees at corporations.[431] 74% of full-time American workers get paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although only 24% of part-time workers get the same benefits.[431] In 2009, the United States had the third-highest workforce productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands.[432]
+
+
+
+The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. Methods for producing interchangeable parts were developed by the U.S. War Department by the Federal Armories during the first half of the 19th century. This technology, along with the establishment of a machine tool industry, enabled the U.S. to have large-scale manufacturing of sewing machines, bicycles, and other items in the late 19th century and became known as the American system of manufacturing. Factory electrification in the early 20th century and introduction of the assembly line and other labor-saving techniques created the system of mass production.[433] In the 21st century, approximately two-thirds of research and development funding comes from the private sector.[434] The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor.[435][436]
+
+In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's research laboratory, one of the first of its kind, developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera.[437] The latter led to emergence of the worldwide entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.[438]
+
+The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann, to immigrate to the United States.[439] During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age, while the Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and aeronautics.[440][441]
+
+The invention of the transistor in the 1950s, a key active component in practically all modern electronics, led to many technological developments and a significant expansion of the U.S. technology industry.[442] This, in turn, led to the establishment of many new technology companies and regions around the country such as Silicon Valley in California. Advancements by American microprocessor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel along with both computer software and hardware companies that include Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems created and popularized the personal computer. The ARPANET was developed in the 1960s to meet Defense Department requirements, and became the first of a series of networks which evolved into the Internet.[443]
+
+Accounting for 4.24% of the global population, Americans collectively possess 29.4% of the world's total wealth, and Americans make up roughly half of the world's population of millionaires.[444] The Global Food Security Index ranked the U.S. number one for food affordability and overall food security in March 2013.[445] Americans on average have more than twice as much living space per dwelling and per person as European Union residents, and more than every EU nation.[446] For 2017 the United Nations Development Programme ranked the United States 13th among 189 countries in its Human Development Index and 25th among 151 countries in its inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI).[447]
+
+Wealth, like income and taxes, is highly concentrated; the richest 10% of the adult population possess 72% of the country's household wealth, while the bottom half claim only 2%.[448] According to a September 2017 report by the Federal Reserve, the top 1% controlled 38.6% of the country's wealth in 2016.[449] According to a 2018 study by the OECD, the United States has a larger percentage of low-income workers than almost any other developed nation. This is largely because at-risk workers get almost no government support and are further set back by a very weak collective bargaining system.[450] The top one percent of income-earners accounted for 52 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2015, where income is defined as market income excluding government transfers.[451] In 2018, U.S. income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau.[452]
+
+After years of stagnation, median household income reached a record high in 2016 following two consecutive years of record growth. Income inequality remains at record highs however, with the top fifth of earners taking home more than half of all overall income.[454] The rise in the share of total annual income received by the top one percent, which has more than doubled from nine percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2011, has significantly affected income inequality,[455] leaving the United States with one of the widest income distributions among OECD nations.[456]  The extent and relevance of income inequality is a matter of debate.[457][458][459]
+
+Between June 2007 and November 2008, the global recession led to falling asset prices around the world. Assets owned by Americans lost about a quarter of their value.[460] Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth was down $14 trillion, but has since increased $14 trillion over 2006 levels.[461] At the end of 2014, household debt amounted to $11.8 trillion,[462] down from $13.8 trillion at the end of 2008.[463]
+
+There were about 578,424 sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in the US in January 2014, with almost two-thirds staying in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program.[464] In 2011, 16.7 million children lived in food-insecure households, about 35% more than 2007 levels, though only 1.1% of U.S. children, or 845,000, saw reduced food intake or disrupted eating patterns at some point during the year, and most cases were not chronic.[465] As of June 2018[update], 40 million people, roughly 12.7% of the U.S. population, were living in poverty, with 18.5 million of those living in deep poverty (a family income below one-half of the poverty threshold) and over five million live "in 'Third World' conditions." In 2016, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, which made up 32.6% of the impoverished population.[466] In 2017, the U.S. state or territory with the lowest poverty rate was New Hampshire (7.6%), and the one with the highest was American Samoa (65%).[467][468][469]
+
+Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of public roads.[471] The United States has the world's second-largest automobile market,[472] and has the highest rate of per-capita vehicle ownership in the world, with 765 vehicles per 1,000 Americans (1996).[473][needs update] In 2017, there were 255,009,283 non-two wheel motor vehicles, or about 910 vehicles per 1,000 people.[474]
+
+The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned and has been largely deregulated since 1978, while most major airports are publicly owned.[475] The three largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are US-based; American Airlines is number one after its 2013 acquisition by US Airways.[476] Of the world's 50 busiest passenger airports, 16 are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.[477]
+
+The United States energy market is about 29,000 terawatt hours per year.[478] In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear and renewable energy sources.[479]
+
+Since 2007, the total greenhouse gas emissions by the United States are the second highest by country, exceeded only by China.[480] The United States has historically been the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gas emissions per capita remain high.[481]
+
+The United States is home to many cultures and a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.[483][484] Aside from the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors settled or immigrated within the past five centuries.[485] Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.[483][486] More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.[483]
+
+Americans have traditionally been characterized by a strong work ethic, competitiveness, and individualism,[487] as well as a unifying belief in an "American creed" emphasizing liberty, equality, private property, democracy, rule of law, and a preference for limited government.[488] Americans are extremely charitable by global standards. According to a 2006 British study, Americans gave 1.67% of GDP to charity, more than any other nation studied.[489][490][491]
+
+The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants.[492] Whether this perception is accurate has been a topic of debate.[493][494][495][496][420][497] While mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,[498] scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.[499] While Americans tend  to greatly value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is also generally seen as a positive attribute.[500]
+
+In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.[501] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."[502]
+
+Twelve U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Bob Dylan in 2016. William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[503] Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.[504]
+
+The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty, and later Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of American philosophical academia. John Rawls and Robert Nozick also led a revival of political philosophy.
+
+In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.[505] Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new, individualistic styles. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.[506] Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.[507]
+
+Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain with about three-quarters of grain products made of wheat flour[508] and many dishes use indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers.[509] These homegrown foods are part of a shared national menu on one of America's most popular holidays, Thanksgiving, when some Americans make traditional foods to celebrate the occasion.[510]
+
+The American fast food industry, the world's largest,[511] pioneered the drive-through format in the 1940s.[512] Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[513] Americans drink three times as much coffee as tea.[514] Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.[515][516]
+
+Although little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music.
+
+The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European and African traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s.[517]
+
+Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. Rock bands such as Metallica, the Eagles, and Aerosmith are among the highest grossing in worldwide sales.[518][519][520] In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk.
+
+More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities,[517] as have contemporary musical artists such as Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West, and Ariana Grande.[521]
+
+Hollywood, a northern district of Los Angeles, California, is one of the leaders in motion picture production.[522] The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope.[523] Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, although in the 21st century an increasing number of films are not made there, and film companies have been subject to the forces of globalization.[524]
+
+Director D. W. Griffith, the top American filmmaker during the silent film period, was central to the development of film grammar, and producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising.[525] Directors such as John Ford redefined the image of the American Old West, and, like others such as John Huston, broadened the possibilities of cinema with location shooting. The industry enjoyed its golden years, in what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood," from the early sound period until the early 1960s,[526] with screen actors such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe becoming iconic figures.[527][528] In the 1970s, "New Hollywood" or the "Hollywood Renaissance"[529] was defined by grittier films influenced by French and Italian realist pictures of the post-war period.[530] In more recent times, directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron have gained renown for their blockbuster films, often characterized by high production costs and earnings.
+
+Notable films topping the American Film Institute's AFI 100 list include Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time,[531][532] Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Graduate (1967), On the Waterfront (1954), Schindler's List (1993), Singin' in the Rain (1952), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).[533] The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, have been held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1929,[534] and the Golden Globe Awards have been held annually since January 1944.[535]
+
+American football is by several measures the most popular spectator sport;[537] the National Football League (NFL) has the highest average attendance of any sports league in the world, and the Super Bowl is watched by tens of millions globally. Baseball has been regarded as the U.S. national sport since the late 19th century, with Major League Baseball (MLB) being the top league. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports, with the top leagues being the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL). College football and basketball attract large audiences.[538] In soccer, the country hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the men's national soccer team qualified for ten World Cups and the women's team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup four times; Major League Soccer is the sport's highest league in the United States (featuring 23 American and three Canadian teams). The market for professional sports in the United States is roughly $69 billion, roughly 50% larger than that of all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined.[539]
+
+Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri were the first ever Olympic Games held outside of Europe.[540] As of 2017[update], the United States has won 2,522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 305 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.[541]
+While most major U.S. sports such as baseball and American football have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, some of which have become popular worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.[542] The most watched individual sports are golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR.[543][544]
+
+The four major broadcasters in the U.S. are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX). The four major broadcast television networks are all commercial entities. Cable television offers hundreds of channels catering to a variety of niches.[545] Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercial, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.[546]
+
+In 1998, the number of U.S. commercial radio stations had grown to 4,793 AM stations and 5,662 FM stations. In addition, there are 1,460 public radio stations. Most of these stations are run by universities and public authorities for educational purposes and are financed by public or private funds, subscriptions, and corporate underwriting. Much public-radio broadcasting is supplied by NPR. NPR was incorporated in February 1970 under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967; its television counterpart, PBS, was created by the same legislation. As of September 30, 2014[update], there are 15,433 licensed full-power radio stations in the U.S. according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).[547]
+
+Well-known newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.[548] Although the cost of publishing has increased over the years, the price of newspapers has generally remained low, forcing newspapers to rely more on advertising revenue and on articles provided by a major wire service, such as the Associated Press or Reuters, for their national and world coverage. With very few exceptions, all the newspapers in the U.S. are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families. Major cities often have "alternative weeklies" to complement the mainstream daily papers, such as New York City's The Village Voice or Los Angeles' LA Weekly. Major cities may also support a local business journal, trade papers relating to local industries, and papers for local ethnic and social groups. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Twitter.[549]
+
+More than 800 publications are produced in Spanish, the second most commonly used language in the United States behind English.[550][551]
+
+Internet sources
+

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+
+
+
+Summer  is the hottest of the four temperate seasons, falling after spring and before autumn. At or around the summer solstice (about 3 days before Midsummer Day), the earliest sunrise and latest sunset occurs, the days are longest and the nights are shortest, with day length decreasing as the season progresses after the solstice. The date of the beginning of summer varies according to climate, tradition, and culture. When it is summer in the Northern Hemisphere, it is winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and vice versa.
+
+From an astronomical view, the equinoxes and solstices would be the middle of the respective seasons,[1][2] but sometimes astronomical summer is defined as starting at the solstice, the time of maximal insolation, often identified with the 21st day of June or December. A variable seasonal lag means that the meteorological centre of the season, which is based on average temperature patterns, occurs several weeks after the time of maximal insolation.[3] The meteorological convention is to define summer as comprising the months of June, July, and August in the northern hemisphere and the months of December, January, and February in the southern hemisphere.[4][5] Under meteorological definitions, all seasons are arbitrarily set to start at the beginning of a calendar month and end at the end of a month.[4] This meteorological definition of summer also aligns with the commonly viewed notion of summer as the season with the longest (and warmest) days of the year, in which daylight predominates. The meteorological reckoning of seasons is used in Australia, Austria, Denmark, Russia and Japan. It is also used by many in the United Kingdom and in Canada. In Ireland, the summer months according to the national meteorological service, Met Éireann, are June, July and August. However, according to the Irish Calendar, summer begins on 1 May and ends on 1 August. School textbooks in Ireland follow the cultural norm of summer commencing on 1 May rather than the meteorological definition of 1 June.
+
+Days continue to lengthen from equinox to solstice and summer days progressively shorten after the solstice, so meteorological summer encompasses the build-up to the longest day and a diminishing thereafter, with summer having many more hours of daylight than spring. Reckoning by hours of daylight alone, summer solstice marks the midpoint, not the beginning, of the seasons. Midsummer takes place over the shortest night of the year, which is the summer solstice, or on a nearby date that varies with tradition.
+
+Where a seasonal lag of half a season or more is common, reckoning based on astronomical markers is shifted half a season.[6] By this method, in North America, summer is the period from the summer solstice (usually 20 or 21 June in the Northern Hemisphere) to the autumn equinox.[7][8][9]
+
+Reckoning by cultural festivals, the summer season in the United States is traditionally regarded as beginning on Memorial Day weekend (the last Weekend in May) and ending on Labor Day (the first Monday in September), more closely in line with the meteorological definition for the parts of the country that have four-season weather. The similar Canadian tradition starts summer on Victoria Day one week prior (although summer conditions vary widely across Canada's expansive territory) and ends, as in the United States, on Labour Day.
+
+In Chinese astronomy, summer starts on or around 5 May, with the jiéqì (solar term) known as lìxià (立夏), i.e. "establishment of summer", and it ends on or around 6 August.
+
+In southern and southeast Asia, where the monsoon occurs, summer is more generally defined as lasting from March, April, May and June, the warmest time of the year, ending with the onset of the monsoon rains.[citation needed]
+
+Because the temperature lag is shorter in the oceanic temperate southern hemisphere,[10] most countries in this region use the meteorological definition with summer starting on 1 December and ending on the last day of February.[11][12]
+
+Summer is traditionally associated with hot or warm weather. In the Mediterranean regions, it is also associated with dry weather, while in other places (particularly in Eastern Asia because of the monsoon) it is associated with rainy weather. The wet season is the main period of vegetation growth within the savanna climate regime.[13] Where the wet season is associated with a seasonal shift in the prevailing winds, it is known as a monsoon.[14]
+
+In the northern Atlantic Ocean, a distinct tropical cyclone season occurs from 1 June to 30 November.[15] The statistical peak of the Atlantic hurricane season is 10 September. The Northeast Pacific Ocean has a broader period of activity, but in a similar timeframe to the Atlantic.[16] The Northwest Pacific sees tropical cyclones year-round, with a minimum in February and March and a peak in early September. In the North Indian basin, storms are most common from April to December, with peaks in May and November.[15] In the Southern Hemisphere, the tropical cyclone season runs from 1 November until the end of April with peaks in mid-February to early March.[15][17]
+
+Thunderstorm season in the United States and Canada runs in the spring through summer but sometimes can run as late as October or even November in the fall. These storms can produce hail, strong winds and tornadoes, usually during the afternoon and evening.
+
+Schools and universities typically have a summer break to take advantage of the warmer weather and longer days. In almost all countries, children are out of school during this time of year for summer break, although dates vary. In the United States, public schools usually end in late May in Memorial Day weekend, while colleges finish in early May. Public school traditionally resumes near Labor Day, while higher institutions often resume in mid-August. In England and Wales, school ends in mid-July and resumes again in early September; in Scotland, the summer holiday begins in late June and ends in mid- to late-August. Similarly, in Canada the summer holiday starts on the last or second-last Friday in June and ends in late August or on the first Tuesday of September, with the exception of when that date falls before Labour Day, in which case, ends on the second Tuesday of the month. In Russia the summer holiday begins at the end of May and ends on 31 August.
+
+In the Southern Hemisphere, school summer holiday dates include the major holidays of Christmas and New Year's Day. School summer holidays in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa begin in early December and end in early February, with dates varying between states. In South Africa, the new school-year usually starts during the second week of January, thus aligning the academic year with the Calendar year. In India, school ends in late April and resumes in early or mid-June. In Cameroon and Nigeria, schools usually finish for summer vacation in mid-July, and resume in the later weeks of September or the first week of October.
+
+A wide range of public holidays fall during summer, including:
+
+People generally take advantage of the high temperatures by spending more time outdoors during summer. Activities such as travelling to the beach and picnics occur during the summer months. Sports such as soccer, basketball, football, volleyball, skateboarding, baseball, softball, cricket, tennis and golf are played. Water sports also occur. These include water skiing, wakeboarding, swimming, surfing, tubing and water polo. The modern Olympics have been held during the summer months every four years since 1896. The 2000 Summer Olympics, in Sydney, however, were held during the Australian Spring.
+
+Summer is normally a low point in television viewing, and television schedules generally reflect this by not scheduling new episodes of their most popular shows between the end of May sweeps and the beginning of the television season in September, instead scheduling low-cost reality television shows and burning off commitments to already-cancelled series. There is an exception to this with children's television. Many television shows made for children and are popular with children are released during the summer months, especially on children's cable channels such as the Disney Channel in the United States, as children are off school. Disney Channel, for example, ends its pre-school programming earlier in the day for older school-age children in the summer months while it reverts to the original scheduling as the new school year begins. Conversely, the music and film industries generally experience higher returns during the summer than other times of the year and market their summer hits accordingly. Summer is most popular for animated movies to be released theatrically in movie theaters.[citation needed]
+
+With most school-age children and college students (except those attending summer school and summer camp) on summer vacation during the summer months, especially in the United States, travel and vacationing traditionally peak during the summer, with the volume of travel in a typical summer weekend rivalled only by Thanksgiving. Teenagers and college students often take summer jobs in industries that cater to recreation. Business activity for the recreation, tourism, restaurant, and retail industries peaks during the summer months as well as the holiday season.
+
+Children cycling during summer
+
+Barefoot skiing
+
+Fig trees bear fruit when summer is near
+
+Using a personal cooling device in summer

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+
+
+
+In chemistry, alcohol is an organic compound that carries at least one hydroxyl functional group (−OH) bound to a saturated carbon atom.[2] The term alcohol originally referred to the primary alcohol ethanol (ethyl alcohol), which is used as a drug and is the main alcohol present in alcoholic beverages. An important class of alcohols, of which methanol and ethanol are the simplest members, includes all compounds for which the general formula is CnH2n+1OH. Simple monoalcohols that are the subject of this article include primary (RCH2OH), secondary (R2CHOH) and tertiary (R3COH) alcohols.
+
+The suffix -ol appears in the IUPAC chemical name of all substances where the hydroxyl group is the functional group with the highest priority. When a higher priority group is present in the compound, the prefix hydroxy- is used in its IUPAC name. The suffix -ol in non-IUPAC names (such as paracetamol or cholesterol) also typically indicates that the substance is an alcohol. However, many substances that contain hydroxyl functional groups (particularly sugars, such as glucose and sucrose) have names which include neither the suffix -ol, nor the prefix hydroxy-.
+
+Alcohol distillation possibly originated in the Indus valley civilization as early as 2000 BCE. The people of India used an alcoholic drink called Sura made from fermented rice, barley, jaggery, and flowers of the madhyaka tree.[3] Alcohol distillation was known to Islamic chemists as early as the eighth century.[4][5]
+
+The Arab chemist, al-Kindi, unambiguously described the distillation of wine in a treatise titled as "The Book of the chemistry of Perfume and Distillations".[6][7][8]
+
+The word "alcohol" is from the Arabic kohl (Arabic: الكحل‎, romanized: al-kuḥl), a powder used as an eyeliner.[9] Al- is the Arabic definite article, equivalent to the in English. Alcohol was originally used for the very fine powder produced by the sublimation of the natural mineral stibnite to form antimony trisulfide Sb2S3. It was considered to be the essence or "spirit" of this mineral. It was used as an antiseptic, eyeliner, and cosmetic. The meaning of alcohol was extended to distilled substances in general, and then narrowed to ethanol, when "spirits" was a synonym for hard liquor.[10]
+
+Bartholomew Traheron, in his 1543 translation of John of Vigo, introduces the word as a term used by "barbarous" authors for "fine powder." Vigo wrote: "the barbarous auctours use alcohol, or (as I fynde it sometymes wryten) alcofoll, for moost fine poudre."[11]
+
+The 1657 Lexicon Chymicum, by William Johnson glosses the word as "antimonium sive stibium."[12] By extension, the word came to refer to any fluid obtained by distillation, including "alcohol of wine," the distilled essence of wine. Libavius in Alchymia (1594) refers to "vini alcohol vel vinum alcalisatum". Johnson (1657) glosses alcohol vini as "quando omnis superfluitas vini a vino separatur, ita ut accensum ardeat donec totum consumatur, nihilque fæcum aut phlegmatis in fundo remaneat." The word's meaning became restricted to "spirit of wine" (the chemical known today as ethanol) in the 18th century and was extended to the class of substances so-called as "alcohols" in modern chemistry after 1850.[11]
+
+The term ethanol was invented in 1892, combining the word ethane with the "-ol" ending of "alcohol".[13]
+
+IUPAC nomenclature is used in scientific publications and where precise identification of the substance is important, especially in cases where the relative complexity of the molecule does not make such a systematic name unwieldy. In naming simple alcohols, the name of the alkane chain loses the terminal e and adds the suffix -ol, e.g., as in "ethanol" from the alkane chain name "ethane".[14] When necessary, the position of the hydroxyl group is indicated by a number between the alkane name and the -ol: propan-1-ol for CH3CH2CH2OH, propan-2-ol for CH3CH(OH)CH3. If a higher priority group is present (such as an aldehyde, ketone, or carboxylic acid), then the prefix hydroxy-is used,[14] e.g., as in 1-hydroxy-2-propanone (CH3C(O)CH2OH).[15]
+
+In cases where the OH functional group is bonded to an sp2 carbon on an aromatic ring the molecule is known as a phenol, and is named using the IUPAC rules for naming phenols.[16]
+
+In other less formal contexts, an alcohol is often called with the name of the corresponding alkyl group followed by the word "alcohol", e.g., methyl alcohol, ethyl alcohol. Propyl alcohol may be n-propyl alcohol or isopropyl alcohol, depending on whether the hydroxyl group is bonded to the end or middle carbon on the straight propane chain. As described under systematic naming, if another group on the molecule takes priority, the alcohol moiety is often indicated using the "hydroxy-" prefix.[17]
+
+Alcohols are then classified into primary, secondary (sec-, s-), and tertiary (tert-, t-), based upon the number of carbon atoms connected to the carbon atom that bears the hydroxyl functional group. (The respective numeric shorthands 1°, 2°, and 3° are also sometimes used in informal settings.[18]) The primary alcohols have general formulas RCH2OH. The simplest primary alcohol is methanol (CH3OH), for which R=H, and the next is ethanol, for which R=CH3, the methyl group. Secondary alcohols are those of the form RR'CHOH, the simplest of which is 2-propanol (R=R'=CH3). For the tertiary alcohols the general form is RR'R"COH. The simplest example is tert-butanol (2-methylpropan-2-ol), for which each of R, R', and R" is CH3. In these shorthands, R, R', and R" represent substituents, alkyl or other attached, generally organic groups.
+
+In archaic nomenclature, alcohols can be named as derivatives of methanol using "-carbinol" as the ending.  For instance, (CH3)3COH can be named trimethylcarbinol.
+
+Alcohols have a long history of myriad uses. For simple mono-alcohols, which is the focus on this article, the following are most important industrial alcohols:[20]
+
+Methanol is the most common industrial alcohol, with about 12 million tons/y produced in 1980. The combined capacity of the other alcohols is about the same, distributed roughly equally.[20]
+
+With respect to acute toxicity, simple alcohols have low acute toxicities.  Doses of several milliliters are tolerated.  For pentanols, hexanols, octanols and longer alcohols, LD50 range from 2–5 g/kg (rats, oral).  Methanol and ethanol are less acutely toxic.  All alcohols are mild skin irritants.[20]
+
+The metabolism of methanol (and ethylene glycol) is affected by the presence of ethanol, which has a higher affinity for liver alcohol dehydrogenase.  In this way methanol will be excreted intact in urine.[21][22][23]
+
+In general, the hydroxyl group makes alcohols polar. Those groups can form hydrogen bonds to one another and to most other compounds.  Owing to the presence of the polar OH alcohols are more water-soluble than simple hydrocarbons.  Methanol, ethanol, and propanol are miscible in water. Butanol, with a four-carbon chain, is moderately soluble.
+
+Because of hydrogen bonding, alcohols tend to have higher boiling points than comparable hydrocarbons and ethers. The boiling point of the alcohol ethanol is 78.29 °C, compared to 69 °C for the hydrocarbon hexane, and 34.6 °C for diethyl ether.
+
+Simple alcohols are found widely in nature.  Ethanol is most prominent because it is the product of fermentation, a major energy-producing pathway.  The other simple alcohols are formed in only trace amounts.  More complex alcohols are pervasive, as manifested in sugars, some amino acids, and fatty acids.
+
+In the Ziegler process, linear alcohols are produced from ethylene and triethylaluminium followed by oxidation and hydrolysis.[20] An idealized synthesis of 1-octanol is shown:
+
+The process generates a range of alcohols that are separated by distillation.
+
+Many higher alcohols are produced by hydroformylation of alkenes followed by hydrogenation. When applied to a terminal alkene, as is common, one typically obtains a linear alcohol:[20]
+
+Such processes give fatty alcohols, which are useful for detergents.
+
+Some low molecular weight alcohols of industrial importance are produced by the addition of water to alkenes. Ethanol, isopropanol, 2-butanol, and tert-butanol are produced by this general method. Two implementations are employed, the direct and indirect methods. The direct method avoids the formation of stable intermediates, typically using acid catalysts. In the indirect method, the alkene is converted to the sulfate ester, which is subsequently hydrolyzed. The direct hydration using ethylene (ethylene hydration)[24] or other alkenes from cracking of fractions of distilled crude oil.
+
+Hydration is also used industrially to produce the diol ethylene glycol from ethylene oxide.
+
+Ethanol is obtained by fermentation using glucose produced from sugar from the hydrolysis of starch, in the presence of yeast and temperature of less than 37 °C to produce ethanol. For instance, such a process might proceed by the conversion of sucrose by the enzyme invertase into glucose and fructose, then the conversion of glucose by the enzyme complex zymase into ethanol (and carbon dioxide).
+
+Several species of the benign bacteria in the intestine use fermentation as a form of anaerobic metabolism. This metabolic reaction produces ethanol as a waste product. Thus, human bodies contain some quantity of alcohol endogenously produced by these bacteria. In rare cases, this can be sufficient to cause "auto-brewery syndrome" in which intoxicating quantities of alcohol are produced.[25][26][27]
+
+Like ethanol, butanol can be produced by fermentation processes. Saccharomyces yeast are known to produce these higher alcohols at temperatures above 75 °F (24 °C). The bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum can feed on cellulose to produce butanol on an industrial scale.[28]
+
+Primary alkyl halides react with aqueous NaOH or KOH mainly to primary alcohols in nucleophilic aliphatic substitution. (Secondary and especially tertiary alkyl halides will give the elimination (alkene) product instead). Grignard reagents react with carbonyl groups to secondary and tertiary alcohols. Related reactions are the Barbier reaction and the Nozaki-Hiyama reaction.
+
+Aldehydes or ketones are reduced with sodium borohydride or lithium aluminium hydride (after an acidic workup). Another reduction by aluminiumisopropylates is the Meerwein-Ponndorf-Verley reduction. Noyori asymmetric hydrogenation is the asymmetric reduction of β-keto-esters.
+
+Alkenes engage in an acid catalysed hydration reaction using concentrated sulfuric acid as a catalyst that gives usually secondary or tertiary alcohols. The hydroboration-oxidation and oxymercuration-reduction of alkenes are more reliable in organic synthesis. Alkenes react with NBS and water in halohydrin formation reaction. Amines can be converted to diazonium salts, which are then hydrolyzed.
+
+The formation of a secondary alcohol via reduction and hydration is shown:
+
+With a pKa of around 16–19, they are, in general, slightly weaker acids than water.  With strong bases such as sodium hydride or sodium they form salts called alkoxides, with the general formula RO− M+.
+
+The acidity of alcohols is strongly affected by solvation.  In the gas phase, alcohols are more acidic than in water.[29]
+
+The OH group is not a good leaving group in nucleophilic substitution reactions, so neutral alcohols do not react in such reactions. However, if the oxygen is first protonated to give R−OH2+, the leaving group (water) is much more stable, and the nucleophilic substitution can take place. For instance, tertiary alcohols react with hydrochloric acid to produce tertiary alkyl halides, where the hydroxyl group is replaced by a chlorine atom by unimolecular nucleophilic substitution. If primary or secondary alcohols are to be reacted with hydrochloric acid, an activator such as zinc chloride is needed. In alternative fashion, the conversion may be performed directly using thionyl chloride.[1]
+
+
+
+Alcohols may, likewise, be converted to alkyl bromides using hydrobromic acid or phosphorus tribromide, for example:
+
+In the Barton-McCombie deoxygenation an alcohol is deoxygenated to an alkane with tributyltin hydride or a trimethylborane-water complex in a radical substitution reaction.
+
+Meanwhile, the oxygen atom has lone pairs of nonbonded electrons that render it weakly basic in the presence of strong acids such as sulfuric acid. For example, with methanol:
+
+
+
+Upon treatment with strong acids, alcohols undergo the E1 elimination reaction to produce alkenes. The reaction, in general, obeys Zaitsev's Rule, which states that the most stable (usually the most substituted) alkene is formed. Tertiary alcohols eliminate easily at just above room temperature, but primary alcohols require a higher temperature.
+
+This is a diagram of acid catalysed dehydration of ethanol to produce ethylene:
+
+
+
+A more controlled elimination reaction requires the formation of the xanthate ester.
+
+Tertiary alcohols react with strong acids to generate carbocations.  The reaction is related to their dehydration, e.g. isobutylene from tert-butyl alcohol. A special kind of dehydration reaction involves triphenylmethanol and especially its amine-substituted derivatives.  When treated with acid, these alcohols lose water to give stable carbocations, which are commercial dyes.[30]
+
+Alcohol and carboxylic acids react in the so-called Fischer esterification.  The reaction usually requires a catalyst, such as concentrated sulfuric acid:
+
+Other types of ester are prepared in a similar manner –  for example, tosyl (tosylate) esters are made by reaction of the alcohol with p-toluenesulfonyl chloride in pyridine.
+
+Primary alcohols (R-CH2OH) can be oxidized either to aldehydes (R-CHO) or to carboxylic acids (R-CO2H).  The oxidation of secondary alcohols (R1R2CH-OH) normally terminates at the ketone (R1R2C=O) stage. Tertiary alcohols (R1R2R3C-OH) are resistant to oxidation.
+
+The direct oxidation of primary alcohols to carboxylic acids normally proceeds via the corresponding aldehyde, which is transformed via an aldehyde hydrate (R-CH(OH)2) by reaction with water before it can be further oxidized to the carboxylic acid.
+
+Reagents useful for the transformation of primary alcohols to aldehydes are normally also suitable for the oxidation of secondary alcohols to ketones. These include Collins reagent and Dess-Martin periodinane. The direct oxidation of primary alcohols to carboxylic acids can be carried out using potassium permanganate or the Jones reagent.

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+
+
+Ethernet (/ˈiːθərnɛt/) is a family of computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN).[1]  It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1983 as IEEE 802.3. Ethernet has since been refined to support higher bit rates, a greater number of nodes, and longer link distances, but retains much backward compatibility. Over time, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies such as Token Ring, FDDI and ARCNET.
+
+The original 10BASE5 Ethernet uses coaxial cable as a shared medium, while the newer Ethernet variants use twisted pair and fiber optic links in conjunction with switches. Over the course of its history, Ethernet data transfer rates have been increased from the original 2.94 megabits per second (Mbit/s)[2] to the latest 400 gigabits per second (Gbit/s). The Ethernet standards comprise several wiring and signaling variants of the OSI physical layer in use with Ethernet.
+
+Systems communicating over Ethernet divide a stream of data into shorter pieces called frames. Each frame contains source and destination addresses, and error-checking data so that damaged frames can be detected and discarded; most often, higher-layer protocols trigger retransmission of lost frames. As per the OSI model, Ethernet provides services up to and including the data link layer.[3] The 48-bit MAC address was adopted by other IEEE 802 networking standards, including IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi, as well as by FDDI, and EtherType values are also used in Subnetwork Access Protocol (SNAP) headers.
+
+Ethernet is widely used in homes and industry, and interworks well with Wi-Fi. The Internet Protocol is commonly carried over Ethernet and so it is considered one of the key technologies that make up the Internet.
+
+Ethernet was developed at Xerox PARC between 1973 and 1974.[4][5] It was inspired by ALOHAnet, which Robert Metcalfe had studied as part of his PhD dissertation.[6] The idea was first documented in a memo that Metcalfe wrote on May 22, 1973, where he named it after the luminiferous aether once postulated to exist as an "omnipresent, completely-passive medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves."[4][7][8] In 1975, Xerox filed a patent application listing Metcalfe, David Boggs, Chuck Thacker, and Butler Lampson as inventors.[9] In 1976, after the system was deployed at PARC, Metcalfe and Boggs published a seminal paper.[10][a] Yogen Dalal,[12] Ron Crane, Bob Garner, and Roy Ogus facilitated the upgrade from the original 2.94 Mbit/s protocol to the 10 Mbit/s protocol, which was released to the market in 1980.[13]
+
+Metcalfe left Xerox in June 1979 to form 3Com.[4][14] He convinced Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Intel, and Xerox to work together to promote Ethernet as a standard. As part of that process Xerox agreed to relinquish their 'Ethernet' trademark.[15] The first standard was published on September 30, 1980 as "The Ethernet, A Local Area Network. Data Link Layer and Physical Layer Specifications". This so-called DIX standard (Digital Intel Xerox) specified 10 Mbit/s Ethernet, with 48-bit destination and source addresses and a global 16-bit Ethertype-type field.[16] Version 2 was published in November, 1982[17] and defines what has become known as Ethernet II. Formal standardization efforts proceeded at the same time and resulted in the publication of IEEE 802.3 on June 23, 1983.[18]
+
+Ethernet initially competed with Token Ring and other proprietary protocols. Ethernet was able to adapt to market needs and with 10BASE2, shift to inexpensive thin coaxial cable and from 1990, to the now-ubiquitous twisted pair with 10BASE-T. By the end of the 1980s, Ethernet was clearly the dominant network technology.[4] In the process, 3Com became a major company. 3Com shipped its first 10 Mbit/s Ethernet 3C100 NIC in March 1981, and that year started selling adapters for PDP-11s and VAXes, as well as Multibus-based Intel and Sun Microsystems computers.[19]:9 This was followed quickly by DEC's Unibus to Ethernet adapter, which DEC sold and used internally to build its own corporate network, which reached over 10,000 nodes by 1986, making it one of the largest computer networks in the world at that time.[20] An Ethernet adapter card for the IBM PC was released in 1982, and, by 1985, 3Com had sold 100,000.[14] In the 1980s, IBM's own PC Network product competed with Ethernet for the PC, and through the 1980s, LAN hardware, in general, was not common on PCs. However, in the mid to late 1980s, PC networking did become popular in offices and schools for printer and fileserver sharing, and among the many diverse competing LAN technologies of that decade, Ethernet was one of the most popular. Parallel port based Ethernet adapters were produced for a time, with drivers for DOS and Windows. By the early 1990s, Ethernet became so prevalent that Ethernet ports began to appear on some PCs and most workstations. This process was greatly sped up with the introduction of 10BASE-T and its relatively small modular connector, at which point Ethernet ports appeared even on low-end motherboards.[citation needed]
+
+Since then, Ethernet technology has evolved to meet new bandwidth and market requirements.[21] In addition to computers, Ethernet is now used to interconnect appliances and other personal devices.[4] As Industrial Ethernet it is used in industrial applications and is quickly replacing legacy data transmission systems in the world's telecommunications networks.[22] By 2010, the market for Ethernet equipment amounted to over $16 billion per year.[23]
+
+In February 1980, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) started project 802 to standardize local area networks (LAN).[14][24] The "DIX-group" with Gary Robinson (DEC), Phil Arst (Intel), and Bob Printis (Xerox) submitted the so-called "Blue Book" CSMA/CD specification as a candidate for the LAN specification.[16] In addition to CSMA/CD, Token Ring (supported by IBM) and Token Bus (selected and henceforward supported by General Motors) were also considered as candidates for a LAN standard. Competing proposals and broad interest in the initiative led to strong disagreement over which technology to standardize. In December 1980, the group was split into three subgroups, and standardization proceeded separately for each proposal.[14]
+
+Delays in the standards process put at risk the market introduction of the Xerox Star workstation and 3Com's Ethernet LAN products. With such business implications in mind, David Liddle (General Manager, Xerox Office Systems) and Metcalfe (3Com) strongly supported a proposal of Fritz Röscheisen (Siemens Private Networks) for an alliance in the emerging office communication market, including Siemens' support for the international standardization of Ethernet (April 10, 1981). Ingrid Fromm, Siemens' representative to IEEE 802, quickly achieved broader support for Ethernet beyond IEEE by the establishment of a competing Task Group "Local Networks" within the European standards body ECMA TC24. On March 1982, ECMA TC24 with its corporate members reached an agreement on a standard for CSMA/CD based on the IEEE 802 draft.[19]:8 Because the DIX proposal was most technically complete and because of the speedy action taken by ECMA which decisively contributed to the conciliation of opinions within IEEE, the IEEE 802.3 CSMA/CD standard was approved in December 1982.[14] IEEE published the 802.3 standard as a draft in 1983 and as a standard in 1985.[25]
+
+Approval of Ethernet on the international level was achieved by a similar, cross-partisan action with Fromm as the liaison officer working to integrate with International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Technical Committee 83 and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Technical Committee 97 Sub Committee 6. The ISO 8802-3 standard was published in 1989.[26]
+
+Ethernet has evolved to include higher bandwidth, improved medium access control methods, and different physical media. The coaxial cable was replaced with point-to-point links connected by Ethernet repeaters or switches.[27]
+
+Ethernet stations communicate by sending each other data packets: blocks of data individually sent and delivered. As with other IEEE 802 LANs, adapters come programmed with globally unique 48-bit MAC address so that each Ethernet station has a unique address[b]. The MAC addresses are used to specify both the destination and the source of each data packet. Ethernet establishes link-level connections, which can be defined using both the destination and source addresses. On reception of a transmission, the receiver uses the destination address to determine whether the transmission is relevant to the station or should be ignored. A network interface normally does not accept packets addressed to other Ethernet stations.[c][d]
+
+An EtherType field in each frame is used by the operating system on the receiving station to select the appropriate protocol module (e.g., an Internet Protocol version such as IPv4). Ethernet frames are said to be self-identifying, because of the EtherType field. Self-identifying frames make it possible to intermix multiple protocols on the same physical network and allow a single computer to use multiple protocols together.[28] Despite the evolution of Ethernet technology, all generations of Ethernet (excluding early experimental versions) use the same frame formats.[29] Mixed-speed networks can be built using Ethernet switches and repeaters supporting the desired Ethernet variants.[30]
+
+Due to the ubiquity of Ethernet, the ever-decreasing cost of the hardware needed to support it, and the reduced panel space needed by twisted pair Ethernet, most manufacturers now build Ethernet interfaces directly into PC motherboards, eliminating the need for installation of a separate network card.[31]
+
+Ethernet was originally based on the idea of computers communicating over a shared coaxial cable acting as a broadcast transmission medium. The method used was similar to those used in radio systems,[e] with the common cable providing the communication channel likened to the Luminiferous aether in 19th century physics, and it was from this reference that the name "Ethernet" was derived.[32]
+
+Original Ethernet's shared coaxial cable (the shared medium) traversed a building or campus to every attached machine. A scheme known as carrier sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD) governed the way the computers shared the channel. This scheme was simpler than competing Token Ring or Token Bus technologies.[f] Computers are connected to an Attachment Unit Interface (AUI) transceiver, which is in turn connected to the cable (with thin Ethernet the transceiver is usually integrated into the network adapter). While a simple passive wire is highly reliable for small networks, it is not reliable for large extended networks, where damage to the wire in a single place, or a single bad connector, can make the whole Ethernet segment unusable.[g]
+
+Through the first half of the 1980s, Ethernet's 10BASE5 implementation used a coaxial cable 0.375 inches (9.5 mm) in diameter, later called "thick Ethernet" or "thicknet". Its successor, 10BASE2, called "thin Ethernet" or "thinnet", used the RG-58 coaxial cable. The emphasis was on making installation of the cable easier and less costly.[33]:57
+
+Since all communication happens on the same wire, any information sent by one computer is received by all, even if that information is intended for just one destination.[h] The network interface card interrupts the CPU only when applicable packets are received: the card ignores information not addressed to it.[i] Use of a single cable also means that the data bandwidth is shared, such that, for example, available data bandwidth to each device is halved when two stations are simultaneously active.[34]
+
+A collision happens when two stations attempt to transmit at the same time. They corrupt transmitted data and require stations to re-transmit. The lost data and re-transmission reduces throughput. In the worst case, where multiple active hosts connected with maximum allowed cable length attempt to transmit many short frames, excessive collisions can reduce throughput dramatically. However, a Xerox report in 1980 studied performance of an existing Ethernet installation under both normal and artificially generated heavy load. The report claimed that 98% throughput on the LAN was observed.[35] This is in contrast with token passing LANs (Token Ring, Token Bus), all of which suffer throughput degradation as each new node comes into the LAN, due to token waits. This report was controversial, as modeling showed that collision-based networks theoretically became unstable under loads as low as 37% of nominal capacity. Many early researchers failed to understand these results. Performance on real networks is significantly better.[36]
+
+In a modern Ethernet, the stations do not all share one channel through a shared cable or a simple repeater hub; instead, each station communicates with a switch, which in turn forwards that traffic to the destination station. In this topology, collisions are only possible if station and switch attempt to communicate with each other at the same time, and collisions are limited to this link. Furthermore, the 10BASE-T standard introduced a full duplex mode of operation which became common with Fast Ethernet and the de facto standard with Gigabit Ethernet. In full duplex, switch and station can send and receive simultaneously, and therefore modern Ethernets are completely collision-free.
+
+The original Ethernet implementation: shared medium, collision-prone. All computers trying to communicate share the same cable, and so compete with each other.
+
+Modern Ethernet implementation: switched connection, collision-free. Each computer communicates only with its own switch, without competition for the cable with others.
+
+For signal degradation and timing reasons, coaxial Ethernet segments have a restricted size.[37] Somewhat larger networks can be built by using an Ethernet repeater. Early repeaters had only two ports, allowing, at most, a doubling of network size. Once repeaters with more than two ports became available, it was possible to wire the network in a star topology. Early experiments with star topologies (called "Fibernet") using optical fiber were published by 1978.[38]
+
+Shared cable Ethernet is always hard to install in offices because its bus topology is in conflict with the star topology cable plans designed into buildings for telephony. Modifying Ethernet to conform to twisted pair telephone wiring already installed in commercial buildings provided another opportunity to lower costs, expand the installed base, and leverage building design, and, thus, twisted-pair Ethernet was the next logical development in the mid-1980s.
+
+Ethernet on unshielded twisted-pair cables (UTP) began with StarLAN at 1 Mbit/s in the mid-1980s. In 1987 SynOptics introduced the first twisted-pair Ethernet at 10 Mbit/s in a star-wired cabling topology with a central hub, later called LattisNet.[14][32]:29[39] These evolved into 10BASE-T, which was designed for point-to-point links only, and all termination was built into the device. This changed repeaters from a specialist device used at the center of large networks to a device that every twisted pair-based network with more than two machines had to use. The tree structure that resulted from this made Ethernet networks easier to maintain by preventing most faults with one peer or its associated cable from affecting other devices on the network.[citation needed]
+
+Despite the physical star topology and the presence of separate transmit and receive channels in the twisted pair and fiber media, repeater-based Ethernet networks still use half-duplex and CSMA/CD, with only minimal activity by the repeater, primarily generation of the jam signal in dealing with packet collisions. Every packet is sent to every other port on the repeater, so bandwidth and security problems are not addressed. The total throughput of the repeater is limited to that of a single link, and all links must operate at the same speed.[32]:278
+
+While repeaters can isolate some aspects of Ethernet segments, such as cable breakages, they still forward all traffic to all Ethernet devices. The entire network is one collision domain, and all hosts have to be able to detect collisions anywhere on the network. This limits the number of repeaters between the farthest nodes and creates practical limits on how many machines can communicate on an Ethernet network. Segments joined by repeaters have to all operate at the same speed, making phased-in upgrades impossible.[citation needed]
+
+To alleviate these problems, bridging was created to communicate at the data link layer while isolating the physical layer. With bridging, only well-formed Ethernet packets are forwarded from one Ethernet segment to another; collisions and packet errors are isolated. At initial startup, Ethernet bridges work somewhat like Ethernet repeaters, passing all traffic between segments. By observing the source addresses of incoming frames, the bridge then builds an address table associating addresses to segments. Once an address is learned, the bridge forwards network traffic destined for that address only to the associated segment, improving overall performance. Broadcast traffic is still forwarded to all network segments. Bridges also overcome the limits on total segments between two hosts and allow the mixing of speeds, both of which are critical to the incremental deployment of faster Ethernet variants.[citation needed]
+
+In 1989, Motorola Codex introduced their 6310 EtherSpan, and Kalpana introduced their EtherSwitch; these were examples of the first commercial Ethernet switches.[j] Early switches such as this used cut-through switching where only the header of the incoming packet is examined before it is either dropped or forwarded to another segment.[40]  This reduces the forwarding latency. One drawback of this method is that it does not readily allow a mixture of different link speeds. Another is that packets that have been corrupted are still propagated through the network.  The eventual remedy for this was a return to the original store and forward approach of bridging, where the packet is read into a buffer on the switch in its entirety, its frame check sequence verified and only then the packet is forwarded.[40] In modern network equipment, this process is typically done using application-specific integrated circuits allowing packets to be forwarded at wire speed.[citation needed]
+
+When a twisted pair or fiber link segment is used and neither end is connected to a repeater, full-duplex Ethernet becomes possible over that segment.  In full-duplex mode, both devices can transmit and receive to and from each other at the same time, and there is no collision domain.[41] This doubles the aggregate bandwidth of the link and is sometimes advertised as double the link speed (for example, 200 Mbit/s for Fast Ethernet).[k] The elimination of the collision domain for these connections also means that all the link's bandwidth can be used by the two devices on that segment and that segment length is not limited by the constraints of collision detection.
+
+Since packets are typically delivered only to the port they are intended for, traffic on a switched Ethernet is less public than on shared-medium Ethernet. Despite this, switched Ethernet should still be regarded as an insecure network technology, because it is easy to subvert switched Ethernet systems by means such as ARP spoofing and MAC flooding.[citation needed][42]
+
+The bandwidth advantages, the improved isolation of devices from each other, the ability to easily mix different speeds of devices and the elimination of the chaining limits inherent in non-switched Ethernet have made switched Ethernet the dominant network technology.[43]
+
+Simple switched Ethernet networks, while a great improvement over repeater-based Ethernet, suffer from single points of failure, attacks that trick switches or hosts into sending data to a machine even if it is not intended for it, scalability and security issues with regard to switching loops, broadcast radiation and multicast traffic.[citation needed]
+
+Advanced networking features in switches use shortest path bridging (SPB) or the spanning-tree protocol (STP) to maintain a loop-free, meshed network, allowing physical loops for redundancy (STP) or load-balancing (SPB). Advanced networking features also ensure port security, provide protection features such as MAC lockdown[44] and broadcast radiation filtering, use virtual LANs to keep different classes of users separate while using the same physical infrastructure, employ multilayer switching to route between different classes, and use link aggregation to add bandwidth to overloaded links and to provide some redundancy.[citation needed]
+
+Shortest path bridging includes the use of the link-state routing protocol IS-IS to allow larger networks with shortest path routes between devices.  In 2012, it was stated by David Allan and Nigel Bragg, in 802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging Design and Evolution: The Architect's Perspective that shortest path bridging is one of the most significant enhancements in Ethernet's history.[45]
+
+Ethernet has replaced InfiniBand as the most popular system interconnect of TOP500 supercomputers.[46]
+
+The Ethernet physical layer evolved over a considerable time span and encompasses coaxial, twisted pair and fiber-optic physical media interfaces, with speeds from 10 Mbit/s to 100 Gbit/s, with 400 Gbit/s expected by 2018.[47] The first introduction of twisted-pair CSMA/CD was StarLAN, standardized as 802.3 1BASE5.[48] While 1BASE5 had little market penetration, it defined the physical apparatus (wire, plug/jack, pin-out, and wiring plan) that would be carried over to 10BASE-T.
+
+The most common forms used are 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, and 1000BASE-T. All three use twisted pair cables and 8P8C modular connectors. They run at 10 Mbit/s, 100 Mbit/s, and 1 Gbit/s, respectively.[citation needed]
+
+Fiber optic variants of Ethernet (that use SFP) are also very common in larger networks, offering high performance, better electrical isolation and longer distance (tens of kilometers with some versions). In general, network protocol stack software will work similarly on all varieties.[citation needed]
+
+In IEEE 802.3, a datagram is called a packet or frame. Packet is used to describe the overall transmission unit and includes the preamble, start frame delimiter (SFD) and carrier extension (if present).[l] The frame begins after the start frame delimiter with a frame header featuring source and destination MAC addresses and the EtherType field giving either the protocol type for the payload protocol or the length of the payload. The middle section of the frame consists of payload data including any headers for other protocols (for example, Internet Protocol) carried in the frame. The frame ends with a 32-bit cyclic redundancy check, which is used to detect corruption of data in transit.[49]:sections 3.1.1 and 3.2 Notably, Ethernet packets have no time-to-live field, leading to possible problems in the presence of a switching loop.
+
+Autonegotiation is the procedure by which two connected devices choose common transmission parameters, e.g. speed and duplex mode. Autonegotiation was initially an optional feature, first introduced with 100BASE-TX, while it is also backward compatible with 10BASE-T. Autonegotiation is mandatory for 1000BASE-T and faster.
+
+A switching loop or bridge loop occurs in computer networks when there is more than one Layer 2 (OSI model) path between two endpoints (e.g. multiple connections between two network switches or two ports on the same switch connected to each other). The loop creates broadcast storms as broadcasts and multicasts are forwarded by switches out every port, the switch or switches will repeatedly rebroadcast the broadcast messages flooding the network. Since the Layer 2 header does not support a time to live (TTL) value, if a frame is sent into a looped topology, it can loop forever.[citation needed]
+
+A physical topology that contains switching or bridge loops is attractive for redundancy reasons, yet a switched network must not have loops.  The solution is to allow physical loops, but create a loop-free logical topology using the shortest path bridging (SPB) protocol or the older spanning tree protocols (STP) on the network switches.[citation needed]
+
+A node that is sending longer than the maximum transmission window for an Ethernet packet is considered to be jabbering. Depending on the physical topology, jabber detection and remedy differ somewhat.

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+Coordinates: 8°N 38°E / 8°N 38°E / 8; 38
+
+Ethiopia (/ˌiːθiˈoʊpiə/; Amharic: ኢትዮጵያ, ʾĪtyōṗṗyā (listen), Afar: Itiyoophiyaa, Ge'ez: ኢትዮጵያ. Oromo: Itoophiyaa, Somali: Itoobiya, Tigrinya: ኢትዮጵያ), officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in  East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Kenya to the south, South Sudan to the west and Sudan to the northwest. With over 109 million inhabitants as of 2019[update],[7][8] Ethiopia is the most populous landlocked country in the world and the second-most populous nation on the African continent (after Nigeria). The country has a total area of 1,100,000 square kilometres (420,000 sq mi). Its capital and largest city is Addis Ababa, which lies a few miles west of the East African Rift that splits the country into the African and Somali tectonic plates.[13] Ethiopian national identity is grounded in the historic and contemporary roles of Christianity and Islam, and the independence of Ethiopia from foreign rule, stemming from the various ancient Ethiopian kingdoms of antiquity.[14]
+
+Some of the oldest skeletal evidence for anatomically modern humans has been found in Ethiopia.[15] It is widely considered as the region from which modern humans first set out for the Middle East and places beyond.[16][17][18] According to linguists, the first Afroasiatic-speaking populations settled in the Horn region during the ensuing Neolithic era.[19] Tracing its roots to the 2nd millennium BC, Ethiopia's governmental system was a monarchy for most of its history. Oral literature tells that the monarchy was founded by the Solomonic dynasty of the Queen of Sheba, under its first king, Menelik I.[20] In the first centuries, the Kingdom of Aksum maintained a unified civilization in the region,[21][22][23][24] followed by the Ethiopian Empire c. 1137.
+
+During the late–19th-century Scramble for Africa, Ethiopia and Liberia were the only two nations that preserved their sovereignty from long-term colonisation by a European colonial power, and many newly independent nations on the continent subsequently adopted its flag colours. However, the country was later occupied by Italy in 1936 and became Italian Ethiopia (part of Italian East Africa), until it was liberated during World War II. During the Italian rule, the government abolished slavery,[25] a practice that existed in the country for centuries, and urbanization steadily increased.[26] Ethiopia was also the first independent African member of the 20th-century League of Nations and the United Nations.[27] In 1974, the Ethiopian monarchy under Haile Selassie was overthrown by the Derg, a communist military government backed by the Soviet Union. In 1987, the Derg established the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, but it was overthrown in 1991 by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, which has been the ruling political coalition since.
+
+Ethiopia and Eritrea use the ancient Ge'ez script, which is one of the oldest alphabets still in use in the world.[28] They follow the Ethiopian calendar, which is approximately seven years and three months behind the Gregorian calendar. A majority of the population adheres to Christianity (mainly the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and P'ent'ay), and the historical Kingdom of Aksum was one of the first states to officially adopt the religion, whereas around a third follows Islam (primarily Sunni). The country is the site of the Islamic Migration to Abyssinia and the oldest Muslim settlement in Africa, at Negash. A substantial population of Ethiopian Jews, known as Bete Israel, also resided in Ethiopia until the 1980s.[29][30] Ethiopia is a multilingual nation, with around 80 ethnolinguistic groups, the four largest of which are the Oromo, Amhara, Somali and Tigrayans. Most people in the country speak Afroasiatic languages of the Cushitic or Semitic branches. Additionally, Omotic languages are spoken by ethnic minority groups inhabiting the southern regions. Nilo-Saharan languages are also spoken by the nation's Nilotic ethnic minorities. Oromo is the most populous language by native speakers, while Amharic is the most populous by number of total speakers and serves as the working language in the federal government. Ge'ez remains important as a liturgical language for both the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church and for the Beta Israel.
+
+The nation is a land of natural contrasts, with its vast fertile west, its forests and its numerous rivers, and the world's hottest settlement of Dallol in its north. The Ethiopian Highlands are the largest continuous mountain ranges in Africa, and the Sof Omar Caves contains the largest cave on the continent. Ethiopia also has the second-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Africa.[31] Additionally, the sovereign state is a founding member of the UN, the Group of 24 (G-24), the Non-Aligned Movement, the G77 and the Organisation of African Unity. Its capital city, Addis Ababa, serves as the headquarters of the African Union, the Pan African Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the African Standby Force and many of the global NGOs focused on Africa. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ethiopia experienced civil conflicts and communist purges, which hindered its economy. The country has since recovered and as of 2010[update] has the largest economy (by GDP) in East Africa, as well as having the largest population in the region.[32][33][34] Despite these improvements, it remains one of the world's poorest countries.[35] In addition to poverty, Ethiopia faces hunger, corruption, weak infrastructure, and poor respect for human rights and access to health and education (with an illiteracy rate of 51%),[36] ranking in the worst quartile on the Human Development Index.
+
+The Greek name Αἰθιοπία (from Αἰθίοψ, Aithiops, "an Ethiopian") is a compound word, derived from the two Greek words, from αἴθω + ὤψ (aitho "I burn" + ops "face"). According to the Perseus Digital Library, the designation properly translates as Burnt-face in noun form and red-brown in adjectival form.[37] The historian Herodotus used the appellation to denote those parts of Africa South of the Sahara that were then known within the Ecumene (inhabitable world).[38] However, the Greek formation may be a folk etymology for the Ancient Egyptian term athtiu-abu, which means 'robbers of hearts'.[39] This Greek name was borrowed into Amharic as ኢትዮጵያ, ʾĪtyōṗṗyā.
+
+In Greco-Roman epigraphs, Aethiopia was a specific toponym for ancient Nubia.[40] At least as early as c. 850,[41] the name Aethiopia also occurs in many translations of the Old Testament in allusion to Nubia. The ancient Hebrew texts identify Nubia instead as Kush.[42] However, in the New Testament, the Greek term Aithiops does occur, referring to a servant of the Kandake, the queen of Kush.[43]
+
+Following the Hellenic and Biblical traditions, the Monumentum Adulitanum, a third century inscription belonging to the Aksumite Empire, indicates that Aksum's then ruler governed an area which was flanked to the west by the territory of Ethiopia and Sasu. The Aksumite King Ezana would eventually conquer Nubia the following century, and the Aksumites thereafter appropriated the designation "Ethiopians" for their own kingdom. In the Ge'ez version of the Ezana inscription, Aἰθιόποι is equated with the unvocalized Ḥbšt and Ḥbśt (Ḥabashat), and denotes for the first time the highland inhabitants of Aksum. This new demonym would subsequently be rendered as 'ḥbs ('Aḥbāsh) in Sabaic and as Ḥabasha in Arabic.[40]
+
+In the 15th-century Ge'ez Book of Aksum, the name is ascribed to a legendary individual called Ityopp'is. He was an extra-Biblical son of Cush, son of Ham, said to have founded the city of Axum.[44]
+
+In English, and generally outside of Ethiopia, the country was once historically known as Abyssinia. This toponym was derived from the Latinized form of the ancient Habash.[45]
+
+Several important finds have propelled Ethiopia and the surrounding region to the forefront of palaeontology. The oldest hominid discovered to date in Ethiopia is the 4.2 million year old Ardipithicus ramidus (Ardi) found by Tim D. White in 1994.[46] The most well known hominid discovery is Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy). Known locally as Dinkinesh, the specimen was found in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Region in 1974 by Donald Johanson, and is one of the most complete and best preserved adult Australopithecine fossils ever uncovered. Lucy's taxonomic name refers to the region where the discovery was made. The hominid is estimated to have lived 3.2 million years ago.[47][48][49]
+
+Ethiopia is also considered one of the earliest sites of the emergence of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens. The oldest of these local fossil finds, the Omo remains, were excavated in the southwestern Omo Kibish area and have been dated to the Middle Paleolithic, around 200,000 years ago.[50] Additionally, skeletons of Homo sapiens idaltu were found at a site in the Middle Awash valley. Dated to approximately 160,000 years ago, they may represent an extinct subspecies of Homo sapiens, or the immediate ancestors of anatomically modern humans.[51] Archaic Homo sapiens fossils excavated at the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco have since been dated to an earlier period, about 300,000 years ago,[52] while Omo-Kibish I (Omo I) from southern Ethiopia is the oldest anatomically modern Homo sapiens skeleton currently known (196 ± 5 ka).[53]
+
+According to linguists, the first Afroasiatic-speaking populations arrived in the region during the ensuing Neolithic era from the family's proposed urheimat ("original homeland") in the Nile Valley,[19] or the Near East.[54] Other scholars propose that the Afroasiatic family developed in situ in the Horn, with its speakers subsequently dispersing from there.[55]
+
+In 2019, archaeologists discovered a 30,000-year-old Middle-Stone Age rock shelter at the Fincha Habera site in the Bale Mountains of Ethiopia at an elevation of 3,469 metres above sea level. At this high altitude humans are susceptible both to hypoxia and to extreme weather. According to a study published in the journal Science, this dwelling is proof of the earliest permanent human occupation at high altitude yet discovered. Thousands of animal bones, hundreds of stone tools, and ancient fireplaces were discovered, revealing a diet that featured giant mole rats.[56][57][58][59][60][61][62]
+
+Evidence of some of the earliest known stone-tipped projectile weapons (a characteristic tool of Homo sapiens), the stone tips of javelins or throwing spears, were discovered in 2013 at the Ethiopian site of Gademotta, and date to around 279,000 years ago.[63] In 2019, further evidence of Middle Stone Age complex projectile weapons was found at Aduma, also in Ethiopia, dated 100,000-80,000 years ago, in the form of points considered likely to belong to darts delivered by spear throwers.[64]
+
+Around the 8th century BC, a kingdom known as Dʿmt was established in Tigray, in northern Ethiopia, and Eritrea. The polity's capital was located at Yeha, in northern Ethiopia. Most modern historians consider this civilization to be a native Ethiopian one, although Sabaean-influenced because of the latter's hegemony of the Red Sea.[22]
+
+Other scholars regard Dʿmt as the result of a union of Afroasiatic-speaking cultures of the Cushitic and Semitic branches; namely, local Agaw peoples and Sabaeans from South Arabia. However, Ge'ez, the ancient Semitic language of Ethiopia, is thought to have developed independently from Sabaean, one of the South Semitic languages. As early as 2000 BC, other Semitic speakers were living in Ethiopia and Eritrea where Ge'ez developed.[65][66] Sabaean influence is now thought to have been minor, limited to a few localities, and disappearing after a few decades or a century. It may have been a trading or military colony in alliance with the Ethiopian civilization of Dʿmt or some other proto-Aksumite state.[22]
+
+After the fall of Dʿmt during the fourth century BC, the Ethiopian plateau came to be dominated by smaller successor kingdoms. In the first century AD, the Kingdom of Aksum emerged in what is now Tigray and Eritrea. According to the medieval Book of Aksum, the kingdom's first capital, Mazaber, was built by Itiyopis, son of Cush.[44] Aksum would later at times extend its rule into Yemen on the other side of the Red Sea.[67] The Persian prophet Mani listed Aksum with Rome, Persia, and China as one of the four great powers of his era, during the 3rd century.[68]
+
+Around 316 AD, Frumentius and his brother Edesius from Tyre accompanied their uncle on a voyage to Ethiopia. When the vessel stopped at a Red Sea port, the natives killed all the travellers except the two brothers, who were taken to the court as slaves. They were given positions of trust by the monarch, and they converted members of the royal court to Christianity. Frumentius became the first bishop of Aksum.[69] A coin dated to 324 shows that Ethiopia was the second country to officially adopt Christianity (after Armenia did so in 301), although the religion may have been at first confined to court circles; it was the first major power to do so.
+
+The weakened Axumite dynasty came to an end in the 9th century when Yodit defeated the last king of the dynasty. Empress Yodit's reign, which lasted for 40 years, aimed to abolish Christianity (a religion first accepted by King Ezana of the Axumite dynasty) by burning down churches and crucifying people who remained faithful to the orthodox Tewahedo church, which at the time was considered as the religion of the state. The Empress tried to force many people to change their religion and destroyed much historical heritage of the Axumite dynasty earning her the epithet of Yodit Gudit (in Amharic ዮዲት ጉዲት). Her reign finally came to an end in 912 following her defeat by the first leader of the Zagwe dynasty.[70] The reign of the Zagwe dynasty came to an end by the rise of Yekuno Amlak.[71]
+
+The first interaction that the Islamic Prophet Muhammad had with Ethiopia was during the reign of Aṣḥama ibn Abjar, who was at the time the Emperor of Aksum and gave refuge to several Muslims in the Kingdom of Aksum in 614 AD.[72] According to other authors, Ashama may have been the same person as king Armah, or his father or son.[73] Taddesse Tamrat records that the inhabitants of Wiqro, where the ruler is known as Ashamat al-Negashi, claim that his tomb is located in their village.[74][75]
+
+Muhammad's second interaction with Ethiopia was during the Expedition of Zaid ibn Haritha, when he sent Amr bin Umayyah al-Damri to the King of Ethiopia (then Abyssinia).[76]
+
+The Zagwe dynasty ruled many parts of present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea between the early 12th and late 13th century. The name of the dynasty is derived from the Cushitic-speaking Agaw of northern Ethiopia. From 1270 AD until the Zemene Mesafint (Age of Princes), the Solomonic dynasty governed the Ethiopian Empire.[77]
+
+In the early 15th century, Ethiopia sought to make diplomatic contact with European kingdoms for the first time since the Aksumite era. A letter from Henry IV of England to the Emperor of Abyssinia survives.[78] In 1428, Yeshaq I sent two emissaries to Alfonso V of Aragon, who sent return emissaries. They failed to complete the return trip.[79] The first continuous relations with a European country began in 1508 with Portugal under Dawit II (Lebna Dengel), who had just inherited the throne from his father.[80] In 1487, King John II of Portugal sent two emissaries to the Orient, Pero da Covilhã and Afonso de Paiva. Afonso would die on this mission.[81]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+This proved to be an important development, for when the Empire was subjected to an occupation led by the Adal Sultanate's general and imam, Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (called "Grañ " "the Left-handed"), Portugal assisted the Ethiopian emperor by sending weapons and four hundred men, who helped his son Gelawdewos defeat Ahmad and re-establish his rule.[82]
+
+This Abyssinian–Adal War was also one of the first proxy wars in the region, as the Ottoman Empire and Portugal took sides in the conflict.
+When Emperor Susenyos I converted to Roman Catholicism in 1624, years of revolt and civil unrest followed, resulting in thousands of deaths.[83] The Jesuit missionaries had offended the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo faith of the local Ethiopians. In June 1632, Fasilides, Susenyos' son, declared the state religion again to be the Ethiopian Orthodoxy. He expelled the Jesuit missionaries and other Europeans.[84][85]
+
+The Sultanate of Aussa or "Afar Sultanate" succeeded the earlier Imamate of Aussa. The latter polity had come into existence in 1577 when Muhammed Jasa moved his capital from Harar to Aussa (Asaita) with the split of the Adal Sultanate into the Sultanate of Aussa and the Sultanate of Harar. At some point after 1672, the Sultanate of Aussa declined and temporarily came to an end in conjunction with Imam Umar Din bin Adam's recorded ascension to the throne.[86]
+
+The Sultanate was subsequently re-established by Kedafu around the year 1734. It was thereafter ruled by his Mudaito Dynasty.[87] The primary symbol of the Sultan was a silver baton, which was considered to have magical properties.[88]
+
+Between 1755 and 1855, Ethiopia experienced a period of isolation referred to as the Zemene Mesafint or "Age of Princes". The Emperors became figureheads, controlled by regional lords and noblemen like Ras Mikael Sehul of Tigray, Ras Wolde Selassie of Tigray, and by the Were ShehYejju Oromo dynasty, such as Ras Gugsa of Yejju. Prior to the Zemene Mesafint, King Iyoas had introduced Oromo as the language of the court from Amharic to Afaan Oromo.[89][90]
+
+Ethiopian isolationism ended following a British mission that concluded an alliance between the two nations, but it was not until 1855 that the Amhara kingdoms of northern Ethiopia (Gonder, Gojam, Shoa) were briefly united after the power of the Emperor was restored beginning with the reign of Tewodros II.  Tewodros had been born in Begemder from a nobleman of Qwara, where the Qwara dialect of the Agaw language is spoken.
+
+Upon his ascent, he began modernizing Ethiopia and recentralizing power in the Emperor. Ethiopia began to take part in world affairs once again.[91]
+
+But Tewodros suffered several rebellions inside his empire. Northern Oromo militias, Tigrayan rebellion, and the constant incursion of Ottoman Empire and Egyptian forces near the Red Sea brought the weakening and the final downfall of Tewodros II. He killed himself in 1868 during his last fight with the British Expedition to Abyssinia at the Battle of Magdala.
+
+After Tewodros' death, Tekle Giyorgis II was proclaimed Emperor but was defeated in the Battles of Zulawu (21 June 1871) and Adua (11 July 1871).
+
+The victorious Mercha Kassai was subsequently declared Yohannes IV on 21 January 1872. In 1875 and 1876, Turkish/Egyptian forces, accompanied by many European and American 'advisors', twice invaded Abyssinia but were initially defeated: once at the Battle of Gundet losing 800 men, and then in the second invasion, decisively defeated by Emperor Yohannes IV at the Battle of Gura on 7 March 1875, where the invading forces lost at least 3000 men by death or captured.[92] From 1885 to 1889, Ethiopia joined the Mahdist War allied to Britain, Turkey, and Egypt against the Sudanese Mahdist State. In 1887 Menelik king of Shewa invaded the Emirate of Harar after his victory at the Battle of Chelenqo.[93] On 10 March 1889, Yohannes IV was killed by the Sudanese Khalifah Abdullah's army whilst leading his army in the Battle of Gallabat (also called Battle of Metemma).[94]
+
+Ethiopia in roughly its current form began under the reign of Menelik II, who was Emperor from 1889 until his death in 1913. From his base in the central province of Shewa, Menelik set out to annex territories to the south, east and west,[95] areas inhabited by the Oromo, Sidama, Gurage, Welayta, and other peoples.[96] He did this with the help of Ras Gobana Dacche's Shewan Oromo militia, which occupied lands that had not been held since Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi's war, as well as other areas that had never been under Ethiopian sovereignty.[97] Menelik's campaign against Oromos outside his army was largely in retaliation for centuries of Oromo expansionism and the Zemene Mesafint, a period during which a succession of Oromo feudal rulers dominated the highlanders.[98] Chief among these was the Yejju dynasty, which included Aligaz of Yejju and his brother Ali I of Yejju. Ali I founded the town of Debre Tabor in the Amhara Region, which became the dynasty's capital.[99]
+
+Menelik was born from King Hailemelekot of Shewa and his mother Ejegayehu Lema Adeyamo who was a servant in the royal household.[100] He had been born at Angolala in an Oromo area and had lived his first twelve years with Shewan Oromos with whom he thus had much in common.[101] During his reign, Menelik II advanced road construction, electricity and education; the development of a central taxation system and the foundation and building of the city of Addis Ababa—which became the capital of Shewa Province in 1881. After he ascended to the throne in 1889, it was renamed Addis Ababa, the new capital of Abyssinia.
+
+For his leadership, despite opposition from more traditional elements of society, Menelik II is heralded as a national hero. Menelik had signed the Treaty of Wichale with Italy in May 1889 in which Italy would recognize Ethiopia's sovereignty so long as Italy could control an area north of Ethiopia (now part of modern Eritrea). In return, Italy was to provide Menelik with weapons and support him as emperor. The Italians used the time between the signing of the treaty and its ratification by the Italian government to expand their territorial claims. This conflict erupted in the Battle of Adwa on 1 March 1896 in which Italy's colonial forces were defeated by the Ethiopians.[96][102]
+
+About a third of the population died in the Great Ethiopian Famine (1888 to 1892).[103][104]
+
+The early 20th century was marked by the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie (Ras Tafari). Haile Selassie I was born to parents with ethnic links to three of Ethiopia's Afroasiatic-speaking populations: the Oromo and Amhara, the country's two largest ethnic groups, as well as the Gurage. He came to power after Iyasu V was deposed, and undertook a nationwide modernization campaign from 1916, when he was made a Ras and Regent (Inderase) for the Empress Regnant, Zewditu, and became the de facto ruler of the Ethiopian Empire. Following Zewditu's death, on 2 November 1930, he succeeded her as emperor.[105]
+
+The independence of Ethiopia was interrupted by the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, beginning when it was invaded by Fascist Italy in early October 1935, and Italian occupation of the country (1936–1941).[106] During this time, Haile Selassie appealed to the League of Nations in 1935, delivering an address that made him a worldwide figure, and the 1935 Time Man of the Year.[107] As the majority of the Ethiopian population lived in rural towns, Italy faced continued resistance and ambushes in urban centres throughout its occupation. Haile Selassie fled into exile in Fairfield House, Bath, England. Mussolini was able to proclaim Italian Ethiopia and the assumption of the imperial title by the Italian king Vittorio Emanuele III.[108]
+
+In 1937, the Italian massacre of Yekatit 12 took place, in which as many as 30,000 civilians were killed and many others imprisoned.[109][110][111] This massacre was a reprisal for the attempted assassination Rodolfo Graziani, the viceroy of Italian East Africa.[112]
+
+The Italians made investments in Ethiopian infrastructure development during their occupation. They created the so-called "imperial road" between Addis Ababa and Massaua.[113] More than 900 km of railways were reconstructed, dams and hydroelectric plants were built, and many public and private companies were established. The Italian government abolished slavery, a practice that existed in the country for centuries.[26]
+
+Following the entry of Italy into World War II, British Empire forces, together with the Arbegnoch (literally, "patriots", referring to armed resistance soldiers) restored the sovereignty of Ethiopia in the course of the East African Campaign in 1941. An Italian guerrilla warfare campaign continued until 1943. This was followed by British recognition of Ethiopia's full sovereignty, without any special British privileges, when the Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement was signed in December 1944.[114] Under the peace treaty of 1947, Italy recognised the sovereignty and independence of Ethiopia.
+
+On 26 August 1942, Haile Selassie issued a proclamation that removed Ethiopia's legal basis for slavery.[115] Ethiopia had between two and four million slaves in the early 20th century, out of a total population of about eleven million.[116]
+
+In 1952, Haile Selassie orchestrated a federation with Eritrea. He dissolved this in 1962 and annexed Eritrea, resulting in the Eritrean War of Independence. Haile Selassie played a leading role in the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963.[117]
+
+Opinion within Ethiopia turned against Haile Selassie I owing to the worldwide 1973 oil crisis. This oil crisis caused a sharp increase in gasoline prices starting on 13 February 1974; food shortages; uncertainty regarding the succession; border wars; and discontent in the middle class created through modernization.[118] The high gasoline prices motivated taxi drivers and teachers to go on strike on 18 February 1974, and students and workers in Addis Ababa began demonstrating against the government on 20 February 1974.[119] The feudal oligarchical cabinet of Akilou Habte Wolde was toppled, and a new government was formed with Endelkachew Makonnen serving as Prime Minister.[120]
+
+Haile Selassie's rule ended on 12 September 1974, when he was deposed by the Derg, a Soviet-backed Marxist–Leninist military dictatorship led by Mengistu Haile Mariam.[121] The new Provisional Military Administrative Council established a one-party communist state in March 1975.[122]
+
+The ensuing government suffered several coups, uprisings, wide-scale drought, and a huge refugee problem. In 1977, Somalia, which had previously been receiving assistance and arms from the USSR, invaded Ethiopia in the Ogaden War, capturing part of the Ogaden region. Ethiopia recovered it after it began receiving massive military aid from the USSR, Cuba, South Yemen, East Germany,[123] and North Korea. This included around 15,000 Cuban combat troops.[124][125]
+
+In 1977–78, up to 500,000 were killed as a result of the Red Terror,[126] from forced deportations or from the use of hunger as a weapon under Mengistu's rule.[118] The Red Terror was carried out in response to what the Derg termed the 'White Terror', a chain of violent events, assassinations, and killings carried out by what it called "petty bourgeois reactionaries" who desired a reversal of the 1974 revolution.[127][128]
+
+The 1983–85 famine in Ethiopia affected around eight million people, resulting in one million dead. Insurrections against Communist rule sprang up, particularly in the northern regions of Eritrea and Tigray. The Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) merged with other ethnically based opposition movements in 1989, to form the coalition known as the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF).[130]
+
+Concurrently, the Soviet Union began to retreat from building world communism under Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika policies, marking a dramatic reduction in aid to Ethiopia from Socialist Bloc countries. This resulted in more economic hardship and the collapse of the military in the face of determined onslaughts by guerrilla forces in the north. The collapse of Marxism–Leninism in general, and in eastern Europe during the revolutions of 1989, coincided with the Soviet Union stopping aid to Ethiopia altogether in 1990. The strategic outlook for Mengistu quickly deteriorated.[131][132]
+
+EPRDF forces advanced on Addis Ababa in May 1991, and the Soviet Union did not intervene to save the government side. Mengistu fled the country and was granted asylum in Zimbabwe, where he still resides.[133][134]
+
+In 2006, after a trial that lasted 12 years, Ethiopia's Federal High Court in Addis Ababa found Mengistu guilty of genocide in absentia.[135] Numerous other top leaders of his government were also found guilty of war crimes. Mengistu and others who had fled the country were tried and sentenced in absentia. Numerous former officials received the death sentence and tens of others spent the next 20 years in jail, before being pardoned from life sentences.[136][137][138][139]
+
+In July 1991, EPRDF convened a National Conference to establish the Transitional Government of Ethiopia composed of an 87-member Council of Representatives and guided by a national charter that functioned as a transitional constitution.[140] In June 1992, the Oromo Liberation Front withdrew from the government; in March 1993, members of the Southern Ethiopia Peoples' Democratic Coalition also left the government.[141][142] In 1994, a new constitution was written that established a parliamentary republic with a bicameral legislature and a judicial system.[2]
+
+The first multiparty election took place in May 1995, which was won by the EPRDF.[143] The president of the transitional government, EPRDF leader Meles Zenawi, became the first Prime Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, and Negasso Gidada was elected its president.[144]
+
+In May 1998, a border dispute with Eritrea led to the Eritrean–Ethiopian War, which lasted until June 2000 and cost both countries an estimated $1 million a day.[145] This had a negative effect on Ethiopia's economy,[146] but strengthened the ruling coalition.[citation needed]
+
+Ethiopia's 3rd multiparty election on 15 May 2005 was highly disputed, with some opposition groups claiming fraud. Though the Carter Center approved the pre-election conditions, it expressed its dissatisfaction with post-election events. European Union election observers cited state support for the EPRDF campaign, as well as irregularities in ballot counting and results publishing.[147] The opposition parties gained more than 200 parliamentary seats, compared with just 12 in the 2000 elections. While most of the opposition representatives joined the parliament, some leaders of the CUD party who refused to take up their parliamentary seats were accused of inciting the post-election violence and were imprisoned. Amnesty International considered them "prisoners of conscience" and they were subsequently released.[148]
+
+A coalition of opposition parties and some individuals was established in 2009 to oust the government of the EPRDF in legislative elections of 2010. Meles' party, which has been in power since 1991, published its 65-page manifesto in Addis Ababa on 10 October 2009. The opposition won most votes in Addis Ababa, but the EPRDF halted counting of votes for several days. After it ensued, it claimed the election, amidst charges of fraud and intimidation.[149]
+
+Some of the eight member parties of the Medrek (Forum for Democratic Dialogue) include the Oromo Federalist Congress (organized by the Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement and the Oromo People's Congress), the Arena Tigray (organized by former members of the ruling party TPLF), the Unity for Democracy and Justice (UDJ, whose leader is imprisoned), and the Coalition of Somali Democratic Forces.[citation needed]
+
+In mid-2011, two consecutively missed rainy seasons precipitated the worst drought in East Africa seen in 60 years. Full recovery from the drought's effects did not occur until 2012, with long-term strategies by the national government in conjunction with development agencies believed to offer the most sustainable results.[150]
+
+Meles died on 20 August 2012 in Brussels, where he was being treated for an unspecified illness.[151] Deputy Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn was appointed as a new prime minister until the 2015 elections,[152] and remained so afterwards with his party in control of every parliamentary seat.[153]
+
+Protests broke out across the country on 5 August 2016 and dozens of protesters were subsequently shot and killed by police. The protesters demanded an end to human rights abuses, the release of political prisoners, a fairer redistribution of the wealth generated by over a decade of economic growth, and a return of Wolqayt District to the Amhara Region.[154][155][156] The events were the most violent crackdown against protesters in Sub-Saharan Africa since the Ethiopian government killed at least 75 people during protests in the Oromia Region in November and December 2015.[157][158] Following these protests, Ethiopia declared a state of emergency on 6 October 2016.[159] The state of emergency was lifted in August 2017.[160]
+
+On 16 February 2018, the government of Ethiopia declared a six-month nationwide state of emergency following the resignation of Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn.[161] Hailemariam is the first ruler in modern Ethiopian history to step down; previous leaders have died in office or been overthrown.[162] He said he wanted to clear the way for reforms.
+
+The new Prime Minister was Abiy Ahmed, who made a historic visit to Eritrea in 2018, ending the state of conflict between the countries.[163] For his efforts in ending the 20-year-long war between Ethiopia and Eritrea Abiy Ahmed was awarded with the Nobel prize for peace in 2019.[164] Since taking office in April 2018, 42-year-old Abiy has also released political prisoners, promised fair elections for 2019 and announced sweeping economic reforms.[165] As of 6 June 2019,[update] all the previously censored websites were made accessible again, over a thousand political prisoners were released and hundreds of administrative staff were fired as part of the reforms.[166][167][168][169]
+
+Ethnic violence rose with the political unrest. There were Oromo–Somali clashes between the Oromo, who make up the largest ethnic group in the country, and the ethnic Somalis, leading to up to 400,000 have been displaced in 2017.[170] Gedeo–Oromo clashes between the Oromo and the Gedeo people in the south of the country led to Ethiopia having the largest number of people to flee their homes in the world in 2018, with 1.4 million newly displaced people.[171] In September 2018 in the minorities protest that took place in Oromo near the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, 23 people were killed.[172] Some have blamed the rise in ethnic violence by the Oromo on the new Oromo Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for giving space to groups formerly banned by previous Tigrayan-led governments, such as the Oromo Liberation Front.[173] Oromo-led protests broke out across Ethiopia following the assassination of musician Hachalu Hundessa on 29 June 2020, leading to the deaths of at least 200 people.[174]
+
+The dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has escalated in 2020.[175][176] Egypt has opposed the dam, fearing that it will reduce the amount of water it receives from the Nile.[177] Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed warned that "No force can stop Ethiopia from building a dam. If there is need to go to war, we could get millions readied."[178]
+
+The politics of Ethiopia takes place in a framework of a federal parliamentary republic, wherein the Prime Minister is the head of government.
+
+The President is the head of state but with largely ceremonial powers. Executive power is exercised by the government. Federal legislative power is vested in both the government and the two chambers of parliament. On the basis of Article 78 of the 1994 Ethiopian Constitution, the Judiciary is completely independent of the executive and the legislature.[179] In 2015, the realities of this provision were questioned in a report prepared by Freedom House.[180]
+
+According to the Democracy Index published by the United Kingdom-based Economist Intelligence Unit in late 2010, Ethiopia was an "authoritarian regime", ranking as the 118th-most democratic out of 167 countries.[181] Ethiopia had dropped 12 places on the list since 2006, and the 2010 report attributed the drop to the government's crackdown on opposition activities, media and civil society before the 2010 parliamentary election, which the report argued had made Ethiopia a de facto one-party state.
+
+However, since the appointment of Abiy Ahmed as prime minister in 2018, the situation has rapidly evolved.[clarification needed]
+
+In July 2015, during a trip that then-U.S. President Barack Obama took to Ethiopia, he highlighted the role of the country in the fight against Islamic terrorism.[182] Obama was the first sitting United States president to visit Ethiopia.
+
+The election of Ethiopia's 547-member constituent assembly was held in June 1994. This assembly adopted the constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia in December 1994. The elections for Ethiopia's first popularly chosen national parliament and regional legislatures were held in May and June 1995. Most opposition parties chose to boycott these elections. There was a landslide victory for the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). International and non-governmental observers concluded that opposition parties would have been able to participate had they chosen to do so.[citation needed] The current government of Ethiopia was installed in August 1995. The first President was Negasso Gidada. The EPRDF-led government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi promoted a policy of ethnic federalism, devolving significant powers to regional, ethnically based authorities. Ethiopia today has nine semi-autonomous administrative regions that have the power to raise and spend their own revenues. Under the present government, some fundamental freedoms, including freedom of the press, are circumscribed.[183]
+
+Citizens have little access to media other than the state-owned networks, and most private newspapers struggle to remain open and suffer periodic harassment from the government.[183] Since the 2005 elections, at least 18 journalists who had written articles critical of the government, were arrested on genocide and treason charges. The government uses press laws governing libel to intimidate journalists who are critical of its policies.[184]
+
+Meles' government was elected in 2000 in Ethiopia's first-ever multiparty elections; however, the results were heavily criticized by international observers and denounced by the opposition as fraudulent. The EPRDF also won the 2005 election returning Meles to power. Although the opposition vote increased in the election, both the opposition and observers from the European Union and elsewhere stated that the vote did not meet international standards for fair and free elections.[183] Ethiopian police are said to have massacred 193 protesters, mostly in the capital Addis Ababa, in the violence following the May 2005 elections in the Ethiopian police massacre.[185]
+
+The government initiated a crackdown in the provinces as well; in Oromia state the authorities used concerns over insurgency and terrorism to use torture, imprisonment, and other repressive methods to silence critics following the election, particularly people sympathetic to the registered opposition party Oromo National Congress (ONC).[184] The government has been engaged in a conflict with rebels in the Ogaden region since 2007. The biggest opposition party in 2005 was the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD). After various internal divisions, most of the CUD party leaders have established the new Unity for Democracy and Justice party led by Judge Birtukan Mideksa. A member of the country's Oromo ethnic group, Ms. Birtukan Mideksa is the first woman to lead a political party in Ethiopia.
+
+In 2008, the top five opposition parties were the Unity for Democracy and Justice led by Judge Birtukan Mideksa, United Ethiopian Democratic Forces led by Dr. Beyene Petros, Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement led by Dr. Bulcha Demeksa, Oromo People's Congress led by Dr. Merera Gudina, and United Ethiopian Democratic Party – Medhin Party led by Lidetu Ayalew.  After the 2015 elections, Ethiopia lost its single remaining opposition MP;[186] there are now no opposition MPs in the Ethiopian parliament.[187]
+
+Recent human rights violations include the killing of 100 peaceful protestors by direct government gunfire in the Oromo and Amhara regions in 2016.[188] The UN has called for UN observers on the ground in Ethiopia to investigate this incident,[189] however the EPRDF-dominated Ethiopian government has refused this call.[190] The protestors are protesting land grabs and lack of basic human rights such as the freedom to elect their representatives. The TPLF-dominated EPRDF won 100% in an election marked by fraud which has resulted in Ethiopian civilians protesting on scale unseen in prior post-election protests.[191]
+
+Merera Gudina, leader of the Oromo People's Congress, said the East African country was at a "crossroads". "People are demanding their rights," he said. "People are fed up with what the regime has been doing for a quarter of a century. They're protesting against land grabs, reparations, stolen elections, the rising cost of living, many things. "If the government continue to repress while the people are demanding their rights in the millions that (civil war) is one of the likely scenarios," Merera said in an interview with Reuters.[191]
+
+According to surveys in 2003 by the National Committee on Traditional Practices in Ethiopia, marriage by abduction accounts for 69% of the nation's marriages, with around 80% in the largest region, Oromiya, and as high as 92% in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region.[192][193] Homosexual acts are illegal in Ethiopia.[194] Journalists and activists have been threatened or arrested for their coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ethiopia.[195]
+
+Among the Omotic Karo-speaking and Hamer peoples in southern Ethiopia, adults and children with physical abnormalities are considered to be mingi, "ritually impure". The latter are believed to exert an evil influence upon others; disabled infants have traditionally been murdered without a proper burial.[196] The Karo officially banned the practice in July 2012.[197]
+
+In 2013, the Oakland Institute released a report accusing the Ethiopian government of forcing the relocation of "hundreds of thousands of indigenous people from their lands" in the Gambela Region[198] The report describes the Ethiopian government's "plans to move over 1.5 million people" by the end of 2013, in order to allow foreign investors to develop the land for large scale industrial agriculture.[198] According to several reports by the organization, those who refused were the subject of a variety of intimidation techniques including physical and sexual abuse, which sometimes led to deaths.[199][200][201] A similar 2012 report by Human Rights Watch also describes the Ethiopian government's 2010–2011 villagization program in Gambella, with plans to carry out similar resettlements in other regions.[202] The Ethiopian government has denied the accusations of land grabbing and instead pointed to the positive trajectory of the countries economy as evidence of the development program's benefits.[201]
+Map of the Regions of Ethiopia; each is based on ethnicity and language, rather than physical geography or history.
+Despite a wide range of support from all over the world, and even winning Nobel peace prize for 2019, Prim minister Abiy Ahmed has failed to deliver the peace and integrity he promised in the highly divided nation. A nationwide series of violent protests, concentrated in the Oromia Region, broke out starting on 23 October 2019, sparked by activist and media owner Jawar Mohammed's allegation that security forces had attempted to detain him. According to official reports, 86 people were killed,[203] mostly by mobs targeting ethnic and religious minorities within the region and surrounding areas, including Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa, and the Harari Region.[citation needed]
+
+On 29 May 2020, Amnesty International released a report accusing the security forces of Ethiopia of mass detentions and extrajudicial killings. The report stated that in 2019, at least 25 people, suspected of supporting the Oromo Liberation Army, were killed by the forces in parts the Oromia Region. Besides, between January and September 2019, at least 10,000 people were detained under suspicion, where most were “subjected to brutal beatings”.[204]
+
+Since 1996, landlocked Ethiopia has had no navy and the army is relatively small with about 170,000 volunteers on active duty. In 2018 Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said on state TV: "We built one of the strongest ground and air force in Africa ... we should build our naval force capacity in the future."[205]
+
+Before 1996, Ethiopia was divided into thirteen provinces, many derived from historical regions. The nation now has a tiered governmental system consisting of a federal government overseeing ethnically based regional states, zones, districts (woreda), and kebeles ("neighbourhoods").
+
+Since 1996, Ethiopia has been divided into nine ethnically based and politically autonomous regional states (kililoch, singular kilil ) and two chartered cities (astedader akababiwoch, singular astedader akababi ), the latter being Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa. The kililoch are subdivided into sixty-eight zones, and then further into 550 woredas and several special woredas.
+
+The constitution assigns extensive power to regional states, which can establish their own government and democracy as long as it is in line with the federal government's constitution. Each region has at its apex a regional council where members are directly elected to represent the districts and the council has legislative and executive power to direct internal affairs of the regions.
+
+Article 39 of the Ethiopian Constitution further gives every regional state the right to secede from Ethiopia. There is debate, however, as to how much of the power guaranteed in the constitution is actually given to the states. The councils implement their mandate through an executive committee and regional sectoral bureaus. Such elaborate structure of council, executive, and sectoral public institutions is replicated to the next level (woreda).
+
+At 1,104,300 square kilometres (426,372.61 sq mi),[6] Ethiopia is the world's 28th-largest country, comparable in size to Bolivia. It lies between the 3rd parallel north and the 15th parallel north and longitudes 33rd meridian east and 48th meridian east.
+
+The major portion of Ethiopia lies in the Horn of Africa, which is the easternmost part of the African landmass. The territories that have frontiers with Ethiopia are Eritrea to the north and then, moving in a clockwise direction, Djibouti, the de facto state of Somaliland, Somalia, Kenya, South Sudan and Sudan. Within Ethiopia is a vast highland complex of mountains and dissected plateaus divided by the Great Rift Valley, which runs generally southwest to northeast and is surrounded by lowlands, steppes, or semi-desert. There is a great diversity of terrain with wide variations in climate, soils, natural vegetation and settlement patterns.
+
+Ethiopia is an ecologically diverse country, ranging from the deserts along the eastern border to the tropical forests in the south to extensive Afromontane in the northern and southwestern parts. Lake Tana in the north is the source of the Blue Nile. It also has many endemic species, notably the gelada, the walia ibex and the Ethiopian wolf ("Simien fox"). The wide range of altitude has given the country a variety of ecologically distinct areas, and this has helped to encourage the evolution of endemic species in ecological isolation.
+
+The predominant climate type is tropical monsoon, with wide topographic-induced variation. The Ethiopian Highlands cover most of the country and have a climate which is generally considerably cooler than other regions at similar proximity to the Equator. Most of the country's major cities are located at elevations of around 2,000–2,500 m (6,562–8,202 ft) above sea level, including historic capitals such as Gondar and Axum.
+
+The modern capital, Addis Ababa, is situated on the foothills of Mount Entoto at an elevation of around 2,400 metres (7,900 ft). It experiences a mild climate year round. With temperatures fairly uniform year round, the seasons in Addis Ababa are largely defined by rainfall: a dry season from October to February, a light rainy season from March to May, and a heavy rainy season from June to September. The average annual rainfall is approximately 1,200 millimetres (47 in).
+
+There are on average seven hours of sunshine per day. The dry season is the sunniest time of the year, though even at the height of the rainy season in July and August there are still usually several hours per day of bright sunshine. The average annual temperature in Addis Ababa is 16 °C (60.8 °F), with daily maximum temperatures averaging 20–25 °C (68.0–77.0 °F) throughout the year, and overnight lows averaging 5–10 °C (41.0–50.0 °F).
+
+Most major cities and tourist sites in Ethiopia lie at a similar elevation to Addis Ababa and have a comparable climate. In less elevated regions, particularly the lower lying Ethiopian xeric grasslands and shrublands in the east of the country, the climate can be significantly hotter and drier. Dallol, in the Danakil Depression in this eastern zone, has the world's highest average annual temperature of 34 °C (93.2 °F).
+
+Ethiopia has 31 endemic species of mammals.[208] The African wild dog prehistorically had widespread distribution in the territory. However, with last sightings at Finicha'a, this canid is thought to be potentially locally extinct. The Ethiopian wolf is perhaps the most researched of all the endangered species within Ethiopia.
+
+Ethiopia is a global center of avian diversity. To date more than 856 bird species have been recorded in Ethiopia, twenty of which are endemic to the country.[209] Sixteen species are endangered or critically endangered. Many of these birds feed on butterflies, like the Bicyclus anynana.[210]
+
+Historically, throughout the African continent, wildlife populations have been rapidly declining due to logging, civil wars, pollution, poaching, and other human factors.[211] A 17-year-long civil war, along with severe drought, negatively affected Ethiopia's environmental conditions, leading to even greater habitat degradation.[212] Habitat destruction is a factor that leads to endangerment. When changes to a habitat occur rapidly, animals do not have time to adjust. Human impact threatens many species, with greater threats expected as a result of climate change induced by greenhouse gases.[213] With carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 of 6,494,000 tonnes, Ethiopia contributes just 0.02% to the annual human-caused release of greenhouse gases.[214]
+
+Ethiopia has many species listed as critically endangered, endangered, and vulnerable to global extinction. The threatened species in Ethiopia can be broken down into three categories (based on IUCN ratings): critically endangered, endangered, and vulnerable.[208]
+
+Ethiopia is one of the eight fundamental and independent centers of origin for cultivated plants in the world.[216] However, deforestation is a major concern for Ethiopia as studies suggest loss of forest contributes to soil erosion, loss of nutrients in the soil, loss of animal habitats, and reduction in biodiversity. At the beginning of the 20th century, around 420,000 km2 (or 35%) of Ethiopia's land was covered by trees, but recent research indicates that forest cover is now approximately 11.9% of the area.[217]
+
+Ethiopia loses an estimated 1,410 km2 of natural forests each year. Between 1990 and 2005 the country lost approximately 21,000 km2 of forests.[citation needed] Current government programs to control deforestation consist of education, promoting reforestation programs, and providing raw materials which are alternatives to timber. In rural areas the government also provides non-timber fuel sources and access to non-forested land to promote agriculture without destroying forest habitat.[citation needed] [218]
+
+Organizations such as SOS and Farm Africa are working with the federal government and local governments to create a system of forest management.[219] Working with a grant of approximately 2.3 million Euros, the Ethiopian government recently began training people on reducing erosion and using proper irrigation techniques that do not contribute to deforestation. This project is assisting more than 80 communities.[citation needed]
+
+Since April 2019, Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed has promoted Beautifying Sheger, a development project that aims to reduce the negative effects of climate change – among other things – in the capital city of Addis Ababa.[220] In the following May, the government held "Dine for Sheger", a fundraising event in order to cover some of the $1 billion needed through the public.[221] $25 million was raised through the expensive event, both through the cost of attending and donation.[222] Two Chinese railway companies under the Belt and Road Initiative between China and Ethiopia had supplied funds to develop 12 of the total 56 kilometres.[223]
+
+According to the IMF, Ethiopia was one of the fastest growing economies in the world, registering over 10% economic growth from 2004 through 2009.[225] It was the fastest-growing non-oil-dependent African economy in the years 2007 and 2008.[226] In 2015, the World Bank highlighted that Ethiopia had witnessed rapid economic growth with real domestic product (GDP) growth averaging 10.9% between 2004 and 2014.[227]
+
+In 2008 and 2011, Ethiopia's growth performance and considerable development gains were challenged by high inflation and a difficult balance of payments situation. Inflation surged to 40% in August 2011 because of loose monetary policy, large civil service wage increase in early 2011, and high food prices.[228] For 2011/12, end-year inflation was projected to be about 22%, and single digit inflation is projected in 2012/13 with the implementation of tight monetary and fiscal policies.[229]
+
+In spite of fast growth in recent years, GDP per capita is one of the lowest in the world, and the economy faces a number of serious structural problems. However, with a focused investment in public infrastructure and industrial parks, Ethiopia's economy is addressing its structural problems to become a hub for light manufacturing in Africa.[230] In 2019 a law was passed allowing expatriate Ethiopians to invest in Ethiopia's financial service industry.[231]
+
+The Ethiopian constitution defines the right to own land as belonging only to "the state and the people", but citizens may lease land (up to 99 years), and are unable to mortgage or sell. Renting of land for a maximum of twenty years is allowed and this is expected to ensure that land goes to the most productive user. Land distribution and administration is considered an area where corruption is institutionalized, and facilitation payments as well as bribes are often demanded when dealing with land-related issues.[232] As there is no land ownership, infrastructural projects are most often simply done without asking the land users, which then end up being displaced and without home or land. A lot of anger and distrust sometimes results in public protests. In addition, agricultural productivity remains low, and frequent droughts still beset the country, also leading to internal displacement.[233]
+
+Ethiopia has 14 major rivers flowing from its highlands, including the Nile. It has the largest water reserves in Africa. As of 2012[update], hydroelectric plants represented around 88.2% of the total installed electricity generating capacity.
+
+The remaining electrical power was generated from fossil fuels (8.3%) and renewable sources (3.6%).
+
+The electrification rate for the total population in 2016 was 42%, with 85% coverage in urban areas and 26% coverage in rural areas. As of 2016[update], total electricity production was 11.15 TW⋅h and consumption was 9.062 TW⋅h. There were 0.166 TW⋅h of electricity exported, 0 kW⋅h imported, and 2.784 GW of installed generating capacity.[13]
+
+Ethiopia delivers roughly 81% of water volume to the Nile through the river basins of the Blue Nile, Sobat River and Atbara. In 1959, Egypt and Sudan signed a bilateral treaty, the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement, which gave both countries exclusive maritime rights over the Nile waters. Ever since, Egypt has discouraged almost all projects in Ethiopia that sought to utilize the local Nile tributaries. This had the effect of discouraging external financing of hydropower and irrigation projects in western Ethiopia, thereby impeding water resource-based economic development projects. However, Ethiopia is in the process of constructing a large 6,450 MW hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile river. When completed, this Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is slated to be the largest hydroelectric power station in Africa.[234]
+
+The Gibe III hydroelectric project is so far the largest in the country with an installed capacity of 1,870 MW. For the year 2017–18 (2010 E.C) this hydro electric dam generated 4,900 GW⋅h.[235]
+
+Agriculture constitutes around 85% of the labour force. However, the service sector represents the largest portion of the GDP.[13] Many other economic activities depend on agriculture, including marketing, processing, and export of agricultural products. Production is overwhelmingly by small-scale farmers and enterprises, and a large part of commodity exports are provided by the small agricultural cash-crop sector. Principal crops include coffee, legumes, oilseeds, cereals, potatoes, sugarcane, and vegetables. Ethiopia is also a Vavilov center of diversity for domesticated crops, including enset,[236] coffee and teff.
+
+Exports are almost entirely agricultural commodities (with the exception of Gold exports), and coffee is the largest foreign exchange earner. Ethiopia is Africa's second biggest maize producer.[237] According to UN estimations the per capita GDP of Ethiopia has reached $357 as of 2011[update].[238]
+
+Exports from Ethiopia in the 2009/2010 financial year totaled US$1.4 billion.[239] The country produces more coffee than any other nation on the continent.[240]"Coffee provides a livelihood for close to 15 million Ethiopians, 16% of the population. Farmers in the eastern part of the country, where a warming climate is already impacting production, have struggled in recent years, and many are currently reporting largely failed harvests as a result of a prolonged drought".[241]
+
+Ethiopia also has the 5th largest inventory of cattle.[242] Other main export commodities are khat, gold, leather products, and oilseeds. Recent development of the floriculture sector means Ethiopia is poised to become one of the top flower and plant exporters in the world.[243]
+
+Cross-border trade by pastoralists is often informal and beyond state control and regulation. In East Africa, over 95% of cross-border trade is through unofficial channels. The unofficial trade of live cattle, camels, sheep, and goats from Ethiopia sold to Somalia, Djibouti, and Kenya generates an estimated total value of between 250 and US$300 million annually (100 times more than the official figure).[244]
+
+This trade helps lower food prices, increase food security, relieve border tensions, and promote regional integration.[244] However, the unregulated and undocumented nature of this trade runs risks, such as allowing disease to spread more easily across national borders. Furthermore, the government of Ethiopia is purportedly unhappy with lost tax revenue and foreign exchange revenues.[244] Recent initiatives have sought to document and regulate this trade.[244]
+
+With the private sector growing slowly, designer leather products like bags are becoming a big export business, with Taytu becoming the first luxury designer label in the country.[245] Additional small-scale export products include cereals, pulses, cotton, sugarcane, potatoes, and hides. With the construction of various new dams and growing hydroelectric power projects around the country, Ethiopia also plans to export electric power to its neighbors.[246][247]
+
+Most regard Ethiopia's large water resources and potential as its "white oil" and its coffee resources as "black gold".[248][249]
+
+The country also has large mineral resources and oil potential in some of the less inhabited regions. Political instability in those regions, however, has inhibited development. Ethiopian geologists were implicated in a major gold swindle in 2008. Four chemists and geologists from the Ethiopian Geological Survey were arrested in connection with a fake gold scandal, following complaints from buyers in South Africa. Gold bars from the National Bank of Ethiopia were found by police to be gilded metal, costing the state around US$17 million, according to the Science and Development Network website.[250]
+
+In 2011, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project was commenced. When completed, it will provide surplus energy in Ethiopia which will be available for export to neighboring countries.
+
+Ethiopia has 926 km of electrified 1,435 mm (4 ft 8 1⁄2 in) standard gauge railways, 656 km for the Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway between Addis Ababa and the Port of Djibouti (via Awash)[251] and 270 km for the Awash–Hara Gebeya Railway between Addis Ababa and the twin cities of Dessie/Kombolcha[252] (also via Awash). Both railways are either in trial service or still under construction as of August 2017[update]. Once commissioned and fully operational in 2018/2019, both railways will allow passenger transport with a designated speed of 120 km/hour and freight transport with a speed of ~80 km/hour. Expected travel time from Addis Ababa to Djibouti City for passengers would be less than twelve hours and travel time from Addis Ababa to Dessie/Kombolcha would be around six hours.
+
+Beyond the first 270 km of the Awash–Hara Gebeya Railway, a second construction phase over 120 km foresees the extension of this railway from Dessie/Kombolcha to Hara Gebeya/Woldiya. It is not clear, when this section will be built and opened.[253] A third, northern 216 km long railway is also under construction between Mek'ele and Woldiya, but it is also not clear, when this railway will be commissioned and opened.[254] All railways are part of a future railway network of more than 5,000 km of railways, the National Railway Network of Ethiopia.
+
+As the first part of a ten-year Road Sector Development Program, between 1997 and 2002 the Ethiopian government began a sustained effort to improve its infrastructure of roads. As a result, as of 2015[update] Ethiopia has a total (Federal and Regional) of 100,000 km of roads, both paved and gravel.[255]
+
+Ethiopia had 58 airports as of 2012[update],[13] and 61 as of 2016[update].[256] Among these, the Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa and the Aba Tenna Dejazmach Yilma International Airport in Dire Dawa accommodate international flights. Ethiopian Airlines is the country's flag carrier, and is wholly owned by the Government of Ethiopia.[257] From its hub at the Bole International Airport, the airline serves a network of 102 international passenger, 20 domestic passenger, and 44 cargo destinations.[258][259] It is also one of the fastest-growing carriers in the industry and continent.[260]
+
+Ethiopia's total population has grown from 38.1 million in 1983 to 109.5 million in 2018.[261] The population was only about nine million in the 19th century.[262] The 2007 Population and Housing Census results show that the population of Ethiopia grew at an average annual rate of 2.6% between 1994 and 2007, down from 2.8% during the period 1983–1994. Currently, the population growth rate is among the top ten countries in the world. The population is forecast to grow to over 210 million by 2060, which would be an increase from 2011 estimates by a factor of about 2.5.[263] According to UN estimations, life expectancy had improved substantially in recent years with male life expectancy reported to be 56 years and for women 60 years.[238]
+
+The country's population is highly diverse, containing over 80 different ethnic groups. According to the Ethiopian national census of 2007, the Oromo are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, at 34.4% of the nation's population. The Amhara represent 27.0% of the country's inhabitants, while Somalis and Tigrayans represent 6.2% and 6.1% of the population, respectively. Other prominent ethnic groups are as follows: Sidama 4.0%, Gurage 2.5%, Welayta 2.3%, Afar 1.7%, Hadiya 1.7%, Gamo 1.5% and Arabs and others 12.6%.[9]
+
+Afroasiatic-speaking communities make up the majority of the population. Among these, Semitic speakers often collectively refer to themselves as the Habesha people. The Arabic form of this term (al-Ḥabasha) is the etymological basis of "Abyssinia," the former name of Ethiopia in English and other European languages.[265] Additionally, Nilo-Saharan-speaking ethnic minorities inhabit the southern regions of the country, particularly in areas of the Gambela Region which borders South Sudan. The largest ethnic groups among these include the Nuer and Anuak.
+
+In addition, Ethiopia had over 75,000 Italian settlers during the Italian occupation of the country.[266] After independence, many Italians remained for decades after receiving full pardons from Emperor Selassie, as he saw the opportunity to continue modernization efforts.[267] However, due to the Ethiopian Civil War in 1974, nearly 22,000 Italo-Ethiopians left the country.[267] In the 2000s, some Italian companies returned to operate in Ethiopia, and many Italian technicians and managers arrived with their families, residing mainly in the metropolitan area of the capital.[268]
+
+In 2009, Ethiopia hosted a population of refugees and asylum seekers numbering approximately 135,200. The majority of this population came from Somalia (approximately 64,300 persons), Eritrea (41,700) and Sudan (25,900). The Ethiopian government required nearly all refugees to live in refugee camps.[269]
+
+Languages of Ethiopia as of 2007[update] Census[9]
+
+According to Ethnologue, there are 90 individual languages spoken in Ethiopia.[270] Most people in the country speak Afroasiatic languages of the Cushitic or Semitic branches. The former includes Oromo language, spoken by the Oromo, and Somali, spoken by the Somalis; the latter includes Amharic, spoken by the Amhara, and Tigrinya, spoken by the Tigrayans. Together, these four groups make up about three-quarters of Ethiopia's population. Other Afroasiatic languages with a significant number of speakers include the Cushitic Sidamo, Afar, Hadiyya and Agaw languages, as well as the Semitic Gurage languages, Harari, Silt'e, and Argobba languages.[9] Arabic, which also belongs to the Afroasiatic family, is likewise spoken in some areas.[271]
+
+Additionally, Omotic languages are spoken by Omotic ethnic minority groups inhabiting the southern regions. Among these idioms are Aari, Bench, Dime, Dizin, Gamo-Gofa-Dawro, Maale, Hamer, and Wolaytta.[9]
+
+Languages from the Nilo-Saharan family are also spoken by ethnic minorities concentrated in the southwestern parts of the country. These languages include Nuer, Anuak, Nyangatom, Majang, Suri, Me'en, and Mursi.[9]
+
+English is the most widely spoken foreign language, and is the medium of instruction in secondary schools. Amharic was the language of primary school instruction, but has been replaced in many areas by regional languages such as Oromiffa, Somali or Tigrinya.[272] While all languages enjoy equal state recognition in the 1995 Constitution of Ethiopia and Oromo is the most widely spoken language, Amharic is recognized as the official working language of the Federal Government.[2]
+
+The various regions of Ethiopia and chartered cities are free to determine their own working languages.[272] Amharic is recognised as the official working language of Amhara Region, Benishangul-Gumuz, Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region, Gambela Region, Addis Abeba and Dire Dawa.[273] Oromo language serves as the official working language and the primary language of education in the Oromia,[274] Harar and Dire Dawa and of the Oromia Zone in the Amhara Region. Somali is the official working language of Somali region and Dire Dawa, while Afar,[275] Harari,[276] and Tigrinya[277] are recognized as official working languages in their respective regions.
+
+Italian is still spoken by few parts of the population, mostly among older generations, and is taught in many schools (most notably the Istituto Statale Italiano Omnicomprensivo di Addis Abeba). Also, Amharic and Tigrinya have many words borrowed from the Italian language.[278][279]
+
+Ethiopia's principal orthography is the Ge'ez script. Employed as an abugida for several of the country's languages, it first came into usage in the 6th and 5th centuries BC as an abjad to transcribe the Semitic Ge'ez language.[280] Ge'ez now serves as the liturgical language of both the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches. During the 1980s, the Ethiopic character set was computerized. It is today part of the Unicode standard as Ethiopic, Ethiopic Extended, Ethiopic Supplement and Ethiopic Extended-A.
+
+Other writing systems have also been used over the years by different Ethiopian communities. The latter include Bakri Sapalo's script for Oromiffa.[281]
+
+Religion in Ethiopia (2007)
+
+Ethiopia has close historical ties with all three of the world's major Abrahamic religions. In the 4th century, the Ethiopian empire was one of the first in the world to officially adopt Christianity as the state religion. As a result of the resolutions of the Council of Chalcedon, in 451 the miaphysites,[282] which included the vast majority of Christians in Egypt and Ethiopia, were accused of monophysitism and designated as heretics under the common name of Coptic Christianity (see Oriental Orthodoxy). While no longer distinguished as a state religion, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church remains the majority Christian denomination. There is also a substantial Muslims demographic, representing around a third of the population. Additionally, Ethiopia is the site of the First Hegira, a major emigration in Islamic history. A town in the Tigray Region, Negash is the oldest Muslim settlement in Africa.
+
+Until the 1980s, a substantial population of Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) resided in Ethiopia.[283][284] About 4,000 are estimated to still live in the country, along with many more members of two related ethno-religious groups, the Falash Mura and the Beta Abraham. The Falash Mura are Beta Israel who, while identifying as Jews, adopted elements of Christianity due to missionary efforts, and now practice a syncretic form of Ethiopian Judaism mixed with Christianity; they number about 150,000 people. The Beta Abraham are regarded as a medieval offshoot of the Beta Israel, having incorporated elements of traditional African religion, and number about 8,000. While both still identify as Beta Israel, they exist outside the main community. The official Beta Israel community leaders tentatively accept the Falash Mura, and have requested they be allowed to emigrate to Israel. The Beta Abraham have historically been shunned by most other communities, having a reputation of being "sorcerers".
+
+According to the 2007 National Census, Christians make up 62.8% of the country's population (43.5% Ethiopian Orthodox, 19.3% other denominations), Muslims 33.9%, practitioners of traditional faiths 2.6%, and other religions 0.6%.[9] This is in agreement with the CIA World Factbook, which states that Christianity is the most widely practiced religion in Ethiopia.[13] The ratio of the Christian to Muslim population has largely remained stable when compared to previous censuses conducted decades ago.[285] Sunnis form the majority of Muslims with non-denominational Muslims being the second largest group of Muslims, and the Shia and Ahmadiyyas are a minority. Sunnis are largely Shafi'is or Salafis, and there are also many Sufi Muslims there.[286] The large Muslim population in the northern Afar region has resulted in a Muslim separatist movement called the "Islamic State of Afaria" seeking a sharia-compliant constitution.[287]
+
+Some critics asserted that the Haile Selassie regime had been fabricating the census to present Ethiopia as a Christian country to the outside world, stating that Islam made up 50% of the total population in 1991, based on the 1984 census commissioned by the Derg regime.[288] Several Muslim observers and bloggers claim that Muslims are in the majority and disagree with the above census numbers, without providing factual data supporting their claims.[289]
+
+The Kingdom of Aksum was one of the first polities to officially embrace Christianity, when Frumentius of Tyre, called Fremnatos or Abba Selama ("Father of Peace") in Ethiopia, converted Emperor Ezana during the fourth century.[69][283] According to the New Testament, Christianity had entered Ethiopia even earlier, when an official in the Ethiopian royal treasury was baptized by Philip the Evangelist.[290]
+
+The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is part of Oriental Orthodoxy. It is by far the largest Christian denomination, although a number of P'ent'ay (Protestant) churches have recently gained ground. Since 1930, a relatively small Ethiopian Catholic Church has existed in full communion with Rome, with adherents making up less than 1% of the total population.[285][291]
+
+Islam in Ethiopia dates back to the founding of the religion in 622 when a group of Muslims were counseled by Muhammad to escape persecution in Mecca. The disciples subsequently migrated to Abyssinia via modern-day Eritrea, which was at the time ruled by Ashama ibn-Abjar, a pious Christian emperor.[283] Also, the largest single ethnic group of non-Arab Sahabah was that of the Ethiopians.[citation needed]
+
+According to the 2007 Population and Housing Census, around 1,957,944 people in Ethiopia are adherents of traditional religions. An additional 471,861 residents practice other creeds.[9] While followers of all religions can be found in each region, they tend to be concentrated in certain parts of the country. Christians predominantly live in the northern Amhara and Tigray regions, and are largely members of the non-Chalcedonian Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Those belonging to P'ent'ay are centered in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region (SNNP) and Oromia. Muslims in Ethiopia predominantly adhere to Sunni Islam and generally inhabit eastern and northeastern areas; particularly the Somali, Afar, Dire Dawa and Harari regions. Practitioners of traditional religions mainly reside in the nation's far southwestern and western rural borderlands, in the SNNP, Benishangul-Gumuz and Gambela regions.[9][283]
+
+Human rights groups have regularly accused the government of arresting activists, journalists and bloggers to stamp out dissent among some religious communities. Lengthy prison terms were handed to 17 Muslim activists on 3 August 2015 ranging from seven to 22 years. They were charged with trying to create an Islamic state in the majority Christian country. All the defendants denied the charges and claimed that they were merely protesting in defence of their rights.[292][293][294]
+
+There is a small, yet significant number of Jews in Ethiopia, who claim to be one of the lost tribes of Israel. In the 1980s, the number of Ethiopian-Jews decreased, as many started moving to Israel. The tribe has been given the name Beta Israel / ቤታ እስራኤል / ביתא ישראל. There are a higher number of Ethiopian-Jews living in Israel today, though, in certain Ethiopian towns and villages such as Wolleka, near the Ethiopian city of Gondar, the concentration of Ethiopian-Jews reaches an estimated 100%. The US also has a significant number of Ethiopian-Jews, with a population slightly less than that of Ethiopia.
+
+Population growth, migration, and urbanization are all straining both governments' and ecosystems' capacity to provide people with basic services.[295] Urbanization has steadily been increasing in Ethiopia, with two periods of significantly rapid growth. First, in 1936–1941 during the Italian occupation under Mussolini's fascist government, and from 1967 to 1975 when the populations of urban centers tripled.[296]
+
+In 1936, Italy annexed Ethiopia, building infrastructure to connect major cities, and a dam providing power and water.[26] This along with the influx of Italians and labourers was the major cause of rapid growth during this period. The second period of growth was from 1967 to 1975 when rural populations migrated to urban centers seeking work and better living conditions.[296]
+
+This pattern slowed due to the 1975 Land Reform program instituted by the government, which provided incentives for people to stay in rural areas. As people moved from rural areas to the cities, there were fewer people to grow food for the population. The Land Reform Act was meant to increase agriculture since food production was not keeping up with population growth over the period of 1970–1983. This program proliferated the formation of peasant associations, large villages based on agriculture. The act did lead to an increase in food production, although there is debate over the cause; it may be related to weather conditions more than the reform act.[297] Urban populations have continued to grow with an 8.1% increase from 1975 to 2000.[298]
+
+Migration to urban areas is usually motivated by the hope of better lives. In peasant associations daily life is a struggle to survive. About 16% of the population in Ethiopia are living on less than one dollar per day (2008). Only 65% of rural households in Ethiopia consume the World Health Organization's minimum standard of food per day (2,200 kilocalories), with 42% of children under 5 years old being underweight.[299]
+
+Most poor families (75%) share their sleeping quarters with livestock, and 40% of children sleep on the floor, where nighttime temperatures average 5 degrees Celsius in the cold season.[299] The average family size is six or seven, living in a 30-square-meter mud and thatch hut, with less than two hectares of land to cultivate.[299]
+
+The peasant associations face a cycle of poverty. Since the landholdings are so small, farmers cannot allow the land to lie fallow, which reduces soil fertility.[299] This land degradation reduces the production of fodder for livestock, which causes low milk yields.[299] Since the community burns livestock manure as fuel, rather than plowing the nutrients back into the land, the crop production is reduced.[299] The low productivity of agriculture leads to inadequate incomes for farmers, hunger, malnutrition and disease. These unhealthy farmers have difficulty working the land and the productivity drops further.[299]
+
+Although conditions are drastically better in cities, all of Ethiopia suffers from poverty and poor sanitation. However, poverty in Ethiopia fell from 44% to 29.6% during 2000–2011, according to the World Bank.[300] In the capital city of Addis Ababa, 55% of the population used to live in slums.[26] Now, however, a construction boom in both the private and the public sector has led to a dramatic improvement in living standards in major cities, particularly in Addis Ababa. Notably, government-built condominium housing complexes have sprung up throughout the city, benefiting close to 600,000 individuals.[301] Sanitation is the most pressing need in the city, with most of the population lacking access to waste treatment facilities. This contributes to the spread of illness through unhealthy water.[26]
+
+Despite the living conditions in the cities, the people of Addis Ababa are much better off than people living in the peasant associations owing to their educational opportunities. Unlike rural children, 69% of urban children are enrolled in primary school, and 35% of those are eligible to attend secondary school.[clarification needed][26] Addis Ababa has its own university as well as many other secondary schools. The literacy rate is 82%.[26]
+
+Many NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) are working to solve this problem; however, most are far apart, uncoordinated, and working in isolation.[298] The Sub-Saharan Africa NGO Consortium is attempting to coordinate efforts.[298]
+
+The World Health Organization's 2006 World Health Report gives a figure of 1,936 physicians (for 2003),[302] which comes to about 2.6 per 100,000. A brain drain associated with globalization is said to affect the country, with many educated professionals leaving Ethiopia for better economic opportunities in the West.
+
+Ethiopia's main health problems are said to be communicable (contagious) diseases worsened by poor sanitation and malnutrition. Over 44 million people (nearly half the population) do not have access to clean water.[303] These problems are exacerbated by the shortage of trained doctors and nurses and health facilities.[304]
+
+The state of public health is considerably better in the cities. Birth rates, infant mortality rates, and death rates are lower in cities than in rural areas due to better access to education, medicines, and hospitals.[26] Life expectancy is better in cities compared to rural areas, but there have been significant improvements witnessed throughout the country in recent years, the average Ethiopian living to be 62.2 years old, according to a UNDP report.[305] Despite sanitation being a problem, use of improved water sources is also on the rise; 81% in cities compared to 11% in rural areas.[298] As in other parts of Africa, there has been a steady migration of people towards the cities in hopes of better living conditions.
+
+There are 119 hospitals (12 in Addis Ababa) and 412 health centers in Ethiopia.[306] Infant mortality rates are relatively high, as 41 infants die per 1,000 live births.[307] Ethiopia has been able to reduce under-five mortality by two-thirds (one of the Millennium Development Goals) since 1990.[306] Although this is a dramatic decrease, birth-related complications such as obstetric fistula affect many of the nation's women.
+
+HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia stood at 1.1% in 2014, a dramatic decrease from 4.5% 15 years ago.[citation needed] The most affected are poor communities and women, due to lack of health education, empowerment, awareness and lack of social well-being. The government of Ethiopia and many international organizations like World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations, are launching campaigns and are working aggressively to improve Ethiopia's health conditions and promote health awareness on AIDS and other communicable diseases.[308]
+
+Ethiopia has a relatively high infant and maternal mortality rate. Although, Ethiopia did not meet the MDG target of reducing maternal mortality rate by two thirds in 2015, there are improvements nonetheless. For instance, the contraception prevalence rate increased from 8.1% in 2000 to 41.8% in 2014, and Antenatal care service coverage increase from 29% to an astounding 98.1% in the same period.[citation needed] Currently, the maternal mortality rate stands at 420 per 100,000 live births.[citation needed] Only a minority of Ethiopians are born in hospitals, while most are born in rural households. Those who are expected to give birth at home have elderly women serve as midwives who assist with the delivery.[309] The "WHO estimates that a majority of maternal fatalities and disabilities could be prevented if deliveries were to take place at well-equipped health centers, with adequately trained staff".[310]
+
+The low availability of health-care professionals with modern medical training, together with lack of funds for medical services, leads to the preponderance of less-reliable traditional healers that use home-based therapies to heal common ailments.
+
+One common cultural practice, irrespective of religion or economic status, is female genital mutilation (FGM), also known as female genital cutting (FGC), a procedure that involves partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.[311] The practice was made illegal in Ethiopia in 2004.[312] FGM is a pre-marital custom mainly endemic to Northeast Africa and parts of the Near East that has its ultimate origins in Ancient Egypt.[313][314] Encouraged by women in the community, it is primarily intended to deter promiscuity and to offer protection from assault.[315]
+
+The country has a high prevalence of FGM, but prevalence is lower among young girls. Ethiopia's 2005 Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS) noted that the national prevalence rate is 74% among women ages 15–49.[316] The practice is almost universal in the regions of Dire Dawa, Somali, and Afar. In the Oromo and Harari regions, more than 80% of girls and women undergo the procedure. FGC is least prevalent in the regions of Tigray and Gambela, where 29% and 27% of girls and women, respectively, are affected.[317] According to a 2010 study performed by the Population Reference Bureau, Ethiopia has a prevalence rate of 81% among women ages 35 to 39 and 62% among women ages 15–19.[318] A 2014 UNICEF report found that only 24% of girls under 14 had undergone FGM.[319]
+
+Male circumcision is also practiced in the country, and about 76% of Ethiopia's male population is reportedly circumcised.[320]
+
+The Government of the Federal Republic of Ethiopia is signatory to various international conventions and treaties that protect the rights of women and children. Its constitution provides for the fundamental rights and freedoms for women. There is an attempt being made to raise the social and economic status of women through eliminating all legal and customary practices, which hinder women's equal participation in society and undermine their social status.
+
+The National Mental Health Strategy, published in 2012, introduced the development of policy designed to improve mental health care in Ethiopia. This strategy mandated that mental health be integrated into the primary health care system.[321] However, the success of the National Mental Health Strategy has been limited. For example, the burden of depression is estimated to have increased 34.2% from 2007 to 2017.[322] Furthermore, the prevalence of stigmatizing attitudes, inadequate leadership and co-ordination of efforts, as well as a lack of mental health awareness in the general population, all remain as obstacles to successful mental health care.[323]
+
+Education in Ethiopia was dominated by the Tewahedo Church for many centuries until secular education was adopted in the early 1900s. The current system follows school expansion schemes which are very similar to the system in the rural areas during the 1980s, with an addition of deeper regionalization, providing rural education in students' own languages starting at the elementary level, and with more budget finances allocated to the education sector. The sequence of general education in Ethiopia is six years of primary school, four years of lower secondary school and two years of higher secondary school.[324]
+
+Access to education in Ethiopia has improved significantly. Approximately three million people were in primary school in 1994/95, and by 2008/09, primary enrolment had risen to 15.5 million – an increase of over 500%.[325] In 2013/14, the country had witnessed significant boost in gross enrolment across all regions.[326] The national GER was 104.8% for boys, 97.8% for girls and 101.3% across both sexes.[327]
+
+The literacy rate has increased in recent years: according to the 1994 census, the literacy rate in Ethiopia was 23.4%.[270] In 2007 it was estimated to be 39% (male 49.1% and female 28.9%).[328] A report by UNDP in 2011 showed that the literacy rate in Ethiopia was 46.7%. The same report also indicated that the female literacy rate has increased from 27 to 39 percent from 2004 to 2011, and the male literacy rate has increased from 49 to 59 percent over the same period for persons 10 years and older.[329] By 2015, the literacy rate had further increased, to 49.1% (57.2% male and 41.1% female).[330]
+
+Ethiopians have a different naming system to the family name-based Western system. Children add the given names of their father and paternal grandfather consecutively to their own given name. For compatibility purposes, as is done in passports, the grandfather's given name is taken as a family surname, and a person's given name and their father's given name form the first names.
+
+Everyone is addressed by their given name. In official situations, the prefixes Ato (አቶ) is used for men; Weyzero (ወይዘሮ) for married women; and Weyzerīt (ወይዘሪት) for unmarried women.
+
+Ethiopia has several local calendars. The most widely known is the Ethiopian calendar, also known as the Ge'ez calendar. It is based on the older Alexandrian or Coptic calendar, which in turn derives from the Egyptian calendar. Like the Coptic calendar, the Ethiopian calendar has twelve months of exactly 30 days each plus five or six epagomenal days, which comprise a thirteenth month. The Ethiopian months begin on the same days as those of the Coptic calendar, but their names are in Ge'ez.
+
+Like the Julian calendar, the sixth epagomenal day—which in essence is a leap day—is added every four years without exception on 29 August of the Julian calendar, six months before the Julian leap day. Thus, the first day of the Ethiopian year, 1 Mäskäräm, for years between 1901 and 2099 (inclusive), is usually 11 September (Gregorian), but falls on 12 September in years before the Gregorian leap year. Also, a seven- to eight-year gap between the Ethiopian and Gregorian calendars results from an alternate calculation in determining the date of the Annunciation of Jesus.
+
+Another calendrical system was developed around 300 BC by the Oromo. A lunar-stellar calendar, this Oromo calendar relies on astronomical observations of the moon in conjunction with seven particular stars or constellations. Oromo months (stars/lunar phases) are Bittottessa (Iangulum), Camsa (Pleiades), Bufa (Aldebarran), Waxabajjii (Belletrix), Obora Gudda (Central Orion-Saiph), Obora Dikka (Sirius), Birra (full moon), Cikawa (gibbous moon), Sadasaa (quarter moon), Abrasa (large crescent), Ammaji (medium crescent), and Gurrandala (small crescent).[331]
+
+Time in Ethiopia is counted differently from most countries. The Ethiopian day is reckoned as beginning at 06:00 as opposed to 00:00, coinciding with sunrise throughout the year. To convert between the Ethiopian clock and Western clocks, one must add (or subtract) six hours to the Western time. For example, 02:00 local Addis Ababa time is called "8 at night" in Ethiopia, while 20:00 is called "2 in the evening".
+
+The best-known Ethiopian cuisine consists of various types of thick meat stews, known as wat in Ethiopian culture, and vegetable side dishes served atop injera, a large sourdough flatbread made of teff flour. This is not eaten with utensils, but instead one uses the injera to scoop up the entrées and side dishes. Almost universally in Ethiopia, it is common to eat from the same dish in the center of the table with a group of people. It is also a common custom to feed others in your group with your own hands—a tradition referred to as "gursha".[332] Traditional Ethiopian cuisine employs no pork or shellfish of any kind, as they are forbidden in the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, Islamic and Jewish faiths.
+
+Chechebsa, marqa, chukko, michirra and dhanga are the most popular dishes from the Oromo. Kitfo, which originated among the Gurage, is one of the country's most popular delicacies. In addition, Doro wot (ደሮ ወጥ in Amharic) and Tsebehi derho (ጽብሒ ድርሆ in Tigrinya), are other popular dishes, originating from northwestern Ethiopia.[citation needed] Tihlo (ጥሕሎ)—which is a type of dumpling—is prepared from roasted barley flour and originated in the Tigray Region. Tihlo is now very popular in Amhara and spreading further south.[333]
+
+Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation (EBC), formerly known as ETV, is the government-owned national channel. Other television stations in the country include Kana TV.
+
+The most widely circulated newspapers in Ethiopia are Addis Fortune, Capital Ethiopia, Ethiopian Reporter, Addis Zemen[citation needed] (Amharic) and Ethiopian Herald[citation needed].
+
+The sole internet service provider is the national telecommunications firm Ethio Telecom. A large portion of users in the country access the internet through mobile devices.[334] As of July 2016[update], there are around 4.29 million people who have internet access at their home as compared to a quarter of a million users a decade before that.[335] The Ethiopian government has at times intentionally shut down internet service in the country or restricted access to certain social media sites during periods of political unrest. In August 2016, following protest and demonstration in the Oromia Region, all access to the internet was shut down for a period of two days.[336] In June 2017, the government shut down access to the internet for mobile users during a period that coincided with the administration of Ethiopia's university entrance examination. Although the reason for the restriction was not confirmed by the government,[334] the move was similar to a measure taken during the same period in 2016, after a leak of test questions.[337][338]
+
+The music of Ethiopia is extremely diverse, with each of the country's 80 ethnic groups being associated with unique sounds. Ethiopian music uses a distinct modal system that is pentatonic, with characteristically long intervals between some notes. As with many other aspects of Ethiopian culture and tradition, tastes in music and lyrics are strongly linked with those in neighboring Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti, and Sudan.[339][340] Traditional singing in Ethiopia presents diverse styles of polyphony (heterophony, drone, imitation, and counterpoint). Traditionally, lyricism in Ethiopian song writing is strongly associated with views of patriotism or national pride, romance, friendship, and a most unique type of memoire known as 'Tizita'.
+
+The main sports in Ethiopia are track and field (particularly long distance running) and football. Ethiopian athletes have won many Olympic gold medals in track and field, most of them in long distance running.[341] Abebe Bikila became the first athlete from a sub Saharan country to win an Olympic Gold medal when he won the Marathon at the 1960 Rome Olympic Games in a world record time of 2:15:16.[342][343]
+
+Haile Gebrselassie is a world-renowned long distance runner with several world records under his belt. Kenenisa Bekele and Tirunesh Dibaba are also dominant runners, particularly in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters in which they hold the world records.
+
+Other notable Ethiopian athletes are Mamo Wolde, Miruts Yifter, Derartu Tulu, Meseret Defar, Almaz Ayana, Birhane Adere, Tiki Gelana, Genzebe Dibaba, Tariku Bekele, and Gelete Burka. As of 2012[update] and going into 2013, the current national Ethiopian national football team (nicknamed the Walayia Antelopes) made history by qualifying for the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations and reached the last 10 African football teams in the last stage of qualification for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Noted players include captain Adane Girma and top scorer Saladin Said.
+
+Ethiopia has sub-Saharan Africa's longest basketball tradition as it established a national basketball team in 1949.
+

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+
+
+Coordinates: 8°N 38°E / 8°N 38°E / 8; 38
+
+Ethiopia (/ˌiːθiˈoʊpiə/; Amharic: ኢትዮጵያ, ʾĪtyōṗṗyā (listen), Afar: Itiyoophiyaa, Ge'ez: ኢትዮጵያ. Oromo: Itoophiyaa, Somali: Itoobiya, Tigrinya: ኢትዮጵያ), officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in  East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Kenya to the south, South Sudan to the west and Sudan to the northwest. With over 109 million inhabitants as of 2019[update],[7][8] Ethiopia is the most populous landlocked country in the world and the second-most populous nation on the African continent (after Nigeria). The country has a total area of 1,100,000 square kilometres (420,000 sq mi). Its capital and largest city is Addis Ababa, which lies a few miles west of the East African Rift that splits the country into the African and Somali tectonic plates.[13] Ethiopian national identity is grounded in the historic and contemporary roles of Christianity and Islam, and the independence of Ethiopia from foreign rule, stemming from the various ancient Ethiopian kingdoms of antiquity.[14]
+
+Some of the oldest skeletal evidence for anatomically modern humans has been found in Ethiopia.[15] It is widely considered as the region from which modern humans first set out for the Middle East and places beyond.[16][17][18] According to linguists, the first Afroasiatic-speaking populations settled in the Horn region during the ensuing Neolithic era.[19] Tracing its roots to the 2nd millennium BC, Ethiopia's governmental system was a monarchy for most of its history. Oral literature tells that the monarchy was founded by the Solomonic dynasty of the Queen of Sheba, under its first king, Menelik I.[20] In the first centuries, the Kingdom of Aksum maintained a unified civilization in the region,[21][22][23][24] followed by the Ethiopian Empire c. 1137.
+
+During the late–19th-century Scramble for Africa, Ethiopia and Liberia were the only two nations that preserved their sovereignty from long-term colonisation by a European colonial power, and many newly independent nations on the continent subsequently adopted its flag colours. However, the country was later occupied by Italy in 1936 and became Italian Ethiopia (part of Italian East Africa), until it was liberated during World War II. During the Italian rule, the government abolished slavery,[25] a practice that existed in the country for centuries, and urbanization steadily increased.[26] Ethiopia was also the first independent African member of the 20th-century League of Nations and the United Nations.[27] In 1974, the Ethiopian monarchy under Haile Selassie was overthrown by the Derg, a communist military government backed by the Soviet Union. In 1987, the Derg established the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, but it was overthrown in 1991 by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, which has been the ruling political coalition since.
+
+Ethiopia and Eritrea use the ancient Ge'ez script, which is one of the oldest alphabets still in use in the world.[28] They follow the Ethiopian calendar, which is approximately seven years and three months behind the Gregorian calendar. A majority of the population adheres to Christianity (mainly the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and P'ent'ay), and the historical Kingdom of Aksum was one of the first states to officially adopt the religion, whereas around a third follows Islam (primarily Sunni). The country is the site of the Islamic Migration to Abyssinia and the oldest Muslim settlement in Africa, at Negash. A substantial population of Ethiopian Jews, known as Bete Israel, also resided in Ethiopia until the 1980s.[29][30] Ethiopia is a multilingual nation, with around 80 ethnolinguistic groups, the four largest of which are the Oromo, Amhara, Somali and Tigrayans. Most people in the country speak Afroasiatic languages of the Cushitic or Semitic branches. Additionally, Omotic languages are spoken by ethnic minority groups inhabiting the southern regions. Nilo-Saharan languages are also spoken by the nation's Nilotic ethnic minorities. Oromo is the most populous language by native speakers, while Amharic is the most populous by number of total speakers and serves as the working language in the federal government. Ge'ez remains important as a liturgical language for both the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church and for the Beta Israel.
+
+The nation is a land of natural contrasts, with its vast fertile west, its forests and its numerous rivers, and the world's hottest settlement of Dallol in its north. The Ethiopian Highlands are the largest continuous mountain ranges in Africa, and the Sof Omar Caves contains the largest cave on the continent. Ethiopia also has the second-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Africa.[31] Additionally, the sovereign state is a founding member of the UN, the Group of 24 (G-24), the Non-Aligned Movement, the G77 and the Organisation of African Unity. Its capital city, Addis Ababa, serves as the headquarters of the African Union, the Pan African Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the African Standby Force and many of the global NGOs focused on Africa. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ethiopia experienced civil conflicts and communist purges, which hindered its economy. The country has since recovered and as of 2010[update] has the largest economy (by GDP) in East Africa, as well as having the largest population in the region.[32][33][34] Despite these improvements, it remains one of the world's poorest countries.[35] In addition to poverty, Ethiopia faces hunger, corruption, weak infrastructure, and poor respect for human rights and access to health and education (with an illiteracy rate of 51%),[36] ranking in the worst quartile on the Human Development Index.
+
+The Greek name Αἰθιοπία (from Αἰθίοψ, Aithiops, "an Ethiopian") is a compound word, derived from the two Greek words, from αἴθω + ὤψ (aitho "I burn" + ops "face"). According to the Perseus Digital Library, the designation properly translates as Burnt-face in noun form and red-brown in adjectival form.[37] The historian Herodotus used the appellation to denote those parts of Africa South of the Sahara that were then known within the Ecumene (inhabitable world).[38] However, the Greek formation may be a folk etymology for the Ancient Egyptian term athtiu-abu, which means 'robbers of hearts'.[39] This Greek name was borrowed into Amharic as ኢትዮጵያ, ʾĪtyōṗṗyā.
+
+In Greco-Roman epigraphs, Aethiopia was a specific toponym for ancient Nubia.[40] At least as early as c. 850,[41] the name Aethiopia also occurs in many translations of the Old Testament in allusion to Nubia. The ancient Hebrew texts identify Nubia instead as Kush.[42] However, in the New Testament, the Greek term Aithiops does occur, referring to a servant of the Kandake, the queen of Kush.[43]
+
+Following the Hellenic and Biblical traditions, the Monumentum Adulitanum, a third century inscription belonging to the Aksumite Empire, indicates that Aksum's then ruler governed an area which was flanked to the west by the territory of Ethiopia and Sasu. The Aksumite King Ezana would eventually conquer Nubia the following century, and the Aksumites thereafter appropriated the designation "Ethiopians" for their own kingdom. In the Ge'ez version of the Ezana inscription, Aἰθιόποι is equated with the unvocalized Ḥbšt and Ḥbśt (Ḥabashat), and denotes for the first time the highland inhabitants of Aksum. This new demonym would subsequently be rendered as 'ḥbs ('Aḥbāsh) in Sabaic and as Ḥabasha in Arabic.[40]
+
+In the 15th-century Ge'ez Book of Aksum, the name is ascribed to a legendary individual called Ityopp'is. He was an extra-Biblical son of Cush, son of Ham, said to have founded the city of Axum.[44]
+
+In English, and generally outside of Ethiopia, the country was once historically known as Abyssinia. This toponym was derived from the Latinized form of the ancient Habash.[45]
+
+Several important finds have propelled Ethiopia and the surrounding region to the forefront of palaeontology. The oldest hominid discovered to date in Ethiopia is the 4.2 million year old Ardipithicus ramidus (Ardi) found by Tim D. White in 1994.[46] The most well known hominid discovery is Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy). Known locally as Dinkinesh, the specimen was found in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Region in 1974 by Donald Johanson, and is one of the most complete and best preserved adult Australopithecine fossils ever uncovered. Lucy's taxonomic name refers to the region where the discovery was made. The hominid is estimated to have lived 3.2 million years ago.[47][48][49]
+
+Ethiopia is also considered one of the earliest sites of the emergence of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens. The oldest of these local fossil finds, the Omo remains, were excavated in the southwestern Omo Kibish area and have been dated to the Middle Paleolithic, around 200,000 years ago.[50] Additionally, skeletons of Homo sapiens idaltu were found at a site in the Middle Awash valley. Dated to approximately 160,000 years ago, they may represent an extinct subspecies of Homo sapiens, or the immediate ancestors of anatomically modern humans.[51] Archaic Homo sapiens fossils excavated at the Jebel Irhoud site in Morocco have since been dated to an earlier period, about 300,000 years ago,[52] while Omo-Kibish I (Omo I) from southern Ethiopia is the oldest anatomically modern Homo sapiens skeleton currently known (196 ± 5 ka).[53]
+
+According to linguists, the first Afroasiatic-speaking populations arrived in the region during the ensuing Neolithic era from the family's proposed urheimat ("original homeland") in the Nile Valley,[19] or the Near East.[54] Other scholars propose that the Afroasiatic family developed in situ in the Horn, with its speakers subsequently dispersing from there.[55]
+
+In 2019, archaeologists discovered a 30,000-year-old Middle-Stone Age rock shelter at the Fincha Habera site in the Bale Mountains of Ethiopia at an elevation of 3,469 metres above sea level. At this high altitude humans are susceptible both to hypoxia and to extreme weather. According to a study published in the journal Science, this dwelling is proof of the earliest permanent human occupation at high altitude yet discovered. Thousands of animal bones, hundreds of stone tools, and ancient fireplaces were discovered, revealing a diet that featured giant mole rats.[56][57][58][59][60][61][62]
+
+Evidence of some of the earliest known stone-tipped projectile weapons (a characteristic tool of Homo sapiens), the stone tips of javelins or throwing spears, were discovered in 2013 at the Ethiopian site of Gademotta, and date to around 279,000 years ago.[63] In 2019, further evidence of Middle Stone Age complex projectile weapons was found at Aduma, also in Ethiopia, dated 100,000-80,000 years ago, in the form of points considered likely to belong to darts delivered by spear throwers.[64]
+
+Around the 8th century BC, a kingdom known as Dʿmt was established in Tigray, in northern Ethiopia, and Eritrea. The polity's capital was located at Yeha, in northern Ethiopia. Most modern historians consider this civilization to be a native Ethiopian one, although Sabaean-influenced because of the latter's hegemony of the Red Sea.[22]
+
+Other scholars regard Dʿmt as the result of a union of Afroasiatic-speaking cultures of the Cushitic and Semitic branches; namely, local Agaw peoples and Sabaeans from South Arabia. However, Ge'ez, the ancient Semitic language of Ethiopia, is thought to have developed independently from Sabaean, one of the South Semitic languages. As early as 2000 BC, other Semitic speakers were living in Ethiopia and Eritrea where Ge'ez developed.[65][66] Sabaean influence is now thought to have been minor, limited to a few localities, and disappearing after a few decades or a century. It may have been a trading or military colony in alliance with the Ethiopian civilization of Dʿmt or some other proto-Aksumite state.[22]
+
+After the fall of Dʿmt during the fourth century BC, the Ethiopian plateau came to be dominated by smaller successor kingdoms. In the first century AD, the Kingdom of Aksum emerged in what is now Tigray and Eritrea. According to the medieval Book of Aksum, the kingdom's first capital, Mazaber, was built by Itiyopis, son of Cush.[44] Aksum would later at times extend its rule into Yemen on the other side of the Red Sea.[67] The Persian prophet Mani listed Aksum with Rome, Persia, and China as one of the four great powers of his era, during the 3rd century.[68]
+
+Around 316 AD, Frumentius and his brother Edesius from Tyre accompanied their uncle on a voyage to Ethiopia. When the vessel stopped at a Red Sea port, the natives killed all the travellers except the two brothers, who were taken to the court as slaves. They were given positions of trust by the monarch, and they converted members of the royal court to Christianity. Frumentius became the first bishop of Aksum.[69] A coin dated to 324 shows that Ethiopia was the second country to officially adopt Christianity (after Armenia did so in 301), although the religion may have been at first confined to court circles; it was the first major power to do so.
+
+The weakened Axumite dynasty came to an end in the 9th century when Yodit defeated the last king of the dynasty. Empress Yodit's reign, which lasted for 40 years, aimed to abolish Christianity (a religion first accepted by King Ezana of the Axumite dynasty) by burning down churches and crucifying people who remained faithful to the orthodox Tewahedo church, which at the time was considered as the religion of the state. The Empress tried to force many people to change their religion and destroyed much historical heritage of the Axumite dynasty earning her the epithet of Yodit Gudit (in Amharic ዮዲት ጉዲት). Her reign finally came to an end in 912 following her defeat by the first leader of the Zagwe dynasty.[70] The reign of the Zagwe dynasty came to an end by the rise of Yekuno Amlak.[71]
+
+The first interaction that the Islamic Prophet Muhammad had with Ethiopia was during the reign of Aṣḥama ibn Abjar, who was at the time the Emperor of Aksum and gave refuge to several Muslims in the Kingdom of Aksum in 614 AD.[72] According to other authors, Ashama may have been the same person as king Armah, or his father or son.[73] Taddesse Tamrat records that the inhabitants of Wiqro, where the ruler is known as Ashamat al-Negashi, claim that his tomb is located in their village.[74][75]
+
+Muhammad's second interaction with Ethiopia was during the Expedition of Zaid ibn Haritha, when he sent Amr bin Umayyah al-Damri to the King of Ethiopia (then Abyssinia).[76]
+
+The Zagwe dynasty ruled many parts of present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea between the early 12th and late 13th century. The name of the dynasty is derived from the Cushitic-speaking Agaw of northern Ethiopia. From 1270 AD until the Zemene Mesafint (Age of Princes), the Solomonic dynasty governed the Ethiopian Empire.[77]
+
+In the early 15th century, Ethiopia sought to make diplomatic contact with European kingdoms for the first time since the Aksumite era. A letter from Henry IV of England to the Emperor of Abyssinia survives.[78] In 1428, Yeshaq I sent two emissaries to Alfonso V of Aragon, who sent return emissaries. They failed to complete the return trip.[79] The first continuous relations with a European country began in 1508 with Portugal under Dawit II (Lebna Dengel), who had just inherited the throne from his father.[80] In 1487, King John II of Portugal sent two emissaries to the Orient, Pero da Covilhã and Afonso de Paiva. Afonso would die on this mission.[81]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+This proved to be an important development, for when the Empire was subjected to an occupation led by the Adal Sultanate's general and imam, Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (called "Grañ " "the Left-handed"), Portugal assisted the Ethiopian emperor by sending weapons and four hundred men, who helped his son Gelawdewos defeat Ahmad and re-establish his rule.[82]
+
+This Abyssinian–Adal War was also one of the first proxy wars in the region, as the Ottoman Empire and Portugal took sides in the conflict.
+When Emperor Susenyos I converted to Roman Catholicism in 1624, years of revolt and civil unrest followed, resulting in thousands of deaths.[83] The Jesuit missionaries had offended the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo faith of the local Ethiopians. In June 1632, Fasilides, Susenyos' son, declared the state religion again to be the Ethiopian Orthodoxy. He expelled the Jesuit missionaries and other Europeans.[84][85]
+
+The Sultanate of Aussa or "Afar Sultanate" succeeded the earlier Imamate of Aussa. The latter polity had come into existence in 1577 when Muhammed Jasa moved his capital from Harar to Aussa (Asaita) with the split of the Adal Sultanate into the Sultanate of Aussa and the Sultanate of Harar. At some point after 1672, the Sultanate of Aussa declined and temporarily came to an end in conjunction with Imam Umar Din bin Adam's recorded ascension to the throne.[86]
+
+The Sultanate was subsequently re-established by Kedafu around the year 1734. It was thereafter ruled by his Mudaito Dynasty.[87] The primary symbol of the Sultan was a silver baton, which was considered to have magical properties.[88]
+
+Between 1755 and 1855, Ethiopia experienced a period of isolation referred to as the Zemene Mesafint or "Age of Princes". The Emperors became figureheads, controlled by regional lords and noblemen like Ras Mikael Sehul of Tigray, Ras Wolde Selassie of Tigray, and by the Were ShehYejju Oromo dynasty, such as Ras Gugsa of Yejju. Prior to the Zemene Mesafint, King Iyoas had introduced Oromo as the language of the court from Amharic to Afaan Oromo.[89][90]
+
+Ethiopian isolationism ended following a British mission that concluded an alliance between the two nations, but it was not until 1855 that the Amhara kingdoms of northern Ethiopia (Gonder, Gojam, Shoa) were briefly united after the power of the Emperor was restored beginning with the reign of Tewodros II.  Tewodros had been born in Begemder from a nobleman of Qwara, where the Qwara dialect of the Agaw language is spoken.
+
+Upon his ascent, he began modernizing Ethiopia and recentralizing power in the Emperor. Ethiopia began to take part in world affairs once again.[91]
+
+But Tewodros suffered several rebellions inside his empire. Northern Oromo militias, Tigrayan rebellion, and the constant incursion of Ottoman Empire and Egyptian forces near the Red Sea brought the weakening and the final downfall of Tewodros II. He killed himself in 1868 during his last fight with the British Expedition to Abyssinia at the Battle of Magdala.
+
+After Tewodros' death, Tekle Giyorgis II was proclaimed Emperor but was defeated in the Battles of Zulawu (21 June 1871) and Adua (11 July 1871).
+
+The victorious Mercha Kassai was subsequently declared Yohannes IV on 21 January 1872. In 1875 and 1876, Turkish/Egyptian forces, accompanied by many European and American 'advisors', twice invaded Abyssinia but were initially defeated: once at the Battle of Gundet losing 800 men, and then in the second invasion, decisively defeated by Emperor Yohannes IV at the Battle of Gura on 7 March 1875, where the invading forces lost at least 3000 men by death or captured.[92] From 1885 to 1889, Ethiopia joined the Mahdist War allied to Britain, Turkey, and Egypt against the Sudanese Mahdist State. In 1887 Menelik king of Shewa invaded the Emirate of Harar after his victory at the Battle of Chelenqo.[93] On 10 March 1889, Yohannes IV was killed by the Sudanese Khalifah Abdullah's army whilst leading his army in the Battle of Gallabat (also called Battle of Metemma).[94]
+
+Ethiopia in roughly its current form began under the reign of Menelik II, who was Emperor from 1889 until his death in 1913. From his base in the central province of Shewa, Menelik set out to annex territories to the south, east and west,[95] areas inhabited by the Oromo, Sidama, Gurage, Welayta, and other peoples.[96] He did this with the help of Ras Gobana Dacche's Shewan Oromo militia, which occupied lands that had not been held since Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi's war, as well as other areas that had never been under Ethiopian sovereignty.[97] Menelik's campaign against Oromos outside his army was largely in retaliation for centuries of Oromo expansionism and the Zemene Mesafint, a period during which a succession of Oromo feudal rulers dominated the highlanders.[98] Chief among these was the Yejju dynasty, which included Aligaz of Yejju and his brother Ali I of Yejju. Ali I founded the town of Debre Tabor in the Amhara Region, which became the dynasty's capital.[99]
+
+Menelik was born from King Hailemelekot of Shewa and his mother Ejegayehu Lema Adeyamo who was a servant in the royal household.[100] He had been born at Angolala in an Oromo area and had lived his first twelve years with Shewan Oromos with whom he thus had much in common.[101] During his reign, Menelik II advanced road construction, electricity and education; the development of a central taxation system and the foundation and building of the city of Addis Ababa—which became the capital of Shewa Province in 1881. After he ascended to the throne in 1889, it was renamed Addis Ababa, the new capital of Abyssinia.
+
+For his leadership, despite opposition from more traditional elements of society, Menelik II is heralded as a national hero. Menelik had signed the Treaty of Wichale with Italy in May 1889 in which Italy would recognize Ethiopia's sovereignty so long as Italy could control an area north of Ethiopia (now part of modern Eritrea). In return, Italy was to provide Menelik with weapons and support him as emperor. The Italians used the time between the signing of the treaty and its ratification by the Italian government to expand their territorial claims. This conflict erupted in the Battle of Adwa on 1 March 1896 in which Italy's colonial forces were defeated by the Ethiopians.[96][102]
+
+About a third of the population died in the Great Ethiopian Famine (1888 to 1892).[103][104]
+
+The early 20th century was marked by the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie (Ras Tafari). Haile Selassie I was born to parents with ethnic links to three of Ethiopia's Afroasiatic-speaking populations: the Oromo and Amhara, the country's two largest ethnic groups, as well as the Gurage. He came to power after Iyasu V was deposed, and undertook a nationwide modernization campaign from 1916, when he was made a Ras and Regent (Inderase) for the Empress Regnant, Zewditu, and became the de facto ruler of the Ethiopian Empire. Following Zewditu's death, on 2 November 1930, he succeeded her as emperor.[105]
+
+The independence of Ethiopia was interrupted by the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, beginning when it was invaded by Fascist Italy in early October 1935, and Italian occupation of the country (1936–1941).[106] During this time, Haile Selassie appealed to the League of Nations in 1935, delivering an address that made him a worldwide figure, and the 1935 Time Man of the Year.[107] As the majority of the Ethiopian population lived in rural towns, Italy faced continued resistance and ambushes in urban centres throughout its occupation. Haile Selassie fled into exile in Fairfield House, Bath, England. Mussolini was able to proclaim Italian Ethiopia and the assumption of the imperial title by the Italian king Vittorio Emanuele III.[108]
+
+In 1937, the Italian massacre of Yekatit 12 took place, in which as many as 30,000 civilians were killed and many others imprisoned.[109][110][111] This massacre was a reprisal for the attempted assassination Rodolfo Graziani, the viceroy of Italian East Africa.[112]
+
+The Italians made investments in Ethiopian infrastructure development during their occupation. They created the so-called "imperial road" between Addis Ababa and Massaua.[113] More than 900 km of railways were reconstructed, dams and hydroelectric plants were built, and many public and private companies were established. The Italian government abolished slavery, a practice that existed in the country for centuries.[26]
+
+Following the entry of Italy into World War II, British Empire forces, together with the Arbegnoch (literally, "patriots", referring to armed resistance soldiers) restored the sovereignty of Ethiopia in the course of the East African Campaign in 1941. An Italian guerrilla warfare campaign continued until 1943. This was followed by British recognition of Ethiopia's full sovereignty, without any special British privileges, when the Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement was signed in December 1944.[114] Under the peace treaty of 1947, Italy recognised the sovereignty and independence of Ethiopia.
+
+On 26 August 1942, Haile Selassie issued a proclamation that removed Ethiopia's legal basis for slavery.[115] Ethiopia had between two and four million slaves in the early 20th century, out of a total population of about eleven million.[116]
+
+In 1952, Haile Selassie orchestrated a federation with Eritrea. He dissolved this in 1962 and annexed Eritrea, resulting in the Eritrean War of Independence. Haile Selassie played a leading role in the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963.[117]
+
+Opinion within Ethiopia turned against Haile Selassie I owing to the worldwide 1973 oil crisis. This oil crisis caused a sharp increase in gasoline prices starting on 13 February 1974; food shortages; uncertainty regarding the succession; border wars; and discontent in the middle class created through modernization.[118] The high gasoline prices motivated taxi drivers and teachers to go on strike on 18 February 1974, and students and workers in Addis Ababa began demonstrating against the government on 20 February 1974.[119] The feudal oligarchical cabinet of Akilou Habte Wolde was toppled, and a new government was formed with Endelkachew Makonnen serving as Prime Minister.[120]
+
+Haile Selassie's rule ended on 12 September 1974, when he was deposed by the Derg, a Soviet-backed Marxist–Leninist military dictatorship led by Mengistu Haile Mariam.[121] The new Provisional Military Administrative Council established a one-party communist state in March 1975.[122]
+
+The ensuing government suffered several coups, uprisings, wide-scale drought, and a huge refugee problem. In 1977, Somalia, which had previously been receiving assistance and arms from the USSR, invaded Ethiopia in the Ogaden War, capturing part of the Ogaden region. Ethiopia recovered it after it began receiving massive military aid from the USSR, Cuba, South Yemen, East Germany,[123] and North Korea. This included around 15,000 Cuban combat troops.[124][125]
+
+In 1977–78, up to 500,000 were killed as a result of the Red Terror,[126] from forced deportations or from the use of hunger as a weapon under Mengistu's rule.[118] The Red Terror was carried out in response to what the Derg termed the 'White Terror', a chain of violent events, assassinations, and killings carried out by what it called "petty bourgeois reactionaries" who desired a reversal of the 1974 revolution.[127][128]
+
+The 1983–85 famine in Ethiopia affected around eight million people, resulting in one million dead. Insurrections against Communist rule sprang up, particularly in the northern regions of Eritrea and Tigray. The Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) merged with other ethnically based opposition movements in 1989, to form the coalition known as the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF).[130]
+
+Concurrently, the Soviet Union began to retreat from building world communism under Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika policies, marking a dramatic reduction in aid to Ethiopia from Socialist Bloc countries. This resulted in more economic hardship and the collapse of the military in the face of determined onslaughts by guerrilla forces in the north. The collapse of Marxism–Leninism in general, and in eastern Europe during the revolutions of 1989, coincided with the Soviet Union stopping aid to Ethiopia altogether in 1990. The strategic outlook for Mengistu quickly deteriorated.[131][132]
+
+EPRDF forces advanced on Addis Ababa in May 1991, and the Soviet Union did not intervene to save the government side. Mengistu fled the country and was granted asylum in Zimbabwe, where he still resides.[133][134]
+
+In 2006, after a trial that lasted 12 years, Ethiopia's Federal High Court in Addis Ababa found Mengistu guilty of genocide in absentia.[135] Numerous other top leaders of his government were also found guilty of war crimes. Mengistu and others who had fled the country were tried and sentenced in absentia. Numerous former officials received the death sentence and tens of others spent the next 20 years in jail, before being pardoned from life sentences.[136][137][138][139]
+
+In July 1991, EPRDF convened a National Conference to establish the Transitional Government of Ethiopia composed of an 87-member Council of Representatives and guided by a national charter that functioned as a transitional constitution.[140] In June 1992, the Oromo Liberation Front withdrew from the government; in March 1993, members of the Southern Ethiopia Peoples' Democratic Coalition also left the government.[141][142] In 1994, a new constitution was written that established a parliamentary republic with a bicameral legislature and a judicial system.[2]
+
+The first multiparty election took place in May 1995, which was won by the EPRDF.[143] The president of the transitional government, EPRDF leader Meles Zenawi, became the first Prime Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, and Negasso Gidada was elected its president.[144]
+
+In May 1998, a border dispute with Eritrea led to the Eritrean–Ethiopian War, which lasted until June 2000 and cost both countries an estimated $1 million a day.[145] This had a negative effect on Ethiopia's economy,[146] but strengthened the ruling coalition.[citation needed]
+
+Ethiopia's 3rd multiparty election on 15 May 2005 was highly disputed, with some opposition groups claiming fraud. Though the Carter Center approved the pre-election conditions, it expressed its dissatisfaction with post-election events. European Union election observers cited state support for the EPRDF campaign, as well as irregularities in ballot counting and results publishing.[147] The opposition parties gained more than 200 parliamentary seats, compared with just 12 in the 2000 elections. While most of the opposition representatives joined the parliament, some leaders of the CUD party who refused to take up their parliamentary seats were accused of inciting the post-election violence and were imprisoned. Amnesty International considered them "prisoners of conscience" and they were subsequently released.[148]
+
+A coalition of opposition parties and some individuals was established in 2009 to oust the government of the EPRDF in legislative elections of 2010. Meles' party, which has been in power since 1991, published its 65-page manifesto in Addis Ababa on 10 October 2009. The opposition won most votes in Addis Ababa, but the EPRDF halted counting of votes for several days. After it ensued, it claimed the election, amidst charges of fraud and intimidation.[149]
+
+Some of the eight member parties of the Medrek (Forum for Democratic Dialogue) include the Oromo Federalist Congress (organized by the Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement and the Oromo People's Congress), the Arena Tigray (organized by former members of the ruling party TPLF), the Unity for Democracy and Justice (UDJ, whose leader is imprisoned), and the Coalition of Somali Democratic Forces.[citation needed]
+
+In mid-2011, two consecutively missed rainy seasons precipitated the worst drought in East Africa seen in 60 years. Full recovery from the drought's effects did not occur until 2012, with long-term strategies by the national government in conjunction with development agencies believed to offer the most sustainable results.[150]
+
+Meles died on 20 August 2012 in Brussels, where he was being treated for an unspecified illness.[151] Deputy Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn was appointed as a new prime minister until the 2015 elections,[152] and remained so afterwards with his party in control of every parliamentary seat.[153]
+
+Protests broke out across the country on 5 August 2016 and dozens of protesters were subsequently shot and killed by police. The protesters demanded an end to human rights abuses, the release of political prisoners, a fairer redistribution of the wealth generated by over a decade of economic growth, and a return of Wolqayt District to the Amhara Region.[154][155][156] The events were the most violent crackdown against protesters in Sub-Saharan Africa since the Ethiopian government killed at least 75 people during protests in the Oromia Region in November and December 2015.[157][158] Following these protests, Ethiopia declared a state of emergency on 6 October 2016.[159] The state of emergency was lifted in August 2017.[160]
+
+On 16 February 2018, the government of Ethiopia declared a six-month nationwide state of emergency following the resignation of Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn.[161] Hailemariam is the first ruler in modern Ethiopian history to step down; previous leaders have died in office or been overthrown.[162] He said he wanted to clear the way for reforms.
+
+The new Prime Minister was Abiy Ahmed, who made a historic visit to Eritrea in 2018, ending the state of conflict between the countries.[163] For his efforts in ending the 20-year-long war between Ethiopia and Eritrea Abiy Ahmed was awarded with the Nobel prize for peace in 2019.[164] Since taking office in April 2018, 42-year-old Abiy has also released political prisoners, promised fair elections for 2019 and announced sweeping economic reforms.[165] As of 6 June 2019,[update] all the previously censored websites were made accessible again, over a thousand political prisoners were released and hundreds of administrative staff were fired as part of the reforms.[166][167][168][169]
+
+Ethnic violence rose with the political unrest. There were Oromo–Somali clashes between the Oromo, who make up the largest ethnic group in the country, and the ethnic Somalis, leading to up to 400,000 have been displaced in 2017.[170] Gedeo–Oromo clashes between the Oromo and the Gedeo people in the south of the country led to Ethiopia having the largest number of people to flee their homes in the world in 2018, with 1.4 million newly displaced people.[171] In September 2018 in the minorities protest that took place in Oromo near the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, 23 people were killed.[172] Some have blamed the rise in ethnic violence by the Oromo on the new Oromo Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed for giving space to groups formerly banned by previous Tigrayan-led governments, such as the Oromo Liberation Front.[173] Oromo-led protests broke out across Ethiopia following the assassination of musician Hachalu Hundessa on 29 June 2020, leading to the deaths of at least 200 people.[174]
+
+The dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has escalated in 2020.[175][176] Egypt has opposed the dam, fearing that it will reduce the amount of water it receives from the Nile.[177] Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed warned that "No force can stop Ethiopia from building a dam. If there is need to go to war, we could get millions readied."[178]
+
+The politics of Ethiopia takes place in a framework of a federal parliamentary republic, wherein the Prime Minister is the head of government.
+
+The President is the head of state but with largely ceremonial powers. Executive power is exercised by the government. Federal legislative power is vested in both the government and the two chambers of parliament. On the basis of Article 78 of the 1994 Ethiopian Constitution, the Judiciary is completely independent of the executive and the legislature.[179] In 2015, the realities of this provision were questioned in a report prepared by Freedom House.[180]
+
+According to the Democracy Index published by the United Kingdom-based Economist Intelligence Unit in late 2010, Ethiopia was an "authoritarian regime", ranking as the 118th-most democratic out of 167 countries.[181] Ethiopia had dropped 12 places on the list since 2006, and the 2010 report attributed the drop to the government's crackdown on opposition activities, media and civil society before the 2010 parliamentary election, which the report argued had made Ethiopia a de facto one-party state.
+
+However, since the appointment of Abiy Ahmed as prime minister in 2018, the situation has rapidly evolved.[clarification needed]
+
+In July 2015, during a trip that then-U.S. President Barack Obama took to Ethiopia, he highlighted the role of the country in the fight against Islamic terrorism.[182] Obama was the first sitting United States president to visit Ethiopia.
+
+The election of Ethiopia's 547-member constituent assembly was held in June 1994. This assembly adopted the constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia in December 1994. The elections for Ethiopia's first popularly chosen national parliament and regional legislatures were held in May and June 1995. Most opposition parties chose to boycott these elections. There was a landslide victory for the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). International and non-governmental observers concluded that opposition parties would have been able to participate had they chosen to do so.[citation needed] The current government of Ethiopia was installed in August 1995. The first President was Negasso Gidada. The EPRDF-led government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi promoted a policy of ethnic federalism, devolving significant powers to regional, ethnically based authorities. Ethiopia today has nine semi-autonomous administrative regions that have the power to raise and spend their own revenues. Under the present government, some fundamental freedoms, including freedom of the press, are circumscribed.[183]
+
+Citizens have little access to media other than the state-owned networks, and most private newspapers struggle to remain open and suffer periodic harassment from the government.[183] Since the 2005 elections, at least 18 journalists who had written articles critical of the government, were arrested on genocide and treason charges. The government uses press laws governing libel to intimidate journalists who are critical of its policies.[184]
+
+Meles' government was elected in 2000 in Ethiopia's first-ever multiparty elections; however, the results were heavily criticized by international observers and denounced by the opposition as fraudulent. The EPRDF also won the 2005 election returning Meles to power. Although the opposition vote increased in the election, both the opposition and observers from the European Union and elsewhere stated that the vote did not meet international standards for fair and free elections.[183] Ethiopian police are said to have massacred 193 protesters, mostly in the capital Addis Ababa, in the violence following the May 2005 elections in the Ethiopian police massacre.[185]
+
+The government initiated a crackdown in the provinces as well; in Oromia state the authorities used concerns over insurgency and terrorism to use torture, imprisonment, and other repressive methods to silence critics following the election, particularly people sympathetic to the registered opposition party Oromo National Congress (ONC).[184] The government has been engaged in a conflict with rebels in the Ogaden region since 2007. The biggest opposition party in 2005 was the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD). After various internal divisions, most of the CUD party leaders have established the new Unity for Democracy and Justice party led by Judge Birtukan Mideksa. A member of the country's Oromo ethnic group, Ms. Birtukan Mideksa is the first woman to lead a political party in Ethiopia.
+
+In 2008, the top five opposition parties were the Unity for Democracy and Justice led by Judge Birtukan Mideksa, United Ethiopian Democratic Forces led by Dr. Beyene Petros, Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement led by Dr. Bulcha Demeksa, Oromo People's Congress led by Dr. Merera Gudina, and United Ethiopian Democratic Party – Medhin Party led by Lidetu Ayalew.  After the 2015 elections, Ethiopia lost its single remaining opposition MP;[186] there are now no opposition MPs in the Ethiopian parliament.[187]
+
+Recent human rights violations include the killing of 100 peaceful protestors by direct government gunfire in the Oromo and Amhara regions in 2016.[188] The UN has called for UN observers on the ground in Ethiopia to investigate this incident,[189] however the EPRDF-dominated Ethiopian government has refused this call.[190] The protestors are protesting land grabs and lack of basic human rights such as the freedom to elect their representatives. The TPLF-dominated EPRDF won 100% in an election marked by fraud which has resulted in Ethiopian civilians protesting on scale unseen in prior post-election protests.[191]
+
+Merera Gudina, leader of the Oromo People's Congress, said the East African country was at a "crossroads". "People are demanding their rights," he said. "People are fed up with what the regime has been doing for a quarter of a century. They're protesting against land grabs, reparations, stolen elections, the rising cost of living, many things. "If the government continue to repress while the people are demanding their rights in the millions that (civil war) is one of the likely scenarios," Merera said in an interview with Reuters.[191]
+
+According to surveys in 2003 by the National Committee on Traditional Practices in Ethiopia, marriage by abduction accounts for 69% of the nation's marriages, with around 80% in the largest region, Oromiya, and as high as 92% in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region.[192][193] Homosexual acts are illegal in Ethiopia.[194] Journalists and activists have been threatened or arrested for their coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ethiopia.[195]
+
+Among the Omotic Karo-speaking and Hamer peoples in southern Ethiopia, adults and children with physical abnormalities are considered to be mingi, "ritually impure". The latter are believed to exert an evil influence upon others; disabled infants have traditionally been murdered without a proper burial.[196] The Karo officially banned the practice in July 2012.[197]
+
+In 2013, the Oakland Institute released a report accusing the Ethiopian government of forcing the relocation of "hundreds of thousands of indigenous people from their lands" in the Gambela Region[198] The report describes the Ethiopian government's "plans to move over 1.5 million people" by the end of 2013, in order to allow foreign investors to develop the land for large scale industrial agriculture.[198] According to several reports by the organization, those who refused were the subject of a variety of intimidation techniques including physical and sexual abuse, which sometimes led to deaths.[199][200][201] A similar 2012 report by Human Rights Watch also describes the Ethiopian government's 2010–2011 villagization program in Gambella, with plans to carry out similar resettlements in other regions.[202] The Ethiopian government has denied the accusations of land grabbing and instead pointed to the positive trajectory of the countries economy as evidence of the development program's benefits.[201]
+Map of the Regions of Ethiopia; each is based on ethnicity and language, rather than physical geography or history.
+Despite a wide range of support from all over the world, and even winning Nobel peace prize for 2019, Prim minister Abiy Ahmed has failed to deliver the peace and integrity he promised in the highly divided nation. A nationwide series of violent protests, concentrated in the Oromia Region, broke out starting on 23 October 2019, sparked by activist and media owner Jawar Mohammed's allegation that security forces had attempted to detain him. According to official reports, 86 people were killed,[203] mostly by mobs targeting ethnic and religious minorities within the region and surrounding areas, including Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa, and the Harari Region.[citation needed]
+
+On 29 May 2020, Amnesty International released a report accusing the security forces of Ethiopia of mass detentions and extrajudicial killings. The report stated that in 2019, at least 25 people, suspected of supporting the Oromo Liberation Army, were killed by the forces in parts the Oromia Region. Besides, between January and September 2019, at least 10,000 people were detained under suspicion, where most were “subjected to brutal beatings”.[204]
+
+Since 1996, landlocked Ethiopia has had no navy and the army is relatively small with about 170,000 volunteers on active duty. In 2018 Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said on state TV: "We built one of the strongest ground and air force in Africa ... we should build our naval force capacity in the future."[205]
+
+Before 1996, Ethiopia was divided into thirteen provinces, many derived from historical regions. The nation now has a tiered governmental system consisting of a federal government overseeing ethnically based regional states, zones, districts (woreda), and kebeles ("neighbourhoods").
+
+Since 1996, Ethiopia has been divided into nine ethnically based and politically autonomous regional states (kililoch, singular kilil ) and two chartered cities (astedader akababiwoch, singular astedader akababi ), the latter being Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa. The kililoch are subdivided into sixty-eight zones, and then further into 550 woredas and several special woredas.
+
+The constitution assigns extensive power to regional states, which can establish their own government and democracy as long as it is in line with the federal government's constitution. Each region has at its apex a regional council where members are directly elected to represent the districts and the council has legislative and executive power to direct internal affairs of the regions.
+
+Article 39 of the Ethiopian Constitution further gives every regional state the right to secede from Ethiopia. There is debate, however, as to how much of the power guaranteed in the constitution is actually given to the states. The councils implement their mandate through an executive committee and regional sectoral bureaus. Such elaborate structure of council, executive, and sectoral public institutions is replicated to the next level (woreda).
+
+At 1,104,300 square kilometres (426,372.61 sq mi),[6] Ethiopia is the world's 28th-largest country, comparable in size to Bolivia. It lies between the 3rd parallel north and the 15th parallel north and longitudes 33rd meridian east and 48th meridian east.
+
+The major portion of Ethiopia lies in the Horn of Africa, which is the easternmost part of the African landmass. The territories that have frontiers with Ethiopia are Eritrea to the north and then, moving in a clockwise direction, Djibouti, the de facto state of Somaliland, Somalia, Kenya, South Sudan and Sudan. Within Ethiopia is a vast highland complex of mountains and dissected plateaus divided by the Great Rift Valley, which runs generally southwest to northeast and is surrounded by lowlands, steppes, or semi-desert. There is a great diversity of terrain with wide variations in climate, soils, natural vegetation and settlement patterns.
+
+Ethiopia is an ecologically diverse country, ranging from the deserts along the eastern border to the tropical forests in the south to extensive Afromontane in the northern and southwestern parts. Lake Tana in the north is the source of the Blue Nile. It also has many endemic species, notably the gelada, the walia ibex and the Ethiopian wolf ("Simien fox"). The wide range of altitude has given the country a variety of ecologically distinct areas, and this has helped to encourage the evolution of endemic species in ecological isolation.
+
+The predominant climate type is tropical monsoon, with wide topographic-induced variation. The Ethiopian Highlands cover most of the country and have a climate which is generally considerably cooler than other regions at similar proximity to the Equator. Most of the country's major cities are located at elevations of around 2,000–2,500 m (6,562–8,202 ft) above sea level, including historic capitals such as Gondar and Axum.
+
+The modern capital, Addis Ababa, is situated on the foothills of Mount Entoto at an elevation of around 2,400 metres (7,900 ft). It experiences a mild climate year round. With temperatures fairly uniform year round, the seasons in Addis Ababa are largely defined by rainfall: a dry season from October to February, a light rainy season from March to May, and a heavy rainy season from June to September. The average annual rainfall is approximately 1,200 millimetres (47 in).
+
+There are on average seven hours of sunshine per day. The dry season is the sunniest time of the year, though even at the height of the rainy season in July and August there are still usually several hours per day of bright sunshine. The average annual temperature in Addis Ababa is 16 °C (60.8 °F), with daily maximum temperatures averaging 20–25 °C (68.0–77.0 °F) throughout the year, and overnight lows averaging 5–10 °C (41.0–50.0 °F).
+
+Most major cities and tourist sites in Ethiopia lie at a similar elevation to Addis Ababa and have a comparable climate. In less elevated regions, particularly the lower lying Ethiopian xeric grasslands and shrublands in the east of the country, the climate can be significantly hotter and drier. Dallol, in the Danakil Depression in this eastern zone, has the world's highest average annual temperature of 34 °C (93.2 °F).
+
+Ethiopia has 31 endemic species of mammals.[208] The African wild dog prehistorically had widespread distribution in the territory. However, with last sightings at Finicha'a, this canid is thought to be potentially locally extinct. The Ethiopian wolf is perhaps the most researched of all the endangered species within Ethiopia.
+
+Ethiopia is a global center of avian diversity. To date more than 856 bird species have been recorded in Ethiopia, twenty of which are endemic to the country.[209] Sixteen species are endangered or critically endangered. Many of these birds feed on butterflies, like the Bicyclus anynana.[210]
+
+Historically, throughout the African continent, wildlife populations have been rapidly declining due to logging, civil wars, pollution, poaching, and other human factors.[211] A 17-year-long civil war, along with severe drought, negatively affected Ethiopia's environmental conditions, leading to even greater habitat degradation.[212] Habitat destruction is a factor that leads to endangerment. When changes to a habitat occur rapidly, animals do not have time to adjust. Human impact threatens many species, with greater threats expected as a result of climate change induced by greenhouse gases.[213] With carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 of 6,494,000 tonnes, Ethiopia contributes just 0.02% to the annual human-caused release of greenhouse gases.[214]
+
+Ethiopia has many species listed as critically endangered, endangered, and vulnerable to global extinction. The threatened species in Ethiopia can be broken down into three categories (based on IUCN ratings): critically endangered, endangered, and vulnerable.[208]
+
+Ethiopia is one of the eight fundamental and independent centers of origin for cultivated plants in the world.[216] However, deforestation is a major concern for Ethiopia as studies suggest loss of forest contributes to soil erosion, loss of nutrients in the soil, loss of animal habitats, and reduction in biodiversity. At the beginning of the 20th century, around 420,000 km2 (or 35%) of Ethiopia's land was covered by trees, but recent research indicates that forest cover is now approximately 11.9% of the area.[217]
+
+Ethiopia loses an estimated 1,410 km2 of natural forests each year. Between 1990 and 2005 the country lost approximately 21,000 km2 of forests.[citation needed] Current government programs to control deforestation consist of education, promoting reforestation programs, and providing raw materials which are alternatives to timber. In rural areas the government also provides non-timber fuel sources and access to non-forested land to promote agriculture without destroying forest habitat.[citation needed] [218]
+
+Organizations such as SOS and Farm Africa are working with the federal government and local governments to create a system of forest management.[219] Working with a grant of approximately 2.3 million Euros, the Ethiopian government recently began training people on reducing erosion and using proper irrigation techniques that do not contribute to deforestation. This project is assisting more than 80 communities.[citation needed]
+
+Since April 2019, Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed has promoted Beautifying Sheger, a development project that aims to reduce the negative effects of climate change – among other things – in the capital city of Addis Ababa.[220] In the following May, the government held "Dine for Sheger", a fundraising event in order to cover some of the $1 billion needed through the public.[221] $25 million was raised through the expensive event, both through the cost of attending and donation.[222] Two Chinese railway companies under the Belt and Road Initiative between China and Ethiopia had supplied funds to develop 12 of the total 56 kilometres.[223]
+
+According to the IMF, Ethiopia was one of the fastest growing economies in the world, registering over 10% economic growth from 2004 through 2009.[225] It was the fastest-growing non-oil-dependent African economy in the years 2007 and 2008.[226] In 2015, the World Bank highlighted that Ethiopia had witnessed rapid economic growth with real domestic product (GDP) growth averaging 10.9% between 2004 and 2014.[227]
+
+In 2008 and 2011, Ethiopia's growth performance and considerable development gains were challenged by high inflation and a difficult balance of payments situation. Inflation surged to 40% in August 2011 because of loose monetary policy, large civil service wage increase in early 2011, and high food prices.[228] For 2011/12, end-year inflation was projected to be about 22%, and single digit inflation is projected in 2012/13 with the implementation of tight monetary and fiscal policies.[229]
+
+In spite of fast growth in recent years, GDP per capita is one of the lowest in the world, and the economy faces a number of serious structural problems. However, with a focused investment in public infrastructure and industrial parks, Ethiopia's economy is addressing its structural problems to become a hub for light manufacturing in Africa.[230] In 2019 a law was passed allowing expatriate Ethiopians to invest in Ethiopia's financial service industry.[231]
+
+The Ethiopian constitution defines the right to own land as belonging only to "the state and the people", but citizens may lease land (up to 99 years), and are unable to mortgage or sell. Renting of land for a maximum of twenty years is allowed and this is expected to ensure that land goes to the most productive user. Land distribution and administration is considered an area where corruption is institutionalized, and facilitation payments as well as bribes are often demanded when dealing with land-related issues.[232] As there is no land ownership, infrastructural projects are most often simply done without asking the land users, which then end up being displaced and without home or land. A lot of anger and distrust sometimes results in public protests. In addition, agricultural productivity remains low, and frequent droughts still beset the country, also leading to internal displacement.[233]
+
+Ethiopia has 14 major rivers flowing from its highlands, including the Nile. It has the largest water reserves in Africa. As of 2012[update], hydroelectric plants represented around 88.2% of the total installed electricity generating capacity.
+
+The remaining electrical power was generated from fossil fuels (8.3%) and renewable sources (3.6%).
+
+The electrification rate for the total population in 2016 was 42%, with 85% coverage in urban areas and 26% coverage in rural areas. As of 2016[update], total electricity production was 11.15 TW⋅h and consumption was 9.062 TW⋅h. There were 0.166 TW⋅h of electricity exported, 0 kW⋅h imported, and 2.784 GW of installed generating capacity.[13]
+
+Ethiopia delivers roughly 81% of water volume to the Nile through the river basins of the Blue Nile, Sobat River and Atbara. In 1959, Egypt and Sudan signed a bilateral treaty, the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement, which gave both countries exclusive maritime rights over the Nile waters. Ever since, Egypt has discouraged almost all projects in Ethiopia that sought to utilize the local Nile tributaries. This had the effect of discouraging external financing of hydropower and irrigation projects in western Ethiopia, thereby impeding water resource-based economic development projects. However, Ethiopia is in the process of constructing a large 6,450 MW hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile river. When completed, this Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is slated to be the largest hydroelectric power station in Africa.[234]
+
+The Gibe III hydroelectric project is so far the largest in the country with an installed capacity of 1,870 MW. For the year 2017–18 (2010 E.C) this hydro electric dam generated 4,900 GW⋅h.[235]
+
+Agriculture constitutes around 85% of the labour force. However, the service sector represents the largest portion of the GDP.[13] Many other economic activities depend on agriculture, including marketing, processing, and export of agricultural products. Production is overwhelmingly by small-scale farmers and enterprises, and a large part of commodity exports are provided by the small agricultural cash-crop sector. Principal crops include coffee, legumes, oilseeds, cereals, potatoes, sugarcane, and vegetables. Ethiopia is also a Vavilov center of diversity for domesticated crops, including enset,[236] coffee and teff.
+
+Exports are almost entirely agricultural commodities (with the exception of Gold exports), and coffee is the largest foreign exchange earner. Ethiopia is Africa's second biggest maize producer.[237] According to UN estimations the per capita GDP of Ethiopia has reached $357 as of 2011[update].[238]
+
+Exports from Ethiopia in the 2009/2010 financial year totaled US$1.4 billion.[239] The country produces more coffee than any other nation on the continent.[240]"Coffee provides a livelihood for close to 15 million Ethiopians, 16% of the population. Farmers in the eastern part of the country, where a warming climate is already impacting production, have struggled in recent years, and many are currently reporting largely failed harvests as a result of a prolonged drought".[241]
+
+Ethiopia also has the 5th largest inventory of cattle.[242] Other main export commodities are khat, gold, leather products, and oilseeds. Recent development of the floriculture sector means Ethiopia is poised to become one of the top flower and plant exporters in the world.[243]
+
+Cross-border trade by pastoralists is often informal and beyond state control and regulation. In East Africa, over 95% of cross-border trade is through unofficial channels. The unofficial trade of live cattle, camels, sheep, and goats from Ethiopia sold to Somalia, Djibouti, and Kenya generates an estimated total value of between 250 and US$300 million annually (100 times more than the official figure).[244]
+
+This trade helps lower food prices, increase food security, relieve border tensions, and promote regional integration.[244] However, the unregulated and undocumented nature of this trade runs risks, such as allowing disease to spread more easily across national borders. Furthermore, the government of Ethiopia is purportedly unhappy with lost tax revenue and foreign exchange revenues.[244] Recent initiatives have sought to document and regulate this trade.[244]
+
+With the private sector growing slowly, designer leather products like bags are becoming a big export business, with Taytu becoming the first luxury designer label in the country.[245] Additional small-scale export products include cereals, pulses, cotton, sugarcane, potatoes, and hides. With the construction of various new dams and growing hydroelectric power projects around the country, Ethiopia also plans to export electric power to its neighbors.[246][247]
+
+Most regard Ethiopia's large water resources and potential as its "white oil" and its coffee resources as "black gold".[248][249]
+
+The country also has large mineral resources and oil potential in some of the less inhabited regions. Political instability in those regions, however, has inhibited development. Ethiopian geologists were implicated in a major gold swindle in 2008. Four chemists and geologists from the Ethiopian Geological Survey were arrested in connection with a fake gold scandal, following complaints from buyers in South Africa. Gold bars from the National Bank of Ethiopia were found by police to be gilded metal, costing the state around US$17 million, according to the Science and Development Network website.[250]
+
+In 2011, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project was commenced. When completed, it will provide surplus energy in Ethiopia which will be available for export to neighboring countries.
+
+Ethiopia has 926 km of electrified 1,435 mm (4 ft 8 1⁄2 in) standard gauge railways, 656 km for the Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway between Addis Ababa and the Port of Djibouti (via Awash)[251] and 270 km for the Awash–Hara Gebeya Railway between Addis Ababa and the twin cities of Dessie/Kombolcha[252] (also via Awash). Both railways are either in trial service or still under construction as of August 2017[update]. Once commissioned and fully operational in 2018/2019, both railways will allow passenger transport with a designated speed of 120 km/hour and freight transport with a speed of ~80 km/hour. Expected travel time from Addis Ababa to Djibouti City for passengers would be less than twelve hours and travel time from Addis Ababa to Dessie/Kombolcha would be around six hours.
+
+Beyond the first 270 km of the Awash–Hara Gebeya Railway, a second construction phase over 120 km foresees the extension of this railway from Dessie/Kombolcha to Hara Gebeya/Woldiya. It is not clear, when this section will be built and opened.[253] A third, northern 216 km long railway is also under construction between Mek'ele and Woldiya, but it is also not clear, when this railway will be commissioned and opened.[254] All railways are part of a future railway network of more than 5,000 km of railways, the National Railway Network of Ethiopia.
+
+As the first part of a ten-year Road Sector Development Program, between 1997 and 2002 the Ethiopian government began a sustained effort to improve its infrastructure of roads. As a result, as of 2015[update] Ethiopia has a total (Federal and Regional) of 100,000 km of roads, both paved and gravel.[255]
+
+Ethiopia had 58 airports as of 2012[update],[13] and 61 as of 2016[update].[256] Among these, the Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa and the Aba Tenna Dejazmach Yilma International Airport in Dire Dawa accommodate international flights. Ethiopian Airlines is the country's flag carrier, and is wholly owned by the Government of Ethiopia.[257] From its hub at the Bole International Airport, the airline serves a network of 102 international passenger, 20 domestic passenger, and 44 cargo destinations.[258][259] It is also one of the fastest-growing carriers in the industry and continent.[260]
+
+Ethiopia's total population has grown from 38.1 million in 1983 to 109.5 million in 2018.[261] The population was only about nine million in the 19th century.[262] The 2007 Population and Housing Census results show that the population of Ethiopia grew at an average annual rate of 2.6% between 1994 and 2007, down from 2.8% during the period 1983–1994. Currently, the population growth rate is among the top ten countries in the world. The population is forecast to grow to over 210 million by 2060, which would be an increase from 2011 estimates by a factor of about 2.5.[263] According to UN estimations, life expectancy had improved substantially in recent years with male life expectancy reported to be 56 years and for women 60 years.[238]
+
+The country's population is highly diverse, containing over 80 different ethnic groups. According to the Ethiopian national census of 2007, the Oromo are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, at 34.4% of the nation's population. The Amhara represent 27.0% of the country's inhabitants, while Somalis and Tigrayans represent 6.2% and 6.1% of the population, respectively. Other prominent ethnic groups are as follows: Sidama 4.0%, Gurage 2.5%, Welayta 2.3%, Afar 1.7%, Hadiya 1.7%, Gamo 1.5% and Arabs and others 12.6%.[9]
+
+Afroasiatic-speaking communities make up the majority of the population. Among these, Semitic speakers often collectively refer to themselves as the Habesha people. The Arabic form of this term (al-Ḥabasha) is the etymological basis of "Abyssinia," the former name of Ethiopia in English and other European languages.[265] Additionally, Nilo-Saharan-speaking ethnic minorities inhabit the southern regions of the country, particularly in areas of the Gambela Region which borders South Sudan. The largest ethnic groups among these include the Nuer and Anuak.
+
+In addition, Ethiopia had over 75,000 Italian settlers during the Italian occupation of the country.[266] After independence, many Italians remained for decades after receiving full pardons from Emperor Selassie, as he saw the opportunity to continue modernization efforts.[267] However, due to the Ethiopian Civil War in 1974, nearly 22,000 Italo-Ethiopians left the country.[267] In the 2000s, some Italian companies returned to operate in Ethiopia, and many Italian technicians and managers arrived with their families, residing mainly in the metropolitan area of the capital.[268]
+
+In 2009, Ethiopia hosted a population of refugees and asylum seekers numbering approximately 135,200. The majority of this population came from Somalia (approximately 64,300 persons), Eritrea (41,700) and Sudan (25,900). The Ethiopian government required nearly all refugees to live in refugee camps.[269]
+
+Languages of Ethiopia as of 2007[update] Census[9]
+
+According to Ethnologue, there are 90 individual languages spoken in Ethiopia.[270] Most people in the country speak Afroasiatic languages of the Cushitic or Semitic branches. The former includes Oromo language, spoken by the Oromo, and Somali, spoken by the Somalis; the latter includes Amharic, spoken by the Amhara, and Tigrinya, spoken by the Tigrayans. Together, these four groups make up about three-quarters of Ethiopia's population. Other Afroasiatic languages with a significant number of speakers include the Cushitic Sidamo, Afar, Hadiyya and Agaw languages, as well as the Semitic Gurage languages, Harari, Silt'e, and Argobba languages.[9] Arabic, which also belongs to the Afroasiatic family, is likewise spoken in some areas.[271]
+
+Additionally, Omotic languages are spoken by Omotic ethnic minority groups inhabiting the southern regions. Among these idioms are Aari, Bench, Dime, Dizin, Gamo-Gofa-Dawro, Maale, Hamer, and Wolaytta.[9]
+
+Languages from the Nilo-Saharan family are also spoken by ethnic minorities concentrated in the southwestern parts of the country. These languages include Nuer, Anuak, Nyangatom, Majang, Suri, Me'en, and Mursi.[9]
+
+English is the most widely spoken foreign language, and is the medium of instruction in secondary schools. Amharic was the language of primary school instruction, but has been replaced in many areas by regional languages such as Oromiffa, Somali or Tigrinya.[272] While all languages enjoy equal state recognition in the 1995 Constitution of Ethiopia and Oromo is the most widely spoken language, Amharic is recognized as the official working language of the Federal Government.[2]
+
+The various regions of Ethiopia and chartered cities are free to determine their own working languages.[272] Amharic is recognised as the official working language of Amhara Region, Benishangul-Gumuz, Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region, Gambela Region, Addis Abeba and Dire Dawa.[273] Oromo language serves as the official working language and the primary language of education in the Oromia,[274] Harar and Dire Dawa and of the Oromia Zone in the Amhara Region. Somali is the official working language of Somali region and Dire Dawa, while Afar,[275] Harari,[276] and Tigrinya[277] are recognized as official working languages in their respective regions.
+
+Italian is still spoken by few parts of the population, mostly among older generations, and is taught in many schools (most notably the Istituto Statale Italiano Omnicomprensivo di Addis Abeba). Also, Amharic and Tigrinya have many words borrowed from the Italian language.[278][279]
+
+Ethiopia's principal orthography is the Ge'ez script. Employed as an abugida for several of the country's languages, it first came into usage in the 6th and 5th centuries BC as an abjad to transcribe the Semitic Ge'ez language.[280] Ge'ez now serves as the liturgical language of both the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches. During the 1980s, the Ethiopic character set was computerized. It is today part of the Unicode standard as Ethiopic, Ethiopic Extended, Ethiopic Supplement and Ethiopic Extended-A.
+
+Other writing systems have also been used over the years by different Ethiopian communities. The latter include Bakri Sapalo's script for Oromiffa.[281]
+
+Religion in Ethiopia (2007)
+
+Ethiopia has close historical ties with all three of the world's major Abrahamic religions. In the 4th century, the Ethiopian empire was one of the first in the world to officially adopt Christianity as the state religion. As a result of the resolutions of the Council of Chalcedon, in 451 the miaphysites,[282] which included the vast majority of Christians in Egypt and Ethiopia, were accused of monophysitism and designated as heretics under the common name of Coptic Christianity (see Oriental Orthodoxy). While no longer distinguished as a state religion, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church remains the majority Christian denomination. There is also a substantial Muslims demographic, representing around a third of the population. Additionally, Ethiopia is the site of the First Hegira, a major emigration in Islamic history. A town in the Tigray Region, Negash is the oldest Muslim settlement in Africa.
+
+Until the 1980s, a substantial population of Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) resided in Ethiopia.[283][284] About 4,000 are estimated to still live in the country, along with many more members of two related ethno-religious groups, the Falash Mura and the Beta Abraham. The Falash Mura are Beta Israel who, while identifying as Jews, adopted elements of Christianity due to missionary efforts, and now practice a syncretic form of Ethiopian Judaism mixed with Christianity; they number about 150,000 people. The Beta Abraham are regarded as a medieval offshoot of the Beta Israel, having incorporated elements of traditional African religion, and number about 8,000. While both still identify as Beta Israel, they exist outside the main community. The official Beta Israel community leaders tentatively accept the Falash Mura, and have requested they be allowed to emigrate to Israel. The Beta Abraham have historically been shunned by most other communities, having a reputation of being "sorcerers".
+
+According to the 2007 National Census, Christians make up 62.8% of the country's population (43.5% Ethiopian Orthodox, 19.3% other denominations), Muslims 33.9%, practitioners of traditional faiths 2.6%, and other religions 0.6%.[9] This is in agreement with the CIA World Factbook, which states that Christianity is the most widely practiced religion in Ethiopia.[13] The ratio of the Christian to Muslim population has largely remained stable when compared to previous censuses conducted decades ago.[285] Sunnis form the majority of Muslims with non-denominational Muslims being the second largest group of Muslims, and the Shia and Ahmadiyyas are a minority. Sunnis are largely Shafi'is or Salafis, and there are also many Sufi Muslims there.[286] The large Muslim population in the northern Afar region has resulted in a Muslim separatist movement called the "Islamic State of Afaria" seeking a sharia-compliant constitution.[287]
+
+Some critics asserted that the Haile Selassie regime had been fabricating the census to present Ethiopia as a Christian country to the outside world, stating that Islam made up 50% of the total population in 1991, based on the 1984 census commissioned by the Derg regime.[288] Several Muslim observers and bloggers claim that Muslims are in the majority and disagree with the above census numbers, without providing factual data supporting their claims.[289]
+
+The Kingdom of Aksum was one of the first polities to officially embrace Christianity, when Frumentius of Tyre, called Fremnatos or Abba Selama ("Father of Peace") in Ethiopia, converted Emperor Ezana during the fourth century.[69][283] According to the New Testament, Christianity had entered Ethiopia even earlier, when an official in the Ethiopian royal treasury was baptized by Philip the Evangelist.[290]
+
+The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is part of Oriental Orthodoxy. It is by far the largest Christian denomination, although a number of P'ent'ay (Protestant) churches have recently gained ground. Since 1930, a relatively small Ethiopian Catholic Church has existed in full communion with Rome, with adherents making up less than 1% of the total population.[285][291]
+
+Islam in Ethiopia dates back to the founding of the religion in 622 when a group of Muslims were counseled by Muhammad to escape persecution in Mecca. The disciples subsequently migrated to Abyssinia via modern-day Eritrea, which was at the time ruled by Ashama ibn-Abjar, a pious Christian emperor.[283] Also, the largest single ethnic group of non-Arab Sahabah was that of the Ethiopians.[citation needed]
+
+According to the 2007 Population and Housing Census, around 1,957,944 people in Ethiopia are adherents of traditional religions. An additional 471,861 residents practice other creeds.[9] While followers of all religions can be found in each region, they tend to be concentrated in certain parts of the country. Christians predominantly live in the northern Amhara and Tigray regions, and are largely members of the non-Chalcedonian Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Those belonging to P'ent'ay are centered in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region (SNNP) and Oromia. Muslims in Ethiopia predominantly adhere to Sunni Islam and generally inhabit eastern and northeastern areas; particularly the Somali, Afar, Dire Dawa and Harari regions. Practitioners of traditional religions mainly reside in the nation's far southwestern and western rural borderlands, in the SNNP, Benishangul-Gumuz and Gambela regions.[9][283]
+
+Human rights groups have regularly accused the government of arresting activists, journalists and bloggers to stamp out dissent among some religious communities. Lengthy prison terms were handed to 17 Muslim activists on 3 August 2015 ranging from seven to 22 years. They were charged with trying to create an Islamic state in the majority Christian country. All the defendants denied the charges and claimed that they were merely protesting in defence of their rights.[292][293][294]
+
+There is a small, yet significant number of Jews in Ethiopia, who claim to be one of the lost tribes of Israel. In the 1980s, the number of Ethiopian-Jews decreased, as many started moving to Israel. The tribe has been given the name Beta Israel / ቤታ እስራኤል / ביתא ישראל. There are a higher number of Ethiopian-Jews living in Israel today, though, in certain Ethiopian towns and villages such as Wolleka, near the Ethiopian city of Gondar, the concentration of Ethiopian-Jews reaches an estimated 100%. The US also has a significant number of Ethiopian-Jews, with a population slightly less than that of Ethiopia.
+
+Population growth, migration, and urbanization are all straining both governments' and ecosystems' capacity to provide people with basic services.[295] Urbanization has steadily been increasing in Ethiopia, with two periods of significantly rapid growth. First, in 1936–1941 during the Italian occupation under Mussolini's fascist government, and from 1967 to 1975 when the populations of urban centers tripled.[296]
+
+In 1936, Italy annexed Ethiopia, building infrastructure to connect major cities, and a dam providing power and water.[26] This along with the influx of Italians and labourers was the major cause of rapid growth during this period. The second period of growth was from 1967 to 1975 when rural populations migrated to urban centers seeking work and better living conditions.[296]
+
+This pattern slowed due to the 1975 Land Reform program instituted by the government, which provided incentives for people to stay in rural areas. As people moved from rural areas to the cities, there were fewer people to grow food for the population. The Land Reform Act was meant to increase agriculture since food production was not keeping up with population growth over the period of 1970–1983. This program proliferated the formation of peasant associations, large villages based on agriculture. The act did lead to an increase in food production, although there is debate over the cause; it may be related to weather conditions more than the reform act.[297] Urban populations have continued to grow with an 8.1% increase from 1975 to 2000.[298]
+
+Migration to urban areas is usually motivated by the hope of better lives. In peasant associations daily life is a struggle to survive. About 16% of the population in Ethiopia are living on less than one dollar per day (2008). Only 65% of rural households in Ethiopia consume the World Health Organization's minimum standard of food per day (2,200 kilocalories), with 42% of children under 5 years old being underweight.[299]
+
+Most poor families (75%) share their sleeping quarters with livestock, and 40% of children sleep on the floor, where nighttime temperatures average 5 degrees Celsius in the cold season.[299] The average family size is six or seven, living in a 30-square-meter mud and thatch hut, with less than two hectares of land to cultivate.[299]
+
+The peasant associations face a cycle of poverty. Since the landholdings are so small, farmers cannot allow the land to lie fallow, which reduces soil fertility.[299] This land degradation reduces the production of fodder for livestock, which causes low milk yields.[299] Since the community burns livestock manure as fuel, rather than plowing the nutrients back into the land, the crop production is reduced.[299] The low productivity of agriculture leads to inadequate incomes for farmers, hunger, malnutrition and disease. These unhealthy farmers have difficulty working the land and the productivity drops further.[299]
+
+Although conditions are drastically better in cities, all of Ethiopia suffers from poverty and poor sanitation. However, poverty in Ethiopia fell from 44% to 29.6% during 2000–2011, according to the World Bank.[300] In the capital city of Addis Ababa, 55% of the population used to live in slums.[26] Now, however, a construction boom in both the private and the public sector has led to a dramatic improvement in living standards in major cities, particularly in Addis Ababa. Notably, government-built condominium housing complexes have sprung up throughout the city, benefiting close to 600,000 individuals.[301] Sanitation is the most pressing need in the city, with most of the population lacking access to waste treatment facilities. This contributes to the spread of illness through unhealthy water.[26]
+
+Despite the living conditions in the cities, the people of Addis Ababa are much better off than people living in the peasant associations owing to their educational opportunities. Unlike rural children, 69% of urban children are enrolled in primary school, and 35% of those are eligible to attend secondary school.[clarification needed][26] Addis Ababa has its own university as well as many other secondary schools. The literacy rate is 82%.[26]
+
+Many NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) are working to solve this problem; however, most are far apart, uncoordinated, and working in isolation.[298] The Sub-Saharan Africa NGO Consortium is attempting to coordinate efforts.[298]
+
+The World Health Organization's 2006 World Health Report gives a figure of 1,936 physicians (for 2003),[302] which comes to about 2.6 per 100,000. A brain drain associated with globalization is said to affect the country, with many educated professionals leaving Ethiopia for better economic opportunities in the West.
+
+Ethiopia's main health problems are said to be communicable (contagious) diseases worsened by poor sanitation and malnutrition. Over 44 million people (nearly half the population) do not have access to clean water.[303] These problems are exacerbated by the shortage of trained doctors and nurses and health facilities.[304]
+
+The state of public health is considerably better in the cities. Birth rates, infant mortality rates, and death rates are lower in cities than in rural areas due to better access to education, medicines, and hospitals.[26] Life expectancy is better in cities compared to rural areas, but there have been significant improvements witnessed throughout the country in recent years, the average Ethiopian living to be 62.2 years old, according to a UNDP report.[305] Despite sanitation being a problem, use of improved water sources is also on the rise; 81% in cities compared to 11% in rural areas.[298] As in other parts of Africa, there has been a steady migration of people towards the cities in hopes of better living conditions.
+
+There are 119 hospitals (12 in Addis Ababa) and 412 health centers in Ethiopia.[306] Infant mortality rates are relatively high, as 41 infants die per 1,000 live births.[307] Ethiopia has been able to reduce under-five mortality by two-thirds (one of the Millennium Development Goals) since 1990.[306] Although this is a dramatic decrease, birth-related complications such as obstetric fistula affect many of the nation's women.
+
+HIV/AIDS in Ethiopia stood at 1.1% in 2014, a dramatic decrease from 4.5% 15 years ago.[citation needed] The most affected are poor communities and women, due to lack of health education, empowerment, awareness and lack of social well-being. The government of Ethiopia and many international organizations like World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations, are launching campaigns and are working aggressively to improve Ethiopia's health conditions and promote health awareness on AIDS and other communicable diseases.[308]
+
+Ethiopia has a relatively high infant and maternal mortality rate. Although, Ethiopia did not meet the MDG target of reducing maternal mortality rate by two thirds in 2015, there are improvements nonetheless. For instance, the contraception prevalence rate increased from 8.1% in 2000 to 41.8% in 2014, and Antenatal care service coverage increase from 29% to an astounding 98.1% in the same period.[citation needed] Currently, the maternal mortality rate stands at 420 per 100,000 live births.[citation needed] Only a minority of Ethiopians are born in hospitals, while most are born in rural households. Those who are expected to give birth at home have elderly women serve as midwives who assist with the delivery.[309] The "WHO estimates that a majority of maternal fatalities and disabilities could be prevented if deliveries were to take place at well-equipped health centers, with adequately trained staff".[310]
+
+The low availability of health-care professionals with modern medical training, together with lack of funds for medical services, leads to the preponderance of less-reliable traditional healers that use home-based therapies to heal common ailments.
+
+One common cultural practice, irrespective of religion or economic status, is female genital mutilation (FGM), also known as female genital cutting (FGC), a procedure that involves partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.[311] The practice was made illegal in Ethiopia in 2004.[312] FGM is a pre-marital custom mainly endemic to Northeast Africa and parts of the Near East that has its ultimate origins in Ancient Egypt.[313][314] Encouraged by women in the community, it is primarily intended to deter promiscuity and to offer protection from assault.[315]
+
+The country has a high prevalence of FGM, but prevalence is lower among young girls. Ethiopia's 2005 Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS) noted that the national prevalence rate is 74% among women ages 15–49.[316] The practice is almost universal in the regions of Dire Dawa, Somali, and Afar. In the Oromo and Harari regions, more than 80% of girls and women undergo the procedure. FGC is least prevalent in the regions of Tigray and Gambela, where 29% and 27% of girls and women, respectively, are affected.[317] According to a 2010 study performed by the Population Reference Bureau, Ethiopia has a prevalence rate of 81% among women ages 35 to 39 and 62% among women ages 15–19.[318] A 2014 UNICEF report found that only 24% of girls under 14 had undergone FGM.[319]
+
+Male circumcision is also practiced in the country, and about 76% of Ethiopia's male population is reportedly circumcised.[320]
+
+The Government of the Federal Republic of Ethiopia is signatory to various international conventions and treaties that protect the rights of women and children. Its constitution provides for the fundamental rights and freedoms for women. There is an attempt being made to raise the social and economic status of women through eliminating all legal and customary practices, which hinder women's equal participation in society and undermine their social status.
+
+The National Mental Health Strategy, published in 2012, introduced the development of policy designed to improve mental health care in Ethiopia. This strategy mandated that mental health be integrated into the primary health care system.[321] However, the success of the National Mental Health Strategy has been limited. For example, the burden of depression is estimated to have increased 34.2% from 2007 to 2017.[322] Furthermore, the prevalence of stigmatizing attitudes, inadequate leadership and co-ordination of efforts, as well as a lack of mental health awareness in the general population, all remain as obstacles to successful mental health care.[323]
+
+Education in Ethiopia was dominated by the Tewahedo Church for many centuries until secular education was adopted in the early 1900s. The current system follows school expansion schemes which are very similar to the system in the rural areas during the 1980s, with an addition of deeper regionalization, providing rural education in students' own languages starting at the elementary level, and with more budget finances allocated to the education sector. The sequence of general education in Ethiopia is six years of primary school, four years of lower secondary school and two years of higher secondary school.[324]
+
+Access to education in Ethiopia has improved significantly. Approximately three million people were in primary school in 1994/95, and by 2008/09, primary enrolment had risen to 15.5 million – an increase of over 500%.[325] In 2013/14, the country had witnessed significant boost in gross enrolment across all regions.[326] The national GER was 104.8% for boys, 97.8% for girls and 101.3% across both sexes.[327]
+
+The literacy rate has increased in recent years: according to the 1994 census, the literacy rate in Ethiopia was 23.4%.[270] In 2007 it was estimated to be 39% (male 49.1% and female 28.9%).[328] A report by UNDP in 2011 showed that the literacy rate in Ethiopia was 46.7%. The same report also indicated that the female literacy rate has increased from 27 to 39 percent from 2004 to 2011, and the male literacy rate has increased from 49 to 59 percent over the same period for persons 10 years and older.[329] By 2015, the literacy rate had further increased, to 49.1% (57.2% male and 41.1% female).[330]
+
+Ethiopians have a different naming system to the family name-based Western system. Children add the given names of their father and paternal grandfather consecutively to their own given name. For compatibility purposes, as is done in passports, the grandfather's given name is taken as a family surname, and a person's given name and their father's given name form the first names.
+
+Everyone is addressed by their given name. In official situations, the prefixes Ato (አቶ) is used for men; Weyzero (ወይዘሮ) for married women; and Weyzerīt (ወይዘሪት) for unmarried women.
+
+Ethiopia has several local calendars. The most widely known is the Ethiopian calendar, also known as the Ge'ez calendar. It is based on the older Alexandrian or Coptic calendar, which in turn derives from the Egyptian calendar. Like the Coptic calendar, the Ethiopian calendar has twelve months of exactly 30 days each plus five or six epagomenal days, which comprise a thirteenth month. The Ethiopian months begin on the same days as those of the Coptic calendar, but their names are in Ge'ez.
+
+Like the Julian calendar, the sixth epagomenal day—which in essence is a leap day—is added every four years without exception on 29 August of the Julian calendar, six months before the Julian leap day. Thus, the first day of the Ethiopian year, 1 Mäskäräm, for years between 1901 and 2099 (inclusive), is usually 11 September (Gregorian), but falls on 12 September in years before the Gregorian leap year. Also, a seven- to eight-year gap between the Ethiopian and Gregorian calendars results from an alternate calculation in determining the date of the Annunciation of Jesus.
+
+Another calendrical system was developed around 300 BC by the Oromo. A lunar-stellar calendar, this Oromo calendar relies on astronomical observations of the moon in conjunction with seven particular stars or constellations. Oromo months (stars/lunar phases) are Bittottessa (Iangulum), Camsa (Pleiades), Bufa (Aldebarran), Waxabajjii (Belletrix), Obora Gudda (Central Orion-Saiph), Obora Dikka (Sirius), Birra (full moon), Cikawa (gibbous moon), Sadasaa (quarter moon), Abrasa (large crescent), Ammaji (medium crescent), and Gurrandala (small crescent).[331]
+
+Time in Ethiopia is counted differently from most countries. The Ethiopian day is reckoned as beginning at 06:00 as opposed to 00:00, coinciding with sunrise throughout the year. To convert between the Ethiopian clock and Western clocks, one must add (or subtract) six hours to the Western time. For example, 02:00 local Addis Ababa time is called "8 at night" in Ethiopia, while 20:00 is called "2 in the evening".
+
+The best-known Ethiopian cuisine consists of various types of thick meat stews, known as wat in Ethiopian culture, and vegetable side dishes served atop injera, a large sourdough flatbread made of teff flour. This is not eaten with utensils, but instead one uses the injera to scoop up the entrées and side dishes. Almost universally in Ethiopia, it is common to eat from the same dish in the center of the table with a group of people. It is also a common custom to feed others in your group with your own hands—a tradition referred to as "gursha".[332] Traditional Ethiopian cuisine employs no pork or shellfish of any kind, as they are forbidden in the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, Islamic and Jewish faiths.
+
+Chechebsa, marqa, chukko, michirra and dhanga are the most popular dishes from the Oromo. Kitfo, which originated among the Gurage, is one of the country's most popular delicacies. In addition, Doro wot (ደሮ ወጥ in Amharic) and Tsebehi derho (ጽብሒ ድርሆ in Tigrinya), are other popular dishes, originating from northwestern Ethiopia.[citation needed] Tihlo (ጥሕሎ)—which is a type of dumpling—is prepared from roasted barley flour and originated in the Tigray Region. Tihlo is now very popular in Amhara and spreading further south.[333]
+
+Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation (EBC), formerly known as ETV, is the government-owned national channel. Other television stations in the country include Kana TV.
+
+The most widely circulated newspapers in Ethiopia are Addis Fortune, Capital Ethiopia, Ethiopian Reporter, Addis Zemen[citation needed] (Amharic) and Ethiopian Herald[citation needed].
+
+The sole internet service provider is the national telecommunications firm Ethio Telecom. A large portion of users in the country access the internet through mobile devices.[334] As of July 2016[update], there are around 4.29 million people who have internet access at their home as compared to a quarter of a million users a decade before that.[335] The Ethiopian government has at times intentionally shut down internet service in the country or restricted access to certain social media sites during periods of political unrest. In August 2016, following protest and demonstration in the Oromia Region, all access to the internet was shut down for a period of two days.[336] In June 2017, the government shut down access to the internet for mobile users during a period that coincided with the administration of Ethiopia's university entrance examination. Although the reason for the restriction was not confirmed by the government,[334] the move was similar to a measure taken during the same period in 2016, after a leak of test questions.[337][338]
+
+The music of Ethiopia is extremely diverse, with each of the country's 80 ethnic groups being associated with unique sounds. Ethiopian music uses a distinct modal system that is pentatonic, with characteristically long intervals between some notes. As with many other aspects of Ethiopian culture and tradition, tastes in music and lyrics are strongly linked with those in neighboring Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti, and Sudan.[339][340] Traditional singing in Ethiopia presents diverse styles of polyphony (heterophony, drone, imitation, and counterpoint). Traditionally, lyricism in Ethiopian song writing is strongly associated with views of patriotism or national pride, romance, friendship, and a most unique type of memoire known as 'Tizita'.
+
+The main sports in Ethiopia are track and field (particularly long distance running) and football. Ethiopian athletes have won many Olympic gold medals in track and field, most of them in long distance running.[341] Abebe Bikila became the first athlete from a sub Saharan country to win an Olympic Gold medal when he won the Marathon at the 1960 Rome Olympic Games in a world record time of 2:15:16.[342][343]
+
+Haile Gebrselassie is a world-renowned long distance runner with several world records under his belt. Kenenisa Bekele and Tirunesh Dibaba are also dominant runners, particularly in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters in which they hold the world records.
+
+Other notable Ethiopian athletes are Mamo Wolde, Miruts Yifter, Derartu Tulu, Meseret Defar, Almaz Ayana, Birhane Adere, Tiki Gelana, Genzebe Dibaba, Tariku Bekele, and Gelete Burka. As of 2012[update] and going into 2013, the current national Ethiopian national football team (nicknamed the Walayia Antelopes) made history by qualifying for the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations and reached the last 10 African football teams in the last stage of qualification for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Noted players include captain Adane Girma and top scorer Saladin Said.
+
+Ethiopia has sub-Saharan Africa's longest basketball tradition as it established a national basketball team in 1949.
+

en/188.html.txt

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+
+
+Coordinates: 40°N 100°W / 40°N 100°W / 40; -100
+
+The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country mostly located in central North America, between Canada and Mexico. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions.[i] At 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2), it is the world's third- or fourth-largest country by total area.[e] With a 2019 estimated population of over 328 million,[7] the U.S. is the third most populous country in the world. The Americans are a racially and ethnically diverse population that has been shaped through centuries of immigration. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City.
+
+Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago,[19] and European colonization began in the 16th century. The United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies led to the American Revolutionary War lasting between 1775 and 1783, leading to independence.[20] Beginning in the late 18th century, the United States vigorously expanded across North America, gradually acquiring new territories,[21] killing and displacing Native Americans, and admitting new states. By 1848, the United States spanned the continent.[21]
+Slavery was legal in much of the United States until the second half of the 19th century, when the American Civil War led to its abolition.[22][23]
+
+The Spanish–American War and World War I entrenched the U.S. as a world power, a status confirmed by the outcome of World War II. It was the first country to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have used them in warfare. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower.[24]
+
+The United States is a federal republic and a representative democracy. It is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States (OAS), NATO, and other international organizations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.
+
+A highly developed country, the United States is the world's largest economy and accounts for approximately a quarter of global gross domestic product (GDP).[25] The United States is the world's largest importer and the second-largest exporter of goods, by value.[26][27] Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total,[28] it holds 29.4% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share held by any country.[29] Despite income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, median income, median wealth, human development, per capita GDP, and worker productivity.[30][31] It is the foremost military power in the world, making up more than a third of global military spending,[32] and is a leading political, cultural, and scientific force internationally.[33]
+
+The first known use of the name "America" dates back to 1507, when it appeared on a world map created by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller. On this map, the name applied to South America in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.[34] After returning from his expeditions, Vespucci first postulated that the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern limit, as initially thought by Christopher Columbus, but instead were part of an entirely separate landmass thus far unknown to the Europeans.[35] In 1538, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator used the name "America" on his own world map, applying it to the entire Western Hemisphere.[36]
+
+The first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written by Stephen Moylan, Esq., to Lt. Col. Joseph Reed, George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort.[37][38][39] The first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776.[40]
+
+The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed no later than June 17, 1776, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the 'United States of America'".[41] The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be 'The United States of America'".[42] In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence.[41] This draft of the document did not surface until June 21, 1776, and it is unclear whether it was written before or after Dickinson used the term in his June 17 draft of the Articles of Confederation.[41]
+
+The short form "United States" is also standard. Other common forms are the "U.S.," the "USA," and "America." Colloquial names are the "U.S. of A." and, internationally, the "States." "Columbia," a name popular in poetry and songs of the late 18th century, derives its origin from Christopher Columbus; it appears in the name "District of Columbia." Many landmarks and institutions in the Western Hemisphere bear his name, including the country of Colombia.[43]
+
+The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865.[44] The singular form—e.g., "the United States is"—became popular after the end of the Civil War. The singular form is now standard; the plural form is retained in the idiom "these United States." The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.[45]
+
+A citizen of the United States is an "American." "United States," "American" and "U.S." refer to the country adjectivally ("American values," "U.S. forces"). In English, the word "American" rarely refers to topics or subjects not directly connected with the United States.[46]
+
+It has been generally accepted that the first inhabitants of North America migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 12,000 years ago; however, increasing evidence suggests an even earlier arrival.[19][47][48] After crossing the land bridge, the Paleo-Indians moved southward along the Pacific coast[49] and through an interior ice-free corridor.[50] The Clovis culture, which appeared around 11,000 BC, was initially believed to represent the first wave of human settlement of the Americas.[51][52] It is likely these represent the first of three major waves of migration into North America.[53]
+
+Over time, indigenous cultures in North America grew increasingly complex, and some, such as the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture in the southeast, developed advanced agriculture, grand architecture, and state-level societies.[54] The Mississippian culture flourished in the south from 800 to 1600 AD, extending from the Mexican border down through Florida.[55] Its city state Cahokia is the largest, most complex pre-Columbian archaeological site in the modern-day United States.[56] In the Four Corners region, Ancestral Puebloan culture developed from centuries of agricultural experimentation.[57]
+
+Three UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States are credited to the Pueblos: Mesa Verde National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and Taos Pueblo.[58][59] The earthworks constructed by Native Americans of the Poverty Point culture have also been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. In the southern Great Lakes region, the Iroquois Confederacy was established at some point between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.[60] Most prominent along the Atlantic coast were the Algonquian tribes, who practiced hunting and trapping, along with limited cultivation.
+
+With the progress of European colonization in the territories of the contemporary United States, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[61] The native population of America declined after European arrival for various reasons,[62][63] primarily diseases such as smallpox and measles.[64][65]
+
+Estimating the native population of North America at the time of European contact is difficult.[66][67] Douglas H. Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution estimated that there was a population of 92,916 in the south Atlantic states and a population of 473,616 in the Gulf states,[68] but most academics regard this figure as too low.[66] Anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns believed the populations were much higher, suggesting 1,100,000 along the shores of the gulf of Mexico, 2,211,000 people living between Florida and Massachusetts, 5,250,000 in the Mississippi Valley and tributaries and 697,000 people in the Florida peninsula.[66][67]
+
+In the early days of colonization, many European settlers were subject to food shortages, disease, and attacks from Native Americans. Native Americans were also often at war with neighboring tribes and allied with Europeans in their colonial wars. In many cases, however, natives and settlers came to depend on each other. Settlers traded for food and animal pelts; natives for guns, ammunition and other European goods.[69] Natives taught many settlers to cultivate corn, beans, and squash. European missionaries and others felt it was important to "civilize" the Native Americans and urged them to adopt European agricultural techniques and lifestyles.[70][71]
+
+With the advancement of European colonization in North America, the Native Americans were often conquered and displaced.[72] The first Europeans to arrive in the contiguous United States were Spanish conquistadors such as Juan Ponce de León, who made his first visit to Florida in 1513. Even earlier, Christopher Columbus landed in Puerto Rico on his 1493 voyage. The Spanish set up the first settlements in Florida and New Mexico such as Saint Augustine[73] and Santa Fe. The French established their own as well along the Mississippi River. Successful English settlement on the eastern coast of North America began with the Virginia Colony in 1607 at Jamestown and with the Pilgrims' Plymouth Colony in 1620. Many settlers were dissenting Christian groups who came seeking religious freedom. The continent's first elected legislative assembly, Virginia's House of Burgesses, was created in 1619. The Mayflower Compact, signed by the Pilgrims before disembarking, and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, established precedents for the pattern of representative self-government and constitutionalism that would develop throughout the American colonies.[74][75]
+
+Most settlers in every colony were small farmers, though other industries were formed. Cash crops included tobacco, rice, and wheat. Extraction industries grew up in furs, fishing and lumber. Manufacturers produced rum and ships, and by the late colonial period, Americans were producing one-seventh of the world's iron supply.[76] Cities eventually dotted the coast to support local economies and serve as trade hubs. English colonists were supplemented by waves of Scotch-Irish immigrants and other groups. As coastal land grew more expensive, freed indentured servants claimed lands further west.[77]
+
+A large-scale slave trade with English privateers began.[78] Because of less disease and better food and treatment, the life expectancy of slaves was much higher in North America than further south, leading to a rapid increase in the numbers of slaves.[79][80] Colonial society was largely divided over the religious and moral implications of slavery, and colonies passed acts for and against the practice.[81][82] But by the turn of the 18th century, African slaves were replacing indentured servants for cash crop labor, especially in the South.[83]
+
+With the establishment of the Province of Georgia in 1732, the 13 colonies that would become the United States of America were administered by the British as overseas dependencies.[84] All nonetheless had local governments with elections open to most free men.[85] With extremely high birth rates, low death rates, and steady settlement, the colonial population grew rapidly. Relatively small Native American populations were eclipsed.[86] The Christian revivalist movement of the 1730s and 1740s known as the Great Awakening fueled interest both in religion and in religious liberty.[87]
+
+During the Seven Years' War (known in the United States as the French and Indian War), British forces seized Canada from the French, but the francophone population remained politically isolated from the southern colonies. Excluding the Native Americans, who were being conquered and displaced, the 13 British colonies had a population of over 2.1 million in 1770, about a third that of Britain. Despite continuing, new arrivals, the rate of natural increase was such that by the 1770s only a small minority of Americans had been born overseas.[88] The colonies' distance from Britain had allowed the development of self-government, but their unprecedented success motivated monarchs to periodically seek to reassert royal authority.[89]
+
+In 1774, the Spanish Navy ship Santiago, under Juan Pérez, entered and anchored in an inlet of Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island, in present-day British Columbia. Although the Spanish did not land, natives paddled to the ship to trade furs for abalone shells from California.[90] At the time, the Spanish were able to monopolize the trade between Asia and North America, granting limited licenses to the Portuguese. When the Russians began establishing a growing fur trading system in Alaska, the Spanish began to challenge the Russians, with Pérez's voyage being the first of many to the Pacific Northwest.[91][j]
+
+During his third and final voyage, Captain James Cook became the first European to begin formal contact with Hawaii.[93] Captain Cook's last voyage included sailing along the coast of North America and Alaska searching for a Northwest Passage for approximately nine months.[94]
+
+The American Revolutionary War was the first successful colonial war of independence against a European power. Americans had developed an ideology of "republicanism" asserting that government rested on the will of the people as expressed in their local legislatures. They demanded their rights as Englishmen and "no taxation without representation". The British insisted on administering the empire through Parliament, and the conflict escalated into war.[95]
+
+The Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, which asserted that Great Britain was not protecting Americans' unalienable rights. July 4 is celebrated annually as Independence Day.[96] In 1777, the Articles of Confederation established a decentralized government that operated until 1789.[96]
+
+Following the decisive Franco-American victory at Yorktown in 1781,[97] Britain signed the peace treaty of 1783, and American sovereignty was internationally recognized and the country was granted all lands east of the Mississippi River. Nationalists led the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 in writing the United States Constitution, ratified in state conventions in 1788. The federal government was reorganized into three branches, on the principle of creating salutary checks and balances, in 1789. George Washington, who had led the Continental Army to victory, was the first president elected under the new constitution. The Bill of Rights, forbidding federal restriction of personal freedoms and guaranteeing a range of legal protections, was adopted in 1791.[98]
+
+Although the federal government criminalized the international slave trade in 1808, after 1820, cultivation of the highly profitable cotton crop exploded in the Deep South, and along with it, the slave population.[99][100][101] The Second Great Awakening, especially 1800–1840, converted millions to evangelical Protestantism. In the North, it energized multiple social reform movements, including abolitionism;[102] in the South, Methodists and Baptists proselytized among slave populations.[103]
+
+Americans' eagerness to expand westward prompted a long series of American Indian Wars.[104] The Louisiana Purchase of French-claimed territory in 1803 almost doubled the nation's area.[105] The War of 1812, declared against Britain over various grievances and fought to a draw, strengthened U.S. nationalism.[106] A series of military incursions into Florida led Spain to cede it and other Gulf Coast territory in 1819.[107] The expansion was aided by steam power, when steamboats began traveling along America's large water systems, many of which were connected by new canals, such as the Erie and the I&M; then, even faster railroads began their stretch across the nation's land.[108]
+
+From 1820 to 1850, Jacksonian democracy began a set of reforms which included wider white male suffrage; it led to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854. The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplified the Indian removal policy that forcibly resettled Indians into the west on Indian reservations. The U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845 during a period of expansionist Manifest destiny.[109] The 1846 Oregon Treaty with Britain led to U.S. control of the present-day American Northwest.[110] Victory in the Mexican–American War resulted in the 1848 Mexican Cession of California and much of the present-day American Southwest.[111]
+The California Gold Rush of 1848–49 spurred migration to the Pacific coast, which led to the California Genocide[112][113][114][115] and the creation of additional western states.[116] After the Civil War, new transcontinental railways made relocation easier for settlers, expanded internal trade and increased conflicts with Native Americans.[117] In 1869, a new Peace Policy nominally promised to protect Native Americans from abuses, avoid further war, and secure their eventual U.S. citizenship. Nonetheless, large-scale conflicts continued throughout the West into the 1900s.
+
+Irreconcilable sectional conflict regarding the slavery of Africans and African Americans ultimately led to the American Civil War.[118] Initially, states entering the Union had alternated between slave and free states, keeping a sectional balance in the Senate, while free states outstripped slave states in population and in the House of Representatives. But with additional western territory and more free-soil states, tensions between slave and free states mounted with arguments over federalism and disposition of the territories, as well as whether to expand or restrict slavery.[119]
+
+With the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, conventions in thirteen slave states ultimately declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "South" or the "Confederacy"), while the federal government (the "Union") maintained that secession was illegal.[119] In order to bring about this secession, military action was initiated by the secessionists, and the Union responded in kind. The ensuing war would become the deadliest military conflict in American history, resulting in the deaths of approximately 618,000 soldiers as well as many civilians.[120] The Union initially simply fought to keep the country united. Nevertheless, as casualties mounted after 1863 and Lincoln delivered his Emancipation Proclamation, the main purpose of the war from the Union's viewpoint became the abolition of slavery. Indeed, when the Union ultimately won the war in April 1865, each of the states in the defeated South was required to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery.
+
+The government enacted three constitutional amendments in the years after the war: the aforementioned Thirteenth as well as the Fourteenth Amendment providing citizenship to the nearly four million African Americans who had been slaves,[121] and the Fifteenth Amendment ensuring in theory that African Americans had the right to vote. The war and its resolution led to a substantial increase in federal power[122] aimed at reintegrating and rebuilding the South while guaranteeing the rights of the newly freed slaves.
+
+Reconstruction began in earnest following the war. While President Lincoln attempted to foster friendship and forgiveness between the Union and the former Confederacy, his assassination on April 14, 1865, drove a wedge between North and South again. Republicans in the federal government made it their goal to oversee the rebuilding of the South and to ensure the rights of African Americans. They persisted until the Compromise of 1877 when the Republicans agreed to cease protecting the rights of African Americans in the South in order for Democrats to concede the presidential election of 1876.
+
+Southern white Democrats, calling themselves "Redeemers," took control of the South after the end of Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1910 the Redeemers established so-called Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising most blacks and some poor whites throughout the region. Blacks faced racial segregation, especially in the South.[123] They also occasionally experienced vigilante violence, including lynching.[124]
+
+In the North, urbanization and an unprecedented influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe supplied a surplus of labor for the country's industrialization and transformed its culture.[126] National infrastructure including telegraph and transcontinental railroads spurred economic growth and greater settlement and development of the American Old West. The later invention of electric light and the telephone would also affect communication and urban life.[127]
+
+The United States fought Indian Wars west of the Mississippi River from 1810 to at least 1890.[128] Most of these conflicts ended with the cession of Native American territory and their confinement to Indian reservations. This further expanded acreage under mechanical cultivation, increasing surpluses for international markets.[129] Mainland expansion also included the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867.[130] In 1893, pro-American elements in Hawaii overthrew the monarchy and formed the Republic of Hawaii, which the U.S. annexed in 1898. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were ceded by Spain in the same year, following the Spanish–American War.[131] American Samoa was acquired by the United States in 1900 after the end of the Second Samoan Civil War.[132] The U.S. Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.[133]
+
+Rapid economic development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries fostered the rise of many prominent industrialists. Tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie led the nation's progress in railroad, petroleum, and steel industries. Banking became a major part of the economy, with J. P. Morgan playing a notable role. The American economy boomed, becoming the world's largest, and the United States achieved great power status.[134] These dramatic changes were accompanied by social unrest and the rise of populist, socialist, and anarchist movements.[135] This period eventually ended with the advent of the Progressive Era, which saw significant reforms including women's suffrage, alcohol prohibition, regulation of consumer goods, greater antitrust measures to ensure competition and attention to worker conditions.[136][137][138]
+
+The United States remained neutral from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 until 1917, when it joined the war as an "associated power," alongside the formal Allies of World War I, helping to turn the tide against the Central Powers. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson took a leading diplomatic role at the Paris Peace Conference and advocated strongly for the U.S. to join the League of Nations. However, the Senate refused to approve this and did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles that established the League of Nations.[139]
+
+In 1920, the women's rights movement won passage of a constitutional amendment granting women's suffrage.[140] The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of radio for mass communication and the invention of early television.[141] The prosperity of the Roaring Twenties ended with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. After his election as president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with the New Deal.[142] The Great Migration of millions of African Americans out of the American South began before World War I and extended through the 1960s;[143] whereas the Dust Bowl of the mid-1930s impoverished many farming communities and spurred a new wave of western migration.[144]
+
+At first effectively neutral during World War II, the United States began supplying materiel to the Allies in March 1941 through the Lend-Lease program. On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the Allies against the Axis powers.[145] Although Japan attacked the United States first, the U.S. nonetheless pursued a "Europe first" defense policy.[146] The United States thus left its vast Asian colony, the Philippines, isolated and fighting a losing struggle against Japanese invasion and occupation, as military resources were devoted to the European theater. During the war, the United States was referred to as one of the "Four Policemen"[147] of Allies power who met to plan the postwar world, along with Britain, the Soviet Union and China.[148][149] Although the nation lost around 400,000 military personnel,[150] it emerged relatively undamaged from the war with even greater economic and military influence.[151]
+
+The United States played a leading role in the Bretton Woods and Yalta conferences with the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and other Allies, which signed agreements on new international financial institutions and Europe's postwar reorganization. As an Allied victory was won in Europe, a 1945 international conference held in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter, which became active after the war.[152] The United States and Japan then fought each other in the largest naval battle in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.[153][154] The United States eventually developed the first nuclear weapons and used them on Japan in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese surrendered on September 2, ending World War II.[155][156]
+
+After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for power, influence, and prestige during what became known as the Cold War, driven by an ideological divide between capitalism and communism.[157] They dominated the military affairs of Europe, with the U.S. and its NATO allies on one side and the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies on the other. The U.S. developed a policy of containment towards the expansion of communist influence. While the U.S. and Soviet Union engaged in proxy wars and developed powerful nuclear arsenals, the two countries avoided direct military conflict.[citation needed]
+
+The United States often opposed Third World movements that it viewed as Soviet-sponsored, and occasionally pursued direct action for regime change against left-wing governments, even supporting right-wing authoritarian governments at times.[158] American troops fought communist Chinese and North Korean forces in the Korean War of 1950–53.[159] The Soviet Union's 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite and its 1961 launch of the first manned spaceflight initiated a "Space Race" in which the United States became the first nation to land a man on the moon in 1969.[159] A proxy war in Southeast Asia eventually evolved into full American participation, as the Vietnam War.[citation needed]
+
+At home, the U.S. experienced sustained economic expansion and a rapid growth of its population and middle class. Construction of an Interstate Highway System transformed the nation's infrastructure over the following decades. Millions moved from farms and inner cities to large suburban housing developments.[160][161] In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th and last U.S. state added to the country.[162] The growing Civil Rights Movement used nonviolence to confront segregation and discrimination, with Martin Luther King Jr. becoming a prominent leader and figurehead. A combination of court decisions and legislation, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1968, sought to end racial discrimination.[163][164][165] Meanwhile, a counterculture movement grew which was fueled by opposition to the Vietnam war, black nationalism, and the sexual revolution.
+
+The launch of a "War on Poverty" expanded entitlements and welfare spending, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that provide health coverage to the elderly and poor, respectively, and the means-tested Food Stamp Program and Aid to Families with Dependent Children.[166]
+
+The 1970s and early 1980s saw the onset of stagflation. After his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan responded to economic stagnation with free-market oriented reforms. Following the collapse of détente, he abandoned "containment" and initiated the more aggressive "rollback" strategy towards the USSR.[167][168][169][170][171] After a surge in female labor participation over the previous decade, by 1985 the majority of women aged 16 and over were employed.[172]
+
+The late 1980s brought a "thaw" in relations with the USSR, and its collapse in 1991 finally ended the Cold War.[173][174][175][176] This brought about unipolarity[177] with the U.S. unchallenged as the world's dominant superpower. The concept of Pax Americana, which had appeared in the post-World War II period, gained wide popularity as a term for the post-Cold War new world order.[citation needed]
+
+After the Cold War, the conflict in the Middle East triggered a crisis in 1990, when Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded and attempted to annex Kuwait, an ally of the United States. Fearing the instability would spread to other regions, President George H. W. Bush launched Operation Desert Shield, a defensive force buildup in Saudi Arabia, and Operation Desert Storm, in a staging titled the Gulf War; waged by coalition forces from 34 nations, led by the United States against Iraq ending in the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and restoration of the monarchy.[178]
+
+Originating within U.S. military defense networks, the Internet spread to international academic platforms and then to the public in the 1990s, greatly affecting the global economy, society, and culture.[179] Due to the dot-com boom, stable monetary policy, and reduced social welfare spending, the 1990s saw the longest economic expansion in modern U.S. history.[180] Beginning in 1994, the U.S. entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), prompting trade among the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to soar.[181]
+
+On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people.[182] In response, the United States launched the War on Terror, which included a war in Afghanistan and the 2003–11 Iraq War.[183][184]
+
+Government policy designed to promote affordable housing,[185] widespread failures in corporate and regulatory governance,[186] and historically low interest rates set by the Federal Reserve[187] led to the mid-2000s housing bubble, which culminated with the 2008 financial crisis, the nation's largest economic contraction since the Great Depression.[188] Barack Obama, the first African-American[189] and multiracial[190] president, was elected in 2008 amid the crisis,[191] and subsequently passed stimulus measures and the Dodd–Frank Act in an attempt to mitigate its negative effects and ensure there would not be a repeat of the crisis. In 2010, the Obama administration passed the Affordable Care Act, which made the most sweeping reforms to the nation's healthcare system in nearly five decades, including mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges.[citation needed]
+
+American forces in Iraq were withdrawn in large numbers in 2009 and 2010, and the war in the region was declared formally over in December 2011.[192] But months earlier, Operation Neptune Spear led to the death of the leader of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.[193] In the presidential election of 2016, Republican Donald Trump was elected as the 45th president of the United States. On January 20, 2020, the first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed.[194] As of July 2020, the United States has over 4 million COVID-19 cases and over 145,000 deaths.[195] The United States is, by far, the country with the most cases of COVID-19 since April 11, 2020.[196]
+
+The 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia occupy a combined area of 3,119,884.69 square miles (8,080,464.3 km2). Of this area, 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2) is contiguous land, composing 83.65% of total U.S. land area.[197][198] Hawaii, occupying an archipelago in the central Pacific, southwest of North America, is 10,931 square miles (28,311 km2) in area. The populated territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and U.S. Virgin Islands together cover 9,185 square miles (23,789 km2).[199] Measured by only land area, the United States is third in size behind Russia and China, just ahead of Canada.[200]
+
+The United States is the world's third- or fourth-largest nation by total area (land and water), ranking behind Russia and Canada and nearly equal to China. The ranking varies depending on how two territories disputed by China and India are counted, and how the total size of the United States is measured.[e][201][202]
+
+The coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard gives way further inland to deciduous forests and the rolling hills of the Piedmont.[203] The Appalachian Mountains divide the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the grasslands of the Midwest.[204] The Mississippi–Missouri River, the world's fourth longest river system, runs mainly north–south through the heart of the country. The flat, fertile prairie of the Great Plains stretches to the west, interrupted by a highland region in the southeast.[204]
+
+The Rocky Mountains, west of the Great Plains, extend north to south across the country, peaking around 14,000 feet (4,300 m) in Colorado.[205] Farther west are the rocky Great Basin and deserts such as the Chihuahua and Mojave.[206] The Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges run close to the Pacific coast, both ranges reaching altitudes higher than 14,000 feet (4,300 m). The lowest and highest points in the contiguous United States are in the state of California,[207] and only about 84 miles (135 km) apart.[208] At an elevation of 20,310 feet (6,190.5 m), Alaska's Denali is the highest peak in the country and in North America.[209] Active volcanoes are common throughout Alaska's Alexander and Aleutian Islands, and Hawaii consists of volcanic islands. The supervolcano underlying Yellowstone National Park in the Rockies is the continent's largest volcanic feature.[210]
+
+The United States, with its large size and geographic variety, includes most climate types. To the east of the 100th meridian, the climate ranges from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.[211] The Great Plains west of the 100th meridian are semi-arid. Much of the Western mountains have an alpine climate. The climate is arid in the Great Basin, desert in the Southwest, Mediterranean in coastal California, and oceanic in coastal Oregon and Washington and southern Alaska. Most of Alaska is subarctic or polar. Hawaii and the southern tip of Florida are tropical, as well as its territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific.[212] States bordering the Gulf of Mexico are prone to hurricanes, and most of the world's tornadoes occur in the country, mainly in Tornado Alley areas in the Midwest and South.[213] Overall, the United States has the world's most violent weather, receiving more high-impact extreme weather incidents than any other country in the world.[214]
+
+The U.S. ecology is megadiverse: about 17,000 species of vascular plants occur in the contiguous United States and Alaska, and more than 1,800 species of flowering plants are found in Hawaii, few of which occur on the mainland.[216] The United States is home to 428 mammal species, 784 bird species, 311 reptile species, and 295 amphibian species,[217] as well as about 91,000 insect species.[218]
+
+There are 62 national parks and hundreds of other federally managed parks, forests, and wilderness areas.[219] Altogether, the government owns about 28% of the country's land area,[220] mostly in the western states.[221] Most of this land is protected, though some is leased for oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, or cattle ranching, and about .86% is used for military purposes.[222][223]
+
+Environmental issues include debates on oil and nuclear energy, dealing with air and water pollution, the economic costs of protecting wildlife, logging and deforestation,[224][225] and international responses to global warming.[226][227] The most prominent environmental agency is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created by presidential order in 1970.[228] The idea of wilderness has shaped the management of public lands since 1964, with the Wilderness Act.[229] The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is intended to protect threatened and endangered species and their habitats, which are monitored by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.[230]
+
+The U.S. Census Bureau officially estimated the country's population to be 328,239,523 as of July 1, 2019.[231] In addition, the Census Bureau provides a continuously updated U.S. Population Clock that approximates the latest population of the 50 states and District of Columbia based on the Bureau's most recent demographic trends.[234] According to the clock, on May 23, 2020, the U.S. population exceeded 329 million residents, with a net gain of one person every 19 seconds, or about 4,547 people per day. The United States is the third most populous nation in the world, after China and India. In 2018 the median age of the United States population was 38.1 years.[235]
+
+In 2018, there were almost 90 million immigrants and U.S.-born children of immigrants (second-generation Americans) in the United States, accounting for 28% of the overall U.S. population.[236] The United States has a very diverse population; 37 ancestry groups have more than one million members.[237] German Americans are the largest ethnic group (more than 50 million)—followed by Irish Americans (circa 37 million), Mexican Americans (circa 31 million) and English Americans (circa 28 million).[238][239]
+
+White Americans (mostly European ancestry) are the largest racial group at 73.1% of the population; African Americans are the nation's largest racial minority and third-largest ancestry group.[237] Asian Americans are the country's second-largest racial minority; the three largest Asian American ethnic groups are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, and Indian Americans.[237] The largest American community with European ancestry is German Americans, which consists of more than 14% of the total population.[240] In 2010, the U.S. population included an estimated 5.2 million people with some American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry (2.9 million exclusively of such ancestry) and 1.2 million with some native Hawaiian or Pacific island ancestry (0.5 million exclusively).[241] The census counted more than 19 million people of "Some Other Race" who were "unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories in 2010, more than 18.5 million (97%) of whom are of Hispanic ethnicity.[241]
+
+In 2017, out of the U.S. foreign-born population, some 45% (20.7 million) were naturalized citizens, 27% (12.3 million) were lawful permanent residents (including many eligible to become citizens), 6% (2.2 million) were temporary lawful residents, and 23% (10.5 million) were unauthorized immigrants.[242] Among current living immigrants to the U.S., the top five countries of birth are Mexico, China, India, the Philippines and El Salvador. Until 2017 and 2018, the United States led the world in refugee resettlement for decades, admitted more refugees than the rest of the world combined.[243] From fiscal year 1980 until 2017, 55% of refugees came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 13% from Africa, and 4% from Latin America.[243]
+
+A 2017 United Nations report projected that the U.S. would be one of nine countries in which world population growth through 2050 would be concentrated.[244] A 2020 U.S. Census Bureau report projected the population of the country could be anywhere between 320 million and 447 million by 2060, depending on the rate of in-migration; in all projected scenarios, a lower fertility rate and increases in life expectancy would result in an aging population.[245] The United States has an annual birth rate of 13 per 1,000, which is five births per 1,000 below the world average.[246] Its population growth rate is positive at 0.7%, higher than that of many developed nations.[247]
+
+About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (including suburbs);[202] about half of those reside in cities with populations over 50,000.[248] In 2008, 273 incorporated municipalities had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than one million residents, and four cities had over two million (namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston).[249] Estimates for the year 2018 show that 53 metropolitan areas have populations greater than one million. Many metros in the South, Southwest and West grew significantly between 2010 and 2018. The Dallas and Houston metros increased by more than a million people, while the Washington, D.C., Miami, Atlanta, and Phoenix metros all grew by more than 500,000 people.
+
+English (specifically, American English) is the de facto national language of the United States. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2010, about 230 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. 12% of the population speaks Spanish at home, making it the second most common language. Spanish is also the most widely taught second language.[250][251]
+
+Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii.[252] In addition to English, Alaska recognizes twenty official Native languages,[253][k] and South Dakota recognizes Sioux.[254] While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French.[255] Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms.[256]
+
+Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan[257] is officially recognized by American Samoa and Chamorro[258] is an official language of Guam. Both Carolinian and Chamorro have official recognition in the Northern Mariana Islands.[259]
+Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico and is more widely spoken than English there.[260]
+
+The most widely taught foreign languages in the United States, in terms of enrollment numbers from kindergarten through university undergraduate education, are Spanish (around 7.2 million students), French (1.5 million), and German (500,000). Other commonly taught languages include Latin, Japanese, ASL, Italian, and Chinese.[261][262] 18% of all Americans claim to speak both English and another language.[263]
+
+Religion in the United States (2017)[266]
+
+The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids Congress from passing laws respecting its establishment.
+
+In a 2013 survey, 56% of Americans said religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other Western nation.[267] In a 2009 Gallup poll, 42% of Americans said they attended church weekly or almost weekly; the figures ranged from a low of 23% in Vermont to a high of 63% in Mississippi.[268]
+
+In a 2014 survey, 70.6% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians;[269] Protestants accounted for 46.5%, while Roman Catholics, at 20.8%, formed the largest single Christian group.[270] In 2014, 5.9% of the U.S. adult population claimed a non-Christian religion.[271] These include Judaism (1.9%), Islam (0.9%), Hinduism (0.7%), and Buddhism (0.7%).[271] The survey also reported that 22.8% of Americans described themselves as agnostic, atheist or simply having no religion—up from 8.2% in 1990.[270][272][273] There are also Unitarian Universalist, Scientologist, Baha'i, Sikh, Jain, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Confucian, Satanist, Taoist, Druid, Native American, Afro-American, traditional African, Wiccan, Gnostic, humanist and deist communities.[274][275]
+
+Protestantism is the largest Christian religious grouping in the United States, accounting for almost half of all Americans. Baptists collectively form the largest branch of Protestantism at 15.4%,[276] and the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest individual Protestant denomination at 5.3% of the U.S. population.[276] Apart from Baptists, other Protestant categories include nondenominational Protestants, Methodists, Pentecostals, unspecified Protestants, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, other Reformed, Episcopalians/Anglicans, Quakers, Adventists, Holiness, Christian fundamentalists, Anabaptists, Pietists, and multiple others.[276]
+
+As with other Western countries, the U.S. is becoming less religious. Irreligion is growing rapidly among Americans under 30.[277] Polls show that overall American confidence in organized religion has been declining since the mid to late 1980s,[278] and that younger Americans, in particular, are becoming increasingly irreligious.[271][279] In a 2012 study, the Protestant share of the U.S. population had dropped to 48%, thus ending its status as religious category of the majority for the first time.[280][281] Americans with no religion have 1.7 children compared to 2.2 among Christians. The unaffiliated are less likely to marry with 37% marrying compared to 52% of Christians.[282]
+
+The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. By contrast, religion plays the least important role in New England and in the Western United States.[268]
+
+As of 2018[update], 52% of Americans age 15 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 32% had never been married.[283] Women now work mostly outside the home and receive the majority of bachelor's degrees.[284]
+
+The U.S. teenage pregnancy rate is 26.5 per 1,000 women. The rate has declined by 57% since 1991.[285] Abortion is legal throughout the country. Abortion rates, currently 241 per 1,000 live births and 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44, are falling but remain higher than most Western nations.[286] In 2013, the average age at first birth was 26 and 41% of births were to unmarried women.[287]
+
+The total fertility rate in 2016 was 1820.5 births per 1000 women.[288] Adoption in the United States is common and relatively easy from a legal point of view (compared to other Western countries).[289] As of 2001[update], with more than 127,000 adoptions, the U.S. accounted for nearly half of the total number of adoptions worldwide.[needs update][290] Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide, and it is legal for same-sex couples to adopt. Polygamy is illegal throughout the U.S.[291]
+
+In 2019, the U.S. had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households.[292]
+
+The United States had a life expectancy of 78.6 years at birth in 2017, which was the third year of declines in life expectancy following decades of continuous increase. The recent decline, primarily among the age group 25 to 64, is largely due to sharp increases in the drug overdose and suicide rates; the country has one of the highest suicide rates among wealthy countries.[293][294] Life expectancy was highest among Asians and Hispanics and lowest among blacks.[295][296] According to CDC and Census Bureau data, deaths from suicide, alcohol and drug overdoses hit record highs in 2017.[297]
+
+Increasing obesity in the United States and health improvements elsewhere contributed to lowering the country's rank in life expectancy from 11th in the world in 1987, to 42nd in 2007, and as of 2017 the country had the lowest life expectancy among Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and seven countries of western Europe.[298][299] Obesity rates have more than doubled in the last 30 years and are the highest in the industrialized world.[300][301] Approximately one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight.[302] Obesity-related type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.[303]
+
+In 2010, coronary artery disease, lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and traffic accidents caused the most years of life lost in the U.S. Low back pain, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety caused the most years lost to disability. The most harmful risk factors were poor diet, tobacco smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, physical inactivity, and alcohol use. Alzheimer's disease, drug abuse, kidney disease, cancer, and falls caused the most additional years of life lost over their age-adjusted 1990 per-capita rates.[304] U.S. teenage pregnancy and abortion rates are substantially higher than in other Western nations, especially among blacks and Hispanics.[305]
+
+Health-care coverage in the United States is a combination of public and private efforts and is not universal. In 2017, 12.2% of the population did not carry health insurance.[306] The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue.[307][308] Federal legislation, passed in early 2010, roughly halved the uninsured share of the population, though the bill and its ultimate effect are issues of controversy.[309][310] The U.S. health-care system far outspends any other nation, measured both in per capita spending and as percentage of GDP.[311] At the same time, the U.S. is a global leader in medical innovation.[312]
+
+American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. In most states, children are required to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn 18 (generally bringing them through twelfth grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at 16 or 17.[313]
+
+About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.[314] The U.S. spends more on education per student than any nation in the world, spending more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student.[315][needs update] Some 80% of U.S. college students attend public universities.[316]
+
+Of Americans 25 and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees.[317] The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%.[202][318] The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.[319]
+
+The United States has many private and public institutions of higher education. The majority of the world's top universities, as listed by various ranking organizations, are in the U.S.[320][321][322] There are also local community colleges with generally more open admission policies, shorter academic programs, and lower tuition.
+
+In 2018, U21, a network of research-intensive universities, ranked the United States first in the world for breadth and quality of higher education, and 15th when GDP was a factor.[323] As for public expenditures on higher education, the U.S. trails some other OECD nations but spends more per student than the OECD average, and more than all nations in combined public and private spending.[315][324] As of 2018[update], student loan debt exceeded 1.5 trillion dollars.[325][326]
+
+The United States is a federal republic of 50 states, a federal district, five territories and several uninhabited island possessions.[327][328][329] It is the world's oldest surviving federation. It is a federal republic and a representative democracy, "in which majority rule is tempered by minority rights protected by law."[330] For 2018, the U.S. ranked 25th on the Democracy Index.[331] On Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index its public sector position deteriorated from a score of 76 in 2015 to 69 in 2019.[332]
+
+In the American federalist system, citizens are usually subject to three levels of government: federal, state, and local. The local government's duties are commonly split between county and municipal governments. In almost all cases, executive and legislative officials are elected by a plurality vote of citizens by district.
+
+The government is regulated by a system of checks and balances defined by the U.S. Constitution, which serves as the country's supreme legal document.[333] The original text of the Constitution establishes the structure and responsibilities of the federal government and its relationship with the individual states. Article One protects the right to the "great writ" of habeas corpus. The Constitution has been amended 27 times;[334] the first ten amendments, which make up the Bill of Rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment form the central basis of Americans' individual rights. All laws and governmental procedures are subject to judicial review and any law ruled by the courts to be in violation of the Constitution is voided. The principle of judicial review, not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was established by the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison (1803)[335] in a decision handed down by Chief Justice John Marshall.[336]
+
+The federal government comprises three branches:
+
+The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each representing a congressional district for a two-year term. House seats are apportioned among the states by population. Each state then draws single-member districts to conform with the census apportionment. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories each have one member of Congress—these members are not allowed to vote.[341]
+
+The Senate has 100 members with each state having two senators, elected at-large to six-year terms; one-third of Senate seats are up for election every two years. The District of Columbia and the five major U.S. territories do not have senators.[341] The president serves a four-year term and may be elected to the office no more than twice. The president is not elected by direct vote, but by an indirect electoral college system in which the determining votes are apportioned to the states and the District of Columbia.[342] The Supreme Court, led by the chief justice of the United States, has nine members, who serve for life.[343]
+
+The state governments are structured in a roughly similar fashion, though Nebraska has a unicameral legislature.[344] The governor (chief executive) of each state is directly elected. Some state judges and cabinet officers are appointed by the governors of the respective states, while others are elected by popular vote.
+
+The 50 states are the principal administrative divisions in the country. These are subdivided into counties or county equivalents and further divided into municipalities. The District of Columbia is a federal district that contains the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C.[345] The states and the District of Columbia choose the president of the United States. Each state has presidential electors equal to the number of their representatives and senators in Congress; the District of Columbia has three (because of the 23rd Amendment).[346] Territories of the United States such as Puerto Rico do not have presidential electors, and so people in those territories cannot vote for the president.[341]
+
+The United States also observes tribal sovereignty of the American Indian nations to a limited degree, as it does with the states' sovereignty. American Indians are U.S. citizens and tribal lands are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress and the federal courts. Like the states they have a great deal of autonomy, but also like the states, tribes are not allowed to make war, engage in their own foreign relations, or print and issue currency.[347]
+
+Citizenship is granted at birth in all states, the District of Columbia, and all major U.S. territories except American Samoa.[348][349][m]
+
+The United States has operated under a two-party system for most of its history.[352] For elective offices at most levels, state-administered primary elections choose the major party nominees for subsequent general elections. Since the general election of 1856, the major parties have been the Democratic Party, founded in 1824, and the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Since the Civil War, only one third-party presidential candidate—former president Theodore Roosevelt, running as a Progressive in 1912—has won as much as 20% of the popular vote. The president and vice president are elected by the Electoral College.[353]
+
+In American political culture, the center-right Republican Party is considered "conservative" and the center-left Democratic Party is considered "liberal."[354][355] The states of the Northeast and West Coast and some of the Great Lakes states, known as "blue states," are relatively liberal. The "red states" of the South and parts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains are relatively conservative.
+
+Republican Donald Trump, the winner of the 2016 presidential election, is serving as the 45th president of the United States.[356] Leadership in the Senate includes Republican vice president Mike Pence, Republican president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.[357] Leadership in the House includes Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.[358]
+
+In the 116th United States Congress, the House of Representatives is controlled by the Democratic Party and the Senate is controlled by the Republican Party, giving the U.S. a split Congress. The Senate consists of 53 Republicans and 45 Democrats with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats; the House consists of 233 Democrats, 196 Republicans, and 1 Libertarian.[359] Of state governors, there are 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats. Among the D.C. mayor and the five territorial governors, there are two Republicans, one Democrat, one New Progressive, and two Independents.[360]
+
+The United States has an established structure of foreign relations. It is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. New York City is home to the United Nations Headquarters. Almost all countries have embassies in Washington, D.C., and many have consulates around the country. Likewise, nearly all nations host American diplomatic missions. However, Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, and the Republic of China (Taiwan) do not have formal diplomatic relations with the United States (although the U.S. still maintains unofficial relations with Bhutan and Taiwan).[361] It is a member of the G7,[362] G20, and OECD.
+
+The United States has a "Special Relationship" with the United Kingdom[363] and strong ties with India, Canada,[364] Australia,[365] New Zealand,[366] the Philippines,[367] Japan,[368] South Korea,[369] Israel,[370] and several European Union countries, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Poland.[371] It works closely with fellow NATO members on military and security issues and with its neighbors through the Organization of American States and free trade agreements such as the trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Colombia is traditionally considered by the United States as its most loyal ally in South America.[372][373]
+
+The U.S. exercises full international defense authority and responsibility for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau through the Compact of Free Association.[374]
+
+Taxation in the United States is levied at the federal, state, and local government levels. This includes taxes on income, payroll, property, sales, imports, estates, and gifts, as well as various fees. Taxation in the United States is based on citizenship, not residency.[375] Both non-resident citizens and Green Card holders living abroad are taxed on their income irrespective of where they live or where their income is earned. The United States is one of the only countries in the world to do so.[376]
+
+In 2010 taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP.[377] Based on CBO estimates,[378] under 2013 tax law the top 1% will be paying the highest average tax rates since 1979, while other income groups will remain at historic lows.[379] For 2018, the effective tax rate for the wealthiest 400 households was 23%, compared to 24.2% for the bottom half of U.S. households.[380]
+
+
+
+During fiscal year 2012, the federal government spent $3.54 trillion on a budget or cash basis, down $60 billion or 1.7% vs. fiscal year 2011 spending of $3.60 trillion. Major categories of fiscal year 2012 spending included: Medicare & Medicaid (23%), Social Security (22%), Defense Department (19%), non-defense discretionary (17%), other mandatory (13%) and interest (6%).[382]
+
+The total national debt of the United States in the United States was $18.527 trillion (106% of the GDP) in 2014.[383][n] The United States has the largest external debt in the world[387] and the 34th largest government debt as a % of GDP in the world.[388]
+
+The president is the commander-in-chief of the country's armed forces and appoints its leaders, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States Department of Defense administers the armed forces, including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. The Coast Guard is run by the Department of Homeland Security in peacetime and by the Department of the Navy during times of war. In 2008, the armed forces had 1.4 million personnel on active duty. The Reserves and National Guard brought the total number of troops to 2.3 million. The Department of Defense also employed about 700,000 civilians, not including contractors.[389]
+
+Military service is voluntary, though conscription may occur in wartime through the Selective Service System.[390] American forces can be rapidly deployed by the Air Force's large fleet of transport aircraft, the Navy's 11 active aircraft carriers, and Marine expeditionary units at sea with the Navy's Atlantic and Pacific fleets. The military operates 865 bases and facilities abroad,[391] and maintains deployments greater than 100 active duty personnel in 25 foreign countries.[392]
+
+The military budget of the United States in 2011 was more than $700 billion, 41% of global military spending. At 4.7% of GDP, the rate was the second-highest among the top 15 military spenders, after Saudi Arabia.[393]  Defense spending plays a major role in science and technology investment, with roughly half of U.S. federal research and development funded by the Department of Defense.[394] Defense's share of the overall U.S. economy has generally declined in recent decades, from Cold War peaks of 14.2% of GDP in 1953 and 69.5% of federal outlays in 1954 to 4.7% of GDP and 18.8% of federal outlays in 2011.[395]
+
+The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.[396] More than 90% of the world's 14,000 nuclear weapons are owned by Russia and the United States.[397]
+
+Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police departments and sheriff's offices, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties, including protecting civil rights, national security and enforcing U.S. federal courts' rulings and federal laws.[398] State courts conduct most criminal trials while federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state criminal courts.
+
+A cross-sectional analysis of the World Health Organization Mortality Database from 2010 showed that United States "homicide rates were 7.0 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25.2 times higher."[399] In 2016, the US murder rate was 5.4 per 100,000.[400] Gun ownership rights, guaranteed by the Second Amendment, continue to be the subject of contention.
+
+The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world.[401] As of 2020, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that there were some 2.3 million people incarcerated.[402]  The imprisonment rate for all prisoners sentenced to more than a year in state or federal facilities is 478 per 100,000 in 2013.[403] According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of inmates held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses.[404] About 9% of prisoners are held in privatized prisons.[402] The practice of privately operated prisons began in the 1980s and has been a subject of contention.[405]
+
+Capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and at the state level in 30 states.[406][407] No executions took place from 1967 to 1977, owing in part to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down arbitrary imposition of the death penalty. Since the decision there have been more than 1,300 executions, a majority of these taking place in three states: Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.[408] Meanwhile, several states have either abolished or struck down death penalty laws. In 2019, the country had the sixth-highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt.[409]
+
+According to the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. GDP of $16.8 trillion constitutes 24% of the gross world product at market exchange rates and over 19% of the gross world product at purchasing power parity (PPP).[417] The United States is the largest importer of goods and second-largest exporter, though exports per capita are relatively low. In 2010, the total U.S. trade deficit was $635 billion.[418] Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, and Germany are its top trading partners.[419]
+
+From 1983 to 2008, U.S. real compounded annual GDP growth was 3.3%, compared to a 2.3% weighted average for the rest of the G7.[420] The country ranks ninth in the world in nominal GDP per capita[421] and sixth in GDP per capita at PPP.[417] The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.[422]
+
+In 2009, the private sector was estimated to constitute 86.4% of the economy.[425] While its economy has reached a postindustrial level of development, the United States remains an industrial power.[426] Consumer spending comprised 68% of the U.S. economy in 2015.[427] In August 2010, the American labor force consisted of 154.1 million people (50%). With 21.2 million people, government is the leading field of employment. The largest private employment sector is health care and social assistance, with 16.4 million people. It has a smaller welfare state and redistributes less income through government action than most European nations.[428]
+
+The United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation[429] and is one of a few countries in the world without paid family leave as a legal right.[430] While federal law does not require sick leave, it is a common benefit for government workers and full-time employees at corporations.[431] 74% of full-time American workers get paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although only 24% of part-time workers get the same benefits.[431] In 2009, the United States had the third-highest workforce productivity per person in the world, behind Luxembourg and Norway. It was fourth in productivity per hour, behind those two countries and the Netherlands.[432]
+
+
+
+The United States has been a leader in technological innovation since the late 19th century and scientific research since the mid-20th century. Methods for producing interchangeable parts were developed by the U.S. War Department by the Federal Armories during the first half of the 19th century. This technology, along with the establishment of a machine tool industry, enabled the U.S. to have large-scale manufacturing of sewing machines, bicycles, and other items in the late 19th century and became known as the American system of manufacturing. Factory electrification in the early 20th century and introduction of the assembly line and other labor-saving techniques created the system of mass production.[433] In the 21st century, approximately two-thirds of research and development funding comes from the private sector.[434] The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor.[435][436]
+
+In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's research laboratory, one of the first of its kind, developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera.[437] The latter led to emergence of the worldwide entertainment industry. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.[438]
+
+The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann, to immigrate to the United States.[439] During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age, while the Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and aeronautics.[440][441]
+
+The invention of the transistor in the 1950s, a key active component in practically all modern electronics, led to many technological developments and a significant expansion of the U.S. technology industry.[442] This, in turn, led to the establishment of many new technology companies and regions around the country such as Silicon Valley in California. Advancements by American microprocessor companies such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Intel along with both computer software and hardware companies that include Adobe Systems, Apple Inc., IBM, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems created and popularized the personal computer. The ARPANET was developed in the 1960s to meet Defense Department requirements, and became the first of a series of networks which evolved into the Internet.[443]
+
+Accounting for 4.24% of the global population, Americans collectively possess 29.4% of the world's total wealth, and Americans make up roughly half of the world's population of millionaires.[444] The Global Food Security Index ranked the U.S. number one for food affordability and overall food security in March 2013.[445] Americans on average have more than twice as much living space per dwelling and per person as European Union residents, and more than every EU nation.[446] For 2017 the United Nations Development Programme ranked the United States 13th among 189 countries in its Human Development Index and 25th among 151 countries in its inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI).[447]
+
+Wealth, like income and taxes, is highly concentrated; the richest 10% of the adult population possess 72% of the country's household wealth, while the bottom half claim only 2%.[448] According to a September 2017 report by the Federal Reserve, the top 1% controlled 38.6% of the country's wealth in 2016.[449] According to a 2018 study by the OECD, the United States has a larger percentage of low-income workers than almost any other developed nation. This is largely because at-risk workers get almost no government support and are further set back by a very weak collective bargaining system.[450] The top one percent of income-earners accounted for 52 percent of the income gains from 2009 to 2015, where income is defined as market income excluding government transfers.[451] In 2018, U.S. income inequality reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau.[452]
+
+After years of stagnation, median household income reached a record high in 2016 following two consecutive years of record growth. Income inequality remains at record highs however, with the top fifth of earners taking home more than half of all overall income.[454] The rise in the share of total annual income received by the top one percent, which has more than doubled from nine percent in 1976 to 20 percent in 2011, has significantly affected income inequality,[455] leaving the United States with one of the widest income distributions among OECD nations.[456]  The extent and relevance of income inequality is a matter of debate.[457][458][459]
+
+Between June 2007 and November 2008, the global recession led to falling asset prices around the world. Assets owned by Americans lost about a quarter of their value.[460] Since peaking in the second quarter of 2007, household wealth was down $14 trillion, but has since increased $14 trillion over 2006 levels.[461] At the end of 2014, household debt amounted to $11.8 trillion,[462] down from $13.8 trillion at the end of 2008.[463]
+
+There were about 578,424 sheltered and unsheltered homeless persons in the US in January 2014, with almost two-thirds staying in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program.[464] In 2011, 16.7 million children lived in food-insecure households, about 35% more than 2007 levels, though only 1.1% of U.S. children, or 845,000, saw reduced food intake or disrupted eating patterns at some point during the year, and most cases were not chronic.[465] As of June 2018[update], 40 million people, roughly 12.7% of the U.S. population, were living in poverty, with 18.5 million of those living in deep poverty (a family income below one-half of the poverty threshold) and over five million live "in 'Third World' conditions." In 2016, 13.3 million children were living in poverty, which made up 32.6% of the impoverished population.[466] In 2017, the U.S. state or territory with the lowest poverty rate was New Hampshire (7.6%), and the one with the highest was American Samoa (65%).[467][468][469]
+
+Personal transportation is dominated by automobiles, which operate on a network of 4 million miles (6.4 million kilometers) of public roads.[471] The United States has the world's second-largest automobile market,[472] and has the highest rate of per-capita vehicle ownership in the world, with 765 vehicles per 1,000 Americans (1996).[473][needs update] In 2017, there were 255,009,283 non-two wheel motor vehicles, or about 910 vehicles per 1,000 people.[474]
+
+The civil airline industry is entirely privately owned and has been largely deregulated since 1978, while most major airports are publicly owned.[475] The three largest airlines in the world by passengers carried are US-based; American Airlines is number one after its 2013 acquisition by US Airways.[476] Of the world's 50 busiest passenger airports, 16 are in the United States, including the busiest, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport.[477]
+
+The United States energy market is about 29,000 terawatt hours per year.[478] In 2005, 40% of this energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 22% from natural gas. The remainder was supplied by nuclear and renewable energy sources.[479]
+
+Since 2007, the total greenhouse gas emissions by the United States are the second highest by country, exceeded only by China.[480] The United States has historically been the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gas emissions per capita remain high.[481]
+
+The United States is home to many cultures and a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.[483][484] Aside from the Native American, Native Hawaiian, and Native Alaskan populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors settled or immigrated within the past five centuries.[485] Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.[483][486] More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.[483]
+
+Americans have traditionally been characterized by a strong work ethic, competitiveness, and individualism,[487] as well as a unifying belief in an "American creed" emphasizing liberty, equality, private property, democracy, rule of law, and a preference for limited government.[488] Americans are extremely charitable by global standards. According to a 2006 British study, Americans gave 1.67% of GDP to charity, more than any other nation studied.[489][490][491]
+
+The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants.[492] Whether this perception is accurate has been a topic of debate.[493][494][495][496][420][497] While mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,[498] scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.[499] While Americans tend  to greatly value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is also generally seen as a positive attribute.[500]
+
+In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.[501] A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."[502]
+
+Twelve U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Bob Dylan in 2016. William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[503] Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.[504]
+
+The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty, and later Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of American philosophical academia. John Rawls and Robert Nozick also led a revival of political philosophy.
+
+In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.[505] Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new, individualistic styles. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.[506] Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams.[507]
+
+Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain with about three-quarters of grain products made of wheat flour[508] and many dishes use indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers.[509] These homegrown foods are part of a shared national menu on one of America's most popular holidays, Thanksgiving, when some Americans make traditional foods to celebrate the occasion.[510]
+
+The American fast food industry, the world's largest,[511] pioneered the drive-through format in the 1940s.[512] Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.[513] Americans drink three times as much coffee as tea.[514] Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.[515][516]
+
+Although little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music.
+
+The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European and African traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s.[517]
+
+Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. Rock bands such as Metallica, the Eagles, and Aerosmith are among the highest grossing in worldwide sales.[518][519][520] In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk.
+
+More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities,[517] as have contemporary musical artists such as Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West, and Ariana Grande.[521]
+
+Hollywood, a northern district of Los Angeles, California, is one of the leaders in motion picture production.[522] The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope.[523] Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, although in the 21st century an increasing number of films are not made there, and film companies have been subject to the forces of globalization.[524]
+
+Director D. W. Griffith, the top American filmmaker during the silent film period, was central to the development of film grammar, and producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising.[525] Directors such as John Ford redefined the image of the American Old West, and, like others such as John Huston, broadened the possibilities of cinema with location shooting. The industry enjoyed its golden years, in what is commonly referred to as the "Golden Age of Hollywood," from the early sound period until the early 1960s,[526] with screen actors such as John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe becoming iconic figures.[527][528] In the 1970s, "New Hollywood" or the "Hollywood Renaissance"[529] was defined by grittier films influenced by French and Italian realist pictures of the post-war period.[530] In more recent times, directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron have gained renown for their blockbuster films, often characterized by high production costs and earnings.
+
+Notable films topping the American Film Institute's AFI 100 list include Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), which is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time,[531][532] Casablanca (1942), The Godfather (1972), Gone with the Wind (1939), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Graduate (1967), On the Waterfront (1954), Schindler's List (1993), Singin' in the Rain (1952), It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).[533] The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, have been held annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1929,[534] and the Golden Globe Awards have been held annually since January 1944.[535]
+
+American football is by several measures the most popular spectator sport;[537] the National Football League (NFL) has the highest average attendance of any sports league in the world, and the Super Bowl is watched by tens of millions globally. Baseball has been regarded as the U.S. national sport since the late 19th century, with Major League Baseball (MLB) being the top league. Basketball and ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports, with the top leagues being the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Hockey League (NHL). College football and basketball attract large audiences.[538] In soccer, the country hosted the 1994 FIFA World Cup, the men's national soccer team qualified for ten World Cups and the women's team has won the FIFA Women's World Cup four times; Major League Soccer is the sport's highest league in the United States (featuring 23 American and three Canadian teams). The market for professional sports in the United States is roughly $69 billion, roughly 50% larger than that of all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined.[539]
+
+Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri were the first ever Olympic Games held outside of Europe.[540] As of 2017[update], the United States has won 2,522 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 305 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most behind Norway.[541]
+While most major U.S. sports such as baseball and American football have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, some of which have become popular worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.[542] The most watched individual sports are golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR.[543][544]
+
+The four major broadcasters in the U.S. are the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Fox Broadcasting Company (FOX). The four major broadcast television networks are all commercial entities. Cable television offers hundreds of channels catering to a variety of niches.[545] Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercial, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.[546]
+
+In 1998, the number of U.S. commercial radio stations had grown to 4,793 AM stations and 5,662 FM stations. In addition, there are 1,460 public radio stations. Most of these stations are run by universities and public authorities for educational purposes and are financed by public or private funds, subscriptions, and corporate underwriting. Much public-radio broadcasting is supplied by NPR. NPR was incorporated in February 1970 under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967; its television counterpart, PBS, was created by the same legislation. As of September 30, 2014[update], there are 15,433 licensed full-power radio stations in the U.S. according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).[547]
+
+Well-known newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today.[548] Although the cost of publishing has increased over the years, the price of newspapers has generally remained low, forcing newspapers to rely more on advertising revenue and on articles provided by a major wire service, such as the Associated Press or Reuters, for their national and world coverage. With very few exceptions, all the newspapers in the U.S. are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families. Major cities often have "alternative weeklies" to complement the mainstream daily papers, such as New York City's The Village Voice or Los Angeles' LA Weekly. Major cities may also support a local business journal, trade papers relating to local industries, and papers for local ethnic and social groups. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon, and Twitter.[549]
+
+More than 800 publications are produced in Spanish, the second most commonly used language in the United States behind English.[550][551]
+
+Internet sources
+

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+Mount Etna, or Etna (Italian: Etna [ˈɛtna] or Mongibello [mondʒiˈbɛllo]; Sicilian: Mungibeddu [mʊndʒɪbˈbɛɖɖʊ] or a Muntagna; Latin: Aetna; Greek: Αίτνα), is an active stratovolcano on the east coast of Sicily, Italy, in the Metropolitan City of Catania, between the cities of Messina and Catania. It lies above the convergent plate margin between the African Plate and the Eurasian Plate. It is the highest active volcano in Europe outside the Caucasus[3] and the highest peak in Italy south of the Alps with a current height of 3,326 m (10,912 ft), though this varies with summit eruptions. Etna covers an area of 1,190 km2 (459 sq mi) with a basal circumference of 140 km (87 miles). This makes it by far the largest of the three active volcanoes in Italy, being about two and a half times the height of the next largest, Mount Vesuvius. Only Mount Teide on Tenerife in the Canary Islands surpasses it in the whole of the European–North-African region west of the Black Sea.[4] In Greek mythology, the deadly monster Typhon was trapped under this mountain by Zeus, the god of the sky and thunder and king of gods, and the forges of Hephaestus were said also to be underneath it.[5]
+
+Mount Etna is one of the world's most active volcanoes and is in an almost constant state of activity. The fertile volcanic soils support extensive agriculture, with vineyards and orchards spread across the lower slopes of the mountain and the broad Plain of Catania to the south. Due to its history of recent activity and nearby population, Mount Etna has been designated a Decade Volcano by the United Nations.[6] In June 2013, it was added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.[7]
+
+The word Etna is from the Greek αἴθω (aithō), meaning "I burn", through an iotacist pronunciation.[8] In Classical Greek, it is called Αἴτνη (Aítnē),[9] a name given also to Catania and the city originally known as Inessa. In Latin it is called Aetna. In Arabic, it was called جبل النار Jabal al-Nār (the Mountain of Fire).[10]
+
+It is also known as Mungibeddu in Sicilian and Mongibello or Montebello in Italian (the Italian word literally means "beautiful mountain"). According to another hypothesis, the term Mongibello comes from the Latin Mulciber (qui ignem mulcet, "who placates the fire"), one of the Latin names of the Roman god Vulcan.[citation needed] Another theory is that Mongibello came from the Italian word monte plus the Arabic word jabal, both meaning "mountain."
+
+Today, the name Mongibello is used for the area of Mount Etna containing the two central craters, and the craters located southeast and northeast of the volcanic cone.
+
+The name Mongibel is found in Arthurian Romance, as the name of the otherworld castle (or realm) of Morgan le Fay and her half-brother, King Arthur, localised at Etna, according to traditions concerning them derived from the stories told by the Breton conteurs who accompanied the Norman occupiers of Sicily.
+What were originally Welsh conceptions concerning a dwarf king of a paradisal, Celtic underworld became attached to the quasi-historic figure of Arthur as "Ruler of the Antipodes" and were then transplanted into a Sicilian milieu, by Bretons impressed by the already otherworldly associations of the great, volcanic mountain of their new home. Mediaevalist Roger Sherman Loomis quotes passages from the works of Gervase of Tilbury and Caesarius of Heisterbach (dating from the late twelfth century) featuring accounts of Arthur's returning of a lost horse which had strayed into his subterranean kingdom beneath Etna. Caesarius quotes as his authority for the story a certain canon Godescalcus of Bonn, who considered it a matter of historical fact of the time of Emperor Henry's conquest of Sicily circa 1194. Caesarius employs in his account the Latin phrase in monte Gyber ("within Etna") to describe the location of Arthur's kingdom.[11][12][13]
+
+The Fada de Gibel of the Castle of Gibaldar (Fairy of Etna) appears in Jaufre, the only surviving Arthurian romance in the Occitan language, the composition of which is dated to between 1180 and 1230. However, in Jaufre, while it is clear from her name that the fairy queen in question is Morgan le Fay, the rich underworld queendom of which she is the mistress is accessed, not through a fiery grotto on the slopes of Etna, but through a 'fountain' (i.e., a spring) – a circumstance more in keeping with Morgan's original watery, rather than fiery, associations, before her incorporation into the folklore of Sicily.[14] For another Sicilian conception of the fairy realm or castle of Morgan le Fay – see Fata Morgana (mirage) re. an optical phenomenon common in the Strait of Messina.
+
+Volcanic activity first took place at Etna about 500,000 years ago, with eruptions occurring beneath the sea off the ancient coastline of Sicily.[15] About 300,000 years ago, volcanism began occurring to the southwest of the summit (centre top of the volcano), then activity moved towards the present centre 170,000 years ago. Eruptions at this time built up the first major volcanic edifice, forming a stratovolcano in alternating explosive and effusive eruptions. The growth of the mountain was occasionally interrupted by major eruptions, leading to the collapse of the summit to form calderas.
+
+From about 35,000 to 15,000 years ago, Etna experienced some highly explosive eruptions, generating large pyroclastic flows, which left extensive ignimbrite deposits. Ash from these eruptions has been found as far away as south of Rome's border, 800 km (497 mi) to the north.
+
+Thousands of years ago, the eastern flank of the mountain experienced a catastrophic collapse, generating an enormous landslide in an event similar to that seen in the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. The landslide left a large depression in the side of the volcano, known as 'Valle del Bove' (Valley of the Ox). Research published in 2006 suggested this occurred around 8,000 years ago, and caused a huge tsunami, which left its mark in several places in the eastern Mediterranean. It may have been the reason the settlement of Atlit Yam (Israel), now below sea level, was suddenly abandoned around that time.[16]
+
+The steep walls of the valley have suffered subsequent collapses on numerous occasions. The strata exposed in the valley walls provide an important and easily accessible record of Etna's eruptive history.
+
+The most recent collapse event at the summit of Etna is thought to have occurred about 2,000 years ago, forming what is known as the Piano Caldera. This caldera has been almost entirely filled by subsequent lava eruptions but is still visible as a distinct break in the slope of the mountain near the base of the present-day summit cone.
+
+Mount Etna is moving towards the Mediterranean Sea at an average rate of 14 mm (0.55 in) per year, the massif sliding on an unconsolidated layer above the older sloping terrain.[17][18]
+
+Eruptions of Etna follow a variety of patterns. Most occur at the summit, where there are currently (as of 2019)[update] five distinct craters – the Northeast Crater, the Voragine, the Bocca Nuova, and the Southeast Crater Complex (2). Other eruptions occur on the flanks, which have more than 300 vents ranging in size from small holes in the ground to large craters hundreds of metres across. Summit eruptions can be highly explosive and spectacular but rarely threaten the inhabited areas around the volcano. In contrast, flank eruptions can occur down to a few hundred metres altitude, close to or even well within the inhabited areas. Numerous villages and small towns lie around or on cones of past flank eruptions. Since the year AD 1600, at least 60 flank eruptions and countless summit eruptions have occurred; nearly half of these have happened since the start of the 20th century. Since 2000, Etna has had four flank eruptions – in 2001, 2002–2003, 2004–2005, and 2008–2009. Summit eruptions occurred in 2006, 2007–2008, January–April 2012, in July–October 2012 and again in December 2018.
+
+The first known record of eruption at Etna is that of Diodorus Siculus.[19]
+
+In 396 BC, an eruption of Etna reportedly thwarted the Carthaginians in their attempt to advance on Syracuse during the Second Sicilian War.
+
+A particularly violent explosive (Plinian) summit eruption occurred in 122 BC, and caused heavy tephra falls to the southeast, including the town of Catania, where many roofs collapsed.[20] To help with reconstruction after the devastating effects of the eruption, the Roman government exempted the population of Catania from paying taxes for ten years.[citation needed]
+
+The Roman poet Virgil gave what was probably a first-hand description of an eruption in the Aeneid.[21]
+
+During the first 1500 years AD, many eruptions went unrecorded (or records have been lost); among the more significant are: (1) an eruption in about 1030 AD near Monte Ilice on the lower southeast flank, which produced a lava flow that travelled about 10 km, reaching the sea north of Acireale; the villages of Santa Tecla and Stazzo are built on the broad delta built by this lava flow into the sea; (2) an eruption in about 1160 (or 1224), from a fissure at only 350–450 m (1,148–1,476 ft) elevation on the south-southeast flank near the village of Mascalucia, whose lava flow reached the sea just to the north of Catania, in the area now occupied by the portion of the city named Ognina.[citation needed]
+
+Rabban Bar Sauma, a Chinese traveller to the West, recorded the eruption of Etna on 18 June 1287.[22]
+
+The 1669 eruption, Etna's most destructive since 122 BC, started on 11 March 1669 and produced lava flows that destroyed at least 10 villages on its southern flank before reaching the city walls of the town of Catania five weeks later, on 15 April. The lava was largely diverted by these walls into the sea to the south of the city, filling the harbour of Catania. A small portion of lava eventually broke through a fragile section of the city walls on the western side of Catania and destroyed a few buildings before stopping in the rear of the Benedictine monastery, without reaching the centre of the town. Contrary to widespread reports of up to 15,000 (or even 20,000) human fatalities caused by the lava,[23] contemporaneous accounts written both in Italian and English[24] mention no deaths related to the 1669 eruption (but give very precise figures of the number of buildings destroyed, the area of cultivated land lost, and the economic damage). Therefore, it is uncertain where the enormous number of fatalities can be attributed. One possibility is confusion between this eruption and an earthquake that devastated southeast Sicily (including Catania) 24 years later in 1693. A study on the damage and fatalities caused by eruptions of Etna in historical times reveals that only 77 human deaths are attributable with certainty to eruptions of Etna, most recently in 1987 when two tourists were killed by a sudden explosion near the summit.[25][26]
+
+A large lava flow from an eruption in 1928 led to the destruction of a population centre for the first time since the 1669 eruption. The eruption started high on Etna's northeast flank on 2 November. Then new eruptive fissures opened at decreasing elevations down the flank of the volcano. The third and most vigorous of these fissures opened late on 4 November at an unusually low elevation, approximately 1,200 m (3,937 ft) above sea-level, in a zone known as Ripe della Naca. The village of Mascali, lying down-slope of the Ripe della Naca, was almost completely destroyed in two days. Only a church and a few surrounding buildings survived in the north part of the village, called Sant'Antonino or "il quartiere". During the last days of the eruption, the flow interrupted the Messina-Catania railway line and destroyed the train station of Mascali. The event was used by Benito Mussolini's fascist regime for propaganda purposes, with the evacuation, aid, and rebuilding operations being presented as models of fascist planning. Mascali was rebuilt on a new site, and its church contains the Italian fascist symbol of the torch, placed above the statue of Jesus Christ.
+
+Other major 20th-century eruptions occurred in 1949, 1971, 1979, 1981, 1983 and 1991–1993. In 1971, lava buried the Etna Observatory (built in the late 19th century), destroyed the first generation of the Etna cable-car, and seriously threatened several small villages on Etna's east flank. In March 1981, the town of Randazzo on the northwestern flank of Etna narrowly escaped destruction by unusually fast-moving lava flows. That eruption was remarkably similar to one in 1928 that destroyed Mascali. The 1991–1993 eruption saw the town of Zafferana threatened by a lava flow, but successful diversion efforts saved the town with the loss of only one building a few hundred metres from the town's margin. Initially, such efforts consisted of the construction of earth barriers built perpendicularly to the flow direction; it was hoped that the eruption would stop before the artificial basins created behind the barriers would be completely filled. Instead, the eruption continued, and lava surmounted the barriers, heading directly toward Zafferana. Engineers then decided to use explosives near the source of the lava flow, to disrupt a very efficient lava tube system through which the lava travelled for up to 7 km (4 mi) without losing significant heat or fluidity. The main explosion on 23 May 1992 destroyed the tube and forced the lava into a new artificial channel, far from Zafferana, and it would have taken months to re-establish a long lava tube. Shortly after the blasting, the rate of lava emission dropped, and during the remainder of the eruption (until 30 March 1993) the lava never advanced close to the town again.[27]
+
+Following six years (1995–2001) of unusually intense activity at the four summit craters of Etna, the volcano produced its first flank eruption since 1991–1993 in July–August 2001. This eruption, which involved activity from seven distinct eruptive fissures mostly on the south slope of the volcano, was a mass-media eruption because it occurred at the height of the tourist season and numerous reporters and journalists were already in Italy to cover the G8 summit in Genoa. It also occurred close to one of the tourist areas on the volcano, and thus was easily accessible. Part of the "Etna Sud" tourist area, including the arrival station of the Etna cable car, were damaged by this eruption, which otherwise was a rather modest-sized event by Etna standards.
+
+In 2002–2003, a much larger eruption threw up a huge column of ash that could easily be seen from space and fell as far away as Libya, 600 km (370 mi) south across the Mediterranean Sea. Seismic activity in this eruption caused the eastern flanks of the volcano to slip by up to two metres, and many houses on the flanks of the volcano experienced structural damage. The eruption also completely destroyed the tourist station Piano Provenzana, on the northeastern flank of the volcano, and part of the tourist station "Etna Sud" around the Rifugio Sapienza on the south flank. Footage from the eruptions was recorded by Lucasfilm and integrated into the landscape of the planet Mustafar in the 2005 film Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.[28] The Rifugio Sapienza is near the site of a cable car station which had previously been destroyed in the 1983 eruption; it has now been rebuilt. Following a slow and non-destructive lava outflow on the upper southeastern flank between September 2004 and March 2005, intense eruptions occurred at the Southeast Crater in July–December 2006. These were followed by four episodes of lava fountaining, again at the Southeast Crater, on 29 March 11 April 29 April and 7 May 2007. Ash emissions and Strombolian explosions started from a vent on the eastern side of the Southeast Crater in mid-August 2007.
+
+On 4 September 2007, a major episode of lava fountaining occurred from the new vent on the east side of the Southeast Crater, also producing a plume of ash and scoriae which fell over the east flank of the volcano. A lava flow travelled about 4.5 km (2.8 mi) into the uninhabited Valle del Bove. This eruption was visible far into the plains of Sicily, ending the following morning between the hours of 5 to 7 a.m. local time. Catania-Fontanarossa Airport shut down operations during the night for safety precautions.[verification needed]
+
+An eruption on the morning of 13 May 2008, immediately to the east of Etna's summit craters was accompanied by a swarm of more than 200 earthquakes and significant ground deformation in the summit area. The eruption continued at a slowly diminishing rate for 417 days, until 6 July 2009, making this the longest flank eruption of Etna since the 1991–1993 eruption that lasted 473 days. Previous eruptions, in 2001, 2002–2003, and 2004–2005 had lasted 3 weeks, 3 months, and 6 months, respectively. Lava flows advanced 6.5 km during the first few days of this eruption but thereafter stagnated at many minor distances from the vents; during the last months of the eruption lava rarely advanced more than 1 km downslope.
+
+Through January 2011 to February 2012, the summit craters of Etna were the site of intense activity. Frequent eruptions and ash columns forced the authorities to shut down the Catania airport on several occasions.
+[29][30][31][32][33][34] 
+The July 2011 episode also endangered the Sapienza Refuge, the main tourist hub on the volcano, but the lava flow was successfully diverted.[citation needed] In 2014, a flank eruption started involving lava flows and strombolian eruptions. This was the first flank eruption since 2008–09 [1]
+
+On 3 December 2015, an eruption occurred which climaxed between 03:20 and 04:10 local time. The Voragine crater exhibited a lava fountain which reached 1 km (3,300 ft) in height, with an ash plume which reached 3 km (9,800 ft) in height.[35][36] The activity continued on the following days, with an ash plume that reached 7 km (23,000 ft) in height that forced Catania airport to shut down for a few hours.[37] Volcanic gas emissions from this volcano are measured by a Multi-Component Gas Analyzer System, which detects pre-eruptive degassing of rising magmas, improving prediction of volcanic activity.[38]
+
+An eruption on 16 March 2017 injured 10 people, including a BBC News television crew, after magma exploded upon contact with snow.[39][40]
+
+An eruption on 24 December 2018, following a dyke intrusion at shallow depth, spewed ash into the air, forcing the closure of airspace around Mount Etna. Two days later, a magnitude 4.9 earthquake shook the nearby city of Catania, damaging buildings and injuring four people.[41][42]
+
+The Global Volcanism Program has assigned a volcanic explosivity index (VEI) to all of Mount Etna's eruptions since January 1955:[43]
+
+In the 1970s Etna erupted smoke rings,[44] one of the first captured events of this type, which are extremely rare. This happened again in 2000.[45] Video footage of 8 June 2000 event was captured by naturalist filmmaker Geoff Mackley.[46][47] Another event occurred on 11 April 2013.[48]
+
+The borders of ten municipalities (Adrano, Biancavilla, Belpasso, Bronte (from two sides), Castiglione di Sicilia, Maletto, Nicolosi, Randazzo, Sant'Alfio, Zafferana Etnea) meet on the summit of Mount Etna, making this point one of elevenfold complexity.
+
+Etna is one of Sicily's main tourist attractions, with thousands of visitors every year.[49] The most common route is through the road leading to Sapienza Refuge ski area, lying at the south of the crater at elevation of 1910 m.[50] From the Refuge, a cableway runs uphill to an elevation of 2500 m, from where the crater area at 2920 m is accessible.[51]
+
+Ferrovia Circumetnea – Round-Etna railway – is a narrow-gauge railway constructed between 1889 and 1895. It runs around the volcano in a 110-km long semi-circle starting in Catania and ending in Riposto 28 km north of Catania.
+
+There are two ski resorts on Etna: one at the Sapienza Refuge, with a chairlift and three ski lifts, and a smaller one on the north, at Piano Provenzana near Linguaglossa, with three lifts and a chairlift.[52]
+
+Sapienza Refuge was the finish of Stage 9 of the 2011 Giro d'Italia and Stage 4 of the 2017 Giro.

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+
+
+A star is an astronomical object consisting of a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its own gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth during the night, appearing as a multitude of fixed luminous points in the sky due to their immense distance from Earth. Historically, the most prominent stars were grouped into constellations and asterisms, the brightest of which gained proper names. Astronomers have assembled star catalogues that identify the known stars and provide standardized stellar designations. The observable Universe contains an estimated 1×1024 stars,[1][2] but most are invisible to the naked eye from Earth, including all stars outside our galaxy, the Milky Way.
+
+For most of its active life, a star shines due to thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in its core, releasing energy that traverses the star's interior and then radiates into outer space. Almost all naturally occurring elements heavier than helium are created by stellar nucleosynthesis during the star's lifetime, and for some stars by supernova nucleosynthesis when it explodes. Near the end of its life, a star can also contain degenerate matter. Astronomers can determine the mass, age, metallicity (chemical composition), and many other properties of a star by observing its motion through space, its luminosity, and spectrum respectively. The total mass of a star is the main factor that determines its evolution and eventual fate. Other characteristics of a star, including diameter and temperature, change over its life, while the star's environment affects its rotation and movement. A plot of the temperature of many stars against their luminosities produces a plot known as a Hertzsprung–Russell diagram (H–R diagram). Plotting a particular star on that diagram allows the age and evolutionary state of that star to be determined.
+
+A star's life begins with the gravitational collapse of a gaseous nebula of material composed primarily of hydrogen, along with helium and trace amounts of heavier elements. When the stellar core is sufficiently dense, hydrogen becomes steadily converted into helium through nuclear fusion, releasing energy in the process.[3] The remainder of the star's interior carries energy away from the core through a combination of radiative and convective heat transfer processes. The star's internal pressure prevents it from collapsing further under its own gravity. A star with mass greater than 0.4 times the Sun's will expand to become a red giant when the hydrogen fuel in its core is exhausted.[4]  In some cases, it will fuse heavier elements at the core or in shells around the core. As the star expands it throws a part of its mass, enriched with those heavier elements, into the interstellar environment, to be recycled later as new stars.[5] Meanwhile, the core becomes a stellar remnant: a white dwarf, a neutron star, or, if it is sufficiently massive, a black hole.
+
+Binary and multi-star systems consist of two or more stars that are gravitationally bound and generally move around each other in stable orbits. When two such stars have a relatively close orbit, their gravitational interaction can have a significant impact on their evolution.[6] Stars can form part of a much larger gravitationally bound structure, such as a star cluster or a galaxy.
+
+Historically, stars have been important to civilizations throughout the world. They have been part of religious practices and used for celestial navigation and orientation. Many ancient astronomers believed that stars were permanently affixed to a heavenly sphere and that they were immutable. By convention, astronomers grouped stars into constellations and used them to track the motions of the planets and the inferred position of the Sun.[7] The motion of the Sun against the background stars (and the horizon) was used to create calendars, which could be used to regulate agricultural practices.[9] The Gregorian calendar, currently used nearly everywhere in the world, is a solar calendar based on the angle of the Earth's rotational axis relative to its local star, the Sun.
+
+The oldest accurately dated star chart was the result of ancient Egyptian astronomy in 1534 BC.[10] The earliest known star catalogues were compiled by the ancient Babylonian astronomers of Mesopotamia in the late 2nd millennium BC, during the Kassite Period (c. 1531–1155 BC).[11]
+
+The first star catalogue in Greek astronomy was created by Aristillus in approximately 300 BC, with the help of Timocharis.[12] The star catalog of Hipparchus (2nd century BC) included 1020 stars, and was used to assemble Ptolemy's star catalogue.[13] Hipparchus is known for the discovery of the first recorded nova (new star).[14] Many of the constellations and star names in use today derive from Greek astronomy.
+
+In spite of the apparent immutability of the heavens, Chinese astronomers were aware that new stars could appear.[15] In 185 AD, they were the first to observe and write about a supernova, now known as the SN 185.[16] The brightest stellar event in recorded history was the SN 1006 supernova, which was observed in 1006 and written about by the Egyptian astronomer Ali ibn Ridwan and several Chinese astronomers.[17] The SN 1054 supernova, which gave birth to the Crab Nebula, was also observed by Chinese and Islamic astronomers.[18][19][20]
+
+Medieval Islamic astronomers gave Arabic names to many stars that are still used today and they invented numerous astronomical instruments that could compute the positions of the stars. They built the first large observatory research institutes, mainly for the purpose of producing Zij star catalogues.[21] Among these, the Book of Fixed Stars (964) was written by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, who observed a number of stars, star clusters (including the Omicron Velorum and Brocchi's Clusters) and galaxies (including the Andromeda Galaxy).[22] According to A. Zahoor, in the 11th century, the Persian polymath scholar Abu Rayhan Biruni described the Milky Way galaxy as a multitude of fragments having the properties of nebulous stars, and also gave the latitudes of various stars during a lunar eclipse in 1019.[23]
+
+According to Josep Puig, the Andalusian astronomer Ibn Bajjah proposed that the Milky Way was made up of many stars that almost touched one another and appeared to be a continuous image due to the effect of refraction from sublunary material, citing his observation of the conjunction of Jupiter and Mars on 500 AH (1106/1107 AD) as evidence.[24] 
+Early European astronomers such as Tycho Brahe identified new stars in the night sky (later termed novae), suggesting that the heavens were not immutable. In 1584, Giordano Bruno suggested that the stars were like the Sun, and may have other planets, possibly even Earth-like, in orbit around them,[25] an idea that had been suggested earlier by the ancient Greek philosophers, Democritus and Epicurus,[26] and by medieval Islamic cosmologists[27] such as Fakhr al-Din al-Razi.[28] By the following century, the idea of the stars being the same as the Sun was reaching a consensus among astronomers. To explain why these stars exerted no net gravitational pull on the Solar System, Isaac Newton suggested that the stars were equally distributed in every direction, an idea prompted by the theologian Richard Bentley.[29]
+
+The Italian astronomer Geminiano Montanari recorded observing variations in luminosity of the star Algol in 1667. Edmond Halley published the first measurements of the proper motion of a pair of nearby "fixed" stars, demonstrating that they had changed positions since the time of the ancient Greek astronomers Ptolemy and Hipparchus.[25]
+
+William Herschel was the first astronomer to attempt to determine the distribution of stars in the sky. During the 1780s, he established a series of gauges in 600 directions and counted the stars observed along each line of sight. From this he deduced that the number of stars steadily increased toward one side of the sky, in the direction of the Milky Way core. His son John Herschel repeated this study in the southern hemisphere and found a corresponding increase in the same direction.[30] In addition to his other accomplishments, William Herschel is also noted for his discovery that some stars do not merely lie along the same line of sight, but are also physical companions that form binary star systems.
+
+The science of stellar spectroscopy was pioneered by Joseph von Fraunhofer and Angelo Secchi. By comparing the spectra of stars such as Sirius to the Sun, they found differences in the strength and number of their absorption lines—the dark lines in stellar spectra caused by the atmosphere's absorption of specific frequencies. In 1865, Secchi began classifying stars into spectral types.[31] However, the modern version of the stellar classification scheme was developed by Annie J. Cannon during the 1900s.
+
+The first direct measurement of the distance to a star (61 Cygni at 11.4 light-years) was made in 1838 by Friedrich Bessel using the parallax technique. Parallax measurements demonstrated the vast separation of the stars in the heavens.[25] Observation of double stars gained increasing importance during the 19th century. In 1834, Friedrich Bessel observed changes in the proper motion of the star Sirius and inferred a hidden companion. Edward Pickering discovered the first spectroscopic binary in 1899 when he observed the periodic splitting of the spectral lines of the star Mizar in a 104-day period. Detailed observations of many binary star systems were collected by astronomers such as Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve and S. W. Burnham, allowing the masses of stars to be determined from computation of orbital elements. The first solution to the problem of deriving an orbit of binary stars from telescope observations was made by Felix Savary in 1827.[32]
+The twentieth century saw increasingly rapid advances in the scientific study of stars. The photograph became a valuable astronomical tool. Karl Schwarzschild discovered that the color of a star and, hence, its temperature, could be determined by comparing the visual magnitude against the photographic magnitude. The development of the photoelectric photometer allowed precise measurements of magnitude at multiple wavelength intervals. In 1921 Albert A. Michelson made the first measurements of a stellar diameter using an interferometer on the Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory.[33]
+
+Important theoretical work on the physical structure of stars occurred during the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1913, the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram was developed, propelling the astrophysical study of stars. Successful models were developed to explain the interiors of stars and stellar evolution. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin first proposed that stars were made primarily of hydrogen and helium in her 1925 PhD thesis.[34] The spectra of stars were further understood through advances in quantum physics. This allowed the chemical composition of the stellar atmosphere to be determined.[35]
+
+With the exception of supernovae, individual stars have primarily been observed in the Local Group,[36] and especially in the visible part of the Milky Way (as demonstrated by the detailed star catalogues available for our
+galaxy).[37] But some stars have been observed in the M100 galaxy of the Virgo Cluster, about 100 million light years from the Earth.[38]
+In the Local Supercluster it is possible to see star clusters, and current telescopes could in principle observe faint individual stars in the Local Group[39] (see Cepheids). However, outside the Local Supercluster of galaxies, neither individual stars nor clusters of stars have been observed. The only exception is a faint image of a large star cluster containing hundreds of thousands of stars located at a distance of one billion light years[40]—ten times further than the most distant star cluster previously observed.
+
+In February 2018, astronomers reported, for the first time, a signal of the reionization epoch, an indirect detection of light from the earliest stars formed—about 180 million years after the Big Bang.[41]
+
+In April, 2018, astronomers reported the detection of the most distant "ordinary" (i.e., main sequence) star, named Icarus (formally, MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1), at 9 billion light-years away from Earth.[42][43]
+
+In May 2018, astronomers reported the detection of the most distant oxygen ever detected in the Universe—and the most distant galaxy ever observed by Atacama Large Millimeter Array or the Very Large Telescope—with the team inferring that the signal was emitted 13.3 billion years ago (or 500 million years after the Big Bang). They found that the observed brightness of the galaxy is well-explained by a model where the onset of star formation corresponds to only 250 million years after the Universe began, corresponding to a redshift of about 15.[44]
+
+The concept of a constellation was known to exist during the Babylonian period. Ancient sky watchers imagined that prominent arrangements of stars formed patterns, and they associated these with particular aspects of nature or their myths. Twelve of these formations lay along the band of the ecliptic and these became the basis of astrology.[45] Many of the more prominent individual stars were also given names, particularly with Arabic or Latin designations.
+
+As well as certain constellations and the Sun itself, individual stars have their own myths.[46] To the Ancient Greeks, some "stars", known as planets (Greek πλανήτης (planētēs), meaning "wanderer"), represented various important deities, from which the names of the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were taken.[46] (Uranus and Neptune were also Greek and Roman gods, but neither planet was known in Antiquity because of their low brightness. Their names were assigned by later astronomers.)
+
+Circa 1600, the names of the constellations were used to name the stars in the corresponding regions of the sky. The German astronomer Johann Bayer created a series of star maps and applied Greek letters as designations to the stars in each constellation. Later a numbering system based on the star's right ascension was invented and added to John Flamsteed's star catalogue in his book "Historia coelestis Britannica" (the 1712 edition), whereby this numbering system came to be called Flamsteed designation or Flamsteed numbering.[47][48]
+
+The only internationally recognized authority for naming celestial bodies is the International Astronomical Union (IAU).[49] The International Astronomical Union maintains the Working Group on Star Names (WGSN)[50] which catalogs and standardizes proper names for stars. A number of private companies sell names of stars, which the British Library calls an unregulated commercial enterprise.[51][52] The IAU has disassociated itself from this commercial practice, and these names are neither recognized by the IAU, professional astronomers, nor the amateur astronomy community.[53] One such star-naming company is the International Star Registry, which, during the 1980s, was accused of deceptive practice for making it appear that the assigned name was official. This now-discontinued ISR practice was informally labeled a scam and a fraud,[54][55][56][57] and the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection issued a violation against ISR for engaging in a deceptive trade practice.[58][59]
+
+Although stellar parameters can be expressed in SI units or CGS units, it is often most convenient to express mass, luminosity, and radii in solar units, based on the characteristics of the Sun. In 2015, the IAU defined a set of nominal solar values (defined as SI constants, without uncertainties) which can be used for quoting stellar parameters:
+
+The solar mass M⊙ was not explicitly defined by the IAU due to the large relative uncertainty (10−4) of the Newtonian gravitational constant G. However, since the product of the Newtonian gravitational constant and solar mass
+together (GM⊙) has been determined to much greater precision, the IAU defined the nominal solar mass parameter to be:
+
+However, one can combine the nominal solar mass parameter with the most recent (2014) CODATA estimate of the Newtonian gravitational constant G to derive the solar mass to be approximately 1.9885 × 1030 kg. Although the exact values for the luminosity, radius, mass parameter, and mass may vary slightly in the future due to observational uncertainties, the 2015 IAU nominal constants will remain the same SI values as they remain useful measures for quoting stellar parameters.
+
+Large lengths, such as the radius of a giant star or the semi-major axis of a binary star system, are often expressed in terms of the astronomical unit—approximately equal to the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun (150 million km or approximately 93 million miles). In 2012, the IAU defined the astronomical constant to be an exact length in meters: 149,597,870,700 m.[60]
+
+Stars condense from regions of space of higher matter density, yet those regions are less dense than within a vacuum chamber. These regions—known as molecular clouds—consist mostly of hydrogen, with about 23 to 28 percent helium and a few percent heavier elements. One example of such a star-forming region is the Orion Nebula.[61] Most stars form in groups of dozens to hundreds of thousands of stars.[62]
+Massive stars in these groups may powerfully illuminate those clouds, ionizing the hydrogen, and creating H II regions. Such feedback effects, from star formation, may ultimately disrupt the cloud and prevent further star formation.
+
+All stars spend the majority of their existence as main sequence stars, fueled primarily by the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium within their cores. However, stars of different masses have markedly different properties at various stages of their development. The ultimate fate of more massive stars differs from that of less massive stars, as do their luminosities and the impact they have on their environment. Accordingly, astronomers often group stars by their mass:[63]
+
+The formation of a star begins with gravitational instability within a molecular cloud, caused by regions of higher density—often triggered by compression of clouds by radiation from massive stars, expanding bubbles in the interstellar medium, the collision of different molecular clouds, or the collision of galaxies (as in a starburst galaxy).[65][66] When a region reaches a sufficient density of matter to satisfy the criteria for Jeans instability, it begins to collapse under its own gravitational force.[67]
+
+As the cloud collapses, individual conglomerations of dense dust and gas form "Bok globules". As a globule collapses and the density increases, the gravitational energy converts into heat and the temperature rises. When the protostellar cloud has approximately reached the stable condition of hydrostatic equilibrium, a protostar forms at the core.[68] These pre-main-sequence stars are often surrounded by a protoplanetary disk and powered mainly by the conversion of gravitational energy. The period of gravitational contraction lasts about 10 to 15 million years.
+
+Early stars of less than 2 M☉ are called T Tauri stars, while those with greater mass are Herbig Ae/Be stars. These newly formed stars emit jets of gas along their axis of rotation, which may reduce the angular momentum of the collapsing star and result in small patches of nebulosity known as Herbig–Haro objects.[69][70]
+These jets, in combination with radiation from nearby massive stars, may help to drive away the surrounding cloud from which the star was formed.[71]
+
+Early in their development, T Tauri stars follow the Hayashi track—they contract and decrease in luminosity while remaining at roughly the same temperature. Less massive T Tauri stars follow this track to the main sequence, while more massive stars turn onto the Henyey track.
+
+Most stars are observed to be members of binary star systems, and the properties of those binaries are the result of the conditions in which they formed.[72] A gas cloud must lose its angular momentum in order to collapse and form a star. The fragmentation of the cloud into multiple stars distributes some of that angular momentum. The primordial binaries transfer some angular momentum by gravitational interactions during close encounters with other stars in young stellar clusters. These interactions tend to split apart more widely separated (soft) binaries while causing hard binaries to become more tightly bound. This produces the separation of binaries into their two observed populations distributions.
+
+Stars spend about 90% of their existence fusing hydrogen into helium in high-temperature and high-pressure reactions near the core. Such stars are said to be on the main sequence, and are called dwarf stars. Starting at zero-age main sequence, the proportion of helium in a star's core will steadily increase, the rate of nuclear fusion at the core will slowly increase, as will the star's temperature and luminosity.[73]
+The Sun, for example, is estimated to have increased in luminosity by about 40% since it reached the main sequence 4.6 billion (4.6 × 109) years ago.[74]
+
+Every star generates a stellar wind of particles that causes a continual outflow of gas into space. For most stars, the mass lost is negligible. The Sun loses 10−14 M☉ every year,[75] or about 0.01% of its total mass over its entire lifespan. However, very massive stars can lose 10−7 to 10−5 M☉ each year, significantly affecting their evolution.[76] Stars that begin with more than 50 M☉ can lose over half their total mass while on the main sequence.[77]
+
+The time a star spends on the main sequence depends primarily on the amount of fuel it has and the rate at which it fuses it. The Sun is expected to live 10 billion (1010) years. Massive stars consume their fuel very rapidly and are short-lived. Low mass stars consume their fuel very slowly. Stars less massive than 0.25 M☉, called red dwarfs, are able to fuse nearly all of their mass while stars of about 1 M☉ can only fuse about 10% of their mass. The combination of their slow fuel-consumption and relatively large usable fuel supply allows low mass stars to last about one trillion (1012) years; the most extreme of 0.08 M☉) will last for about 12 trillion years. Red dwarfs become hotter and more luminous as they accumulate helium. When they eventually run out of hydrogen, they contract into a white dwarf and decline in temperature.[64] However, since the lifespan of such stars is greater than the current age of the universe (13.8 billion years), no stars under about 0.85 M☉[78] are expected to have moved off the main sequence.
+
+Besides mass, the elements heavier than helium can play a significant role in the evolution of stars. Astronomers label all elements heavier than helium "metals", and call the chemical concentration of these elements in a star, its metallicity. A star's metallicity can influence the time the star takes to burn its fuel, and controls the formation of its magnetic fields,[79] which affects the strength of its stellar wind.[80] Older, population II stars have substantially less metallicity than the younger, population I stars due to the composition of the molecular clouds from which they formed. Over time, such clouds become increasingly enriched in heavier elements as older stars die and shed portions of their atmospheres.
+
+As stars of at least 0.4 M☉[4] exhaust their supply of hydrogen at their core, they start to fuse hydrogen in a shell outside the helium core. Their outer layers expand and cool greatly as they form a red giant. In about 5 billion years, when the Sun enters the helium burning phase, it will expand to a maximum radius of roughly 1 astronomical unit (150 million kilometres), 250 times its present size, and lose 30% of its current mass.[74][81]
+
+As the hydrogen shell burning produces more helium, the core increases in mass and temperature. In a red giant of up to 2.25 M☉, the mass of the helium core becomes degenerate prior to helium fusion. Finally, when the temperature increases sufficiently, helium fusion begins explosively in what is called a helium flash, and the star rapidly shrinks in radius, increases its surface temperature, and moves to the horizontal branch of the HR diagram. For more massive stars, helium core fusion starts before the core becomes degenerate, and the star spends some time in the red clump, slowly burning helium, before the outer convective envelope collapses and the star then moves to the horizontal branch.[6]
+
+After the star has fused the helium of its core, the carbon product fuses producing a hot core with an outer shell of fusing helium. The star then follows an evolutionary path called the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) that parallels the other described red giant phase, but with a higher luminosity. The more massive AGB stars may undergo a brief period of carbon fusion before the core becomes degenerate.
+
+During their helium-burning phase, a star of more than 9 solar masses expands to form first a blue and then a red supergiant. Particularly massive stars may evolve to a Wolf-Rayet star, characterised by spectra dominated by emission lines of elements heavier than hydrogen, which have reached the surface due to strong convection and intense mass loss.
+
+When helium is exhausted at the core of a massive star, the core contracts and the temperature and pressure rises enough to fuse carbon (see Carbon-burning process). This process continues, with the successive stages being fueled by neon (see neon-burning process), oxygen (see oxygen-burning process), and silicon (see silicon-burning process). Near the end of the star's life, fusion continues along a series of onion-layer shells within a massive star. Each shell fuses a different element, with the outermost shell fusing hydrogen; the next shell fusing helium, and so forth.[82]
+
+The final stage occurs when a massive star begins producing iron. Since iron nuclei are more tightly bound than any heavier nuclei, any fusion beyond iron does not produce a net release of energy.[83]
+
+As a star's core shrinks, the intensity of radiation from that surface increases, creating such radiation pressure on the outer shell of gas that it will push those layers away, forming a planetary nebula. If what remains after the outer atmosphere has been shed is less than roughly 1.4 M☉, it shrinks to a relatively tiny object about the size of Earth, known as a white dwarf. White dwarfs lack the mass for further gravitational compression to take place.[84] The electron-degenerate matter inside a white dwarf is no longer a plasma, even though stars are generally referred to as being spheres of plasma. Eventually, white dwarfs fade into black dwarfs over a very long period of time.
+
+In massive stars, fusion continues until the iron core has grown so large (more than 1.4 M☉) that it can no longer support its own mass. This core will suddenly collapse as its electrons are driven into its protons, forming neutrons, neutrinos, and gamma rays in a burst of electron capture and inverse beta decay. The shockwave formed by this sudden collapse causes the rest of the star to explode in a supernova. Supernovae become so bright that they may briefly outshine the star's entire home galaxy. When they occur within the Milky Way, supernovae have historically been observed by naked-eye observers as "new stars" where none seemingly existed before.[85]
+
+A supernova explosion blows away the star's outer layers, leaving a remnant such as the Crab Nebula.[85] The core is compressed into a neutron star, which sometimes manifests itself as a pulsar or X-ray burster. In the case of the largest stars, the remnant is a black hole greater than 4 M☉.[86] In a neutron star the matter is in a state known as neutron-degenerate matter, with a more exotic form of degenerate matter, QCD matter, possibly present in the core. Within a black hole, the matter is in a state that is not currently understood.
+
+The blown-off outer layers of dying stars include heavy elements, which may be recycled during the formation of new stars. These heavy elements allow the formation of rocky planets. The outflow from supernovae and the stellar wind of large stars play an important part in shaping the interstellar medium.[85]
+
+The post–main-sequence evolution of binary stars may be significantly different from the evolution of single stars of the same mass. If stars in a binary system are sufficiently close, when one of the stars expands to become a red giant it may overflow its Roche lobe, the region around a star where material is gravitationally bound to that star, leading to transfer of material to the other. When the Roche lobe is violated, a variety of phenomena can result, including contact binaries, common-envelope binaries, cataclysmic variables, and type Ia supernovae.
+
+Stars are not spread uniformly across the universe, but are normally grouped into galaxies along with interstellar gas and dust. A typical galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, and there are more than 2 trillion (1012) galaxies.[87] Overall, there are as many as an estimated 1×1024 stars[1][2] (more stars than all the grains of sand on planet Earth).[88][89][90] While it is often believed that stars only exist within galaxies, intergalactic stars have been discovered.[91]
+
+A multi-star system consists of two or more gravitationally bound stars that orbit each other. The simplest and most common multi-star system is a binary star, but systems of three or more stars are also found. For reasons of orbital stability, such multi-star systems are often organized into hierarchical sets of binary stars.[92] Larger groups called star clusters also exist. These range from loose stellar associations with only a few stars, up to enormous globular clusters with hundreds of thousands of stars. Such systems orbit their host galaxy.
+
+It has been a long-held assumption that the majority of stars occur in gravitationally bound, multiple-star systems. This is particularly true for very massive O and B class stars, where 80% of the stars are believed to be part of multiple-star systems. The proportion of single star systems increases with decreasing star mass, so that only 25% of red dwarfs are known to have stellar companions. As 85% of all stars are red dwarfs, most stars in the Milky Way are likely single from birth.[93]
+
+The nearest star to the Earth, apart from the Sun, is Proxima Centauri, which is 39.9 trillion kilometres, or 4.2 light-years. Travelling at the orbital speed of the Space Shuttle (8 kilometres per second—almost 30,000 kilometres per hour), it would take about 150,000 years to arrive.[94] This is typical of stellar separations in galactic discs.[95] Stars can be much closer to each other in the centres of galaxies and in globular clusters, or much farther apart in galactic halos.
+
+Due to the relatively vast distances between stars outside the galactic nucleus, collisions between stars are thought to be rare. In denser regions such as the core of globular clusters or the galactic center, collisions can be more common.[96] Such collisions can produce what are known as blue stragglers. These abnormal stars have a higher surface temperature than the other main sequence stars with the same luminosity of the cluster to which it belongs.[97]
+
+Almost everything about a star is determined by its initial mass, including such characteristics as luminosity, size, evolution, lifespan, and its eventual fate.
+
+Most stars are between 1 billion and 10 billion years old. Some stars may even be close to 13.8 billion years old—the observed age of the universe. The oldest star yet discovered, HD 140283, nicknamed Methuselah star, is an estimated 14.46 ± 0.8 billion years old.[98] (Due to the uncertainty in the value, this age for the star does not conflict with the age of the Universe, determined by the Planck satellite as 13.799 ± 0.021).[98][99]
+
+The more massive the star, the shorter its lifespan, primarily because massive stars have greater pressure on their cores, causing them to burn hydrogen more rapidly. The most massive stars last an average of a few million years, while stars of minimum mass (red dwarfs) burn their fuel very slowly and can last tens to hundreds of billions of years.[100][101]
+
+When stars form in the present Milky Way galaxy they are composed of about 71% hydrogen and 27% helium,[103] as measured by mass, with a small fraction of heavier elements. Typically the portion of heavy elements is measured in terms of the iron content of the stellar atmosphere, as iron is a common element and its absorption lines are relatively easy to measure. The portion of heavier elements may be an indicator of the likelihood that the star has a planetary system.[104]
+
+The star with the lowest iron content ever measured is the dwarf HE1327-2326, with only 1/200,000th the iron content of the Sun.[105] By contrast, the super-metal-rich star μ Leonis has nearly double the abundance of iron as the Sun, while the planet-bearing star 14 Herculis has nearly triple the iron.[106] There also exist chemically peculiar stars that show unusual abundances of certain elements in their spectrum; especially chromium and rare earth elements.[107] Stars with cooler outer atmospheres, including the Sun, can form various diatomic and polyatomic molecules.[108]
+
+Due to their great distance from the Earth, all stars except the Sun appear to the unaided eye as shining points in the night sky that twinkle because of the effect of the Earth's atmosphere. The Sun is also a star, but it is close enough to the Earth to appear as a disk instead, and to provide daylight. Other than the Sun, the star with the largest apparent size is R Doradus, with an angular diameter of only 0.057 arcseconds.[109]
+
+The disks of most stars are much too small in angular size to be observed with current ground-based optical telescopes, and so interferometer telescopes are required to produce images of these objects. Another technique for measuring the angular size of stars is through occultation. By precisely measuring the drop in brightness of a star as it is occulted by the Moon (or the rise in brightness when it reappears), the star's angular diameter can be computed.[110]
+
+Stars range in size from neutron stars, which vary anywhere from 20 to 40 km (25 mi) in diameter, to supergiants like Betelgeuse in the Orion constellation, which has a diameter about 1,000 times that of our sun.[111][112] Betelgeuse, however, has a much lower density than the Sun.[113]
+
+The motion of a star relative to the Sun can provide useful information about the origin and age of a star, as well as the structure and evolution of the surrounding galaxy. The components of motion of a star consist of the radial velocity toward or away from the Sun, and the traverse angular movement, which is called its proper motion.
+
+Radial velocity is measured by the doppler shift of the star's spectral lines, and is given in units of km/s. The proper motion of a star, its parallax, is determined by precise astrometric measurements in units of milli-arc seconds (mas) per year. With knowledge of the star's parallax and its distance, the proper motion velocity can be calculated. Together with the radial velocity, the total velocity can be calculated. Stars with high rates of proper motion are likely to be relatively close to the Sun, making them good candidates for parallax measurements.[115]
+
+When both rates of movement are known, the space velocity of the star relative to the Sun or the galaxy can be computed. Among nearby stars, it has been found that younger population I stars have generally lower velocities than older, population II stars. The latter have elliptical orbits that are inclined to the plane of the galaxy.[116] A comparison of the kinematics of nearby stars has allowed astronomers to trace their origin to common points in giant molecular clouds, and are referred to as stellar associations.[117]
+
+The magnetic field of a star is generated within regions of the interior where convective circulation occurs. This movement of conductive plasma functions like a dynamo, wherein the movement of electrical charges induce magnetic fields, as does a mechanical dynamo. Those magnetic fields have a great range that extend throughout and beyond the star. The strength of the magnetic field varies with the mass and composition of the star, and the amount of magnetic surface activity depends upon the star's rate of rotation. This surface activity produces starspots, which are regions of strong magnetic fields and lower than normal surface temperatures. Coronal loops are arching magnetic field flux lines that rise from a star's surface into the star's outer atmosphere, its corona. The coronal loops can be seen due to the plasma they conduct along their length. Stellar flares are bursts of high-energy particles that are emitted due to the same magnetic activity.[118]
+
+Young, rapidly rotating stars tend to have high levels of surface activity because of their magnetic field. The magnetic field can act upon a star's stellar wind, functioning as a brake to gradually slow the rate of rotation with time. Thus, older stars such as the Sun have a much slower rate of rotation and a lower level of surface activity. The activity levels of slowly rotating stars tend to vary in a cyclical manner and can shut down altogether for periods of time.[119] During
+the Maunder Minimum, for example, the Sun underwent a
+70-year period with almost no sunspot activity.
+
+One of the most massive stars known is Eta Carinae,[120] which,
+with 100–150 times as much mass as the Sun, will have a lifespan of only several million years. Studies of the most massive open clusters suggests 150 M☉ as an upper limit for stars in the current era of the universe.[121] This
+represents an empirical value for the theoretical limit on the mass of forming stars due to increasing radiation pressure on the accreting gas cloud. Several stars in the R136 cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud have been measured with larger masses,[122] but
+it has been determined that they could have been created through the collision and merger of massive stars in close binary systems, sidestepping the 150 M☉ limit on massive star formation.[123]
+
+The first stars to form after the Big Bang may have been larger, up to 300 M☉,[124] due
+to the complete absence of elements heavier than lithium in their composition. This generation of supermassive population III stars is likely to have existed in the very early universe (i.e., they are observed to have a high redshift), and may have started the production of chemical elements heavier than hydrogen that are needed for the later formation of planets and life. In June 2015, astronomers reported evidence for Population III stars in the Cosmos Redshift 7 galaxy at z = 6.60.[125][126]
+
+With a mass only 80 times that of Jupiter (MJ), 2MASS J0523-1403 is the smallest known star undergoing nuclear fusion in its core.[127] For
+stars with metallicity similar to the Sun, the theoretical minimum mass the star can have and still undergo fusion at the core, is estimated to be about 75 MJ.[128][129] When the metallicity is very low, however, the minimum star size seems to be about 8.3% of the solar mass, or about 87 MJ.[129][130] Smaller bodies called brown dwarfs, occupy a poorly defined grey area between stars and gas giants.
+
+The combination of the radius and the mass of a star determines its surface gravity. Giant stars have a much lower surface gravity than do main sequence stars, while the opposite is the case for degenerate, compact stars such as white dwarfs. The surface gravity can influence the appearance of a star's spectrum, with higher gravity causing a broadening of the absorption lines.[35]
+
+The rotation rate of stars can be determined through spectroscopic measurement, or more exactly determined by tracking their starspots. Young stars can have a rotation greater than 100 km/s at the equator. The B-class star Achernar, for example, has an equatorial velocity of about 225 km/s or greater, causing its equator to bulge outward and giving it an equatorial diameter that is more than 50% greater than between the poles. This rate of rotation is just below the critical velocity of 300 km/s at which speed the star would break apart.[131] By contrast, the Sun rotates once every 25–35 days depending on latitude,[132] with an equatorial velocity of 1.93 km/s.[133] A main sequence star's magnetic field and the stellar wind serve to slow its rotation by a significant amount as it evolves on the main sequence.[134]
+
+Degenerate stars have contracted into a compact mass, resulting in a rapid rate of rotation. However they have relatively low rates of rotation compared to what would be expected by conservation of angular momentum—the tendency of a rotating body to compensate for a contraction in size by increasing its rate of spin. A large portion of the star's angular momentum is dissipated as a result of mass loss through the stellar wind.[135] In spite of this, the rate of rotation for a pulsar can be very rapid. The pulsar at the heart of the Crab nebula, for example, rotates 30 times per second.[136] The rotation rate of the pulsar will gradually slow due to the emission of radiation.[137]
+
+The surface temperature of a main sequence star is determined by the rate of energy production of its core and by its radius, and is often estimated from the star's color index.[138] The temperature is normally given in terms of an effective temperature,  which is the temperature of an idealized black body that radiates its energy at the same luminosity per surface area as the star. Note that the effective temperature is only a representative of the surface, as the temperature increases toward the core.[139] The temperature in the core region of a star is several million kelvins.[140]
+
+The stellar temperature will determine the rate of ionization of various elements, resulting in characteristic absorption lines in the spectrum. The surface temperature of a star, along with its visual absolute magnitude and absorption features, is used to classify a star (see classification below).[35]
+
+Massive main sequence stars can have surface temperatures of 50,000 K. Smaller stars such as the Sun have surface temperatures of a few thousand K. Red giants have relatively low surface temperatures of about 3,600 K; but they also have a high luminosity due to their large exterior surface area.[141]
+
+The energy produced by stars, a product of nuclear fusion, radiates to space as both electromagnetic radiation and particle radiation. The particle radiation emitted by a star is manifested as the stellar wind,[142] which
+streams from the outer layers as electrically charged protons and alpha and beta particles. Although almost massless, there also exists a steady stream of neutrinos emanating from the star's core.
+
+The production of energy at the core is the reason stars shine so brightly: every time two or more atomic nuclei fuse together to form a single atomic nucleus of a new heavier element, gamma ray photons are released from the nuclear fusion product. This energy is converted to other forms of electromagnetic energy of lower frequency, such as visible light, by the time it reaches the star's outer layers.
+
+The color of a star, as determined by the most intense frequency of the visible light, depends on the temperature of the star's outer layers, including its photosphere.[143] Besides
+visible light, stars also emit forms of electromagnetic radiation that are invisible to the human eye. In fact, stellar electromagnetic radiation spans the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from the longest wavelengths of radio waves through infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, to the shortest of X-rays, and gamma rays. From the standpoint of total energy emitted by a star, not all components of stellar electromagnetic radiation are significant, but all frequencies provide insight into the star's physics.
+
+Using the stellar spectrum, astronomers can also determine the surface temperature, surface gravity, metallicity and rotational velocity of a star. If the distance of the star is found, such as by measuring the parallax, then the luminosity of the star can be derived. The mass, radius, surface gravity, and rotation period can then be estimated based on stellar models. (Mass can be calculated for stars in binary systems by measuring their orbital velocities and distances. Gravitational microlensing has been used to measure the mass of a single star.[144]) With these parameters, astronomers can also estimate the age of the star.[145]
+
+The luminosity of a star is the amount of light and other forms of radiant energy it radiates per unit of time. It has units of power. The luminosity of a star is determined by its radius and surface temperature. Many stars do not radiate uniformly across their entire surface. The rapidly rotating star Vega, for example, has a higher energy flux (power per unit area) at its poles than along its equator.[146]
+
+Patches of the star's surface with a lower temperature and luminosity than average are known as starspots. Small, dwarf stars such as our Sun generally have essentially featureless disks with only small starspots.  Giant stars have much larger, more obvious starspots,[147] and
+they also exhibit strong stellar limb darkening. That is, the brightness decreases towards the edge of the stellar disk.[148] Red
+dwarf flare stars such as UV Ceti may also possess prominent starspot features.[149]
+
+The apparent brightness of a star is expressed in terms of its apparent magnitude. It is a function of the star's luminosity, its distance from Earth, the extinction effect of interstellar dust and gas, and the altering of the star's light as it passes through Earth's atmosphere. Intrinsic or absolute magnitude is directly related to a star's luminosity, and is what the apparent magnitude a star would be if the distance between the Earth and the star were 10 parsecs (32.6 light-years).
+
+Both the apparent and absolute magnitude scales are logarithmic units: one whole number difference in magnitude is equal to a brightness variation of about 2.5 times[151] (the 5th root of 100 or approximately 2.512). This means that a first magnitude star (+1.00) is about 2.5 times brighter than a second magnitude (+2.00) star, and about 100 times brighter than a sixth magnitude star (+6.00). The faintest stars visible to the naked eye under good seeing conditions are about magnitude +6.
+
+On both apparent and absolute magnitude scales, the smaller the magnitude number, the brighter the star; the larger the magnitude number, the fainter the star. The brightest stars, on either scale, have negative magnitude numbers. The variation in brightness (ΔL) between two stars is calculated by subtracting the magnitude number of the brighter star (mb) from the magnitude number of the fainter star (mf), then using the difference as an exponent for the base number 2.512; that is to say:
+
+Relative to both luminosity and distance from Earth, a star's absolute magnitude (M) and apparent magnitude (m) are not equivalent;[151] for example, the bright star Sirius has an apparent magnitude of −1.44, but it has an absolute magnitude of +1.41.
+
+The Sun has an apparent magnitude of −26.7, but its absolute magnitude is only +4.83. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky as seen from Earth, is approximately 23 times more luminous than the Sun, while Canopus, the second brightest star in the night sky with an absolute magnitude of −5.53, is approximately 14,000 times more luminous than the Sun. Despite Canopus being vastly more luminous than Sirius, however, Sirius appears brighter than Canopus. This is because Sirius is merely 8.6 light-years from the Earth, while Canopus is much farther away at a distance of 310 light-years.
+
+As of 2006, the star with the highest known absolute magnitude is LBV 1806-20, with a magnitude of −14.2. This star is at least 5,000,000 times more luminous than the Sun.[152] The least luminous stars that are currently known are located in the NGC 6397 cluster. The faintest red dwarfs in the cluster were magnitude 26, while a 28th magnitude white dwarf was also discovered. These faint stars are so dim that their light is as bright as a birthday candle on the Moon when viewed from the Earth.[153]
+
+The current stellar classification system originated in the early 20th century, when stars were classified from A to Q based on the strength of the hydrogen line.[155] It was thought that the hydrogen line strength was a simple linear function of temperature. Instead, it was more complicated: it strengthened with increasing temperature, peaked near 9000 K, and then declined at greater temperatures. The classifications were since reordered by temperature, on which the modern scheme is based.[156]
+
+Stars are given a single-letter classification according to their spectra, ranging from type O, which are very hot, to M, which are so cool that molecules may form in their atmospheres. The main classifications in order of decreasing surface temperature are: O, B, A, F, G, K, and M. A variety of rare spectral types are given special classifications. The most common of these are types L and T, which classify the coldest low-mass stars and brown dwarfs. Each letter has 10 sub-divisions, numbered from 0 to 9, in order of decreasing temperature. However, this system breaks down at extreme high temperatures as classes O0 and O1 may not exist.[157]
+
+In addition, stars may be classified by the luminosity effects found in their spectral lines, which correspond to their spatial size and is determined by their surface gravity. These range from 0 (hypergiants) through III (giants) to V (main sequence dwarfs); some authors add VII (white dwarfs). Main sequence stars fall along a narrow, diagonal band when graphed according to their absolute magnitude and spectral type.[157] The Sun is a main sequence G2V yellow dwarf of intermediate temperature and ordinary size.
+
+Additional nomenclature, in the form of lower-case letters added to the end of the spectral type to indicate peculiar features of the spectrum. For example, an "e" can indicate the presence of emission lines; "m" represents unusually strong levels of metals, and "var" can mean variations in the spectral type.[157]
+
+White dwarf stars have their own class that begins with the letter D. This is further sub-divided into the classes DA, DB, DC, DO, DZ, and DQ, depending on the types of prominent lines found in the spectrum. This is followed by a numerical value that indicates the temperature.[158]
+
+Variable stars have periodic or random changes in luminosity because of intrinsic or extrinsic properties. Of the intrinsically variable stars, the primary types can be subdivided into three principal groups.
+
+During their stellar evolution, some stars pass through phases where they can become pulsating variables. Pulsating variable stars vary in radius and luminosity over time, expanding and contracting with periods ranging from minutes to years, depending on the size of the star. This category includes Cepheid and Cepheid-like stars, and long-period variables such as Mira.[159]
+
+Eruptive variables are stars that experience sudden increases in luminosity because of flares or mass ejection events.[159] This group includes protostars, Wolf-Rayet stars, and flare stars, as well as giant and supergiant stars.
+
+Cataclysmic or explosive variable stars are those that undergo a dramatic change in their properties. This group includes novae and supernovae. A binary star system that includes a nearby white dwarf can produce certain types of these spectacular stellar explosions, including the nova and a Type 1a supernova.[6] The explosion is created when the white dwarf accretes hydrogen from the companion star, building up mass until the hydrogen undergoes fusion.[160] Some novae are also recurrent, having periodic outbursts of moderate amplitude.[159]
+
+Stars can also vary in luminosity because of extrinsic factors, such as eclipsing binaries, as well as rotating stars that produce extreme starspots.[159] A notable example of an eclipsing binary is Algol, which regularly varies in magnitude from 2.1 to 3.4 over a period of 2.87 days.[161]
+
+The interior of a stable star is in a state of hydrostatic equilibrium: the forces on any small volume almost exactly counterbalance each other. The balanced forces are inward gravitational force and an outward force due to the pressure gradient within the star. The pressure gradient is established by the temperature gradient of the plasma; the outer part of the star is cooler than the core. The temperature at the core of a main sequence or giant star is at least on the order of 107 K. The resulting temperature and pressure at the hydrogen-burning core of a main sequence star are sufficient for nuclear fusion to occur and for sufficient energy to be produced to prevent further collapse of the star.[162][163]
+
+As atomic nuclei are fused in the core, they emit energy in the form of gamma rays. These photons interact with the surrounding plasma, adding to the thermal energy at the core. Stars on the main sequence convert hydrogen into helium, creating a slowly but steadily increasing proportion of helium in the core. Eventually the helium content becomes predominant, and energy production ceases at the core. Instead, for stars of more than 0.4 M☉, fusion occurs in a slowly expanding shell around the degenerate helium core.[164]
+
+In addition to hydrostatic equilibrium, the interior of a stable star will also maintain an energy balance of thermal equilibrium. There is a radial temperature gradient throughout the interior that results in a flux of energy flowing toward the exterior. The outgoing flux of energy leaving any layer within the star will exactly match the incoming flux from below.
+
+The radiation zone is the region of the stellar interior where the flux of energy outward is dependent on radiative heat transfer, since convective heat transfer is inefficient in that zone. In this region the plasma will not be perturbed, and any mass motions will die out. If this is not the case, however, then the plasma becomes unstable and convection will occur, forming a convection zone. This can occur, for example, in regions where very high energy fluxes occur, such as near the core or in areas with high opacity (making radiatative heat transfer inefficient) as in the outer envelope.[163]
+
+The occurrence of convection in the outer envelope of a main sequence star depends on the star's mass. Stars with several times the mass of the Sun have a convection zone deep within the interior and a radiative zone in the outer layers. Smaller stars such as the Sun are just the opposite, with the convective zone located in the outer layers.[165] Red dwarf stars with less than 0.4 M☉ are convective throughout, which prevents the accumulation of a helium core.[4] For most stars the convective zones will also vary over time as the star ages and the constitution of the interior is modified.[163]
+
+The photosphere is that portion of a star that is visible to an observer. This is the layer at which the plasma of the star becomes transparent to photons of light. From here, the energy generated at the core becomes free to propagate into space. It is within the photosphere that sun spots, regions of lower than average temperature, appear.
+
+Above the level of the photosphere is the stellar atmosphere. In a main sequence star such as the Sun, the lowest level of the atmosphere, just above the photosphere, is the thin chromosphere region, where spicules appear and stellar flares begin. Above this is the transition region, where the temperature rapidly increases within a distance of only 100 km (62 mi). Beyond this is the corona, a volume of super-heated plasma that can extend outward to several million kilometres.[166] The existence of a corona appears to be dependent on a convective zone in the outer layers of the star.[165] Despite its high temperature, and the corona emits very little light, due to its low gas density. The corona region of the Sun is normally only visible during a solar eclipse.
+
+From the corona, a stellar wind of plasma particles expands outward from the star, until it interacts with the interstellar medium. For the Sun, the influence of its solar wind extends throughout a bubble-shaped region called the heliosphere.[167]
+
+A variety of nuclear fusion reactions take place in the cores of stars, that depend upon their mass and composition. When nuclei fuse, the mass of the fused product is less than the mass of the original parts. This lost mass is converted to electromagnetic energy, according to the mass–energy equivalence relationship E = mc2.[3]
+
+The hydrogen fusion process is temperature-sensitive, so a moderate increase in the core temperature will result in a significant increase in the fusion rate. As a result, the core temperature of main sequence stars only varies from 4 million kelvin for a small M-class star to 40 million kelvin for a massive O-class star.[140]
+
+In the Sun, with a 10-million-kelvin core, hydrogen fuses to form helium in the proton–proton chain reaction:[168]
+
+These reactions result in the overall reaction:
+
+where e+ is a positron, γ is a gamma ray photon, νe is a neutrino, and H and He are isotopes of hydrogen and helium, respectively. The energy released by this reaction is in millions of electron volts, which is actually only a tiny amount of energy. However enormous numbers of these reactions occur constantly, producing all the energy necessary to sustain the star's radiation output. In comparison, the combustion of two hydrogen gas molecules with one oxygen gas molecule releases only 5.7 eV.
+
+In more massive stars, helium is produced in a cycle of reactions catalyzed by carbon called the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle.[168]
+
+In evolved stars with cores at 100 million kelvin and masses between 0.5 and 10 M☉, helium can be transformed into carbon in the triple-alpha process that uses the intermediate element beryllium:[168]
+
+For an overall reaction of:
+
+In massive stars, heavier elements can also be burned in a contracting core through the neon-burning process and oxygen-burning process. The final stage in the stellar nucleosynthesis process is the silicon-burning process that results in the production of the stable isotope iron-56.[168] Any further fusion would be an endothermic process that consumes energy, and so further energy can only be produced through gravitational collapse.
+
+The table at the left shows the amount of time required for a star of 20 M☉ to consume all of its nuclear fuel. As an O-class main sequence star, it would be 8 times the solar radius and 62,000 times the Sun's luminosity.[171]

en/1882.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,252 @@
+
+
+A star is an astronomical object consisting of a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its own gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth during the night, appearing as a multitude of fixed luminous points in the sky due to their immense distance from Earth. Historically, the most prominent stars were grouped into constellations and asterisms, the brightest of which gained proper names. Astronomers have assembled star catalogues that identify the known stars and provide standardized stellar designations. The observable Universe contains an estimated 1×1024 stars,[1][2] but most are invisible to the naked eye from Earth, including all stars outside our galaxy, the Milky Way.
+
+For most of its active life, a star shines due to thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in its core, releasing energy that traverses the star's interior and then radiates into outer space. Almost all naturally occurring elements heavier than helium are created by stellar nucleosynthesis during the star's lifetime, and for some stars by supernova nucleosynthesis when it explodes. Near the end of its life, a star can also contain degenerate matter. Astronomers can determine the mass, age, metallicity (chemical composition), and many other properties of a star by observing its motion through space, its luminosity, and spectrum respectively. The total mass of a star is the main factor that determines its evolution and eventual fate. Other characteristics of a star, including diameter and temperature, change over its life, while the star's environment affects its rotation and movement. A plot of the temperature of many stars against their luminosities produces a plot known as a Hertzsprung–Russell diagram (H–R diagram). Plotting a particular star on that diagram allows the age and evolutionary state of that star to be determined.
+
+A star's life begins with the gravitational collapse of a gaseous nebula of material composed primarily of hydrogen, along with helium and trace amounts of heavier elements. When the stellar core is sufficiently dense, hydrogen becomes steadily converted into helium through nuclear fusion, releasing energy in the process.[3] The remainder of the star's interior carries energy away from the core through a combination of radiative and convective heat transfer processes. The star's internal pressure prevents it from collapsing further under its own gravity. A star with mass greater than 0.4 times the Sun's will expand to become a red giant when the hydrogen fuel in its core is exhausted.[4]  In some cases, it will fuse heavier elements at the core or in shells around the core. As the star expands it throws a part of its mass, enriched with those heavier elements, into the interstellar environment, to be recycled later as new stars.[5] Meanwhile, the core becomes a stellar remnant: a white dwarf, a neutron star, or, if it is sufficiently massive, a black hole.
+
+Binary and multi-star systems consist of two or more stars that are gravitationally bound and generally move around each other in stable orbits. When two such stars have a relatively close orbit, their gravitational interaction can have a significant impact on their evolution.[6] Stars can form part of a much larger gravitationally bound structure, such as a star cluster or a galaxy.
+
+Historically, stars have been important to civilizations throughout the world. They have been part of religious practices and used for celestial navigation and orientation. Many ancient astronomers believed that stars were permanently affixed to a heavenly sphere and that they were immutable. By convention, astronomers grouped stars into constellations and used them to track the motions of the planets and the inferred position of the Sun.[7] The motion of the Sun against the background stars (and the horizon) was used to create calendars, which could be used to regulate agricultural practices.[9] The Gregorian calendar, currently used nearly everywhere in the world, is a solar calendar based on the angle of the Earth's rotational axis relative to its local star, the Sun.
+
+The oldest accurately dated star chart was the result of ancient Egyptian astronomy in 1534 BC.[10] The earliest known star catalogues were compiled by the ancient Babylonian astronomers of Mesopotamia in the late 2nd millennium BC, during the Kassite Period (c. 1531–1155 BC).[11]
+
+The first star catalogue in Greek astronomy was created by Aristillus in approximately 300 BC, with the help of Timocharis.[12] The star catalog of Hipparchus (2nd century BC) included 1020 stars, and was used to assemble Ptolemy's star catalogue.[13] Hipparchus is known for the discovery of the first recorded nova (new star).[14] Many of the constellations and star names in use today derive from Greek astronomy.
+
+In spite of the apparent immutability of the heavens, Chinese astronomers were aware that new stars could appear.[15] In 185 AD, they were the first to observe and write about a supernova, now known as the SN 185.[16] The brightest stellar event in recorded history was the SN 1006 supernova, which was observed in 1006 and written about by the Egyptian astronomer Ali ibn Ridwan and several Chinese astronomers.[17] The SN 1054 supernova, which gave birth to the Crab Nebula, was also observed by Chinese and Islamic astronomers.[18][19][20]
+
+Medieval Islamic astronomers gave Arabic names to many stars that are still used today and they invented numerous astronomical instruments that could compute the positions of the stars. They built the first large observatory research institutes, mainly for the purpose of producing Zij star catalogues.[21] Among these, the Book of Fixed Stars (964) was written by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, who observed a number of stars, star clusters (including the Omicron Velorum and Brocchi's Clusters) and galaxies (including the Andromeda Galaxy).[22] According to A. Zahoor, in the 11th century, the Persian polymath scholar Abu Rayhan Biruni described the Milky Way galaxy as a multitude of fragments having the properties of nebulous stars, and also gave the latitudes of various stars during a lunar eclipse in 1019.[23]
+
+According to Josep Puig, the Andalusian astronomer Ibn Bajjah proposed that the Milky Way was made up of many stars that almost touched one another and appeared to be a continuous image due to the effect of refraction from sublunary material, citing his observation of the conjunction of Jupiter and Mars on 500 AH (1106/1107 AD) as evidence.[24] 
+Early European astronomers such as Tycho Brahe identified new stars in the night sky (later termed novae), suggesting that the heavens were not immutable. In 1584, Giordano Bruno suggested that the stars were like the Sun, and may have other planets, possibly even Earth-like, in orbit around them,[25] an idea that had been suggested earlier by the ancient Greek philosophers, Democritus and Epicurus,[26] and by medieval Islamic cosmologists[27] such as Fakhr al-Din al-Razi.[28] By the following century, the idea of the stars being the same as the Sun was reaching a consensus among astronomers. To explain why these stars exerted no net gravitational pull on the Solar System, Isaac Newton suggested that the stars were equally distributed in every direction, an idea prompted by the theologian Richard Bentley.[29]
+
+The Italian astronomer Geminiano Montanari recorded observing variations in luminosity of the star Algol in 1667. Edmond Halley published the first measurements of the proper motion of a pair of nearby "fixed" stars, demonstrating that they had changed positions since the time of the ancient Greek astronomers Ptolemy and Hipparchus.[25]
+
+William Herschel was the first astronomer to attempt to determine the distribution of stars in the sky. During the 1780s, he established a series of gauges in 600 directions and counted the stars observed along each line of sight. From this he deduced that the number of stars steadily increased toward one side of the sky, in the direction of the Milky Way core. His son John Herschel repeated this study in the southern hemisphere and found a corresponding increase in the same direction.[30] In addition to his other accomplishments, William Herschel is also noted for his discovery that some stars do not merely lie along the same line of sight, but are also physical companions that form binary star systems.
+
+The science of stellar spectroscopy was pioneered by Joseph von Fraunhofer and Angelo Secchi. By comparing the spectra of stars such as Sirius to the Sun, they found differences in the strength and number of their absorption lines—the dark lines in stellar spectra caused by the atmosphere's absorption of specific frequencies. In 1865, Secchi began classifying stars into spectral types.[31] However, the modern version of the stellar classification scheme was developed by Annie J. Cannon during the 1900s.
+
+The first direct measurement of the distance to a star (61 Cygni at 11.4 light-years) was made in 1838 by Friedrich Bessel using the parallax technique. Parallax measurements demonstrated the vast separation of the stars in the heavens.[25] Observation of double stars gained increasing importance during the 19th century. In 1834, Friedrich Bessel observed changes in the proper motion of the star Sirius and inferred a hidden companion. Edward Pickering discovered the first spectroscopic binary in 1899 when he observed the periodic splitting of the spectral lines of the star Mizar in a 104-day period. Detailed observations of many binary star systems were collected by astronomers such as Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve and S. W. Burnham, allowing the masses of stars to be determined from computation of orbital elements. The first solution to the problem of deriving an orbit of binary stars from telescope observations was made by Felix Savary in 1827.[32]
+The twentieth century saw increasingly rapid advances in the scientific study of stars. The photograph became a valuable astronomical tool. Karl Schwarzschild discovered that the color of a star and, hence, its temperature, could be determined by comparing the visual magnitude against the photographic magnitude. The development of the photoelectric photometer allowed precise measurements of magnitude at multiple wavelength intervals. In 1921 Albert A. Michelson made the first measurements of a stellar diameter using an interferometer on the Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory.[33]
+
+Important theoretical work on the physical structure of stars occurred during the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1913, the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram was developed, propelling the astrophysical study of stars. Successful models were developed to explain the interiors of stars and stellar evolution. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin first proposed that stars were made primarily of hydrogen and helium in her 1925 PhD thesis.[34] The spectra of stars were further understood through advances in quantum physics. This allowed the chemical composition of the stellar atmosphere to be determined.[35]
+
+With the exception of supernovae, individual stars have primarily been observed in the Local Group,[36] and especially in the visible part of the Milky Way (as demonstrated by the detailed star catalogues available for our
+galaxy).[37] But some stars have been observed in the M100 galaxy of the Virgo Cluster, about 100 million light years from the Earth.[38]
+In the Local Supercluster it is possible to see star clusters, and current telescopes could in principle observe faint individual stars in the Local Group[39] (see Cepheids). However, outside the Local Supercluster of galaxies, neither individual stars nor clusters of stars have been observed. The only exception is a faint image of a large star cluster containing hundreds of thousands of stars located at a distance of one billion light years[40]—ten times further than the most distant star cluster previously observed.
+
+In February 2018, astronomers reported, for the first time, a signal of the reionization epoch, an indirect detection of light from the earliest stars formed—about 180 million years after the Big Bang.[41]
+
+In April, 2018, astronomers reported the detection of the most distant "ordinary" (i.e., main sequence) star, named Icarus (formally, MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1), at 9 billion light-years away from Earth.[42][43]
+
+In May 2018, astronomers reported the detection of the most distant oxygen ever detected in the Universe—and the most distant galaxy ever observed by Atacama Large Millimeter Array or the Very Large Telescope—with the team inferring that the signal was emitted 13.3 billion years ago (or 500 million years after the Big Bang). They found that the observed brightness of the galaxy is well-explained by a model where the onset of star formation corresponds to only 250 million years after the Universe began, corresponding to a redshift of about 15.[44]
+
+The concept of a constellation was known to exist during the Babylonian period. Ancient sky watchers imagined that prominent arrangements of stars formed patterns, and they associated these with particular aspects of nature or their myths. Twelve of these formations lay along the band of the ecliptic and these became the basis of astrology.[45] Many of the more prominent individual stars were also given names, particularly with Arabic or Latin designations.
+
+As well as certain constellations and the Sun itself, individual stars have their own myths.[46] To the Ancient Greeks, some "stars", known as planets (Greek πλανήτης (planētēs), meaning "wanderer"), represented various important deities, from which the names of the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were taken.[46] (Uranus and Neptune were also Greek and Roman gods, but neither planet was known in Antiquity because of their low brightness. Their names were assigned by later astronomers.)
+
+Circa 1600, the names of the constellations were used to name the stars in the corresponding regions of the sky. The German astronomer Johann Bayer created a series of star maps and applied Greek letters as designations to the stars in each constellation. Later a numbering system based on the star's right ascension was invented and added to John Flamsteed's star catalogue in his book "Historia coelestis Britannica" (the 1712 edition), whereby this numbering system came to be called Flamsteed designation or Flamsteed numbering.[47][48]
+
+The only internationally recognized authority for naming celestial bodies is the International Astronomical Union (IAU).[49] The International Astronomical Union maintains the Working Group on Star Names (WGSN)[50] which catalogs and standardizes proper names for stars. A number of private companies sell names of stars, which the British Library calls an unregulated commercial enterprise.[51][52] The IAU has disassociated itself from this commercial practice, and these names are neither recognized by the IAU, professional astronomers, nor the amateur astronomy community.[53] One such star-naming company is the International Star Registry, which, during the 1980s, was accused of deceptive practice for making it appear that the assigned name was official. This now-discontinued ISR practice was informally labeled a scam and a fraud,[54][55][56][57] and the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection issued a violation against ISR for engaging in a deceptive trade practice.[58][59]
+
+Although stellar parameters can be expressed in SI units or CGS units, it is often most convenient to express mass, luminosity, and radii in solar units, based on the characteristics of the Sun. In 2015, the IAU defined a set of nominal solar values (defined as SI constants, without uncertainties) which can be used for quoting stellar parameters:
+
+The solar mass M⊙ was not explicitly defined by the IAU due to the large relative uncertainty (10−4) of the Newtonian gravitational constant G. However, since the product of the Newtonian gravitational constant and solar mass
+together (GM⊙) has been determined to much greater precision, the IAU defined the nominal solar mass parameter to be:
+
+However, one can combine the nominal solar mass parameter with the most recent (2014) CODATA estimate of the Newtonian gravitational constant G to derive the solar mass to be approximately 1.9885 × 1030 kg. Although the exact values for the luminosity, radius, mass parameter, and mass may vary slightly in the future due to observational uncertainties, the 2015 IAU nominal constants will remain the same SI values as they remain useful measures for quoting stellar parameters.
+
+Large lengths, such as the radius of a giant star or the semi-major axis of a binary star system, are often expressed in terms of the astronomical unit—approximately equal to the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun (150 million km or approximately 93 million miles). In 2012, the IAU defined the astronomical constant to be an exact length in meters: 149,597,870,700 m.[60]
+
+Stars condense from regions of space of higher matter density, yet those regions are less dense than within a vacuum chamber. These regions—known as molecular clouds—consist mostly of hydrogen, with about 23 to 28 percent helium and a few percent heavier elements. One example of such a star-forming region is the Orion Nebula.[61] Most stars form in groups of dozens to hundreds of thousands of stars.[62]
+Massive stars in these groups may powerfully illuminate those clouds, ionizing the hydrogen, and creating H II regions. Such feedback effects, from star formation, may ultimately disrupt the cloud and prevent further star formation.
+
+All stars spend the majority of their existence as main sequence stars, fueled primarily by the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium within their cores. However, stars of different masses have markedly different properties at various stages of their development. The ultimate fate of more massive stars differs from that of less massive stars, as do their luminosities and the impact they have on their environment. Accordingly, astronomers often group stars by their mass:[63]
+
+The formation of a star begins with gravitational instability within a molecular cloud, caused by regions of higher density—often triggered by compression of clouds by radiation from massive stars, expanding bubbles in the interstellar medium, the collision of different molecular clouds, or the collision of galaxies (as in a starburst galaxy).[65][66] When a region reaches a sufficient density of matter to satisfy the criteria for Jeans instability, it begins to collapse under its own gravitational force.[67]
+
+As the cloud collapses, individual conglomerations of dense dust and gas form "Bok globules". As a globule collapses and the density increases, the gravitational energy converts into heat and the temperature rises. When the protostellar cloud has approximately reached the stable condition of hydrostatic equilibrium, a protostar forms at the core.[68] These pre-main-sequence stars are often surrounded by a protoplanetary disk and powered mainly by the conversion of gravitational energy. The period of gravitational contraction lasts about 10 to 15 million years.
+
+Early stars of less than 2 M☉ are called T Tauri stars, while those with greater mass are Herbig Ae/Be stars. These newly formed stars emit jets of gas along their axis of rotation, which may reduce the angular momentum of the collapsing star and result in small patches of nebulosity known as Herbig–Haro objects.[69][70]
+These jets, in combination with radiation from nearby massive stars, may help to drive away the surrounding cloud from which the star was formed.[71]
+
+Early in their development, T Tauri stars follow the Hayashi track—they contract and decrease in luminosity while remaining at roughly the same temperature. Less massive T Tauri stars follow this track to the main sequence, while more massive stars turn onto the Henyey track.
+
+Most stars are observed to be members of binary star systems, and the properties of those binaries are the result of the conditions in which they formed.[72] A gas cloud must lose its angular momentum in order to collapse and form a star. The fragmentation of the cloud into multiple stars distributes some of that angular momentum. The primordial binaries transfer some angular momentum by gravitational interactions during close encounters with other stars in young stellar clusters. These interactions tend to split apart more widely separated (soft) binaries while causing hard binaries to become more tightly bound. This produces the separation of binaries into their two observed populations distributions.
+
+Stars spend about 90% of their existence fusing hydrogen into helium in high-temperature and high-pressure reactions near the core. Such stars are said to be on the main sequence, and are called dwarf stars. Starting at zero-age main sequence, the proportion of helium in a star's core will steadily increase, the rate of nuclear fusion at the core will slowly increase, as will the star's temperature and luminosity.[73]
+The Sun, for example, is estimated to have increased in luminosity by about 40% since it reached the main sequence 4.6 billion (4.6 × 109) years ago.[74]
+
+Every star generates a stellar wind of particles that causes a continual outflow of gas into space. For most stars, the mass lost is negligible. The Sun loses 10−14 M☉ every year,[75] or about 0.01% of its total mass over its entire lifespan. However, very massive stars can lose 10−7 to 10−5 M☉ each year, significantly affecting their evolution.[76] Stars that begin with more than 50 M☉ can lose over half their total mass while on the main sequence.[77]
+
+The time a star spends on the main sequence depends primarily on the amount of fuel it has and the rate at which it fuses it. The Sun is expected to live 10 billion (1010) years. Massive stars consume their fuel very rapidly and are short-lived. Low mass stars consume their fuel very slowly. Stars less massive than 0.25 M☉, called red dwarfs, are able to fuse nearly all of their mass while stars of about 1 M☉ can only fuse about 10% of their mass. The combination of their slow fuel-consumption and relatively large usable fuel supply allows low mass stars to last about one trillion (1012) years; the most extreme of 0.08 M☉) will last for about 12 trillion years. Red dwarfs become hotter and more luminous as they accumulate helium. When they eventually run out of hydrogen, they contract into a white dwarf and decline in temperature.[64] However, since the lifespan of such stars is greater than the current age of the universe (13.8 billion years), no stars under about 0.85 M☉[78] are expected to have moved off the main sequence.
+
+Besides mass, the elements heavier than helium can play a significant role in the evolution of stars. Astronomers label all elements heavier than helium "metals", and call the chemical concentration of these elements in a star, its metallicity. A star's metallicity can influence the time the star takes to burn its fuel, and controls the formation of its magnetic fields,[79] which affects the strength of its stellar wind.[80] Older, population II stars have substantially less metallicity than the younger, population I stars due to the composition of the molecular clouds from which they formed. Over time, such clouds become increasingly enriched in heavier elements as older stars die and shed portions of their atmospheres.
+
+As stars of at least 0.4 M☉[4] exhaust their supply of hydrogen at their core, they start to fuse hydrogen in a shell outside the helium core. Their outer layers expand and cool greatly as they form a red giant. In about 5 billion years, when the Sun enters the helium burning phase, it will expand to a maximum radius of roughly 1 astronomical unit (150 million kilometres), 250 times its present size, and lose 30% of its current mass.[74][81]
+
+As the hydrogen shell burning produces more helium, the core increases in mass and temperature. In a red giant of up to 2.25 M☉, the mass of the helium core becomes degenerate prior to helium fusion. Finally, when the temperature increases sufficiently, helium fusion begins explosively in what is called a helium flash, and the star rapidly shrinks in radius, increases its surface temperature, and moves to the horizontal branch of the HR diagram. For more massive stars, helium core fusion starts before the core becomes degenerate, and the star spends some time in the red clump, slowly burning helium, before the outer convective envelope collapses and the star then moves to the horizontal branch.[6]
+
+After the star has fused the helium of its core, the carbon product fuses producing a hot core with an outer shell of fusing helium. The star then follows an evolutionary path called the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) that parallels the other described red giant phase, but with a higher luminosity. The more massive AGB stars may undergo a brief period of carbon fusion before the core becomes degenerate.
+
+During their helium-burning phase, a star of more than 9 solar masses expands to form first a blue and then a red supergiant. Particularly massive stars may evolve to a Wolf-Rayet star, characterised by spectra dominated by emission lines of elements heavier than hydrogen, which have reached the surface due to strong convection and intense mass loss.
+
+When helium is exhausted at the core of a massive star, the core contracts and the temperature and pressure rises enough to fuse carbon (see Carbon-burning process). This process continues, with the successive stages being fueled by neon (see neon-burning process), oxygen (see oxygen-burning process), and silicon (see silicon-burning process). Near the end of the star's life, fusion continues along a series of onion-layer shells within a massive star. Each shell fuses a different element, with the outermost shell fusing hydrogen; the next shell fusing helium, and so forth.[82]
+
+The final stage occurs when a massive star begins producing iron. Since iron nuclei are more tightly bound than any heavier nuclei, any fusion beyond iron does not produce a net release of energy.[83]
+
+As a star's core shrinks, the intensity of radiation from that surface increases, creating such radiation pressure on the outer shell of gas that it will push those layers away, forming a planetary nebula. If what remains after the outer atmosphere has been shed is less than roughly 1.4 M☉, it shrinks to a relatively tiny object about the size of Earth, known as a white dwarf. White dwarfs lack the mass for further gravitational compression to take place.[84] The electron-degenerate matter inside a white dwarf is no longer a plasma, even though stars are generally referred to as being spheres of plasma. Eventually, white dwarfs fade into black dwarfs over a very long period of time.
+
+In massive stars, fusion continues until the iron core has grown so large (more than 1.4 M☉) that it can no longer support its own mass. This core will suddenly collapse as its electrons are driven into its protons, forming neutrons, neutrinos, and gamma rays in a burst of electron capture and inverse beta decay. The shockwave formed by this sudden collapse causes the rest of the star to explode in a supernova. Supernovae become so bright that they may briefly outshine the star's entire home galaxy. When they occur within the Milky Way, supernovae have historically been observed by naked-eye observers as "new stars" where none seemingly existed before.[85]
+
+A supernova explosion blows away the star's outer layers, leaving a remnant such as the Crab Nebula.[85] The core is compressed into a neutron star, which sometimes manifests itself as a pulsar or X-ray burster. In the case of the largest stars, the remnant is a black hole greater than 4 M☉.[86] In a neutron star the matter is in a state known as neutron-degenerate matter, with a more exotic form of degenerate matter, QCD matter, possibly present in the core. Within a black hole, the matter is in a state that is not currently understood.
+
+The blown-off outer layers of dying stars include heavy elements, which may be recycled during the formation of new stars. These heavy elements allow the formation of rocky planets. The outflow from supernovae and the stellar wind of large stars play an important part in shaping the interstellar medium.[85]
+
+The post–main-sequence evolution of binary stars may be significantly different from the evolution of single stars of the same mass. If stars in a binary system are sufficiently close, when one of the stars expands to become a red giant it may overflow its Roche lobe, the region around a star where material is gravitationally bound to that star, leading to transfer of material to the other. When the Roche lobe is violated, a variety of phenomena can result, including contact binaries, common-envelope binaries, cataclysmic variables, and type Ia supernovae.
+
+Stars are not spread uniformly across the universe, but are normally grouped into galaxies along with interstellar gas and dust. A typical galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, and there are more than 2 trillion (1012) galaxies.[87] Overall, there are as many as an estimated 1×1024 stars[1][2] (more stars than all the grains of sand on planet Earth).[88][89][90] While it is often believed that stars only exist within galaxies, intergalactic stars have been discovered.[91]
+
+A multi-star system consists of two or more gravitationally bound stars that orbit each other. The simplest and most common multi-star system is a binary star, but systems of three or more stars are also found. For reasons of orbital stability, such multi-star systems are often organized into hierarchical sets of binary stars.[92] Larger groups called star clusters also exist. These range from loose stellar associations with only a few stars, up to enormous globular clusters with hundreds of thousands of stars. Such systems orbit their host galaxy.
+
+It has been a long-held assumption that the majority of stars occur in gravitationally bound, multiple-star systems. This is particularly true for very massive O and B class stars, where 80% of the stars are believed to be part of multiple-star systems. The proportion of single star systems increases with decreasing star mass, so that only 25% of red dwarfs are known to have stellar companions. As 85% of all stars are red dwarfs, most stars in the Milky Way are likely single from birth.[93]
+
+The nearest star to the Earth, apart from the Sun, is Proxima Centauri, which is 39.9 trillion kilometres, or 4.2 light-years. Travelling at the orbital speed of the Space Shuttle (8 kilometres per second—almost 30,000 kilometres per hour), it would take about 150,000 years to arrive.[94] This is typical of stellar separations in galactic discs.[95] Stars can be much closer to each other in the centres of galaxies and in globular clusters, or much farther apart in galactic halos.
+
+Due to the relatively vast distances between stars outside the galactic nucleus, collisions between stars are thought to be rare. In denser regions such as the core of globular clusters or the galactic center, collisions can be more common.[96] Such collisions can produce what are known as blue stragglers. These abnormal stars have a higher surface temperature than the other main sequence stars with the same luminosity of the cluster to which it belongs.[97]
+
+Almost everything about a star is determined by its initial mass, including such characteristics as luminosity, size, evolution, lifespan, and its eventual fate.
+
+Most stars are between 1 billion and 10 billion years old. Some stars may even be close to 13.8 billion years old—the observed age of the universe. The oldest star yet discovered, HD 140283, nicknamed Methuselah star, is an estimated 14.46 ± 0.8 billion years old.[98] (Due to the uncertainty in the value, this age for the star does not conflict with the age of the Universe, determined by the Planck satellite as 13.799 ± 0.021).[98][99]
+
+The more massive the star, the shorter its lifespan, primarily because massive stars have greater pressure on their cores, causing them to burn hydrogen more rapidly. The most massive stars last an average of a few million years, while stars of minimum mass (red dwarfs) burn their fuel very slowly and can last tens to hundreds of billions of years.[100][101]
+
+When stars form in the present Milky Way galaxy they are composed of about 71% hydrogen and 27% helium,[103] as measured by mass, with a small fraction of heavier elements. Typically the portion of heavy elements is measured in terms of the iron content of the stellar atmosphere, as iron is a common element and its absorption lines are relatively easy to measure. The portion of heavier elements may be an indicator of the likelihood that the star has a planetary system.[104]
+
+The star with the lowest iron content ever measured is the dwarf HE1327-2326, with only 1/200,000th the iron content of the Sun.[105] By contrast, the super-metal-rich star μ Leonis has nearly double the abundance of iron as the Sun, while the planet-bearing star 14 Herculis has nearly triple the iron.[106] There also exist chemically peculiar stars that show unusual abundances of certain elements in their spectrum; especially chromium and rare earth elements.[107] Stars with cooler outer atmospheres, including the Sun, can form various diatomic and polyatomic molecules.[108]
+
+Due to their great distance from the Earth, all stars except the Sun appear to the unaided eye as shining points in the night sky that twinkle because of the effect of the Earth's atmosphere. The Sun is also a star, but it is close enough to the Earth to appear as a disk instead, and to provide daylight. Other than the Sun, the star with the largest apparent size is R Doradus, with an angular diameter of only 0.057 arcseconds.[109]
+
+The disks of most stars are much too small in angular size to be observed with current ground-based optical telescopes, and so interferometer telescopes are required to produce images of these objects. Another technique for measuring the angular size of stars is through occultation. By precisely measuring the drop in brightness of a star as it is occulted by the Moon (or the rise in brightness when it reappears), the star's angular diameter can be computed.[110]
+
+Stars range in size from neutron stars, which vary anywhere from 20 to 40 km (25 mi) in diameter, to supergiants like Betelgeuse in the Orion constellation, which has a diameter about 1,000 times that of our sun.[111][112] Betelgeuse, however, has a much lower density than the Sun.[113]
+
+The motion of a star relative to the Sun can provide useful information about the origin and age of a star, as well as the structure and evolution of the surrounding galaxy. The components of motion of a star consist of the radial velocity toward or away from the Sun, and the traverse angular movement, which is called its proper motion.
+
+Radial velocity is measured by the doppler shift of the star's spectral lines, and is given in units of km/s. The proper motion of a star, its parallax, is determined by precise astrometric measurements in units of milli-arc seconds (mas) per year. With knowledge of the star's parallax and its distance, the proper motion velocity can be calculated. Together with the radial velocity, the total velocity can be calculated. Stars with high rates of proper motion are likely to be relatively close to the Sun, making them good candidates for parallax measurements.[115]
+
+When both rates of movement are known, the space velocity of the star relative to the Sun or the galaxy can be computed. Among nearby stars, it has been found that younger population I stars have generally lower velocities than older, population II stars. The latter have elliptical orbits that are inclined to the plane of the galaxy.[116] A comparison of the kinematics of nearby stars has allowed astronomers to trace their origin to common points in giant molecular clouds, and are referred to as stellar associations.[117]
+
+The magnetic field of a star is generated within regions of the interior where convective circulation occurs. This movement of conductive plasma functions like a dynamo, wherein the movement of electrical charges induce magnetic fields, as does a mechanical dynamo. Those magnetic fields have a great range that extend throughout and beyond the star. The strength of the magnetic field varies with the mass and composition of the star, and the amount of magnetic surface activity depends upon the star's rate of rotation. This surface activity produces starspots, which are regions of strong magnetic fields and lower than normal surface temperatures. Coronal loops are arching magnetic field flux lines that rise from a star's surface into the star's outer atmosphere, its corona. The coronal loops can be seen due to the plasma they conduct along their length. Stellar flares are bursts of high-energy particles that are emitted due to the same magnetic activity.[118]
+
+Young, rapidly rotating stars tend to have high levels of surface activity because of their magnetic field. The magnetic field can act upon a star's stellar wind, functioning as a brake to gradually slow the rate of rotation with time. Thus, older stars such as the Sun have a much slower rate of rotation and a lower level of surface activity. The activity levels of slowly rotating stars tend to vary in a cyclical manner and can shut down altogether for periods of time.[119] During
+the Maunder Minimum, for example, the Sun underwent a
+70-year period with almost no sunspot activity.
+
+One of the most massive stars known is Eta Carinae,[120] which,
+with 100–150 times as much mass as the Sun, will have a lifespan of only several million years. Studies of the most massive open clusters suggests 150 M☉ as an upper limit for stars in the current era of the universe.[121] This
+represents an empirical value for the theoretical limit on the mass of forming stars due to increasing radiation pressure on the accreting gas cloud. Several stars in the R136 cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud have been measured with larger masses,[122] but
+it has been determined that they could have been created through the collision and merger of massive stars in close binary systems, sidestepping the 150 M☉ limit on massive star formation.[123]
+
+The first stars to form after the Big Bang may have been larger, up to 300 M☉,[124] due
+to the complete absence of elements heavier than lithium in their composition. This generation of supermassive population III stars is likely to have existed in the very early universe (i.e., they are observed to have a high redshift), and may have started the production of chemical elements heavier than hydrogen that are needed for the later formation of planets and life. In June 2015, astronomers reported evidence for Population III stars in the Cosmos Redshift 7 galaxy at z = 6.60.[125][126]
+
+With a mass only 80 times that of Jupiter (MJ), 2MASS J0523-1403 is the smallest known star undergoing nuclear fusion in its core.[127] For
+stars with metallicity similar to the Sun, the theoretical minimum mass the star can have and still undergo fusion at the core, is estimated to be about 75 MJ.[128][129] When the metallicity is very low, however, the minimum star size seems to be about 8.3% of the solar mass, or about 87 MJ.[129][130] Smaller bodies called brown dwarfs, occupy a poorly defined grey area between stars and gas giants.
+
+The combination of the radius and the mass of a star determines its surface gravity. Giant stars have a much lower surface gravity than do main sequence stars, while the opposite is the case for degenerate, compact stars such as white dwarfs. The surface gravity can influence the appearance of a star's spectrum, with higher gravity causing a broadening of the absorption lines.[35]
+
+The rotation rate of stars can be determined through spectroscopic measurement, or more exactly determined by tracking their starspots. Young stars can have a rotation greater than 100 km/s at the equator. The B-class star Achernar, for example, has an equatorial velocity of about 225 km/s or greater, causing its equator to bulge outward and giving it an equatorial diameter that is more than 50% greater than between the poles. This rate of rotation is just below the critical velocity of 300 km/s at which speed the star would break apart.[131] By contrast, the Sun rotates once every 25–35 days depending on latitude,[132] with an equatorial velocity of 1.93 km/s.[133] A main sequence star's magnetic field and the stellar wind serve to slow its rotation by a significant amount as it evolves on the main sequence.[134]
+
+Degenerate stars have contracted into a compact mass, resulting in a rapid rate of rotation. However they have relatively low rates of rotation compared to what would be expected by conservation of angular momentum—the tendency of a rotating body to compensate for a contraction in size by increasing its rate of spin. A large portion of the star's angular momentum is dissipated as a result of mass loss through the stellar wind.[135] In spite of this, the rate of rotation for a pulsar can be very rapid. The pulsar at the heart of the Crab nebula, for example, rotates 30 times per second.[136] The rotation rate of the pulsar will gradually slow due to the emission of radiation.[137]
+
+The surface temperature of a main sequence star is determined by the rate of energy production of its core and by its radius, and is often estimated from the star's color index.[138] The temperature is normally given in terms of an effective temperature,  which is the temperature of an idealized black body that radiates its energy at the same luminosity per surface area as the star. Note that the effective temperature is only a representative of the surface, as the temperature increases toward the core.[139] The temperature in the core region of a star is several million kelvins.[140]
+
+The stellar temperature will determine the rate of ionization of various elements, resulting in characteristic absorption lines in the spectrum. The surface temperature of a star, along with its visual absolute magnitude and absorption features, is used to classify a star (see classification below).[35]
+
+Massive main sequence stars can have surface temperatures of 50,000 K. Smaller stars such as the Sun have surface temperatures of a few thousand K. Red giants have relatively low surface temperatures of about 3,600 K; but they also have a high luminosity due to their large exterior surface area.[141]
+
+The energy produced by stars, a product of nuclear fusion, radiates to space as both electromagnetic radiation and particle radiation. The particle radiation emitted by a star is manifested as the stellar wind,[142] which
+streams from the outer layers as electrically charged protons and alpha and beta particles. Although almost massless, there also exists a steady stream of neutrinos emanating from the star's core.
+
+The production of energy at the core is the reason stars shine so brightly: every time two or more atomic nuclei fuse together to form a single atomic nucleus of a new heavier element, gamma ray photons are released from the nuclear fusion product. This energy is converted to other forms of electromagnetic energy of lower frequency, such as visible light, by the time it reaches the star's outer layers.
+
+The color of a star, as determined by the most intense frequency of the visible light, depends on the temperature of the star's outer layers, including its photosphere.[143] Besides
+visible light, stars also emit forms of electromagnetic radiation that are invisible to the human eye. In fact, stellar electromagnetic radiation spans the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from the longest wavelengths of radio waves through infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, to the shortest of X-rays, and gamma rays. From the standpoint of total energy emitted by a star, not all components of stellar electromagnetic radiation are significant, but all frequencies provide insight into the star's physics.
+
+Using the stellar spectrum, astronomers can also determine the surface temperature, surface gravity, metallicity and rotational velocity of a star. If the distance of the star is found, such as by measuring the parallax, then the luminosity of the star can be derived. The mass, radius, surface gravity, and rotation period can then be estimated based on stellar models. (Mass can be calculated for stars in binary systems by measuring their orbital velocities and distances. Gravitational microlensing has been used to measure the mass of a single star.[144]) With these parameters, astronomers can also estimate the age of the star.[145]
+
+The luminosity of a star is the amount of light and other forms of radiant energy it radiates per unit of time. It has units of power. The luminosity of a star is determined by its radius and surface temperature. Many stars do not radiate uniformly across their entire surface. The rapidly rotating star Vega, for example, has a higher energy flux (power per unit area) at its poles than along its equator.[146]
+
+Patches of the star's surface with a lower temperature and luminosity than average are known as starspots. Small, dwarf stars such as our Sun generally have essentially featureless disks with only small starspots.  Giant stars have much larger, more obvious starspots,[147] and
+they also exhibit strong stellar limb darkening. That is, the brightness decreases towards the edge of the stellar disk.[148] Red
+dwarf flare stars such as UV Ceti may also possess prominent starspot features.[149]
+
+The apparent brightness of a star is expressed in terms of its apparent magnitude. It is a function of the star's luminosity, its distance from Earth, the extinction effect of interstellar dust and gas, and the altering of the star's light as it passes through Earth's atmosphere. Intrinsic or absolute magnitude is directly related to a star's luminosity, and is what the apparent magnitude a star would be if the distance between the Earth and the star were 10 parsecs (32.6 light-years).
+
+Both the apparent and absolute magnitude scales are logarithmic units: one whole number difference in magnitude is equal to a brightness variation of about 2.5 times[151] (the 5th root of 100 or approximately 2.512). This means that a first magnitude star (+1.00) is about 2.5 times brighter than a second magnitude (+2.00) star, and about 100 times brighter than a sixth magnitude star (+6.00). The faintest stars visible to the naked eye under good seeing conditions are about magnitude +6.
+
+On both apparent and absolute magnitude scales, the smaller the magnitude number, the brighter the star; the larger the magnitude number, the fainter the star. The brightest stars, on either scale, have negative magnitude numbers. The variation in brightness (ΔL) between two stars is calculated by subtracting the magnitude number of the brighter star (mb) from the magnitude number of the fainter star (mf), then using the difference as an exponent for the base number 2.512; that is to say:
+
+Relative to both luminosity and distance from Earth, a star's absolute magnitude (M) and apparent magnitude (m) are not equivalent;[151] for example, the bright star Sirius has an apparent magnitude of −1.44, but it has an absolute magnitude of +1.41.
+
+The Sun has an apparent magnitude of −26.7, but its absolute magnitude is only +4.83. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky as seen from Earth, is approximately 23 times more luminous than the Sun, while Canopus, the second brightest star in the night sky with an absolute magnitude of −5.53, is approximately 14,000 times more luminous than the Sun. Despite Canopus being vastly more luminous than Sirius, however, Sirius appears brighter than Canopus. This is because Sirius is merely 8.6 light-years from the Earth, while Canopus is much farther away at a distance of 310 light-years.
+
+As of 2006, the star with the highest known absolute magnitude is LBV 1806-20, with a magnitude of −14.2. This star is at least 5,000,000 times more luminous than the Sun.[152] The least luminous stars that are currently known are located in the NGC 6397 cluster. The faintest red dwarfs in the cluster were magnitude 26, while a 28th magnitude white dwarf was also discovered. These faint stars are so dim that their light is as bright as a birthday candle on the Moon when viewed from the Earth.[153]
+
+The current stellar classification system originated in the early 20th century, when stars were classified from A to Q based on the strength of the hydrogen line.[155] It was thought that the hydrogen line strength was a simple linear function of temperature. Instead, it was more complicated: it strengthened with increasing temperature, peaked near 9000 K, and then declined at greater temperatures. The classifications were since reordered by temperature, on which the modern scheme is based.[156]
+
+Stars are given a single-letter classification according to their spectra, ranging from type O, which are very hot, to M, which are so cool that molecules may form in their atmospheres. The main classifications in order of decreasing surface temperature are: O, B, A, F, G, K, and M. A variety of rare spectral types are given special classifications. The most common of these are types L and T, which classify the coldest low-mass stars and brown dwarfs. Each letter has 10 sub-divisions, numbered from 0 to 9, in order of decreasing temperature. However, this system breaks down at extreme high temperatures as classes O0 and O1 may not exist.[157]
+
+In addition, stars may be classified by the luminosity effects found in their spectral lines, which correspond to their spatial size and is determined by their surface gravity. These range from 0 (hypergiants) through III (giants) to V (main sequence dwarfs); some authors add VII (white dwarfs). Main sequence stars fall along a narrow, diagonal band when graphed according to their absolute magnitude and spectral type.[157] The Sun is a main sequence G2V yellow dwarf of intermediate temperature and ordinary size.
+
+Additional nomenclature, in the form of lower-case letters added to the end of the spectral type to indicate peculiar features of the spectrum. For example, an "e" can indicate the presence of emission lines; "m" represents unusually strong levels of metals, and "var" can mean variations in the spectral type.[157]
+
+White dwarf stars have their own class that begins with the letter D. This is further sub-divided into the classes DA, DB, DC, DO, DZ, and DQ, depending on the types of prominent lines found in the spectrum. This is followed by a numerical value that indicates the temperature.[158]
+
+Variable stars have periodic or random changes in luminosity because of intrinsic or extrinsic properties. Of the intrinsically variable stars, the primary types can be subdivided into three principal groups.
+
+During their stellar evolution, some stars pass through phases where they can become pulsating variables. Pulsating variable stars vary in radius and luminosity over time, expanding and contracting with periods ranging from minutes to years, depending on the size of the star. This category includes Cepheid and Cepheid-like stars, and long-period variables such as Mira.[159]
+
+Eruptive variables are stars that experience sudden increases in luminosity because of flares or mass ejection events.[159] This group includes protostars, Wolf-Rayet stars, and flare stars, as well as giant and supergiant stars.
+
+Cataclysmic or explosive variable stars are those that undergo a dramatic change in their properties. This group includes novae and supernovae. A binary star system that includes a nearby white dwarf can produce certain types of these spectacular stellar explosions, including the nova and a Type 1a supernova.[6] The explosion is created when the white dwarf accretes hydrogen from the companion star, building up mass until the hydrogen undergoes fusion.[160] Some novae are also recurrent, having periodic outbursts of moderate amplitude.[159]
+
+Stars can also vary in luminosity because of extrinsic factors, such as eclipsing binaries, as well as rotating stars that produce extreme starspots.[159] A notable example of an eclipsing binary is Algol, which regularly varies in magnitude from 2.1 to 3.4 over a period of 2.87 days.[161]
+
+The interior of a stable star is in a state of hydrostatic equilibrium: the forces on any small volume almost exactly counterbalance each other. The balanced forces are inward gravitational force and an outward force due to the pressure gradient within the star. The pressure gradient is established by the temperature gradient of the plasma; the outer part of the star is cooler than the core. The temperature at the core of a main sequence or giant star is at least on the order of 107 K. The resulting temperature and pressure at the hydrogen-burning core of a main sequence star are sufficient for nuclear fusion to occur and for sufficient energy to be produced to prevent further collapse of the star.[162][163]
+
+As atomic nuclei are fused in the core, they emit energy in the form of gamma rays. These photons interact with the surrounding plasma, adding to the thermal energy at the core. Stars on the main sequence convert hydrogen into helium, creating a slowly but steadily increasing proportion of helium in the core. Eventually the helium content becomes predominant, and energy production ceases at the core. Instead, for stars of more than 0.4 M☉, fusion occurs in a slowly expanding shell around the degenerate helium core.[164]
+
+In addition to hydrostatic equilibrium, the interior of a stable star will also maintain an energy balance of thermal equilibrium. There is a radial temperature gradient throughout the interior that results in a flux of energy flowing toward the exterior. The outgoing flux of energy leaving any layer within the star will exactly match the incoming flux from below.
+
+The radiation zone is the region of the stellar interior where the flux of energy outward is dependent on radiative heat transfer, since convective heat transfer is inefficient in that zone. In this region the plasma will not be perturbed, and any mass motions will die out. If this is not the case, however, then the plasma becomes unstable and convection will occur, forming a convection zone. This can occur, for example, in regions where very high energy fluxes occur, such as near the core or in areas with high opacity (making radiatative heat transfer inefficient) as in the outer envelope.[163]
+
+The occurrence of convection in the outer envelope of a main sequence star depends on the star's mass. Stars with several times the mass of the Sun have a convection zone deep within the interior and a radiative zone in the outer layers. Smaller stars such as the Sun are just the opposite, with the convective zone located in the outer layers.[165] Red dwarf stars with less than 0.4 M☉ are convective throughout, which prevents the accumulation of a helium core.[4] For most stars the convective zones will also vary over time as the star ages and the constitution of the interior is modified.[163]
+
+The photosphere is that portion of a star that is visible to an observer. This is the layer at which the plasma of the star becomes transparent to photons of light. From here, the energy generated at the core becomes free to propagate into space. It is within the photosphere that sun spots, regions of lower than average temperature, appear.
+
+Above the level of the photosphere is the stellar atmosphere. In a main sequence star such as the Sun, the lowest level of the atmosphere, just above the photosphere, is the thin chromosphere region, where spicules appear and stellar flares begin. Above this is the transition region, where the temperature rapidly increases within a distance of only 100 km (62 mi). Beyond this is the corona, a volume of super-heated plasma that can extend outward to several million kilometres.[166] The existence of a corona appears to be dependent on a convective zone in the outer layers of the star.[165] Despite its high temperature, and the corona emits very little light, due to its low gas density. The corona region of the Sun is normally only visible during a solar eclipse.
+
+From the corona, a stellar wind of plasma particles expands outward from the star, until it interacts with the interstellar medium. For the Sun, the influence of its solar wind extends throughout a bubble-shaped region called the heliosphere.[167]
+
+A variety of nuclear fusion reactions take place in the cores of stars, that depend upon their mass and composition. When nuclei fuse, the mass of the fused product is less than the mass of the original parts. This lost mass is converted to electromagnetic energy, according to the mass–energy equivalence relationship E = mc2.[3]
+
+The hydrogen fusion process is temperature-sensitive, so a moderate increase in the core temperature will result in a significant increase in the fusion rate. As a result, the core temperature of main sequence stars only varies from 4 million kelvin for a small M-class star to 40 million kelvin for a massive O-class star.[140]
+
+In the Sun, with a 10-million-kelvin core, hydrogen fuses to form helium in the proton–proton chain reaction:[168]
+
+These reactions result in the overall reaction:
+
+where e+ is a positron, γ is a gamma ray photon, νe is a neutrino, and H and He are isotopes of hydrogen and helium, respectively. The energy released by this reaction is in millions of electron volts, which is actually only a tiny amount of energy. However enormous numbers of these reactions occur constantly, producing all the energy necessary to sustain the star's radiation output. In comparison, the combustion of two hydrogen gas molecules with one oxygen gas molecule releases only 5.7 eV.
+
+In more massive stars, helium is produced in a cycle of reactions catalyzed by carbon called the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle.[168]
+
+In evolved stars with cores at 100 million kelvin and masses between 0.5 and 10 M☉, helium can be transformed into carbon in the triple-alpha process that uses the intermediate element beryllium:[168]
+
+For an overall reaction of:
+
+In massive stars, heavier elements can also be burned in a contracting core through the neon-burning process and oxygen-burning process. The final stage in the stellar nucleosynthesis process is the silicon-burning process that results in the production of the stable isotope iron-56.[168] Any further fusion would be an endothermic process that consumes energy, and so further energy can only be produced through gravitational collapse.
+
+The table at the left shows the amount of time required for a star of 20 M☉ to consume all of its nuclear fuel. As an O-class main sequence star, it would be 8 times the solar radius and 62,000 times the Sun's luminosity.[171]

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+
+
+A star is an astronomical object consisting of a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its own gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth during the night, appearing as a multitude of fixed luminous points in the sky due to their immense distance from Earth. Historically, the most prominent stars were grouped into constellations and asterisms, the brightest of which gained proper names. Astronomers have assembled star catalogues that identify the known stars and provide standardized stellar designations. The observable Universe contains an estimated 1×1024 stars,[1][2] but most are invisible to the naked eye from Earth, including all stars outside our galaxy, the Milky Way.
+
+For most of its active life, a star shines due to thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in its core, releasing energy that traverses the star's interior and then radiates into outer space. Almost all naturally occurring elements heavier than helium are created by stellar nucleosynthesis during the star's lifetime, and for some stars by supernova nucleosynthesis when it explodes. Near the end of its life, a star can also contain degenerate matter. Astronomers can determine the mass, age, metallicity (chemical composition), and many other properties of a star by observing its motion through space, its luminosity, and spectrum respectively. The total mass of a star is the main factor that determines its evolution and eventual fate. Other characteristics of a star, including diameter and temperature, change over its life, while the star's environment affects its rotation and movement. A plot of the temperature of many stars against their luminosities produces a plot known as a Hertzsprung–Russell diagram (H–R diagram). Plotting a particular star on that diagram allows the age and evolutionary state of that star to be determined.
+
+A star's life begins with the gravitational collapse of a gaseous nebula of material composed primarily of hydrogen, along with helium and trace amounts of heavier elements. When the stellar core is sufficiently dense, hydrogen becomes steadily converted into helium through nuclear fusion, releasing energy in the process.[3] The remainder of the star's interior carries energy away from the core through a combination of radiative and convective heat transfer processes. The star's internal pressure prevents it from collapsing further under its own gravity. A star with mass greater than 0.4 times the Sun's will expand to become a red giant when the hydrogen fuel in its core is exhausted.[4]  In some cases, it will fuse heavier elements at the core or in shells around the core. As the star expands it throws a part of its mass, enriched with those heavier elements, into the interstellar environment, to be recycled later as new stars.[5] Meanwhile, the core becomes a stellar remnant: a white dwarf, a neutron star, or, if it is sufficiently massive, a black hole.
+
+Binary and multi-star systems consist of two or more stars that are gravitationally bound and generally move around each other in stable orbits. When two such stars have a relatively close orbit, their gravitational interaction can have a significant impact on their evolution.[6] Stars can form part of a much larger gravitationally bound structure, such as a star cluster or a galaxy.
+
+Historically, stars have been important to civilizations throughout the world. They have been part of religious practices and used for celestial navigation and orientation. Many ancient astronomers believed that stars were permanently affixed to a heavenly sphere and that they were immutable. By convention, astronomers grouped stars into constellations and used them to track the motions of the planets and the inferred position of the Sun.[7] The motion of the Sun against the background stars (and the horizon) was used to create calendars, which could be used to regulate agricultural practices.[9] The Gregorian calendar, currently used nearly everywhere in the world, is a solar calendar based on the angle of the Earth's rotational axis relative to its local star, the Sun.
+
+The oldest accurately dated star chart was the result of ancient Egyptian astronomy in 1534 BC.[10] The earliest known star catalogues were compiled by the ancient Babylonian astronomers of Mesopotamia in the late 2nd millennium BC, during the Kassite Period (c. 1531–1155 BC).[11]
+
+The first star catalogue in Greek astronomy was created by Aristillus in approximately 300 BC, with the help of Timocharis.[12] The star catalog of Hipparchus (2nd century BC) included 1020 stars, and was used to assemble Ptolemy's star catalogue.[13] Hipparchus is known for the discovery of the first recorded nova (new star).[14] Many of the constellations and star names in use today derive from Greek astronomy.
+
+In spite of the apparent immutability of the heavens, Chinese astronomers were aware that new stars could appear.[15] In 185 AD, they were the first to observe and write about a supernova, now known as the SN 185.[16] The brightest stellar event in recorded history was the SN 1006 supernova, which was observed in 1006 and written about by the Egyptian astronomer Ali ibn Ridwan and several Chinese astronomers.[17] The SN 1054 supernova, which gave birth to the Crab Nebula, was also observed by Chinese and Islamic astronomers.[18][19][20]
+
+Medieval Islamic astronomers gave Arabic names to many stars that are still used today and they invented numerous astronomical instruments that could compute the positions of the stars. They built the first large observatory research institutes, mainly for the purpose of producing Zij star catalogues.[21] Among these, the Book of Fixed Stars (964) was written by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, who observed a number of stars, star clusters (including the Omicron Velorum and Brocchi's Clusters) and galaxies (including the Andromeda Galaxy).[22] According to A. Zahoor, in the 11th century, the Persian polymath scholar Abu Rayhan Biruni described the Milky Way galaxy as a multitude of fragments having the properties of nebulous stars, and also gave the latitudes of various stars during a lunar eclipse in 1019.[23]
+
+According to Josep Puig, the Andalusian astronomer Ibn Bajjah proposed that the Milky Way was made up of many stars that almost touched one another and appeared to be a continuous image due to the effect of refraction from sublunary material, citing his observation of the conjunction of Jupiter and Mars on 500 AH (1106/1107 AD) as evidence.[24] 
+Early European astronomers such as Tycho Brahe identified new stars in the night sky (later termed novae), suggesting that the heavens were not immutable. In 1584, Giordano Bruno suggested that the stars were like the Sun, and may have other planets, possibly even Earth-like, in orbit around them,[25] an idea that had been suggested earlier by the ancient Greek philosophers, Democritus and Epicurus,[26] and by medieval Islamic cosmologists[27] such as Fakhr al-Din al-Razi.[28] By the following century, the idea of the stars being the same as the Sun was reaching a consensus among astronomers. To explain why these stars exerted no net gravitational pull on the Solar System, Isaac Newton suggested that the stars were equally distributed in every direction, an idea prompted by the theologian Richard Bentley.[29]
+
+The Italian astronomer Geminiano Montanari recorded observing variations in luminosity of the star Algol in 1667. Edmond Halley published the first measurements of the proper motion of a pair of nearby "fixed" stars, demonstrating that they had changed positions since the time of the ancient Greek astronomers Ptolemy and Hipparchus.[25]
+
+William Herschel was the first astronomer to attempt to determine the distribution of stars in the sky. During the 1780s, he established a series of gauges in 600 directions and counted the stars observed along each line of sight. From this he deduced that the number of stars steadily increased toward one side of the sky, in the direction of the Milky Way core. His son John Herschel repeated this study in the southern hemisphere and found a corresponding increase in the same direction.[30] In addition to his other accomplishments, William Herschel is also noted for his discovery that some stars do not merely lie along the same line of sight, but are also physical companions that form binary star systems.
+
+The science of stellar spectroscopy was pioneered by Joseph von Fraunhofer and Angelo Secchi. By comparing the spectra of stars such as Sirius to the Sun, they found differences in the strength and number of their absorption lines—the dark lines in stellar spectra caused by the atmosphere's absorption of specific frequencies. In 1865, Secchi began classifying stars into spectral types.[31] However, the modern version of the stellar classification scheme was developed by Annie J. Cannon during the 1900s.
+
+The first direct measurement of the distance to a star (61 Cygni at 11.4 light-years) was made in 1838 by Friedrich Bessel using the parallax technique. Parallax measurements demonstrated the vast separation of the stars in the heavens.[25] Observation of double stars gained increasing importance during the 19th century. In 1834, Friedrich Bessel observed changes in the proper motion of the star Sirius and inferred a hidden companion. Edward Pickering discovered the first spectroscopic binary in 1899 when he observed the periodic splitting of the spectral lines of the star Mizar in a 104-day period. Detailed observations of many binary star systems were collected by astronomers such as Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve and S. W. Burnham, allowing the masses of stars to be determined from computation of orbital elements. The first solution to the problem of deriving an orbit of binary stars from telescope observations was made by Felix Savary in 1827.[32]
+The twentieth century saw increasingly rapid advances in the scientific study of stars. The photograph became a valuable astronomical tool. Karl Schwarzschild discovered that the color of a star and, hence, its temperature, could be determined by comparing the visual magnitude against the photographic magnitude. The development of the photoelectric photometer allowed precise measurements of magnitude at multiple wavelength intervals. In 1921 Albert A. Michelson made the first measurements of a stellar diameter using an interferometer on the Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory.[33]
+
+Important theoretical work on the physical structure of stars occurred during the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1913, the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram was developed, propelling the astrophysical study of stars. Successful models were developed to explain the interiors of stars and stellar evolution. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin first proposed that stars were made primarily of hydrogen and helium in her 1925 PhD thesis.[34] The spectra of stars were further understood through advances in quantum physics. This allowed the chemical composition of the stellar atmosphere to be determined.[35]
+
+With the exception of supernovae, individual stars have primarily been observed in the Local Group,[36] and especially in the visible part of the Milky Way (as demonstrated by the detailed star catalogues available for our
+galaxy).[37] But some stars have been observed in the M100 galaxy of the Virgo Cluster, about 100 million light years from the Earth.[38]
+In the Local Supercluster it is possible to see star clusters, and current telescopes could in principle observe faint individual stars in the Local Group[39] (see Cepheids). However, outside the Local Supercluster of galaxies, neither individual stars nor clusters of stars have been observed. The only exception is a faint image of a large star cluster containing hundreds of thousands of stars located at a distance of one billion light years[40]—ten times further than the most distant star cluster previously observed.
+
+In February 2018, astronomers reported, for the first time, a signal of the reionization epoch, an indirect detection of light from the earliest stars formed—about 180 million years after the Big Bang.[41]
+
+In April, 2018, astronomers reported the detection of the most distant "ordinary" (i.e., main sequence) star, named Icarus (formally, MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1), at 9 billion light-years away from Earth.[42][43]
+
+In May 2018, astronomers reported the detection of the most distant oxygen ever detected in the Universe—and the most distant galaxy ever observed by Atacama Large Millimeter Array or the Very Large Telescope—with the team inferring that the signal was emitted 13.3 billion years ago (or 500 million years after the Big Bang). They found that the observed brightness of the galaxy is well-explained by a model where the onset of star formation corresponds to only 250 million years after the Universe began, corresponding to a redshift of about 15.[44]
+
+The concept of a constellation was known to exist during the Babylonian period. Ancient sky watchers imagined that prominent arrangements of stars formed patterns, and they associated these with particular aspects of nature or their myths. Twelve of these formations lay along the band of the ecliptic and these became the basis of astrology.[45] Many of the more prominent individual stars were also given names, particularly with Arabic or Latin designations.
+
+As well as certain constellations and the Sun itself, individual stars have their own myths.[46] To the Ancient Greeks, some "stars", known as planets (Greek πλανήτης (planētēs), meaning "wanderer"), represented various important deities, from which the names of the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were taken.[46] (Uranus and Neptune were also Greek and Roman gods, but neither planet was known in Antiquity because of their low brightness. Their names were assigned by later astronomers.)
+
+Circa 1600, the names of the constellations were used to name the stars in the corresponding regions of the sky. The German astronomer Johann Bayer created a series of star maps and applied Greek letters as designations to the stars in each constellation. Later a numbering system based on the star's right ascension was invented and added to John Flamsteed's star catalogue in his book "Historia coelestis Britannica" (the 1712 edition), whereby this numbering system came to be called Flamsteed designation or Flamsteed numbering.[47][48]
+
+The only internationally recognized authority for naming celestial bodies is the International Astronomical Union (IAU).[49] The International Astronomical Union maintains the Working Group on Star Names (WGSN)[50] which catalogs and standardizes proper names for stars. A number of private companies sell names of stars, which the British Library calls an unregulated commercial enterprise.[51][52] The IAU has disassociated itself from this commercial practice, and these names are neither recognized by the IAU, professional astronomers, nor the amateur astronomy community.[53] One such star-naming company is the International Star Registry, which, during the 1980s, was accused of deceptive practice for making it appear that the assigned name was official. This now-discontinued ISR practice was informally labeled a scam and a fraud,[54][55][56][57] and the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection issued a violation against ISR for engaging in a deceptive trade practice.[58][59]
+
+Although stellar parameters can be expressed in SI units or CGS units, it is often most convenient to express mass, luminosity, and radii in solar units, based on the characteristics of the Sun. In 2015, the IAU defined a set of nominal solar values (defined as SI constants, without uncertainties) which can be used for quoting stellar parameters:
+
+The solar mass M⊙ was not explicitly defined by the IAU due to the large relative uncertainty (10−4) of the Newtonian gravitational constant G. However, since the product of the Newtonian gravitational constant and solar mass
+together (GM⊙) has been determined to much greater precision, the IAU defined the nominal solar mass parameter to be:
+
+However, one can combine the nominal solar mass parameter with the most recent (2014) CODATA estimate of the Newtonian gravitational constant G to derive the solar mass to be approximately 1.9885 × 1030 kg. Although the exact values for the luminosity, radius, mass parameter, and mass may vary slightly in the future due to observational uncertainties, the 2015 IAU nominal constants will remain the same SI values as they remain useful measures for quoting stellar parameters.
+
+Large lengths, such as the radius of a giant star or the semi-major axis of a binary star system, are often expressed in terms of the astronomical unit—approximately equal to the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun (150 million km or approximately 93 million miles). In 2012, the IAU defined the astronomical constant to be an exact length in meters: 149,597,870,700 m.[60]
+
+Stars condense from regions of space of higher matter density, yet those regions are less dense than within a vacuum chamber. These regions—known as molecular clouds—consist mostly of hydrogen, with about 23 to 28 percent helium and a few percent heavier elements. One example of such a star-forming region is the Orion Nebula.[61] Most stars form in groups of dozens to hundreds of thousands of stars.[62]
+Massive stars in these groups may powerfully illuminate those clouds, ionizing the hydrogen, and creating H II regions. Such feedback effects, from star formation, may ultimately disrupt the cloud and prevent further star formation.
+
+All stars spend the majority of their existence as main sequence stars, fueled primarily by the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium within their cores. However, stars of different masses have markedly different properties at various stages of their development. The ultimate fate of more massive stars differs from that of less massive stars, as do their luminosities and the impact they have on their environment. Accordingly, astronomers often group stars by their mass:[63]
+
+The formation of a star begins with gravitational instability within a molecular cloud, caused by regions of higher density—often triggered by compression of clouds by radiation from massive stars, expanding bubbles in the interstellar medium, the collision of different molecular clouds, or the collision of galaxies (as in a starburst galaxy).[65][66] When a region reaches a sufficient density of matter to satisfy the criteria for Jeans instability, it begins to collapse under its own gravitational force.[67]
+
+As the cloud collapses, individual conglomerations of dense dust and gas form "Bok globules". As a globule collapses and the density increases, the gravitational energy converts into heat and the temperature rises. When the protostellar cloud has approximately reached the stable condition of hydrostatic equilibrium, a protostar forms at the core.[68] These pre-main-sequence stars are often surrounded by a protoplanetary disk and powered mainly by the conversion of gravitational energy. The period of gravitational contraction lasts about 10 to 15 million years.
+
+Early stars of less than 2 M☉ are called T Tauri stars, while those with greater mass are Herbig Ae/Be stars. These newly formed stars emit jets of gas along their axis of rotation, which may reduce the angular momentum of the collapsing star and result in small patches of nebulosity known as Herbig–Haro objects.[69][70]
+These jets, in combination with radiation from nearby massive stars, may help to drive away the surrounding cloud from which the star was formed.[71]
+
+Early in their development, T Tauri stars follow the Hayashi track—they contract and decrease in luminosity while remaining at roughly the same temperature. Less massive T Tauri stars follow this track to the main sequence, while more massive stars turn onto the Henyey track.
+
+Most stars are observed to be members of binary star systems, and the properties of those binaries are the result of the conditions in which they formed.[72] A gas cloud must lose its angular momentum in order to collapse and form a star. The fragmentation of the cloud into multiple stars distributes some of that angular momentum. The primordial binaries transfer some angular momentum by gravitational interactions during close encounters with other stars in young stellar clusters. These interactions tend to split apart more widely separated (soft) binaries while causing hard binaries to become more tightly bound. This produces the separation of binaries into their two observed populations distributions.
+
+Stars spend about 90% of their existence fusing hydrogen into helium in high-temperature and high-pressure reactions near the core. Such stars are said to be on the main sequence, and are called dwarf stars. Starting at zero-age main sequence, the proportion of helium in a star's core will steadily increase, the rate of nuclear fusion at the core will slowly increase, as will the star's temperature and luminosity.[73]
+The Sun, for example, is estimated to have increased in luminosity by about 40% since it reached the main sequence 4.6 billion (4.6 × 109) years ago.[74]
+
+Every star generates a stellar wind of particles that causes a continual outflow of gas into space. For most stars, the mass lost is negligible. The Sun loses 10−14 M☉ every year,[75] or about 0.01% of its total mass over its entire lifespan. However, very massive stars can lose 10−7 to 10−5 M☉ each year, significantly affecting their evolution.[76] Stars that begin with more than 50 M☉ can lose over half their total mass while on the main sequence.[77]
+
+The time a star spends on the main sequence depends primarily on the amount of fuel it has and the rate at which it fuses it. The Sun is expected to live 10 billion (1010) years. Massive stars consume their fuel very rapidly and are short-lived. Low mass stars consume their fuel very slowly. Stars less massive than 0.25 M☉, called red dwarfs, are able to fuse nearly all of their mass while stars of about 1 M☉ can only fuse about 10% of their mass. The combination of their slow fuel-consumption and relatively large usable fuel supply allows low mass stars to last about one trillion (1012) years; the most extreme of 0.08 M☉) will last for about 12 trillion years. Red dwarfs become hotter and more luminous as they accumulate helium. When they eventually run out of hydrogen, they contract into a white dwarf and decline in temperature.[64] However, since the lifespan of such stars is greater than the current age of the universe (13.8 billion years), no stars under about 0.85 M☉[78] are expected to have moved off the main sequence.
+
+Besides mass, the elements heavier than helium can play a significant role in the evolution of stars. Astronomers label all elements heavier than helium "metals", and call the chemical concentration of these elements in a star, its metallicity. A star's metallicity can influence the time the star takes to burn its fuel, and controls the formation of its magnetic fields,[79] which affects the strength of its stellar wind.[80] Older, population II stars have substantially less metallicity than the younger, population I stars due to the composition of the molecular clouds from which they formed. Over time, such clouds become increasingly enriched in heavier elements as older stars die and shed portions of their atmospheres.
+
+As stars of at least 0.4 M☉[4] exhaust their supply of hydrogen at their core, they start to fuse hydrogen in a shell outside the helium core. Their outer layers expand and cool greatly as they form a red giant. In about 5 billion years, when the Sun enters the helium burning phase, it will expand to a maximum radius of roughly 1 astronomical unit (150 million kilometres), 250 times its present size, and lose 30% of its current mass.[74][81]
+
+As the hydrogen shell burning produces more helium, the core increases in mass and temperature. In a red giant of up to 2.25 M☉, the mass of the helium core becomes degenerate prior to helium fusion. Finally, when the temperature increases sufficiently, helium fusion begins explosively in what is called a helium flash, and the star rapidly shrinks in radius, increases its surface temperature, and moves to the horizontal branch of the HR diagram. For more massive stars, helium core fusion starts before the core becomes degenerate, and the star spends some time in the red clump, slowly burning helium, before the outer convective envelope collapses and the star then moves to the horizontal branch.[6]
+
+After the star has fused the helium of its core, the carbon product fuses producing a hot core with an outer shell of fusing helium. The star then follows an evolutionary path called the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) that parallels the other described red giant phase, but with a higher luminosity. The more massive AGB stars may undergo a brief period of carbon fusion before the core becomes degenerate.
+
+During their helium-burning phase, a star of more than 9 solar masses expands to form first a blue and then a red supergiant. Particularly massive stars may evolve to a Wolf-Rayet star, characterised by spectra dominated by emission lines of elements heavier than hydrogen, which have reached the surface due to strong convection and intense mass loss.
+
+When helium is exhausted at the core of a massive star, the core contracts and the temperature and pressure rises enough to fuse carbon (see Carbon-burning process). This process continues, with the successive stages being fueled by neon (see neon-burning process), oxygen (see oxygen-burning process), and silicon (see silicon-burning process). Near the end of the star's life, fusion continues along a series of onion-layer shells within a massive star. Each shell fuses a different element, with the outermost shell fusing hydrogen; the next shell fusing helium, and so forth.[82]
+
+The final stage occurs when a massive star begins producing iron. Since iron nuclei are more tightly bound than any heavier nuclei, any fusion beyond iron does not produce a net release of energy.[83]
+
+As a star's core shrinks, the intensity of radiation from that surface increases, creating such radiation pressure on the outer shell of gas that it will push those layers away, forming a planetary nebula. If what remains after the outer atmosphere has been shed is less than roughly 1.4 M☉, it shrinks to a relatively tiny object about the size of Earth, known as a white dwarf. White dwarfs lack the mass for further gravitational compression to take place.[84] The electron-degenerate matter inside a white dwarf is no longer a plasma, even though stars are generally referred to as being spheres of plasma. Eventually, white dwarfs fade into black dwarfs over a very long period of time.
+
+In massive stars, fusion continues until the iron core has grown so large (more than 1.4 M☉) that it can no longer support its own mass. This core will suddenly collapse as its electrons are driven into its protons, forming neutrons, neutrinos, and gamma rays in a burst of electron capture and inverse beta decay. The shockwave formed by this sudden collapse causes the rest of the star to explode in a supernova. Supernovae become so bright that they may briefly outshine the star's entire home galaxy. When they occur within the Milky Way, supernovae have historically been observed by naked-eye observers as "new stars" where none seemingly existed before.[85]
+
+A supernova explosion blows away the star's outer layers, leaving a remnant such as the Crab Nebula.[85] The core is compressed into a neutron star, which sometimes manifests itself as a pulsar or X-ray burster. In the case of the largest stars, the remnant is a black hole greater than 4 M☉.[86] In a neutron star the matter is in a state known as neutron-degenerate matter, with a more exotic form of degenerate matter, QCD matter, possibly present in the core. Within a black hole, the matter is in a state that is not currently understood.
+
+The blown-off outer layers of dying stars include heavy elements, which may be recycled during the formation of new stars. These heavy elements allow the formation of rocky planets. The outflow from supernovae and the stellar wind of large stars play an important part in shaping the interstellar medium.[85]
+
+The post–main-sequence evolution of binary stars may be significantly different from the evolution of single stars of the same mass. If stars in a binary system are sufficiently close, when one of the stars expands to become a red giant it may overflow its Roche lobe, the region around a star where material is gravitationally bound to that star, leading to transfer of material to the other. When the Roche lobe is violated, a variety of phenomena can result, including contact binaries, common-envelope binaries, cataclysmic variables, and type Ia supernovae.
+
+Stars are not spread uniformly across the universe, but are normally grouped into galaxies along with interstellar gas and dust. A typical galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, and there are more than 2 trillion (1012) galaxies.[87] Overall, there are as many as an estimated 1×1024 stars[1][2] (more stars than all the grains of sand on planet Earth).[88][89][90] While it is often believed that stars only exist within galaxies, intergalactic stars have been discovered.[91]
+
+A multi-star system consists of two or more gravitationally bound stars that orbit each other. The simplest and most common multi-star system is a binary star, but systems of three or more stars are also found. For reasons of orbital stability, such multi-star systems are often organized into hierarchical sets of binary stars.[92] Larger groups called star clusters also exist. These range from loose stellar associations with only a few stars, up to enormous globular clusters with hundreds of thousands of stars. Such systems orbit their host galaxy.
+
+It has been a long-held assumption that the majority of stars occur in gravitationally bound, multiple-star systems. This is particularly true for very massive O and B class stars, where 80% of the stars are believed to be part of multiple-star systems. The proportion of single star systems increases with decreasing star mass, so that only 25% of red dwarfs are known to have stellar companions. As 85% of all stars are red dwarfs, most stars in the Milky Way are likely single from birth.[93]
+
+The nearest star to the Earth, apart from the Sun, is Proxima Centauri, which is 39.9 trillion kilometres, or 4.2 light-years. Travelling at the orbital speed of the Space Shuttle (8 kilometres per second—almost 30,000 kilometres per hour), it would take about 150,000 years to arrive.[94] This is typical of stellar separations in galactic discs.[95] Stars can be much closer to each other in the centres of galaxies and in globular clusters, or much farther apart in galactic halos.
+
+Due to the relatively vast distances between stars outside the galactic nucleus, collisions between stars are thought to be rare. In denser regions such as the core of globular clusters or the galactic center, collisions can be more common.[96] Such collisions can produce what are known as blue stragglers. These abnormal stars have a higher surface temperature than the other main sequence stars with the same luminosity of the cluster to which it belongs.[97]
+
+Almost everything about a star is determined by its initial mass, including such characteristics as luminosity, size, evolution, lifespan, and its eventual fate.
+
+Most stars are between 1 billion and 10 billion years old. Some stars may even be close to 13.8 billion years old—the observed age of the universe. The oldest star yet discovered, HD 140283, nicknamed Methuselah star, is an estimated 14.46 ± 0.8 billion years old.[98] (Due to the uncertainty in the value, this age for the star does not conflict with the age of the Universe, determined by the Planck satellite as 13.799 ± 0.021).[98][99]
+
+The more massive the star, the shorter its lifespan, primarily because massive stars have greater pressure on their cores, causing them to burn hydrogen more rapidly. The most massive stars last an average of a few million years, while stars of minimum mass (red dwarfs) burn their fuel very slowly and can last tens to hundreds of billions of years.[100][101]
+
+When stars form in the present Milky Way galaxy they are composed of about 71% hydrogen and 27% helium,[103] as measured by mass, with a small fraction of heavier elements. Typically the portion of heavy elements is measured in terms of the iron content of the stellar atmosphere, as iron is a common element and its absorption lines are relatively easy to measure. The portion of heavier elements may be an indicator of the likelihood that the star has a planetary system.[104]
+
+The star with the lowest iron content ever measured is the dwarf HE1327-2326, with only 1/200,000th the iron content of the Sun.[105] By contrast, the super-metal-rich star μ Leonis has nearly double the abundance of iron as the Sun, while the planet-bearing star 14 Herculis has nearly triple the iron.[106] There also exist chemically peculiar stars that show unusual abundances of certain elements in their spectrum; especially chromium and rare earth elements.[107] Stars with cooler outer atmospheres, including the Sun, can form various diatomic and polyatomic molecules.[108]
+
+Due to their great distance from the Earth, all stars except the Sun appear to the unaided eye as shining points in the night sky that twinkle because of the effect of the Earth's atmosphere. The Sun is also a star, but it is close enough to the Earth to appear as a disk instead, and to provide daylight. Other than the Sun, the star with the largest apparent size is R Doradus, with an angular diameter of only 0.057 arcseconds.[109]
+
+The disks of most stars are much too small in angular size to be observed with current ground-based optical telescopes, and so interferometer telescopes are required to produce images of these objects. Another technique for measuring the angular size of stars is through occultation. By precisely measuring the drop in brightness of a star as it is occulted by the Moon (or the rise in brightness when it reappears), the star's angular diameter can be computed.[110]
+
+Stars range in size from neutron stars, which vary anywhere from 20 to 40 km (25 mi) in diameter, to supergiants like Betelgeuse in the Orion constellation, which has a diameter about 1,000 times that of our sun.[111][112] Betelgeuse, however, has a much lower density than the Sun.[113]
+
+The motion of a star relative to the Sun can provide useful information about the origin and age of a star, as well as the structure and evolution of the surrounding galaxy. The components of motion of a star consist of the radial velocity toward or away from the Sun, and the traverse angular movement, which is called its proper motion.
+
+Radial velocity is measured by the doppler shift of the star's spectral lines, and is given in units of km/s. The proper motion of a star, its parallax, is determined by precise astrometric measurements in units of milli-arc seconds (mas) per year. With knowledge of the star's parallax and its distance, the proper motion velocity can be calculated. Together with the radial velocity, the total velocity can be calculated. Stars with high rates of proper motion are likely to be relatively close to the Sun, making them good candidates for parallax measurements.[115]
+
+When both rates of movement are known, the space velocity of the star relative to the Sun or the galaxy can be computed. Among nearby stars, it has been found that younger population I stars have generally lower velocities than older, population II stars. The latter have elliptical orbits that are inclined to the plane of the galaxy.[116] A comparison of the kinematics of nearby stars has allowed astronomers to trace their origin to common points in giant molecular clouds, and are referred to as stellar associations.[117]
+
+The magnetic field of a star is generated within regions of the interior where convective circulation occurs. This movement of conductive plasma functions like a dynamo, wherein the movement of electrical charges induce magnetic fields, as does a mechanical dynamo. Those magnetic fields have a great range that extend throughout and beyond the star. The strength of the magnetic field varies with the mass and composition of the star, and the amount of magnetic surface activity depends upon the star's rate of rotation. This surface activity produces starspots, which are regions of strong magnetic fields and lower than normal surface temperatures. Coronal loops are arching magnetic field flux lines that rise from a star's surface into the star's outer atmosphere, its corona. The coronal loops can be seen due to the plasma they conduct along their length. Stellar flares are bursts of high-energy particles that are emitted due to the same magnetic activity.[118]
+
+Young, rapidly rotating stars tend to have high levels of surface activity because of their magnetic field. The magnetic field can act upon a star's stellar wind, functioning as a brake to gradually slow the rate of rotation with time. Thus, older stars such as the Sun have a much slower rate of rotation and a lower level of surface activity. The activity levels of slowly rotating stars tend to vary in a cyclical manner and can shut down altogether for periods of time.[119] During
+the Maunder Minimum, for example, the Sun underwent a
+70-year period with almost no sunspot activity.
+
+One of the most massive stars known is Eta Carinae,[120] which,
+with 100–150 times as much mass as the Sun, will have a lifespan of only several million years. Studies of the most massive open clusters suggests 150 M☉ as an upper limit for stars in the current era of the universe.[121] This
+represents an empirical value for the theoretical limit on the mass of forming stars due to increasing radiation pressure on the accreting gas cloud. Several stars in the R136 cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud have been measured with larger masses,[122] but
+it has been determined that they could have been created through the collision and merger of massive stars in close binary systems, sidestepping the 150 M☉ limit on massive star formation.[123]
+
+The first stars to form after the Big Bang may have been larger, up to 300 M☉,[124] due
+to the complete absence of elements heavier than lithium in their composition. This generation of supermassive population III stars is likely to have existed in the very early universe (i.e., they are observed to have a high redshift), and may have started the production of chemical elements heavier than hydrogen that are needed for the later formation of planets and life. In June 2015, astronomers reported evidence for Population III stars in the Cosmos Redshift 7 galaxy at z = 6.60.[125][126]
+
+With a mass only 80 times that of Jupiter (MJ), 2MASS J0523-1403 is the smallest known star undergoing nuclear fusion in its core.[127] For
+stars with metallicity similar to the Sun, the theoretical minimum mass the star can have and still undergo fusion at the core, is estimated to be about 75 MJ.[128][129] When the metallicity is very low, however, the minimum star size seems to be about 8.3% of the solar mass, or about 87 MJ.[129][130] Smaller bodies called brown dwarfs, occupy a poorly defined grey area between stars and gas giants.
+
+The combination of the radius and the mass of a star determines its surface gravity. Giant stars have a much lower surface gravity than do main sequence stars, while the opposite is the case for degenerate, compact stars such as white dwarfs. The surface gravity can influence the appearance of a star's spectrum, with higher gravity causing a broadening of the absorption lines.[35]
+
+The rotation rate of stars can be determined through spectroscopic measurement, or more exactly determined by tracking their starspots. Young stars can have a rotation greater than 100 km/s at the equator. The B-class star Achernar, for example, has an equatorial velocity of about 225 km/s or greater, causing its equator to bulge outward and giving it an equatorial diameter that is more than 50% greater than between the poles. This rate of rotation is just below the critical velocity of 300 km/s at which speed the star would break apart.[131] By contrast, the Sun rotates once every 25–35 days depending on latitude,[132] with an equatorial velocity of 1.93 km/s.[133] A main sequence star's magnetic field and the stellar wind serve to slow its rotation by a significant amount as it evolves on the main sequence.[134]
+
+Degenerate stars have contracted into a compact mass, resulting in a rapid rate of rotation. However they have relatively low rates of rotation compared to what would be expected by conservation of angular momentum—the tendency of a rotating body to compensate for a contraction in size by increasing its rate of spin. A large portion of the star's angular momentum is dissipated as a result of mass loss through the stellar wind.[135] In spite of this, the rate of rotation for a pulsar can be very rapid. The pulsar at the heart of the Crab nebula, for example, rotates 30 times per second.[136] The rotation rate of the pulsar will gradually slow due to the emission of radiation.[137]
+
+The surface temperature of a main sequence star is determined by the rate of energy production of its core and by its radius, and is often estimated from the star's color index.[138] The temperature is normally given in terms of an effective temperature,  which is the temperature of an idealized black body that radiates its energy at the same luminosity per surface area as the star. Note that the effective temperature is only a representative of the surface, as the temperature increases toward the core.[139] The temperature in the core region of a star is several million kelvins.[140]
+
+The stellar temperature will determine the rate of ionization of various elements, resulting in characteristic absorption lines in the spectrum. The surface temperature of a star, along with its visual absolute magnitude and absorption features, is used to classify a star (see classification below).[35]
+
+Massive main sequence stars can have surface temperatures of 50,000 K. Smaller stars such as the Sun have surface temperatures of a few thousand K. Red giants have relatively low surface temperatures of about 3,600 K; but they also have a high luminosity due to their large exterior surface area.[141]
+
+The energy produced by stars, a product of nuclear fusion, radiates to space as both electromagnetic radiation and particle radiation. The particle radiation emitted by a star is manifested as the stellar wind,[142] which
+streams from the outer layers as electrically charged protons and alpha and beta particles. Although almost massless, there also exists a steady stream of neutrinos emanating from the star's core.
+
+The production of energy at the core is the reason stars shine so brightly: every time two or more atomic nuclei fuse together to form a single atomic nucleus of a new heavier element, gamma ray photons are released from the nuclear fusion product. This energy is converted to other forms of electromagnetic energy of lower frequency, such as visible light, by the time it reaches the star's outer layers.
+
+The color of a star, as determined by the most intense frequency of the visible light, depends on the temperature of the star's outer layers, including its photosphere.[143] Besides
+visible light, stars also emit forms of electromagnetic radiation that are invisible to the human eye. In fact, stellar electromagnetic radiation spans the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from the longest wavelengths of radio waves through infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, to the shortest of X-rays, and gamma rays. From the standpoint of total energy emitted by a star, not all components of stellar electromagnetic radiation are significant, but all frequencies provide insight into the star's physics.
+
+Using the stellar spectrum, astronomers can also determine the surface temperature, surface gravity, metallicity and rotational velocity of a star. If the distance of the star is found, such as by measuring the parallax, then the luminosity of the star can be derived. The mass, radius, surface gravity, and rotation period can then be estimated based on stellar models. (Mass can be calculated for stars in binary systems by measuring their orbital velocities and distances. Gravitational microlensing has been used to measure the mass of a single star.[144]) With these parameters, astronomers can also estimate the age of the star.[145]
+
+The luminosity of a star is the amount of light and other forms of radiant energy it radiates per unit of time. It has units of power. The luminosity of a star is determined by its radius and surface temperature. Many stars do not radiate uniformly across their entire surface. The rapidly rotating star Vega, for example, has a higher energy flux (power per unit area) at its poles than along its equator.[146]
+
+Patches of the star's surface with a lower temperature and luminosity than average are known as starspots. Small, dwarf stars such as our Sun generally have essentially featureless disks with only small starspots.  Giant stars have much larger, more obvious starspots,[147] and
+they also exhibit strong stellar limb darkening. That is, the brightness decreases towards the edge of the stellar disk.[148] Red
+dwarf flare stars such as UV Ceti may also possess prominent starspot features.[149]
+
+The apparent brightness of a star is expressed in terms of its apparent magnitude. It is a function of the star's luminosity, its distance from Earth, the extinction effect of interstellar dust and gas, and the altering of the star's light as it passes through Earth's atmosphere. Intrinsic or absolute magnitude is directly related to a star's luminosity, and is what the apparent magnitude a star would be if the distance between the Earth and the star were 10 parsecs (32.6 light-years).
+
+Both the apparent and absolute magnitude scales are logarithmic units: one whole number difference in magnitude is equal to a brightness variation of about 2.5 times[151] (the 5th root of 100 or approximately 2.512). This means that a first magnitude star (+1.00) is about 2.5 times brighter than a second magnitude (+2.00) star, and about 100 times brighter than a sixth magnitude star (+6.00). The faintest stars visible to the naked eye under good seeing conditions are about magnitude +6.
+
+On both apparent and absolute magnitude scales, the smaller the magnitude number, the brighter the star; the larger the magnitude number, the fainter the star. The brightest stars, on either scale, have negative magnitude numbers. The variation in brightness (ΔL) between two stars is calculated by subtracting the magnitude number of the brighter star (mb) from the magnitude number of the fainter star (mf), then using the difference as an exponent for the base number 2.512; that is to say:
+
+Relative to both luminosity and distance from Earth, a star's absolute magnitude (M) and apparent magnitude (m) are not equivalent;[151] for example, the bright star Sirius has an apparent magnitude of −1.44, but it has an absolute magnitude of +1.41.
+
+The Sun has an apparent magnitude of −26.7, but its absolute magnitude is only +4.83. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky as seen from Earth, is approximately 23 times more luminous than the Sun, while Canopus, the second brightest star in the night sky with an absolute magnitude of −5.53, is approximately 14,000 times more luminous than the Sun. Despite Canopus being vastly more luminous than Sirius, however, Sirius appears brighter than Canopus. This is because Sirius is merely 8.6 light-years from the Earth, while Canopus is much farther away at a distance of 310 light-years.
+
+As of 2006, the star with the highest known absolute magnitude is LBV 1806-20, with a magnitude of −14.2. This star is at least 5,000,000 times more luminous than the Sun.[152] The least luminous stars that are currently known are located in the NGC 6397 cluster. The faintest red dwarfs in the cluster were magnitude 26, while a 28th magnitude white dwarf was also discovered. These faint stars are so dim that their light is as bright as a birthday candle on the Moon when viewed from the Earth.[153]
+
+The current stellar classification system originated in the early 20th century, when stars were classified from A to Q based on the strength of the hydrogen line.[155] It was thought that the hydrogen line strength was a simple linear function of temperature. Instead, it was more complicated: it strengthened with increasing temperature, peaked near 9000 K, and then declined at greater temperatures. The classifications were since reordered by temperature, on which the modern scheme is based.[156]
+
+Stars are given a single-letter classification according to their spectra, ranging from type O, which are very hot, to M, which are so cool that molecules may form in their atmospheres. The main classifications in order of decreasing surface temperature are: O, B, A, F, G, K, and M. A variety of rare spectral types are given special classifications. The most common of these are types L and T, which classify the coldest low-mass stars and brown dwarfs. Each letter has 10 sub-divisions, numbered from 0 to 9, in order of decreasing temperature. However, this system breaks down at extreme high temperatures as classes O0 and O1 may not exist.[157]
+
+In addition, stars may be classified by the luminosity effects found in their spectral lines, which correspond to their spatial size and is determined by their surface gravity. These range from 0 (hypergiants) through III (giants) to V (main sequence dwarfs); some authors add VII (white dwarfs). Main sequence stars fall along a narrow, diagonal band when graphed according to their absolute magnitude and spectral type.[157] The Sun is a main sequence G2V yellow dwarf of intermediate temperature and ordinary size.
+
+Additional nomenclature, in the form of lower-case letters added to the end of the spectral type to indicate peculiar features of the spectrum. For example, an "e" can indicate the presence of emission lines; "m" represents unusually strong levels of metals, and "var" can mean variations in the spectral type.[157]
+
+White dwarf stars have their own class that begins with the letter D. This is further sub-divided into the classes DA, DB, DC, DO, DZ, and DQ, depending on the types of prominent lines found in the spectrum. This is followed by a numerical value that indicates the temperature.[158]
+
+Variable stars have periodic or random changes in luminosity because of intrinsic or extrinsic properties. Of the intrinsically variable stars, the primary types can be subdivided into three principal groups.
+
+During their stellar evolution, some stars pass through phases where they can become pulsating variables. Pulsating variable stars vary in radius and luminosity over time, expanding and contracting with periods ranging from minutes to years, depending on the size of the star. This category includes Cepheid and Cepheid-like stars, and long-period variables such as Mira.[159]
+
+Eruptive variables are stars that experience sudden increases in luminosity because of flares or mass ejection events.[159] This group includes protostars, Wolf-Rayet stars, and flare stars, as well as giant and supergiant stars.
+
+Cataclysmic or explosive variable stars are those that undergo a dramatic change in their properties. This group includes novae and supernovae. A binary star system that includes a nearby white dwarf can produce certain types of these spectacular stellar explosions, including the nova and a Type 1a supernova.[6] The explosion is created when the white dwarf accretes hydrogen from the companion star, building up mass until the hydrogen undergoes fusion.[160] Some novae are also recurrent, having periodic outbursts of moderate amplitude.[159]
+
+Stars can also vary in luminosity because of extrinsic factors, such as eclipsing binaries, as well as rotating stars that produce extreme starspots.[159] A notable example of an eclipsing binary is Algol, which regularly varies in magnitude from 2.1 to 3.4 over a period of 2.87 days.[161]
+
+The interior of a stable star is in a state of hydrostatic equilibrium: the forces on any small volume almost exactly counterbalance each other. The balanced forces are inward gravitational force and an outward force due to the pressure gradient within the star. The pressure gradient is established by the temperature gradient of the plasma; the outer part of the star is cooler than the core. The temperature at the core of a main sequence or giant star is at least on the order of 107 K. The resulting temperature and pressure at the hydrogen-burning core of a main sequence star are sufficient for nuclear fusion to occur and for sufficient energy to be produced to prevent further collapse of the star.[162][163]
+
+As atomic nuclei are fused in the core, they emit energy in the form of gamma rays. These photons interact with the surrounding plasma, adding to the thermal energy at the core. Stars on the main sequence convert hydrogen into helium, creating a slowly but steadily increasing proportion of helium in the core. Eventually the helium content becomes predominant, and energy production ceases at the core. Instead, for stars of more than 0.4 M☉, fusion occurs in a slowly expanding shell around the degenerate helium core.[164]
+
+In addition to hydrostatic equilibrium, the interior of a stable star will also maintain an energy balance of thermal equilibrium. There is a radial temperature gradient throughout the interior that results in a flux of energy flowing toward the exterior. The outgoing flux of energy leaving any layer within the star will exactly match the incoming flux from below.
+
+The radiation zone is the region of the stellar interior where the flux of energy outward is dependent on radiative heat transfer, since convective heat transfer is inefficient in that zone. In this region the plasma will not be perturbed, and any mass motions will die out. If this is not the case, however, then the plasma becomes unstable and convection will occur, forming a convection zone. This can occur, for example, in regions where very high energy fluxes occur, such as near the core or in areas with high opacity (making radiatative heat transfer inefficient) as in the outer envelope.[163]
+
+The occurrence of convection in the outer envelope of a main sequence star depends on the star's mass. Stars with several times the mass of the Sun have a convection zone deep within the interior and a radiative zone in the outer layers. Smaller stars such as the Sun are just the opposite, with the convective zone located in the outer layers.[165] Red dwarf stars with less than 0.4 M☉ are convective throughout, which prevents the accumulation of a helium core.[4] For most stars the convective zones will also vary over time as the star ages and the constitution of the interior is modified.[163]
+
+The photosphere is that portion of a star that is visible to an observer. This is the layer at which the plasma of the star becomes transparent to photons of light. From here, the energy generated at the core becomes free to propagate into space. It is within the photosphere that sun spots, regions of lower than average temperature, appear.
+
+Above the level of the photosphere is the stellar atmosphere. In a main sequence star such as the Sun, the lowest level of the atmosphere, just above the photosphere, is the thin chromosphere region, where spicules appear and stellar flares begin. Above this is the transition region, where the temperature rapidly increases within a distance of only 100 km (62 mi). Beyond this is the corona, a volume of super-heated plasma that can extend outward to several million kilometres.[166] The existence of a corona appears to be dependent on a convective zone in the outer layers of the star.[165] Despite its high temperature, and the corona emits very little light, due to its low gas density. The corona region of the Sun is normally only visible during a solar eclipse.
+
+From the corona, a stellar wind of plasma particles expands outward from the star, until it interacts with the interstellar medium. For the Sun, the influence of its solar wind extends throughout a bubble-shaped region called the heliosphere.[167]
+
+A variety of nuclear fusion reactions take place in the cores of stars, that depend upon their mass and composition. When nuclei fuse, the mass of the fused product is less than the mass of the original parts. This lost mass is converted to electromagnetic energy, according to the mass–energy equivalence relationship E = mc2.[3]
+
+The hydrogen fusion process is temperature-sensitive, so a moderate increase in the core temperature will result in a significant increase in the fusion rate. As a result, the core temperature of main sequence stars only varies from 4 million kelvin for a small M-class star to 40 million kelvin for a massive O-class star.[140]
+
+In the Sun, with a 10-million-kelvin core, hydrogen fuses to form helium in the proton–proton chain reaction:[168]
+
+These reactions result in the overall reaction:
+
+where e+ is a positron, γ is a gamma ray photon, νe is a neutrino, and H and He are isotopes of hydrogen and helium, respectively. The energy released by this reaction is in millions of electron volts, which is actually only a tiny amount of energy. However enormous numbers of these reactions occur constantly, producing all the energy necessary to sustain the star's radiation output. In comparison, the combustion of two hydrogen gas molecules with one oxygen gas molecule releases only 5.7 eV.
+
+In more massive stars, helium is produced in a cycle of reactions catalyzed by carbon called the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle.[168]
+
+In evolved stars with cores at 100 million kelvin and masses between 0.5 and 10 M☉, helium can be transformed into carbon in the triple-alpha process that uses the intermediate element beryllium:[168]
+
+For an overall reaction of:
+
+In massive stars, heavier elements can also be burned in a contracting core through the neon-burning process and oxygen-burning process. The final stage in the stellar nucleosynthesis process is the silicon-burning process that results in the production of the stable isotope iron-56.[168] Any further fusion would be an endothermic process that consumes energy, and so further energy can only be produced through gravitational collapse.
+
+The table at the left shows the amount of time required for a star of 20 M☉ to consume all of its nuclear fuel. As an O-class main sequence star, it would be 8 times the solar radius and 62,000 times the Sun's luminosity.[171]

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+
+
+Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting of another, usually a child, from that person's biological or legal parent or parents. Legal adoptions permanently transfer all rights and responsibilities, along with filiation, from the biological parent or parents.
+
+In many jurisdictions, the adopted person's full original birth certificate is cancelled and replaced with a fabricated post-adoption birth certificate that states that the child was born to the adoptive parents. This deception, when carried out, may continue with the adopted person for life and can be the cause for many well-documented traumas experienced by the adopted person, including loss of identity, family history, culture, biological family (including not only biological parents but also siblings and extended family), family medical history and records, and increased risk of suicide, homelessness, incarceration, PTSD, depression, and anxiety.
+
+Unlike guardianship or other systems designed for the care of the young, adoption is intended to effect a permanent change in status and as such requires societal recognition, either through legal or religious sanction. Historically, some societies have enacted specific laws governing adoption, while others used less formal means (notably contracts that specified inheritance rights and parental responsibilities without an accompanying transfer of filiation). Modern systems of adoption, arising in the 20th century, tend to be governed by comprehensive statutes and regulations.
+
+While the modern form of adoption emerged in the United States, forms of the practice appeared throughout history.[1] The Code of Hammurabi, for example, details the rights of adopters and the responsibilities of adopted individuals at length. The practice of adoption in ancient Rome is well-documented in the Codex Justinianus.[2][3]
+
+Markedly different from the modern period, ancient adoption practices put emphasis on the political and economic interests of the adopter,[4] providing a legal tool that strengthened political ties between wealthy families and created male heirs to manage estates.[5][6] The use of adoption by the aristocracy is well-documented: many of Rome's emperors were adopted sons.[6] Adrogation was a kind of Roman adoption in which the person adopted consented to be adopted by another.
+
+Infant adoption during Antiquity appears rare.[4][7] Abandoned children were often picked up for slavery[8] and composed a significant percentage of the Empire's slave supply.[9][10] Roman legal records indicate that foundlings were occasionally taken in by families and raised as a son or daughter. Although not normally adopted under Roman Law, the children, called alumni, were reared in an arrangement similar to guardianship, being considered the property of the father who abandoned them.[11]
+
+Other ancient civilizations, notably India and China, used some form of adoption as well. Evidence suggests the goal of this practice was to ensure the continuity of cultural and religious practices; in contrast to the Western idea of extending family lines. In ancient India, secondary sonship, clearly denounced by the Rigveda,[12] continued, in a limited and highly ritualistic form, so that an adopter might have the necessary funerary rites performed by a son.[13] China had a similar idea of adoption with males adopted solely to perform the duties of ancestor worship.[14]
+
+The practice of adopting the children of family members and close friends was common among the cultures of Polynesia including Hawaii where the custom was referred to as hānai.
+
+The nobility of the Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic cultures that dominated Europe after the decline of the Roman Empire denounced the practice of adoption.[15] In medieval society, bloodlines were paramount; a ruling dynasty lacking a "natural-born" heir apparent was replaced, a stark contrast to Roman traditions. The evolution of European law reflects this aversion to adoption. English common law, for instance, did not permit adoption since it contradicted the customary rules of inheritance. In the same vein, France's Napoleonic Code made adoption difficult, requiring adopters to be over the age of 50, sterile, older than the adopted person by at least 15 years, and to have fostered the adoptee for at least six years.[16] Some adoptions continued to occur, however, but became informal, based on ad hoc contracts. For example, in the year 737, in a charter from the town of Lucca, three adoptees were made heirs to an estate. Like other contemporary arrangements, the agreement stressed the responsibility of the adopted rather than adopter, focusing on the fact that, under the contract, the adoptive father was meant to be cared for in his old age; an idea that is similar to the conceptions of adoption under Roman law.[17]
+
+Europe's cultural makeover marked a period of significant innovation for adoption. Without support from the nobility, the practice gradually shifted toward abandoned children. Abandonment levels rose with the fall of the empire and many of the foundlings were left on the doorstep of the Church.[18] Initially, the clergy reacted by drafting rules to govern the exposing, selling, and rearing of abandoned children. The Church's innovation, however, was the practice of oblation, whereby children were dedicated to lay life within monastic institutions and reared within a monastery. This created the first system in European history in which abandoned children did not have legal, social, or moral disadvantages. As a result, many of Europe's abandoned and orphaned children became alumni of the Church, which in turn took the role of adopter. Oblation marks the beginning of a shift toward institutionalization, eventually bringing about the establishment of the foundling hospital and orphanage.[18]
+
+As the idea of institutional care gained acceptance, formal rules appeared about how to place children into families: boys could become apprenticed to an artisan and girls might be married off under the institution's authority.[19] Institutions informally adopted out children as well, a mechanism treated as a way to obtain cheap labor, demonstrated by the fact that when the adopted died their bodies were returned by the family to the institution for burial.[20]
+
+This system of apprenticeship and informal adoption extended into the 19th century, today seen as a transitional phase for adoption history. Under the direction of social welfare activists, orphan asylums began to promote adoptions based on sentiment rather than work; children were placed out under agreements to provide care for them as family members instead of under contracts for apprenticeship.[21] The growth of this model is believed to have contributed to the enactment of the first modern adoption law in 1851 by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, unique in that it codified the ideal of the "best interests of the child."[22][23] Despite its intent, though, in practice, the system operated much the same as earlier incarnations. The experience of the Boston Female Asylum (BFA) is a good example, which had up to 30% of its charges adopted out by 1888.[24] Officials of the BFA noted that, although the asylum promoted otherwise, adoptive parents did not distinguish between indenture and adoption: "We believe," the asylum officials said, "that often, when children of a younger age are taken to be adopted, the adoption is only another name for service."[25]
+
+The next stage of adoption's evolution fell to the emerging nation of the United States. Rapid immigration and the American Civil War resulted in unprecedented overcrowding of orphanages and foundling homes in the mid-nineteenth century. Charles Loring Brace, a Protestant minister, became appalled by the legions of homeless waifs roaming the streets of New York City. Brace considered the abandoned youth, particularly Catholics, to be the most dangerous element challenging the city's order.[26][27]
+
+His solution was outlined in The Best Method of Disposing of Our Pauper and Vagrant Children (1859), which started the Orphan Train movement. The orphan trains eventually shipped an estimated 200,000 children from the urban centers of the East to the nation's rural regions.[28] The children were generally indentured, rather than adopted, to families who took them in.[29] As in times past, some children were raised as members of the family while others were used as farm laborers and household servants.[30]The sheer size of the displacement—the largest migration of children in history—and the degree of exploitation that occurred, gave rise to new agencies and a series of laws that promoted adoption arrangements rather than indenture. The hallmark of the period is Minnesota's adoption law of 1917, which mandated investigation of all placements and limited record access to those involved in the adoption.[31][32]
+
+During the same period, the Progressive movement swept the United States with a critical goal of ending the prevailing orphanage system. The culmination of such efforts came with the First White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children called by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909,[33] where it was declared that the nuclear family represented "the highest and finest product of civilization" and was best able to serve as primary caretaker for the abandoned and orphaned.[34][35] Anti-institutional forces gathered momentum. As late as 1923, only two percent of children without parental care were in adoptive homes, with the balance in foster arrangements and orphanages. Less than forty years later, nearly one-third were in adoptive homes.[36]
+
+Nevertheless, the popularity of eugenic ideas in America put up obstacles to the growth of adoption.[37][38] There were grave concerns about the genetic quality of illegitimate and indigent children, perhaps best exemplified by the influential writings of Henry H. Goddard, who protested against adopting children of unknown origin, saying,
+
+Now it happens that some people are interested in the welfare and high development of the human race; but leaving aside those exceptional people, all fathers and mothers are interested in the welfare of their own families. The dearest thing to the parental heart is to have the children marry well and rear a noble family. How short-sighted it is then for such a family to take into its midst a child whose pedigree is absolutely unknown; or, where, if it were partially known, the probabilities are strong that it would show poor and diseased stock, and that if a marriage should take place between that individual and any member of the family the offspring would be degenerates.[39]
+
+The period 1945 to 1974, the baby scoop era, saw rapid growth and acceptance of adoption as a means to build a family.[40] Illegitimate births rose three-fold after World War II, as sexual mores changed. Simultaneously, the scientific community began to stress the dominance of nurture over genetics, chipping away at eugenic stigmas.[41][42] In this environment, adoption became the obvious solution for both unwed people and infertile couples.[43]
+
+Taken together, these trends resulted in a new American model for adoption. Following its Roman predecessor, Americans severed the rights of the original parents while making adopters the new parents in the eyes of the law. Two innovations were added: 1) adoption was meant to ensure the "best interests of the child," the seeds of this idea can be traced to the first American adoption law in Massachusetts,[16][23] and 2) adoption became infused with secrecy, eventually resulting in the sealing of adoption and original birth records by 1945. The origin of the move toward secrecy began with Charles Loring Brace, who introduced it to prevent children from the Orphan Trains from returning to or being reclaimed by their parents. Brace feared the impact of the parents' poverty, in general, and Catholic religion, in particular, on the youth. This tradition of secrecy was carried on by the later Progressive reformers when drafting of American laws.[44]
+
+The number of adoptions in the United States peaked in 1970.[45] It is uncertain what caused the subsequent decline. Likely contributing factors in the 1960s and 1970s include a decline in the fertility rate, associated with the introduction of the pill, the completion of legalization of artificial birth control methods, the introduction of federal funding to make family planning services available to the young and low-income, and the legalization of abortion. In addition, the years of the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a dramatic change in society's view of illegitimacy and in the legal rights[46] of those born outside of wedlock. In response, family preservation efforts grew[47] so that few children born out of wedlock today are adopted. Ironically, adoption is far more visible and discussed in society today, yet it is less common.[48]
+
+The American model of adoption eventually proliferated globally. England and Wales established their first formal adoption law in 1926. The Netherlands passed its law in 1956. Sweden made adoptees full members of the family in 1959. West Germany enacted its first laws in 1977.[49] Additionally, the Asian powers opened their orphanage systems to adoption, influenced as they were by Western ideas following colonial rule and military occupation.[50] In France, local public institutions accredit candidates for adoption, who can then contact orphanages abroad or ask for the support of NGOs. The system does not involve fees, but gives considerable power to social workers whose decisions may restrict adoption to "standard" families (middle-age, medium to high income, heterosexual, Caucasian).[51]
+
+Adoption is today practiced globally. The table below provides a snapshot of Western adoption rates. Adoption in the United States still occurs at rates nearly three times those of its peers even though the number of children awaiting adoption has held steady in recent years, between 100,000 and 125,000 during the period 2009 to 2018.[52]
+
+Contemporary adoption practices can be open or closed.
+
+Adoptions can occur either between related family members or between unrelated individuals. Historically, most adoptions occurred within a family. The most recent data from the U.S. indicates about half of adoptions are currently between related individuals.[78] A common example of this is a "step-parent adoption", where the new partner of a parent legally adopts a child from the parent's previous relationship. Intra-family adoption can also occur through surrender, as a result of parental death, or when the child cannot otherwise be cared for and a family member agrees to take over.
+
+Infertility is the main reason parents seek to adopt children they are not related to. One study shows this accounted for 80% of unrelated infant adoptions and half of adoptions through foster care.[79] Estimates suggest that 11–24% of Americans who cannot conceive or carry to term attempt to build a family through adoption, and that the overall rate of ever-married American women who adopt is about 1.4%.[80][81] Other reasons people adopt are numerous although not well documented. These may include wanting to cement a new family following divorce or death of one parent, compassion motivated by religious or philosophical conviction, to avoid contributing to overpopulation out of the belief that it is more responsible to care for otherwise parent-less children than to reproduce, to ensure that inheritable diseases (e.g., Tay–Sachs disease) are not passed on, and health concerns relating to pregnancy and childbirth. Although there are a range of reasons, the most recent study of experiences of women who adopt suggests they are most likely to be 40–44 years of age, to be currently married, to have impaired fertility, and to be childless.[82]
+
+Unrelated adoptions may occur through the following mechanisms:
+
+Although adoption is often described as forming a "forever" family, the relationship can be ended at any time. The legal termination of an adoption is called disruption. In U.S. terminology, adoptions are disrupted if they are ended before being finalized, and they are dissolved if the relationship is ended afterwards. It may also be called a failed adoption. After legal finalization, the disruption process is usually initiated by adoptive parents via a court petition and is analogous to divorce proceedings. It is a legal avenue unique to adoptive parents as disruption/dissolution does not apply to biological kin, although biological family members are sometimes disowned or abandoned.[91]
+
+Ad hoc studies performed in the U.S., however, suggest that between 10 and 25 percent of adoptions through the child welfare system (e.g., excluding babies adopted from other countries or step-parents adopting their stepchildren) disrupt before they are legally finalized and from 1 to 10 percent are dissolved after legal finalization. The wide range of values reflects the paucity of information on the subject and demographic factors such as age; it is known that teenagers are more prone to having their adoptions disrupted than young children.[91]
+
+Joint adoption by same-sex couples is legal in 26 countries, and additionally in various sub-national territories. LGBT adoption may also be in the form of step-child adoption, wherein one partner in a same-sex couple adopts the biological child of the other partner.
+
+The biological relationship between a parent and child is important, and the separation of the two has led to concerns about adoption. The traditional view of adoptive parenting received empirical support from a Princeton University study of 6,000 adoptive, step, and foster families in the United States and South Africa from 1968 to 1985; the study indicated that food expenditures in households with mothers of non-biological children (when controlled for income, household size, hours worked, age, etc.) were significantly less for adoptees, step-children, and foster children, causing the researchers to speculate that people are less interested in sustaining the genetic lines of others.[92] This theory is supported in another more qualitative study wherein adoptive relationships marked by sameness in likes, personality, and appearance, were associated with both adult adoptees and adoptive parents report being happier with the adoption.[93]
+
+Other studies provide evidence that adoptive relationships can form along other lines. A study evaluating the level of parental investment indicates strength in adoptive families, suggesting that parents who adopt invest more time in their children than other parents, and concludes "...adoptive parents enrich their children's lives to compensate for the lack of biological ties and the extra challenges of adoption."[94] Another recent study found that adoptive families invested more heavily in their adopted children, for example, by providing further education and financial support. Noting that adoptees seemed to be more likely to experience problems such as drug addiction, the study speculated that adoptive parents might invest more in adoptees not because they favor them, but because they are more likely than genetic children to need the help.[95]
+
+Psychologists' findings regarding the importance of early mother-infant bonding created some concern about whether parents who adopt older infants or toddlers after birth have missed some crucial period for the child's development. However, research on The Mental and Social Life of Babies suggested that the "parent-infant system," rather than a bond between biologically related individuals, is an evolved fit between innate behavior patterns of all human infants and equally evolved responses of human adults to those infant behaviors. Thus nature "ensures some initial flexibility with respect to the particular adults who take on the parental role."[96]
+
+Beyond the foundational issues, the unique questions posed for adoptive parents are varied. They include how to respond to stereotypes, answering questions about heritage, and how best to maintain connections with biological kin when in an open adoption.[97] One author suggests a common question adoptive parents have is: "Will we love the child even though he/she is not our biological child?"[98] A specific concern for many parents is accommodating an adoptee in the classroom.[99] Familiar lessons like "draw your family tree" or "trace your eye color back through your parents and grandparents to see where your genes come from" could be hurtful to children who were adopted and do not know this biological information. Numerous suggestions have been made to substitute new lessons, e.g., focusing on "family orchards."[100]
+
+Adopting older children presents other parenting issues.[101] Some children from foster care have histories of maltreatment, such as physical and psychological neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse, and are at risk of developing psychiatric problems.[102][103] Such children are at risk of developing a disorganized attachment.[104][105][106] Studies by Cicchetti et al. (1990, 1995) found that 80% of abused and maltreated infants in their sample exhibited disorganized attachment styles.[107][108] Disorganized attachment is associated with a number of developmental problems, including dissociative symptoms,[109] as well as depressive, anxious, and acting-out symptoms.[110][111] "Attachment is an active process—it can be secure or insecure, maladaptive or productive."[112] In the U.K., some adoptions fail because the adoptive parents do not get sufficient support to deal with difficult, traumatized children. This is a false economy as local authority care for these children is extremely expensive.[113]
+
+Concerning developmental milestones, studies from the Colorado Adoption Project examined genetic influences on adoptee maturation, concluding that cognitive abilities of adoptees reflect those of their adoptive parents in early childhood but show little similarity by adolescence, resembling instead those of their biological parents and to the same extent as peers in non-adoptive families.[114]
+
+Similar mechanisms appear to be at work in the physical development of adoptees. Danish and American researchers conducting studies on the genetic contribution to body mass index found correlations between an adoptee's weight class and his biological parents' BMI while finding no relationship with the adoptive family environment. Moreover, about one-half of inter-individual differences were due to individual non-shared influences.[115][116]
+
+These differences in development appear to play out in the way young adoptees deal with major life events. In the case of parental divorce, adoptees have been found to respond differently from children who have not been adopted. While the general population experienced more behavioral problems, substance use, lower school achievement, and impaired social competence after parental divorce, the adoptee population appeared to be unaffected in terms of their outside relationships, specifically in their school or social abilities.[117]
+
+Several factors affect the decision to release or raise the child. White adolescents tend to give up their babies to non-relatives, whereas black adolescents are more likely to receive support from their own community in raising the child and also in the form of informal adoption by relatives.[118] Studies by Leynes and by Festinger and Young, Berkman, and Rehr found that, for pregnant adolescents, the decision to release the child for adoption depended on the attitude toward adoption held by the adolescent's mother.[119] Another study found that pregnant adolescents whose mothers had a higher level of education were more likely to release their babies for adoption. Research suggests that women who choose to release their babies for adoption are more likely to be younger, enrolled in school, and have lived in a two-parent household at age 10, than those who kept and raised their babies.[120]
+
+There is limited research on the consequences of adoption for the original parents, and the findings have been mixed. One study found that those who released their babies for adoption were less comfortable with their decision than those who kept their babies. However, levels of comfort over both groups were high, and those who released their child were similar to those who kept their child in ratings of life satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, and positive future outlook for schooling, employment, finances, and marriage.[121] Subsequent research found that adolescent mothers who chose to release their babies for adoption were more likely to experience feelings of sorrow and regret over their decision than those who kept their babies. However, these feelings decreased significantly from one year after birth to the end of the second year.[122]
+
+More recent research found that in a sample of mothers who had released their children for adoption four to 12 years prior, every participant had frequent thoughts of their lost child. For most, thoughts were both negative and positive in that they produced both feelings of sadness and joy. Those who experienced the greatest portion of positive thoughts were those who had open, rather than closed or time-limited mediated, adoptions.[123]
+
+In another study that compared mothers who released their children to those who raised them, mothers who released their children were more likely to delay their next pregnancy, to delay marriage, and to complete job training. However, both groups reached lower levels of education than their peers who were never pregnant.[124] Another study found similar consequences for choosing to release a child for adoption. Adolescent mothers who released their children were more likely to reach a higher level of education and to be employed than those who kept their children. They also waited longer before having their next child.[122] Most of the research that exists on adoption effects on the birth parents was conducted with samples of adolescents, or with women who were adolescents when carrying their babies—little data exists for birth parents from other populations. Furthermore, there is a lack of longitudinal data that may elucidate long-term social and psychological consequences for birth parents who choose to place their children for adoption.
+
+Previous research on adoption has led to assumptions that indicate that there is a heightened risk in terms of psychological development and social relationships for adoptees. Yet, such assumptions have been clarified as flawed due to methodological failures. But more recent studies have been supportive in indicating more accurate information and results about the similarities, differences and overall lifestyles of adoptees.[125]
+
+Evidence about the development of adoptees can be supported in newer studies. It can be said that adoptees, in some respect, tend to develop differently from the general population. This can be seen in many aspects of life, but usually can be found as a greater risk around the time of adolescence. For example, it has been found that many adoptees experience difficulty in establishing a sense of identity.[126]
+
+There are many ways in which the concept of identity can be defined. It is true in all cases that identity construction is an ongoing process of development, change and maintenance of identifying with the self. Research has shown that adolescence is a time of identity progression rather than regression.[127] One's identity tends to lack stability in the beginning years of life but gains a more stable sense in later periods of childhood and adolescence. Typically associated with a time of experimentation, there are endless factors that go into the construction of one's identity. As well as being many factors, there are many types of identities one can associate with. Some categories of identity include gender, sexuality, class, racial and religious, etc. For transracial and international adoptees, tension is generally found in the categories of racial, ethnic and national identification. Because of this, the strength and functionality of family relationships play a huge role in its development and outcome of identity construction. Transracial and transnational adoptees tend to develop feelings of a lack of acceptance because of such racial, ethnic, and cultural differences. Therefore, exposing transracial and transnational adoptees to their "cultures of origin" is important in order to better develop a sense of identity and appreciation for cultural diversity.[128] Identity construction and reconstruction for transnational adoptees the instant they are adopted. For example, based upon specific laws and regulations of the United States, the Child Citizen Act of 2000 makes sure to grant immediate U.S. citizenship to adoptees.[128]
+
+Identity is defined both by what one is and what one is not. Adoptees born into one family lose an identity and then borrow one from the adopting family.
+The formation of identity is a complicated process and there are many factors that affect its outcome. From a perspective of looking at issues in adoption circumstances, the people involved and affected by adoption (the biological parent, the adoptive parent and the adoptee) can be known as the "triad members and state".
+Adoption may threaten triad members' sense of identity. Triad members often express feelings related to confused identity and identity crises because of differences between the triad relationships.
+Adoption, for some, precludes a complete or integrated sense of self. Triad members may experience themselves as incomplete, deficient, or unfinished. They state that they lack feelings of well-being, integration, or solidity associated with a fully developed identity.[129]
+
+Family plays a vital role in identity formation. This is not only true in childhood but also in adolescence. Identity (gender/sexual/ethnic/religious/family) is still forming during adolescence and family holds a vital key to this.
+The research seems to be unanimous; a stable, secure, loving, honest and supportive family in which all members feel safe to explore their identity is necessary for the formation of a sound identity. Transracial and International adoptions are some factors that play a significant role in the identity construction of adoptees. Many tensions arise from relationships built between the adoptee(s) and their family. These include being "different" from the parent(s), developing a positive racial identity, and dealing with racial/ethnic discrimination.[130] It has been found that multicultural and transnational youth tend to identify with their parents origin of culture and ethnicity rather than their residing location, yet it is sometimes hard to balance an identity between the two because school environments tend to lack diversity and acknowledgment regarding such topics.[131] These tensions also tend to create questions for the adoptee, as well as the family, to contemplate. Some common questions include what will happen if the family is more naïve to the ways of socially constructed life? Will tensions arise if this is the case? What if the very people that are supposed to be modeling a sound identity are in fact riddled with insecurities? Ginni Snodgrass answers these questions in the following way.
+The secrecy in an adoptive family and the denial that the adoptive family is different builds dysfunction into it. "... social workers and insecure adoptive parents have structured a family relationship that is based on dishonesty, evasions and exploitation. To believe that good relationships will develop on such a foundation is psychologically unsound" (Lawrence). Secrecy erects barriers to forming a healthy identity.[132]
+
+The research says that the dysfunction, untruths and evasiveness that can be present in adoptive families not only makes identity formation impossible, but also directly works against it. What effect on identity formation is present if the adoptee knows they are adopted but has no information about their biological parents? Silverstein and Kaplan's research states that adoptees lacking medical, genetic, religious, and historical information are plagued by questions such as "Who am I?" "Why was I born?" "What is my purpose?" This lack of identity may lead adoptees, particularly in adolescent years, to seek out ways to belong in a more extreme fashion than many of their non-adopted peers. Adolescent adoptees are overrepresented among those who join sub-cultures, run away, become pregnant, or totally reject their families.[133][134]
+
+Concerning developmental milestones, studies from the Colorado Adoption Project examined genetic influences on adoptee maturation, concluding that cognitive abilities of adoptees reflect those of their adoptive parents in early childhood but show little similarity by adolescence, resembling instead those of their biological parents and to the same extent as peers in non-adoptive families.[114]
+
+Similar mechanisms appear to be at work in the physical development of adoptees. Danish and American researchers conducting studies on the genetic contribution to body mass index found correlations between an adoptee's weight class and his biological parents' BMI while finding no relationship with the adoptive family environment. Moreover, about one-half of inter-individual differences were due to individual non-shared influences.[115][116]
+
+These differences in development appear to play out in the way young adoptees deal with major life events. In the case of parental divorce, adoptees have been found to respond differently from children who have not been adopted. While the general population experienced more behavioral problems, substance use, lower school achievement, and impaired social competence after parental divorce, the adoptee population appeared to be unaffected in terms of their outside relationships, specifically in their school or social abilities.[117]
+
+The adoptee population does, however, seem to be more at risk for certain behavioral issues. Researchers from the University of Minnesota studied adolescents who had been adopted and found that adoptees were twice as likely as non-adopted people to suffer from oppositional defiant disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (with an 8% rate in the general population).[135] Suicide risks were also significantly greater than the general population. Swedish researchers found both international and domestic adoptees undertook suicide at much higher rates than non-adopted peers; with international adoptees and female international adoptees, in particular, at highest risk.[136]
+
+Nevertheless, work on adult adoptees has found that the additional risks faced by adoptees are largely confined to adolescence. Young adult adoptees were shown to be alike with adults from biological families and scored better than adults raised in alternative family types including single parent and step-families.[137] Moreover, while adult adoptees showed more variability than their non-adopted peers on a range of psychosocial measures, adult adoptees exhibited more similarities than differences with adults who had not been adopted.[138] There have been many cases of remediation or the reversibility of early trauma. For example, in one of the earliest studies conducted, Professor Goldfarb in England concluded that some children adjust well socially and emotionally despite their negative experiences of institutional deprivation in early childhood.[139] Other researchers also found that prolonged institutionalization does not necessarily lead to emotional problems or character defects in all children. This suggests that there will always be some children who fare well, who are resilient, regardless of their experiences in early childhood.[140] Furthermore, much of the research on psychological outcomes for adoptees draws from clinical populations. This suggests that conclusions such that adoptees are more likely to have behavioral problems such as ODD and ADHD may be biased. Since the proportion of adoptees that seek mental health treatment is small, psychological outcomes for adoptees compared to those for the general population are more similar than some researchers propose.[141]
+
+In Western culture, many see that the common image of a family being that of a heterosexual couple with biological children. This idea places alternative family forms outside the norm. As a consequence, research indicates, disparaging views of adoptive families exist, along with doubts concerning the strength of their family bonds.[142][143]
+
+The most recent adoption attitudes survey completed by the Evan Donaldson Institute provides further evidence of this stigma. Nearly one-third of the surveyed population believed adoptees are less-well adjusted, more prone to medical issues, and predisposed to drug and alcohol problems. Additionally, 40–45% thought adoptees were more likely to have behavior problems and trouble at school. In contrast, the same study indicated adoptive parents were viewed favorably, with nearly 90% describing them as "lucky, advantaged, and unselfish."[144]
+
+The majority of people state that their primary source of information about adoption comes from friends and family and the news media. Nevertheless, most people report the media provides them a favorable view of adoption; 72% indicated receiving positive impressions.[145] There is, however, still substantial criticism of the media's adoption coverage. Some adoption blogs, for example, criticized Meet the Robinsons for using outdated orphanage imagery[146][147] as did advocacy non-profit The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute.[148]
+
+The stigmas associated with adoption are amplified for children in foster care.[149] Negative perceptions result in the belief that such children are so troubled it would be impossible to adopt them and create "normal" families.[150] A 2004 report from the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care has shown that the number of children waiting in foster care doubled since the 1980s and now remains steady at about a half-million a year."[151]
+
+Attitude toward Adoption Questionnaire (ATAQ)[152]:this questionnaire was first developed by Abdollahzadeh, Chaloyi and Mahmoudi(2019). [153] Preliminary Edition: This questionnaire has 23 items based on the Likert scale of 1 (totally Disagree), up to 5 (Totally Agree) being obtained after refining the items designed to construct the present tool and per-study study. The analysis of item and initial psychometric analyses indicate that there are two factors in it. Items 3-10-11-12-14-15-16-17-19-20-21 are reversed and the rest are graded positively. The results of exploratory factor analysis by main components with varimax rotation indicated two components of attitude toward adoption being named respectively cognitive as the aspects of attitude toward adoption and behavioral-emotional aspects of attitude toward adoption. These two components explained 43.25% of the variance of the total sample. Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used to measure the reliability of the questionnaire. Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.709 for the whole questionnaire, 0.71 for the first component, and 0.713 for the second one. In addition, there was a significant positive relationship between desired social tendencies and the cognitive aspect of attitude toward adoption as well as the behavioral -emotional aspects of attitude toward adoption (P ≤ 0.01).
+
+Adoption practices have changed significantly over the course of the 20th century, with each new movement labeled, in some way, as reform.[154] Beginning in the 1970s, efforts to improve adoption became associated with opening records and encouraging family preservation. These ideas arose from suggestions that the secrecy inherent in modern adoption may influence the process of forming an identity,[155][156] create confusion regarding genealogy,[157] and provide little in the way of medical history.
+
+Family preservation: As concerns over illegitimacy began to decline in the early 1970s, social-welfare agencies began to emphasize that, if possible, mothers and children should be kept together.[158] In the U.S., this was clearly illustrated by the shift in policy of the New York Foundling Home, an adoption-institution that is among the country's oldest and one that had pioneered sealed records. It established three new principles including "to prevent placements of children...," reflecting the belief that children would be better served by staying with their biological families, a striking shift in policy that remains in force today.[159]
+
+Open records: Movements to unseal adoption records for adopted citizens proliferated along with increased acceptance of illegitimacy. In the United States, Jean Paton founded Orphan Voyage in 1954, and Florence Fisher founded the Adoptees' Liberty Movement Association (ALMA) in 1971, calling sealed records "an affront to human dignity.".[160] While in 1975, Emma May Vilardi created the first mutual-consent registry, the International Soundex Reunion Registry (ISRR), allowing those separated by adoption to locate one another.[161] and Lee Campbell and other birthmothers established CUB (Concerned United Birthparents). Similar ideas were taking hold globally with grass-roots organizations like Parent Finders in Canada and Jigsaw in Australia. In 1975, England and Wales opened records on moral grounds.[162]
+
+By 1979, representatives of 32 organizations from 33 states, Canada and Mexico gathered in Washington, DC, to establish the American Adoption Congress (AAC) passing a unanimous resolution: "Open Records complete with all identifying information for all members of the adoption triad, birthparents, adoptive parents and adoptee at the adoptee's age of majority (18 or 19, depending on state) or earlier if all members of the triad agree."[163] Later years saw the evolution of more militant organizations such as Bastard Nation (founded in 1996), groups that helped overturn sealed records in Alabama, Delaware, New Hampshire, Oregon, Tennessee, and Maine.[164][165] Simultaneously, groups such as Origins USA (founded in 1997) started to actively speak about family preservation and the rights of mothers.[166] The intellectual tone of these recent reform movements was influenced by the publishing of The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier. "Primal wound" is described as the "devastation which the infant feels because of separation from its birth mother. It is the deep and consequential feeling of abandonment which the baby adoptee feels after the adoption and which may continue for the rest of his life."[155]
+
+Estimates for the extent of search behavior by adoptees have proven elusive; studies show significant variation.[167] In part, the problem stems from the small adoptee population which makes random surveying difficult, if not impossible.
+
+Nevertheless, some indication of the level of search interest by adoptees can be gleaned from the case of England and Wales which opened adoptees' birth records in 1975. The U.K. Office for National Statistics has projected that 33% of all adoptees would eventually request a copy of their original birth records, exceeding original forecasts made in 1975 when it was believed that only a small fraction of the adoptee population would request their records. The projection is known to underestimate the true search rate, however, since many adoptees of the era get their birth records by other means.[168]
+
+The research literature states adoptees give four reasons for desiring reunion: 1) they wish for a more complete genealogy, 2) they are curious about events leading to their conception, birth, and relinquishment, 3) they hope to pass on information to their children, and 4) they have a need for a detailed biological background, including medical information. It is speculated by adoption researchers, however, that the reasons given are incomplete: although such information could be communicated by a third-party, interviews with adoptees, who sought reunion, found they expressed a need to actually meet biological relations.[169]
+
+It appears the desire for reunion is linked to the adoptee's interaction with and acceptance within the community. Internally focused theories suggest some adoptees possess ambiguities in their sense of self, impairing their ability to present a consistent identity. Reunion helps resolve the lack of self-knowledge.[170]
+
+Externally focused theories, in contrast, suggest that reunion is a way for adoptees to overcome social stigma. First proposed by Goffman, the theory has four parts: 1) adoptees perceive the absence of biological ties as distinguishing their adoptive family from others, 2) this understanding is strengthened by experiences where non-adoptees suggest adoptive ties are weaker than blood ties, 3) together, these factors engender, in some adoptees, a sense of social exclusion, and 4) these adoptees react by searching for a blood tie that reinforces their membership in the community. The externally focused rationale for reunion suggests adoptees may be well adjusted and happy within their adoptive families, but will search as an attempt to resolve experiences of social stigma.[169]
+
+Some adoptees reject the idea of reunion. It is unclear, though, what differentiates adoptees who search from those who do not. One paper summarizes the research, stating, "...attempts to draw distinctions between the searcher and non-searcher are no more conclusive or generalizable than attempts to substantiate...differences between adoptees and nonadoptees."[171]
+
+In sum, reunions can bring a variety of issues for adoptees and parents. Nevertheless, most reunion results appear to be positive. In the largest study to date (based on the responses of 1,007 adoptees and relinquishing parents), 90% responded that reunion was a beneficial experience. This does not, however, imply ongoing relationships were formed between adoptee and parent nor that this was the goal.[172]
+
+The book "Adoption Detective: Memoir of an Adopted Child" by Judith and Martin Land provides insight into the mind of an adoptee from childhood through to adulthood and the emotions invoked when reunification with their birth mothers is desired.
+
+Reform and family preservation efforts have also been strongly associated with the perceived misuse of adoption. In some cases, parents' rights have been terminated when their ethnic or socio-economic group has been deemed unfit by society. Some of these practices were generally accepted but have later been considered abusive; others were uncontroversially reprehensible.
+
+Forced adoption based on ethnicity occurred during World War II. In German occupied Poland, it is estimated that 200,000 Polish children with purportedly Aryan traits were removed from their families and given to German or Austrian couples,[173] and only 25,000 returned to their families after the war.[174]
+
+The Stolen Generation of Aboriginal people in Australia were affected by similar policies,[175] as were Native Americans in the United States[176] and First Nations of Canada.[177]
+
+These practices have become significant social and political issues in recent years, and in many cases the policies have changed.[178][179] The United States, for example, now has the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, which allows the tribe and family of a Native American child to be involved in adoption decisions, with preference being given to adoption within the child's tribe.[180]
+
+From the 1950s through the 1970s, a period called the baby scoop era, adoption practices that involved coercion were directed against unwed mothers, as described for the U.S. in The Girls Who Went Away.
+
+More recently the military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 is known to have given hundreds of babies born to women captives who were then murdered to be brought up by military families.[181]
+
+In Spain under Francisco Franco’s 1939–75 dictatorship the newborns of some left-wing opponents of the regime, or unmarried or poor couples, were removed from their mothers and adopted. New mothers were frequently told their babies had died suddenly after birth and the hospital had taken care of their burials, when in fact they were given or sold to another family. It is believed that up to 300,000 babies were involved. These system – which allegedly involved doctors, nurses, nuns and priests – outlived Franco’s death in 1975 and carried on as an illegal baby trafficking network until 1987 when a new law regulating adoption was introduced.[182][183]
+
+With the increase in adoption rates over the many decades, the United States has been faced with a new immoral practice: rehoming. This is the act of caregivers posting an advertisement when they do not feel the child should be in their care any longer. Investigation of the child's new housing situation is not required in this practice, and this has created an underground market, one where child traffickers can thrive. There is a lack of regulation surrounding this practice and current legislation contradicts each other, making this harder to combat.
+
+When a parent adopts a child, they may not have been aware that the child has special needs and thus, are not equipped to help this child. The child may act out or not fit in with the family so the family turns to rehoming. Rehoming is not  adoption and because of that, the government does not have to be notified and adoption agencies are not involved. Thus, re-homing is a prime target for child and sex traffickers. There are laws set in place to protect children through adoption processes and against sex trafficking, but there are barely any laws regarding rehoming. The courts authorize this practice because the U.S. state law[184] may allow a parent, legal guardian or relative within the second degree to place out or board out a child. However, while the U.S. federal bill Preventing Sex Trafficking and Strengthening Families Act would require the family to make rational decisions and prioritize the health of the child, the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children contradicts this. This states that the family only has to make sure children are placed in adequate care only when the re-homing process is done across state lines. There is no mention of maintaining the children’s safety when rehoming within the same state.
+
+The laws surrounding rehoming are basically non-existent which puts adopted children at the risk of unequipped parents and all other types of dysfunctional homes. This second-chance adoption, as some parents see it, has led to negative effects that failed adoptions have on children as they go through the process of readapting to a new home environment again. With the statute that allows second-degree legal guardians to put their adopted child in the care of someone else, and the rising of re-homing websites and ads on social media, the rehoming process highly exposes children to underground markets and other trafficking prospects. In that regard, laws and statutes concerning adoption and rehoming should be re-evaluated to ensure the full protection of adopted children.
+
+The language of adoption is changing and evolving, and since the 1970s has been a controversial issue tied closely to adoption reform efforts. The controversy arises over the use of terms which, while designed to be more appealing or less offensive to some persons affected by adoption, may simultaneously cause offense or insult to others. This controversy illustrates the problems in adoption, as well as the fact that coining new words and phrases to describe ancient social practices will not necessarily alter the feelings and experiences of those affected by them. Two of the contrasting sets of terms are commonly referred to as positive adoption language (PAL) (sometimes called respectful adoption language (RAL)), and honest adoption language (HAL).
+
+In the 1970s, as adoption search and support organizations developed, there were challenges to the language in common use at the time. As books like Adoption Triangle by Sorosky, Pannor and Baran were published, and support groups formed like CUB (Concerned United Birthparents), a major shift from "natural parent" to "birthparent"[185][186] occurred. Along with the change in times and social attitudes came additional examination of the language used in adoption.
+
+Social workers and other professionals in the field of adoption began changing terms of use to reflect what was being expressed by the parties involved. In 1979, Marietta Spencer wrote "The Terminology of Adoption" for The Child Welfare League of America (CWLA),[187] which was the basis for her later work "Constructive Adoption Terminology".[188] This influenced Pat Johnston's "Positive Adoption Language" (PAL) and "Respectful Adoption Language" (RAL).[189] The terms contained in "Positive Adoption Language" include the terms "birth mother" (to replace the terms "natural mother" and "real mother"), and "placing" (to replace the term "surrender"). These kinds of recommendations encouraged people to be more aware of their use of adoption terminology.
+
+"Honest Adoption Language" refers to a set of terms that proponents say reflect the point of view that: (1) family relationships (social, emotional, psychological or physical) that existed prior to the legal adoption often continue past this point or endure in some form despite long periods of separation, and that (2) mothers who have "voluntarily surrendered" children to adoption (as opposed to involuntary terminations through court-authorized child-welfare proceedings) seldom view it as a choice that was freely made, but instead describe scenarios of powerlessness, lack of resources, and overall lack of choice.[190][191] It also reflects the point of view that the term "birth mother" is derogatory in implying that the woman has ceased being a mother after the physical act of giving birth. Proponents of HAL liken this to the mother being treated as a "breeder" or "incubator".[192] Terms included in HAL include terms that were used before PAL, including "natural mother," "first mother," and "surrendered for adoption."
+
+There are supporters of various lists, developed over many decades, and there are persons who find them lacking, created to support an agenda, or furthering division. All terminology can be used to demean or diminish, uplift or embrace. In addressing the linguistic problem of naming, Edna Andrews says that using "inclusive" and "neutral" language is based upon the concept that "language represents thought, and may even control thought."[193]
+
+Advocates of inclusive language defend it as inoffensive-language usage whose goal is multi-fold:
+
+A common problem is that terms chosen by an identity group, as acceptable descriptors of themselves, can be used in negative ways by detractors. This compromises the integrity of the language and turns what was intended to be positive into negative or vice versa, thus often devaluing acceptability, meaning and use.
+
+Language at its best honors the self-referencing choices of the persons involved, uses inclusive terms and phrases, and is sensitive to the feelings of the primary parties. Language evolves with social attitudes and experiences.[194][195]
+
+Several religious organizations have resisted to allow adoption for same-sex couples. Catholic foster and adoption agencies have been criticized for not placing children with adults perceived to be living an immoral lifestyle in Catholic theology.[196]
+
+Attitudes and laws regarding adoption vary greatly. Whereas all cultures make arrangements whereby children whose birth parents are unavailable to rear them can be brought up by others, not all cultures have the concept of adoption, that is treating unrelated children as equivalent to biological children of the adoptive parents. Under Islamic Law, for example, adopted children must keep their original surname to be identified with blood relations,[197] and, traditionally, women wear a hijab in the presence of males in their adoptive households. In Egypt, these cultural distinctions have led to making adoption illegal opting instead for a system of foster care. [198] [199]
+
+As a reaction against the bans and hurdles affecting international adoption, scholars Elizabeth Bartholet and Paulo Barrozo claim that every child has a right to a family as a matter of basic human rights.[citation needed] This claim devalues heritage or "cultural" claims and emphasizes the child's existence as a human being rather than a "property" of specific nations or, for example, abusive caregivers.
+
+In some countries, such as the United States, "Homecoming Day" is the day when an adoptee is officially united with their new adoptive family.[200] In some adoptive families, this day marks an especially important event and is celebrated annually from thereafter. The term Gotcha Day is also used to refer to this day. Many adopted people and birth parents find this term to be offensive.
+
+1.Barbara Melosh, the American Way of Adoption page 10

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+
+
+Humans (Homo sapiens) are highly intelligent primates that have become the dominant species on Earth. They are the only extant members of the subtribe Hominina and together with chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, they are part of the family Hominidae (the great apes, or hominids). Humans are terrestrial animals, characterized by their erect posture and bipedal locomotion; high manual dexterity and heavy tool use compared to other animals; open-ended and complex language use compared to other animal communications; larger, more complex brains than other primates; and highly advanced and organized societies.[3][4]
+
+Early hominins—particularly the australopithecines, whose brains and anatomy are in many ways more similar to ancestral non-human apes—are less often referred to as "human" than hominins of the genus Homo.[5] Several of these hominins used fire, occupied much of Eurasia, and the lineage that later that gave rise to Homo sapiens is thought to have diverged in Africa from other known hominins around 500,000 years ago, with the earliest fossil evidence of Homo sapiens appearing (also in Africa) around 300,000 years ago.[6] The oldest early H. sapiens fossils were found in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco dating to about 315,000 years ago.[7][8][9][10][11] As of 2017[update], the oldest known skeleton of an anatomically modern Homo sapiens is the Omo-Kibish I, dated to about 196,000 years ago and discovered in southern Ethiopia.[12][13][14] Humans began to exhibit evidence of behavioral modernity at least by about 100,000–70,000 years ago[15][16][17][18][19][20] and (according to recent evidence) as far back as around 300,000 years ago, in the Middle Stone Age.[21][22][23] In several waves of migration, H. sapiens ventured out of Africa and populated most of the world.[24][25]
+
+The spread of the large and increasing population of humans has profoundly affected much of the biosphere and millions of species worldwide. Advantages that explain this evolutionary success include a larger brain with a well-developed neocortex, prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes, which enable advanced abstract reasoning, language, problem solving, sociality, and culture through social learning. Humans use tools more frequently and effectively than any other animal: they are the only extant species to build fires, cook food, clothe themselves, and create and use numerous other technologies and arts.
+
+Humans uniquely use such systems of symbolic communication as language and art to express themselves and exchange ideas, and also organize themselves into purposeful groups. Humans create complex social structures composed of many cooperating and competing groups, from families and kinship networks to political states. Social interactions between humans have established an extremely wide variety of values,[26] social norms, and rituals, which together undergird human society. Curiosity and the human desire to understand and influence the environment and to explain and manipulate phenomena (or events) have motivated humanity's development of science, philosophy, mythology, religion, and numerous other fields of knowledge.
+
+Though most of human existence has been sustained by hunting and gathering in band societies,[27] many human societies transitioned to sedentary agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago,[28] domesticating plants and animals, thus enabling the growth of civilization. These human societies subsequently expanded, establishing various forms of government, religion, and culture around the world, and unifying people within regions to form states and empires. The rapid advancement of scientific and medical understanding in the 19th and 20th centuries permitted the development of fuel-driven technologies and increased lifespans, causing the human population to rise exponentially. The global human population was estimated to be near 7.8 billion in 2019.[29]
+
+In common usage, the word "human" generally refers to the only extant species of the genus Homo—anatomically and behaviorally modern Homo sapiens.
+
+In scientific terms, the meanings of "hominid" and "hominin" have changed during the recent decades with advances in the discovery and study of the fossil ancestors of modern humans. The previously clear boundary between humans and apes has blurred, resulting in biologists now acknowledging the hominids as encompassing multiple species, and Homo and close relatives since the split from chimpanzees as the only hominins. There is also a distinction between anatomically modern humans and Archaic Homo sapiens, the earliest fossil members of the species.
+
+The English adjective human is a Middle English loanword from Old French humain, ultimately from Latin hūmānus, the adjective form of homō "man." The word's use as a noun (with a plural: humans) dates to the 16th century.[30] The native English term man can refer to the species generally (a synonym for humanity) as well as to human males, or individuals of either sex (though this latter form is less common in contemporary English).[31]
+
+The species binomial "Homo sapiens" was coined by Carl Linnaeus in his 18th-century work Systema Naturae.[32] The generic name "Homo" is a learned 18th-century derivation from Latin homō "man," ultimately "earthly being" (Old Latin hemō a cognate to Old English guma "man", from PIE dʰǵʰemon-, meaning "earth" or "ground").[33] The species-name "sapiens" means "wise" or "sapient". Note that the Latin word homo refers to humans of either sex, and that "sapiens" is the singular form (while there is no such word as "sapien").[34]
+
+The genus Homo evolved and diverged from other hominins in Africa, after the human clade split from the chimpanzee lineage of the hominids (great apes) branch of the primates. Modern humans, defined as the species Homo sapiens or specifically to the single extant subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, proceeded to colonize all the continents and larger islands, arriving in Eurasia 125,000–60,000 years ago,[35][36] Australia around 40,000 years ago, the Americas around 15,000 years ago, and remote islands such as Hawaii, Easter Island, Madagascar, and New Zealand between the years 300 and 1280.[37][38]
+
+The closest living relatives of humans are chimpanzees and bonobos (genus Pan)[39][40] and gorillas (genus Gorilla).[41] With the sequencing of human and chimpanzee genomes, current estimates of similarity between human and chimpanzee DNA sequences range between 95% and 99%.[41][42][43] By using the technique called a molecular clock which estimates the time required for the number of divergent mutations to accumulate between two lineages, the approximate date for the split between lineages can be calculated. The gibbons (family Hylobatidae) and orangutans (genus Pongo) were the first groups to split from the line leading to the humans, then gorillas (genus Gorilla) followed by the chimpanzee (genus Pan). The splitting date between human and chimpanzee lineages is placed around 4–8 million years ago during the late Miocene epoch.[44][45] During this split, chromosome 2 was formed from two other chromosomes, leaving humans with only 23 pairs of chromosomes, compared to 24 for the other apes.[46]
+
+There is little fossil evidence for the divergence of the gorilla, chimpanzee and hominin lineages.[47][48] The earliest fossils that have been proposed as members of the hominin lineage are Sahelanthropus tchadensis dating from 7 million years ago, Orrorin tugenensis dating from 5.7 million years ago, and Ardipithecus kadabba dating to 5.6 million years ago. Each of these species has been argued to be a bipedal ancestor of later hominins, but all such claims are contested. It is also possible that any one of the three is an ancestor of another branch of African apes, or is an ancestor shared between hominins and other African Hominoidea (apes). The question of the relation between these early fossil species and the hominin lineage is still to be resolved. From these early species the australopithecines arose around 4 million years ago diverged into robust (also called Paranthropus) and gracile branches,[49] possibly one of which (such as A. garhi, dating to 2.5 million years ago) is a direct ancestor of the genus Homo.[50]
+
+The earliest members of the genus Homo are Homo habilis which evolved around 2.8 million years ago.[51] Homo habilis has been considered the first species for which there is clear evidence of the use of stone tools. More recently, however, in 2015, stone tools, perhaps predating Homo habilis, have been discovered in northwestern Kenya that have been dated to 3.3 million years old.[52] Nonetheless, the brains of Homo habilis were about the same size as that of a chimpanzee, and their main adaptation was bipedalism as an adaptation to terrestrial living. During the next million years a process of encephalization began, and with the arrival of Homo erectus in the fossil record, cranial capacity had doubled. Homo erectus were the first of the hominina to leave Africa, and these species spread through Africa, Asia, and Europe between 1.3 to 1.8 million years ago. One population of H. erectus, also sometimes classified as a separate species Homo ergaster, stayed in Africa and evolved into Homo sapiens. It is believed that these species were the first to use fire and complex tools. The earliest transitional fossils between H. ergaster/erectus and archaic humans are from Africa such as Homo rhodesiensis, but seemingly transitional forms are also found at Dmanisi, Georgia. These descendants of African H. erectus spread through Eurasia from c. 500,000 years ago evolving into H. antecessor, H. heidelbergensis and H. neanderthalensis. Fossils of anatomically modern humans from date from the Middle Paleolithic at about 200,000 years ago such as the Omo remains of Ethiopia, and the fossils of Herto sometimes classified as Homo sapiens idaltu also from Ethiopia. Earlier remains, now classified as early Homo sapiens, such as the Jebel Irhoud remains from Morocco and the Florisbad Skull from South Africa are also now known to date to about 300,000 and 259,000 years old respectively.[53][6][54][55][56][57] Later fossils of archaic Homo sapiens from Skhul in Israel and Southern Europe begin around 90,000 years ago.[58]
+
+Human evolution is characterized by a number of morphological, developmental, physiological, and behavioral changes that have taken place since the split between the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. The most significant of these adaptations are 1. bipedalism, 2. increased brain size, 3. lengthened ontogeny (gestation and infancy), 4. decreased sexual dimorphism (neoteny). The relationship between all these changes is the subject of ongoing debate.[59] Other significant morphological changes included the evolution of a power and precision grip, a change first occurring in H. erectus.[60]
+
+Bipedalism is the basic adaption of the hominin line, and it is considered the main cause behind a suite of skeletal changes shared by all bipedal hominins. The earliest bipedal hominin is considered to be either Sahelanthropus[61] or Orrorin, with Ardipithecus, a full bipedal,[62] coming somewhat later.[citation needed] The knuckle walkers, the gorilla and chimpanzee, diverged around the same time, and either Sahelanthropus or Orrorin may be humans' last shared ancestor with those animals.[citation needed] The early bipedals eventually evolved into the australopithecines and later the genus Homo.[citation needed] There are several theories of the adaptational value of bipedalism. It is possible that bipedalism was favored because it freed up the hands for reaching and carrying food, because it saved energy during locomotion, because it enabled long-distance running and hunting, or as a strategy for avoiding hyperthermia by reducing the surface exposed to direct sun.[citation needed]
+
+The human species developed a much larger brain than that of other primates—typically 1,330 cm3 (81 cu in) in modern humans, over twice the size of that of a chimpanzee or gorilla.[63] The pattern of encephalization started with Homo habilis which at approximately 600 cm3 (37 cu in) had a brain slightly larger than chimpanzees, and continued with Homo erectus (800–1,100 cm3 (49–67 cu in)), and reached a maximum in Neanderthals with an average size of 1,200–1,900 cm3 (73–116 cu in), larger even than Homo sapiens (but less encephalized).[64] The pattern of human postnatal brain growth differs from that of other apes (heterochrony), and allows for extended periods of social learning and language acquisition in juvenile humans. However, the differences between the structure of human brains and those of other apes may be even more significant than differences in size.[65][66][67][68] The increase in volume over time has affected different areas within the brain unequally—the temporal lobes, which contain centers for language processing have increased disproportionately, as has the prefrontal cortex which has been related to complex decision making and moderating social behavior.[63] Encephalization has been tied to an increasing emphasis on meat in the diet,[69][70] or with the development of cooking,[71] and it has been proposed [72] that intelligence increased as a response to an increased necessity for solving social problems as human society became more complex.
+
+The reduced degree of sexual dimorphism is primarily visible in the reduction of the male canine tooth relative to other ape species (except gibbons). Another important physiological change related to sexuality in humans was the evolution of hidden estrus. Humans are the only ape in which the female is intermittently fertile year round, and in which no special signals of fertility are produced by the body (such as genital swelling during estrus). Nonetheless humans retain a degree of sexual dimorphism in the distribution of body hair and subcutaneous fat, and in the overall size, males being around 25% larger than females. These changes taken together have been interpreted as a result of an increased emphasis on pair bonding as a possible solution to the requirement for increased parental investment due to the prolonged infancy of offspring.[citation needed]
+
+By the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic period (50,000 BP), and likely significantly earlier by 100–70,000 years ago[17][18][15][16][19][20] or possibly by about 300,000 years ago[23][22][21] behavioral modernity, including language, music and other cultural universals had developed.[73][74]
+As early Homo sapiens dispersed, it encountered varieties of archaic humans both in Africa and in Eurasia,
+in Eurasia notably Homo neanderthalensis.
+Since 2010, evidence for gene flow between archaic and modern humans during the period of roughly 100,000 to 30,000 years ago has been discovered. This includes modern human admixture in Neanderthals, Neanderthal admixture in all modern humans outside Africa,
+[75][76]
+Denisova hominin admixture in Melanesians[77]
+as well as admixture from unnamed archaic humans to some Sub-Saharan African populations.[78]
+
+The "out of Africa" migration of Homo sapiens took place in at least two waves, the first around 130,000 to 100,000 years ago, the second (Southern Dispersal) around 70,000 to 50,000 years ago,[79][80][81]
+resulting in the colonization of Australia around 65–50,000 years ago,[82][83][84]
+This recent out of Africa migration derived from East African populations, which had become separated from populations migrating to Southern, Central and Western Africa at least 100,000 years earlier.[85] Modern humans subsequently spread globally, replacing archaic humans (either through competition or hybridization). They inhabited Eurasia and Oceania by 40,000 years ago, and the Americas at least 14,500 years ago.[86][87]
+
+Until about 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), all humans lived as hunter-gatherers, generally in small nomadic groups known as band societies, often in caves.
+
+The Neolithic Revolution (the invention of agriculture) took place beginning about 10,000 years ago, first in the Fertile Crescent, spreading through large parts of the Old World over the following millennia, and independently in Mesoamerica about 6,000 years ago.
+Access to food surplus led to the formation of permanent human settlements, the domestication of animals and the use of metal tools for the first time in history.
+
+Agriculture and sedentary lifestyle led to the emergence of early civilizations (the development of urban development, complex society, social stratification and writing)
+from about 5,000 years ago (the Bronze Age), first beginning in Mesopotamia.[88]
+
+Few human populations progressed to historicity, with substantial parts of the world remaining in a Neolithic, Mesolithic or Upper Paleolithic stage of development until the advent of globalisation
+and modernity initiated by European exploration and colonialism.
+
+The Scientific Revolution, Technological Revolution and the Industrial Revolution brought such discoveries as imaging technology, major innovations in transport, such as the airplane and automobile; energy development, such as coal and electricity.[89] This correlates with population growth (especially in America)[90] and higher life expectancy, the World population rapidly increased numerous times in the 19th and 20th centuries as nearly 10% of the 100 billion people who ever lived lived in the past century.[91]
+
+With the advent of the Information Age at the end of the 20th century, modern humans live in a world that has become increasingly globalized and interconnected. As of 2010[update], almost 2 billion humans are able to communicate with each other via the Internet,[92] and 3.3 billion by mobile phone subscriptions.[93] Although connection between humans has encouraged the growth of science, art, discussion, and technology, it has also led to culture clashes and the development and use of weapons of mass destruction.[citation needed] Human population growth and industrialisation has led to environmental destruction and pollution significantly contributing to the ongoing mass extinction of other forms of life called the Holocene extinction event,[94] which may be further accelerated by global warming in the future.[95]
+
+Early human settlements were dependent on proximity to water and, depending on the lifestyle, other natural resources used for subsistence, such as populations of animal prey for hunting and arable land for growing crops and grazing livestock. However, modern humans have a great capacity for altering their habitats by means of technology, through irrigation, urban planning, construction, transport, manufacturing goods, deforestation and desertification,[96] but human settlements continue to be vulnerable to natural disasters, especially those placed in hazardous locations and characterized by lack of quality of construction.[97] Deliberate habitat alteration is often done with the goals of increasing material wealth, increasing thermal comfort, improving the amount of food available, improving aesthetics, or improving ease of access to resources or other human settlements. With the advent of large-scale trade and transport infrastructure, proximity to these resources has become unnecessary, and in many places, these factors are no longer a driving force behind the growth and decline of a population. Nonetheless, the manner in which a habitat is altered is often a major determinant in population change.[citation needed]
+
+Technology has allowed humans to colonize six of the Earth's seven continents and adapt to virtually all climates. However the human population is not uniformly distributed on the Earth's surface, because the population density varies from one region to another and there are large areas almost completely uninhabited, like Antarctica.[98][99] Within the last century, humans have explored Antarctica, underwater environment, and outer space, although large-scale colonization of these environments is not yet feasible. With a population of over seven billion, humans are among the most numerous of the large mammals. Most humans (61%) live in Asia. The remainder live in the Americas (14%), Africa (14%), Europe (11%), and Oceania (0.5%).[100]
+
+Human habitation within closed ecological systems in hostile environments, such as Antarctica and outer space, is expensive, typically limited in duration, and restricted to scientific, military, or industrial expeditions. Life in space has been very sporadic, with no more than thirteen humans in space at any given time.[101] Between 1969 and 1972, two humans at a time spent brief intervals on the Moon. As of July 2020, no other celestial body has been visited by humans, although there has been a continuous human presence in space since the launch of the initial crew to inhabit the International Space Station on 31 October 2000.[102] However, other celestial bodies have been visited by human-made objects.[103][104][105]
+
+Since 1800, the human population has increased from one billion[106] to over seven billion.[107] The combined biomass of the carbon of all the humans on Earth in 2018 was estimated at ~ 60 million tons, about 10 times larger than that of all non-domesticated mammals.[108]
+
+In 2004, some 2.5 billion out of 6.3 billion people (39.7%) lived in urban areas. In February 2008, the U.N. estimated that half the world's population would live in urban areas by the end of the year.[109] Problems for humans living in cities include various forms of pollution and crime,[110] especially in inner city and suburban slums. Both overall population numbers and the proportion residing in cities are expected to increase significantly in the coming decades.[111]
+
+Humans have had a dramatic effect on the environment. Humans are apex predators, being rarely preyed upon by other species.[112] Currently, through land development, combustion of fossil fuels, and pollution, humans are thought to be the main contributor to global climate change.[113] If this continues at its current rate it is predicted that climate change will wipe out half of all plant and animal species over the next century.[114][115]
+
+Most aspects of human physiology are closely homologous to corresponding aspects of animal physiology. The human body consists of the legs, the torso, the arms, the neck, and the head. An adult human body consists of about 100 trillion (1014) cells. The most commonly defined body systems in humans are the nervous, the cardiovascular, the circulatory, the digestive, the endocrine, the immune, the integumentary, the lymphatic, the musculoskeletal, the reproductive, the respiratory, and the urinary system.[116][117]
+
+Humans, like most of the other apes, lack external tails, have several blood type systems, have opposable thumbs, and are sexually dimorphic. The comparatively minor anatomical differences between humans and chimpanzees are largely a result of human bipedalism and larger brain size. One difference is that humans have a far faster and more accurate throw than other animals. Humans are also among the best long-distance runners in the animal kingdom, but slower over short distances.[118][119] Humans' thinner body hair and more productive sweat glands help avoid heat exhaustion while running for long distances.[120]
+
+As a consequence of bipedalism, human females have narrower birth canals. The construction of the human pelvis differs from other primates, as do the toes. A trade-off for these advantages of the modern human pelvis is that childbirth is more difficult and dangerous than in most mammals, especially given the larger head size of human babies compared to other primates. Human babies must turn around as they pass through the birth canal while other primates do not, which makes humans the only species where females usually require help from their conspecifics (other members of their own species) to reduce the risks of birthing. As a partial evolutionary solution, human fetuses are born less developed and more vulnerable. Chimpanzee babies are cognitively more developed than human babies until the age of six months, when the rapid development of human brains surpasses chimpanzees. Another difference between women and chimpanzee females is that women go through the menopause and become infertile decades before the end of their lives. All species of non-human apes are capable of giving birth until death. Menopause probably developed as it provides an evolutionary advantage of more caring time to relatives' young.[119]
+
+Apart from bipedalism, humans differ from chimpanzees mostly in smelling, hearing, digesting proteins, brain size, and the ability of language. Humans' brains are about three times bigger than in chimpanzees. More importantly, the brain to body ratio is much higher in humans than in chimpanzees, and humans have a significantly more developed cerebral cortex, with a larger number of neurons. The mental abilities of humans are remarkable compared to other apes. Humans' ability of speech is unique among primates. Humans are able to create new and complex ideas, and to develop technology, which is unprecedented among other organisms on Earth.[119]
+
+It is estimated that the worldwide average height for an adult human male is about 172 cm (5 ft 7 1⁄2 in),[citation needed] while the worldwide average height for adult human females is about 158 cm (5 ft 2 in).[citation needed] Shrinkage of stature may begin in middle age in some individuals, but tends to be typical in the extremely aged.[121] Through history human populations have universally become taller, probably as a consequence of better nutrition, healthcare, and living conditions.[122] The average mass of an adult human is 54–64 kg (119–141 lb) for females and 70–83 kg (154–183 lb) for males.[123][124] Like many other conditions, body weight and body type is influenced by both genetic susceptibility and environment and varies greatly among individuals. (see obesity)[125][126]
+
+Humans have a density of hair follicles comparable to other apes. However, human body hair is vellus hair, most of which is so short and wispy as to be practically invisible. In contrast (and unusually among species), a follicle of terminal hair on the human scalp can grow for many years before falling out.[127][128] Humans have about 2 million sweat glands spread over their entire bodies, many more than chimpanzees, whose sweat glands are scarce and are mainly located on the palm of the hand and on the soles of the feet.[129] Humans have the largest number of eccrine sweat glands among species.
+
+The dental formula of humans is: 2.1.2.32.1.2.3. Humans have proportionately shorter palates and much smaller teeth than other primates. They are the only primates to have short, relatively flush canine teeth. Humans have characteristically crowded teeth, with gaps from lost teeth usually closing up quickly in young individuals. Humans are gradually losing their third molars, with some individuals having them congenitally absent.[130]
+
+Like all animals, humans are a diploid eukaryotic species. Each somatic cell has two sets of 23 chromosomes, each set received from one parent; gametes have only one set of chromosomes, which is a mixture of the two parental sets. Among the 23 pairs of chromosomes there are 22 pairs of autosomes and one pair of sex chromosomes. Like other mammals, humans have an XY sex-determination system, so that females have the sex chromosomes XX and males have XY.[131]
+
+A rough and incomplete human genome was assembled as an average of a number of humans in 2003, and currently efforts are being made to achieve a sample of the genetic diversity of the species (see International HapMap Project). By present estimates, humans have approximately 22,000 genes.[132] The variation in human DNA is very small compared to other species, possibly suggesting a population bottleneck during the Late Pleistocene (around 100,000 years ago), in which the human population was reduced to a small number of breeding pairs.[133][134] Nucleotide diversity is based on single mutations called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The nucleotide diversity between humans is about 0.1%, i.e. 1 difference per 1,000 base pairs.[135][136] A difference of 1 in 1,000 nucleotides between two humans chosen at random amounts to about 3 million nucleotide differences, since the human genome has about 3 billion nucleotides. Most of these single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are neutral but some (about 3 to 5%) are functional and influence phenotypic differences between humans through alleles.[citation needed]
+
+By comparing the parts of the genome that are not under natural selection and which therefore accumulate mutations at a fairly steady rate, it is possible to reconstruct a genetic tree incorporating the entire human species since the last shared ancestor. Each time a certain mutation (SNP) appears in an individual and is passed on to his or her descendants, a haplogroup is formed including all of the descendants of the individual who will also carry that mutation. By comparing mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from the mother, geneticists have concluded that the last female common ancestor whose genetic marker is found in all modern humans, the so-called mitochondrial Eve, must have lived around 90,000 to 200,000 years ago.[137][138][139]
+
+Human accelerated regions, first described in August 2006,[140][141] are a set of 49 segments of the human genome that are conserved throughout vertebrate evolution but are strikingly different in humans. They are named according to their degree of difference between humans and their nearest animal relative (chimpanzees) (HAR1 showing the largest degree of human-chimpanzee differences). Found by scanning through genomic databases of multiple species, some of these highly mutated areas may contribute to human-specific traits.[citation needed]
+
+The forces of natural selection have continued to operate on human populations, with evidence that certain regions of the genome display directional selection in the past 15,000 years.[142]
+
+As with other mammals, human reproduction takes place by internal fertilization via sexual intercourse. During this process, the male inserts his erect penis into the female's vagina and ejaculates semen, which contains sperm. The sperm travels through the vagina and cervix into the uterus or Fallopian tubes for fertilization of the ovum. Upon fertilization and implantation, gestation then occurs within the female's uterus.
+
+The zygote divides inside the female's uterus to become an embryo, which over a period of 38 weeks (9 months) of gestation becomes a fetus. After this span of time, the fully grown fetus is birthed from the woman's body and breathes independently as an infant for the first time. At this point, most modern cultures recognize the baby as a person entitled to the full protection of the law, though some jurisdictions extend various levels of personhood earlier to human fetuses while they remain in the uterus.
+
+Compared with other species, human childbirth is dangerous. Painful labors lasting 24 hours or more are not uncommon and sometimes lead to the death of the mother, the child or both.[143] This is because of both the relatively large fetal head circumference and the mother's relatively narrow pelvis.[144][145] The chances of a successful labor increased significantly during the 20th century in wealthier countries with the advent of new medical technologies. In contrast, pregnancy and natural childbirth remain hazardous ordeals in developing regions of the world, with maternal death rates approximately 100 times greater than in developed countries.[146]
+
+In developed countries, infants are typically 3–4 kg (7–9 lb) in weight and 50–60 cm (20–24 in) in height at birth.[147][failed verification] However, low birth weight is common in developing countries, and contributes to the high levels of infant mortality in these regions.[148] Helpless at birth, humans continue to grow for some years, typically reaching sexual maturity at 12 to 15 years of age. Females continue to develop physically until around the age of 18, whereas male development continues until around age 21. The human life span can be split into a number of stages: infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood and old age. The lengths of these stages, however, have varied across cultures and time periods. Compared to other primates, humans experience an unusually rapid growth spurt during adolescence, where the body grows 25% in size. Chimpanzees, for example, grow only 14%, with no pronounced spurt.[149] The presence of the growth spurt is probably necessary to keep children physically small until they are psychologically mature. Humans are one of the few species in which females undergo menopause. It has been proposed that menopause increases a woman's overall reproductive success by allowing her to invest more time and resources in her existing offspring, and in turn their children (the grandmother hypothesis), rather than by continuing to bear children into old age.[150][151]
+
+Evidence-based studies indicate that the life span of an individual depends on two major factors, genetics and lifestyle choices.[152] For various reasons, including biological/genetic causes,[153] women live on average about four years longer than men—as of 2013[update] the global average life expectancy at birth of a girl is estimated at 70.2 years compared to 66.1 for a boy.[154] There are significant geographical variations in human life expectancy, mostly correlated with economic development—for example life expectancy at birth in Hong Kong is 84.8 years for girls and 78.9 for boys, while in Swaziland, primarily because of AIDS, it is 31.3 years for both sexes.[155] The developed world is generally aging, with the median age around 40 years. In the developing world the median age is between 15 and 20 years. While one in five Europeans is 60 years of age or older, only one in twenty Africans is 60 years of age or older.[156] The number of centenarians (humans of age 100 years or older) in the world was estimated by the United Nations at 210,000 in 2002.[157] Jeanne Calment is widely believed to have reached the age of 122;[158] higher ages have been claimed but are unsubstantiated.
+
+Humans are omnivorous, capable of consuming a wide variety of plant and animal material.[159][160] Varying with available food sources in regions of habitation, and also varying with cultural and religious norms, human groups have adopted a range of diets, from purely vegan to primarily carnivorous. In some cases, dietary restrictions in humans can lead to deficiency diseases; however, stable human groups have adapted to many dietary patterns through both genetic specialization and cultural conventions to use nutritionally balanced food sources.[161] The human diet is prominently reflected in human culture, and has led to the development of food science.
+
+Until the development of agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago, Homo sapiens employed a hunter-gatherer method as their sole means of food collection. This involved combining stationary food sources (such as fruits, grains, tubers, and mushrooms, insect larvae and aquatic mollusks) with wild game, which must be hunted and killed in order to be consumed.[162] It has been proposed that humans have used fire to prepare and cook food since the time of Homo erectus.[163] Around ten thousand years ago, humans developed agriculture,[164] which substantially altered their diet. This change in diet may also have altered human biology; with the spread of dairy farming providing a new and rich source of food, leading to the evolution of the ability to digest lactose in some adults.[165][166] Agriculture led to increased populations, the development of cities, and because of increased population density, the wider spread of infectious diseases. The types of food consumed, and the way in which they are prepared, have varied widely by time, location, and culture.
+
+In general, humans can survive for two to eight weeks without food, depending on stored body fat. Survival without water is usually limited to three or four days. About 36 million humans die every year from causes directly or indirectly related to starvation.[167] Childhood malnutrition is also common and contributes to the global burden of disease.[168] However global food distribution is not even, and obesity among some human populations has increased rapidly, leading to health complications and increased mortality in some developed, and a few developing countries. Worldwide over one billion people are obese,[169] while in the United States 35% of people are obese, leading to this being described as an "obesity epidemic."[170] Obesity is caused by consuming more calories than are expended, so excessive weight gain is usually caused by an energy-dense diet.[169]
+
+No two humans—not even monozygotic twins—are genetically identical. Genes and environment influence human biological variation in visible characteristics, physiology, disease susceptibility and mental abilities. The exact influence of genes and environment on certain traits is not well understood.[171][172]
+
+Most current genetic and archaeological evidence supports a recent single origin of modern humans in East Africa,[173] with first migrations placed at 60,000 years ago. Compared to the great apes, human gene sequences—even among African populations—are remarkably homogeneous.[174] On average, genetic similarity between any two humans is 99.5%-99.9%.[175][176][177][178][179][180] There is about 2–3 times more genetic diversity within the wild chimpanzee population than in the entire human gene pool.[181][182][183]
+
+The human body's ability to adapt to different environmental stresses is remarkable, allowing humans to acclimatize to a wide variety of temperatures, humidity, and altitudes. As a result, humans are a cosmopolitan species found in almost all regions of the world, including tropical rainforest, arid desert, extremely cold arctic regions, and heavily polluted cities. Most other species are confined to a few geographical areas by their limited adaptability.[184]
+
+There is biological variation in the human species—with traits such as blood type, genetic diseases, cranial features, facial features, organ systems, eye color, hair color and texture, height and build, and skin color varying across the globe. Human body types vary substantially. The typical height of an adult human is between 1.4 and 1.9 m (4 ft 7 in and 6 ft 3 in), although this varies significantly depending, among other things, on sex, ethnic origin,[185][186] and even family bloodlines. Body size is partly determined by genes and is also significantly influenced by environmental factors such as diet, exercise, and sleep patterns, especially as an influence in childhood. Adult height for each sex in a particular ethnic group approximately follows a normal distribution. Those aspects of genetic variation that give clues to human evolutionary history, or are relevant to medical research, have received particular attention. For example, the genes that allow adult humans to digest lactose are present in high frequencies in populations that have long histories of cattle domestication, suggesting natural selection having favored that gene in populations that depend on cow milk. Some hereditary diseases such as sickle cell anemia are frequent in populations where malaria has been endemic throughout history—it is believed that the same gene gives increased resistance to malaria among those who are unaffected carriers of the gene. Similarly, populations that have for a long time inhabited specific climates, such as arctic or tropical regions or high altitudes, tend to have developed specific phenotypes that are beneficial for conserving energy in those environments—short stature and stocky build in cold regions, tall and lanky in hot regions, and with high lung capacities at high altitudes. Some populations have evolved highly unique adaptations to very specific environmental conditions, such as those advantageous to ocean-dwelling lifestyles and freediving in the Bajau.[187] Skin color tends to vary clinally, with darker skin mostly around the equator—where the added protection from the sun's ultraviolet radiation is thought to give an evolutionary advantage—and lighter skin tones closer to the poles.[188][189][190][191]
+
+The hue of human skin and hair is determined by the presence of pigments called melanins. Human skin color can range from darkest brown to lightest peach, or even nearly white or colorless in cases of albinism.[183] Human hair ranges in color from white to red to blond to brown to black, which is most frequent.[192] Hair color depends on the amount of melanin (an effective sun blocking pigment) in the skin and hair, with hair melanin concentrations in hair fading with increased age, leading to grey or even white hair. Most researchers believe that skin darkening is an adaptation that evolved as protection against ultraviolet solar radiation, which also helps balancing folate, which is destroyed by ultraviolet radiation. Light skin pigmentation protects against depletion of vitamin D, which requires sunlight to make.[193] Skin pigmentation of contemporary humans is clinally distributed across the planet, and in general correlates with the level of ultraviolet radiation in a particular geographic area. Human skin also has a capacity to darken (tan) in response to exposure to ultraviolet radiation.[194][195][196]
+
+Within the human species, the greatest degree of genetic variation exists between males and females. While the nucleotide genetic variation of individuals of the same sex across global populations is no greater than 0.1%-0.5%, the genetic difference between males and females is between 1% and 2%. The genetic difference between sexes contributes to anatomical, hormonal, neural, and physiological differences between men and women, although the exact degree and nature of social and environmental influences on sexes are not completely understood. Males on average are 15% heavier and 15 cm (6 in) taller than females. There is a difference between body types, body organs and systems, hormonal levels, sensory systems, and muscle mass between sexes. On average, men have about 40–50% more upper body strength and 20–30% more lower body strength than women. Women generally have a higher body fat percentage than men. Women have lighter skin than men of the same population; this has been explained by a higher need for vitamin D (which is synthesized by sunlight) in females during pregnancy and lactation. As there are chromosomal differences between females and males, some X and Y chromosome related conditions and disorders only affect either men or women. Other conditional differences between males and females are not related to sex chromosomes. Even after allowing for body weight and volume, the male voice is usually an octave deeper than the female voice. Women have a longer life span in almost every population around the world.[197][198][199][200][201][202][203][204][205]
+
+Males typically have larger tracheae and branching bronchi, with about 30% greater lung volume per unit body mass. They have larger hearts, 10% higher red blood cell count, and higher hemoglobin, hence greater oxygen-carrying capacity. They also have higher circulating clotting factors (vitamin K, prothrombin and platelets). These differences lead to faster healing of wounds and higher peripheral pain tolerance.[206] Females typically have more white blood cells (stored and circulating), more granulocytes and B and T lymphocytes. Additionally, they produce more antibodies at a faster rate than males. Hence they develop fewer infectious diseases and these continue for shorter periods.[206] Ethologists argue that females, interacting with other females and multiple offspring in social groups, have experienced such traits as a selective advantage.[207][208][209][210][211] According to Daly and Wilson, "The sexes differ more in human beings than in monogamous mammals, but much less than in extremely polygamous mammals."[212] But given that sexual dimorphism in the closest relatives of humans is much greater than among humans, the human clade must be considered to be characterized by decreasing sexual dimorphism, probably due to less competitive mating patterns. One proposed explanation is that human sexuality has developed more in common with its close relative the bonobo, which exhibits similar sexual dimorphism, is polygynandrous and uses recreational sex to reinforce social bonds and reduce aggression.[213]
+
+Humans of the same sex are 99.5% genetically identical. There is relatively little variation between human geographical populations, and most of the variation that occurs is at the individual level.[183][214][215] Of the 0.1%-0.5% of human genetic differentiation, 85% exists within any randomly chosen local population, be they Italians, Koreans, or Kurds. Two randomly chosen Koreans may be genetically almost as different as a Korean and an Italian. Genetic data shows that no matter how population groups are defined, two people from the same population group are almost as different from each other as two people from any two different population groups.[183][216][217][218]
+
+Current genetic research has demonstrated that human populations native to the African continent are the most genetically diverse.[219] Human genetic diversity decreases in native populations with migratory distance from Africa, and this is thought to be the result of bottlenecks during human migration.[220][221] Humans have lived in Africa for the longest time, which has allowed accumulation of a higher diversity of genetic mutations in these populations. Only part of Africa's population migrated out of the continent into Eurasia, bringing just part of the original African genetic variety with them. Non-African populations, however, acquired new genetic inputs from local admixture with archaic populations, and thus have much larger amounts of variation from Neanderthals and Denisovans than is found in Africa.[222] African populations also harbour the highest number of private genetic variants, or those not found in other places of the world. While many of the common variants found in populations outside of Africa are also found on the African continent, there are still large numbers which are private to these regions, especially Oceania and the Americas.[183][222] Furthermore, recent studies have found that populations in sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly West Africa, have ancestral genetic variation which predates modern humans and has been lost in most non-African populations. This ancestry is thought to originate from admixture with an unknown archaic hominin that diverged before the split of Neanderthals and modern humans.[223][224]
+
+Geographical distribution of human variation is complex and constantly shifts through time which reflects complicated human evolutionary history. Most human biological variation is clinally distributed and blends gradually from one area to the next. Groups of people around the world have different frequencies of polymorphic genes. Furthermore, different traits are often non-concordant and each have different clinal distribution. Adaptability varies both from person to person and from population to population. The most efficient adaptive responses are found in geographical populations where the environmental stimuli are the strongest (e.g. Tibetans are highly adapted to high altitudes). The clinal geographic genetic variation is further complicated by the migration and mixing between human populations which has been occurring since prehistoric times.[183][225][226][227][228][229]
+
+Human variation is highly non-concordant: many of the genes do not cluster together and are not inherited together. Skin and hair color are mostly not correlated to height, weight, or athletic ability. Humans do not share the same patterns of variation through geography. Skin colour generally varies with latitude and certain people are tall or have brown hair. There is a statistical correlation between particular features in a population, but different features might not be expressed or inherited together. Thus, genes which code for some physical traits—such as skin color, hair color, or height—represent a minuscule portion of the human genome and might not correlate with genetic affinity. Dark-skinned populations that are found in Africa, Australia, and South Asia are not closely related to each other.[196][228][229][230][231][232] Even within the same region, physical phenotype can be unrelated to genetic affinity. Despite pygmy populations of South East Asia (Andamanese) having similar physical features with African pygmy populations such as short stature, dark skin, and curly hair, they are not genetically closely related to these populations.[233] Genetic variants affecting superficial anatomical features such as skin color—from a genetic perspective, are highly meaningless—they involve a few hundred of the billions of nucleotides in a person's DNA.[234] Individuals with the same morphology do not necessarily cluster with each other by lineage, and a given lineage does not include only individuals with the same trait complex.[183][217][235]
+
+Due to practices of group endogamy, allele frequencies cluster locally around kin groups and lineages, or by national, ethnic, cultural and linguistic boundaries, giving a detailed degree of correlation between genetic clusters and population groups when considering many alleles simultaneously. Despite this, genetic boundaries around local populations do not biologically mark off any fully discrete groups of humans. Much of human variation is continuous, often with no clear points of demarcation.[235][236][227][228][237][238][239][240][241][242]
+
+The human brain, the focal point of the central nervous system in humans, controls the peripheral nervous system. In addition to controlling "lower," involuntary, or primarily autonomic activities such as respiration and digestion, it is also the locus of "higher" order functioning such as thought, reasoning, and abstraction.[243] These cognitive processes constitute the mind, and, along with their behavioral consequences, are studied in the field of psychology.
+
+Generally regarded as more capable of these higher order activities, the human brain is believed to be more intelligent in general than that of any other known species. While some non-human species are capable of creating structures and using simple tools—mostly through instinct and mimicry—human technology is vastly more complex, and is constantly evolving and improving through time.
+
+Humans are generally diurnal. The average sleep requirement is between seven and nine hours per day for an adult and nine to ten hours per day for a child; elderly people usually sleep for six to seven hours. Having less sleep than this is common among humans, even though sleep deprivation can have negative health effects. A sustained restriction of adult sleep to four hours per day has been shown to correlate with changes in physiology and mental state, including reduced memory, fatigue, aggression, and bodily discomfort.[244] During sleep humans dream. In dreaming humans experience sensory images and sounds, in a sequence which the dreamer usually perceives more as an apparent participant than as an observer. Dreaming is stimulated by the pons and mostly occurs during the REM phase of sleep.
+
+Humans are one of the relatively few species to have sufficient self-awareness to recognize themselves in a mirror.[245] Around 18 months most human children are aware that the mirror image is not another person.[246]
+
+The human brain perceives the external world through the senses, and each individual human is influenced greatly by his or her experiences, leading to subjective views of existence and the passage of time. Humans are variously said to possess consciousness, self-awareness, and a mind, which correspond roughly to the mental processes of thought. These are said to possess qualities such as self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. The extent to which the mind constructs or experiences the outer world is a matter of debate, as are the definitions and validity of many of the terms used above.
+
+The physical aspects of the mind and brain, and by extension of the nervous system, are studied in the field of neurology, the more behavioral in the field of psychology, and a sometimes loosely defined area between in the field of psychiatry, which treats mental illness and behavioral disorders. Psychology does not necessarily refer to the brain or nervous system, and can be framed purely in terms of phenomenological or information processing theories of the mind. Increasingly, however, an understanding of brain functions is being included in psychological theory and practice, particularly in areas such as artificial intelligence, neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience.
+
+The nature of thought is central to psychology and related fields. Cognitive psychology studies cognition, the mental processes' underlying behavior. It uses information processing as a framework for understanding the mind. Perception, learning, problem solving, memory, attention, language and emotion are all well researched areas as well. Cognitive psychology is associated with a school of thought known as cognitivism, whose adherents argue for an information processing model of mental function, informed by positivism and experimental psychology. Techniques and models from cognitive psychology are widely applied and form the mainstay of psychological theories in many areas of both research and applied psychology. Largely focusing on the development of the human mind through the life span, developmental psychology seeks to understand how people come to perceive, understand, and act within the world and how these processes change as they age. This may focus on intellectual, cognitive, neural, social, or moral development. Psychologists have developed intelligence tests and the concept of intelligence quotient in order to assess the relative intelligence of human beings and study its distribution among population.[247]
+
+Some philosophers divide consciousness into phenomenal consciousness, which is experience itself, and access consciousness, which is the processing of the things in experience.[248] Phenomenal consciousness is the state of being conscious, such as when they say "I am conscious." Access consciousness is being conscious of something in relation to abstract concepts, such as when one says "I am conscious of these words." Various forms of access consciousness include awareness, self-awareness, conscience, stream of consciousness, Husserl's phenomenology, and intentionality. The concept of phenomenal consciousness, in modern history, according to some, is closely related to the concept of qualia. Social psychology links sociology with psychology in their shared study of the nature and causes of human social interaction, with an emphasis on how people think towards each other and how they relate to each other. The behavior and mental processes, both human and non-human, can be described through animal cognition, ethology, evolutionary psychology, and comparative psychology as well. Human ecology is an academic discipline that investigates how humans and human societies interact with both their natural environment and the human social environment.
+
+Human motivation is not yet wholly understood. From a psychological perspective, Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a well-established theory which can be defined as the process of satisfying certain needs in ascending order of complexity.[249] From a more general, philosophical perspective, human motivation can be defined as a commitment to, or withdrawal from, various goals requiring the application of human ability. Furthermore, incentive and preference are both factors, as are any perceived links between incentives and preferences. Volition may also be involved, in which case willpower is also a factor. Ideally, both motivation and volition ensure the selection, striving for, and realization of goals in an optimal manner, a function beginning in childhood and continuing throughout a lifetime in a process known as socialization.[250]
+
+Happiness, or the state of being happy, is a human emotional condition. The definition of happiness is a common philosophical topic. Some people might define it as the best condition that a human can have—a condition of mental and physical health. Others define it as freedom from want and distress; consciousness of the good order of things; assurance of one's place in the universe or society.
+
+Emotion has a significant influence on, or can even be said to control, human behavior, though historically many cultures and philosophers have for various reasons discouraged allowing this influence to go unchecked. Emotional experiences perceived as pleasant, such as love, admiration, or joy, contrast with those perceived as unpleasant, like hate, envy, or sorrow. The Stoics believed excessive emotion was harmful, while some Sufi teachers felt certain extreme emotions could yield a conceptual perfection, what is often translated as ecstasy.
+
+In modern scientific thought, certain refined emotions are considered a complex neural trait innate in a variety of domesticated and non-domesticated mammals. These were commonly developed in reaction to superior survival mechanisms and intelligent interaction with each other and the environment; as such, refined emotion is not in all cases as discrete and separate from natural neural function as was once assumed. However, when humans function in civilized tandem, it has been noted that uninhibited acting on extreme emotion can lead to social disorder and crime.
+
+For humans, sexuality has important social functions: it creates physical intimacy, bonds and hierarchies among individuals, besides ensuring biological reproduction. Sexual desire, or libido, is experienced as a bodily urge, often accompanied by strong emotions such as love, ecstasy and jealousy. The significance of sexuality in the human species is reflected in a number of physical features, among them hidden ovulation, the evolution of external scrotum and (among great apes) a relatively large penis suggesting sperm competition in humans, the absence of an os penis, permanent secondary sexual characteristics and the forming of pair bonds based on sexual attraction as a common social structure. Contrary to other primates that often advertise estrus through visible signs, human females do not have distinct or visible signs of ovulation, and they experience sexual desire outside of their fertile periods.
+
+Human choices in acting on sexuality are commonly influenced by social norms, which vary between cultures. Restrictions are often determined by religious beliefs or social customs. People can fall anywhere along a continuous scale of sexual orientation,[251] although most humans are heterosexual.[252] There is considerably more evidence supporting nonsocial, biological causes of sexual orientation than social ones, especially for males.[252] Recent research, including neurology and genetics, suggests that other aspects of human sexuality are biologically influenced as well.[253]
+
+Both the mother and the father provide care for human offspring, in contrast to other primates, where parental care is mostly restricted to mothers.[254]
+
+Humanity's unprecedented set of intellectual skills were a key factor in the species' eventual technological advancement and concomitant domination of the biosphere.[259] Disregarding extinct hominids, humans are the only animals known to teach generalizable information,[260] innately deploy recursive embedding to generate and communicate complex concepts,[261] engage in the "folk physics" required for competent tool design,[262][263] or cook food in the wild.[264] Human traits and behaviors that are unusual (though not necessarily unique) among species, include starting fires,[265] phoneme structuring,[266] self-recognition in mirror tests,[267] habitual bipedal walking,[268] and vocal learning.[269] Scholars debate whether humans evolved the unusual trait of natural persistence hunting,[270][271] and also debate to what extent humans are the only animals with a theory of mind.[272] Even compared with other social animals, humans have an unusually high degree of flexibility in their facial expressions.[273] Humans are the only animals known to cry emotional tears.[274]
+
+Humans are highly social beings and tend to live in large complex social groups. More than any other creature, humans are capable of using systems of communication for self-expression, the exchange of ideas, and organization, and as such have created complex social structures composed of many cooperating and competing groups. Human groups range from the size of families to nations. Social interactions between humans have established an extremely wide variety[clarification needed] of values, social norms, and rituals, which together form the basis of human society.
+
+Culture is defined here as patterns of complex symbolic behavior, i.e. all behavior that is not innate but which has to be learned through social interaction with others; such as the use of distinctive material and symbolic systems, including language, ritual, social organization, traditions, beliefs and technology.
+
+While many species communicate, language is unique to humans, a defining feature of humanity, and a cultural universal. Unlike the limited systems of other animals, human language is open—an infinite number of meanings can be produced by combining a limited number of symbols. Human language also has the capacity of displacement, using words to represent things and happenings that are not presently or locally occurring, but reside in the shared imagination of interlocutors.[130] Language differs from other forms of communication in that it is modality independent; the same meanings can be conveyed through different media, auditively in speech, visually by sign language or writing, and even through tactile media such as braille. Language is central to the communication between humans, and to the sense of identity that unites nations, cultures and ethnic groups. The invention of writing systems at least five thousand years ago allowed the preservation of language on material objects, and was a major technological advancement. The science of linguistics describes the structure and function of language and the relationship between languages. There are approximately six thousand different languages currently in use, including sign languages, and many thousands more that are extinct.[275]
+
+The division of humans into male and female sexes has been marked culturally by a corresponding division of roles, norms, practices, dress, behavior, rights, duties, privileges, status, and power. Cultural differences by gender have often been believed to have arisen naturally out of a division of reproductive labor; the biological fact that women give birth led to their further cultural responsibility for nurturing and caring for children.[276] Gender roles have varied historically, and challenges to predominant gender norms have recurred in many societies.
+
+All human societies organize, recognize and classify types of social relationships based on relations between parents and children (consanguinity), and relations through marriage (affinity). These kinds of relations are generally called kinship relations. In most societies kinship places mutual responsibilities and expectations of solidarity on the individuals that are so related, and those who recognize each other as kinsmen come to form networks through which other social institutions can be regulated. Among the many functions of kinship is the ability to form descent groups, groups of people sharing a common line of descent, which can function as political units such as clans. Another function is the way in which kinship unites families through marriage, forming kinship alliances between groups of wife-takers and wife-givers. Such alliances also often have important political and economical ramifications, and may result in the formation of political organization above the community level. Kinship relations often includes regulations for whom an individual should or shouldn't marry. All societies have rules of incest taboo, according to which marriage between certain kinds of kin relations are prohibited—such rules vary widely between cultures.[citation needed] Some societies also have rules of preferential marriage with certain kin relations, frequently with either cross or parallel cousins. Rules and norms for marriage and social behavior among kinsfolk is often reflected in the systems of kinship terminology in the various languages of the world. In many societies kinship relations can also be formed through forms of co-habitation, adoption, fostering, or companionship, which also tends to create relations of enduring solidarity (nurture kinship).
+
+Humans often form ethnic groups, such groups tend to be larger than kinship networks and be organized around a common identity defined variously in terms of shared ancestry and history, shared cultural norms and language, or shared biological phenotype. Such ideologies of shared characteristics are often perpetuated in the form of powerful, compelling narratives that give legitimacy and continuity to the set of shared values. Ethnic groupings often correspond to some level of political organization such as the band, tribe, city state or nation. Although ethnic groups appear and disappear through history, members of ethnic groups often conceptualize their groups as having histories going back into the deep past. Such ideologies give ethnicity a powerful role in defining social identity and in constructing solidarity between members of an ethno-political unit. This unifying property of ethnicity has been closely tied to the rise of the nation state as the predominant form of political organization in the 19th and 20th centuries.[277][278][279][280][281][282]
+
+Society is the system of organizations and institutions arising from interaction between humans. Within a society people can be divided into different groups according to their income, wealth, power, reputation, etc., but the structure of social stratification and the degree of social mobility differs, especially between modern and traditional societies.[283] A state is an organized political community occupying a definite territory, having an organized government, and possessing internal and external sovereignty. Recognition of the state's claim to independence by other states, enabling it to enter into international agreements, is often important to the establishment of its statehood. The "state" can also be defined in terms of domestic conditions, specifically, as conceptualized by Max Weber, "a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the 'legitimate' use of physical force within a given territory."[284]
+
+Government can be defined as the political means of creating and enforcing laws; typically via a bureaucratic hierarchy. Politics is the process by which decisions are made within groups; this process often involves conflict as well as compromise. Although the term is generally applied to behavior within governments, politics is also observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions. Many different political systems exist, as do many different ways of understanding them, and many definitions overlap. Examples of governments include monarchy, Communist state, military dictatorship, theocracy, and liberal democracy, the last of which is considered dominant today. All of these issues have a direct relationship with economics.
+
+Trade is the voluntary exchange of goods and services, and is a form of economic activity. A mechanism that allows trade is called a market. Modern traders instead generally negotiate through a medium of exchange, such as money. As a result, buying can be separated from selling, or earning. Because of specialization and division of labor, most people concentrate on a small aspect of manufacturing or service, trading their labor for products. Trade exists between regions because different regions have an absolute or comparative advantage in the production of some tradable commodity, or because different regions' size allows for the benefits of mass production.
+
+Economics is a social science which studies the production, distribution, trade, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on measurable variables, and is broadly divided into two main branches: microeconomics, which deals with individual agents, such as households and businesses, and macroeconomics, which considers the economy as a whole, in which case it considers aggregate supply and demand for money, capital and commodities. Aspects receiving particular attention in economics are resource allocation, production, distribution, trade, and competition. Economic logic is increasingly applied to any problem that involves choice under scarcity or determining economic value.
+
+War is a state of organized armed conflict between states or non-state actors. War is characterized by the use of lethal violence against others—whether between combatants or upon non-combatants—to achieve military goals through force. Lesser, often spontaneous conflicts, such as brawls, riots, revolts, and melees, are not considered to be warfare. Revolutions can be nonviolent or an organized and armed revolution which denotes a state of war. During the 20th century, it is estimated that between 167 and 188 million people died as a result of war.[285] A common definition defines war as a series of military campaigns between at least two opposing sides involving a dispute over sovereignty, territory, resources, religion, or other issues. A war between internal elements of a state is a civil war.
+
+There have been a wide variety of rapidly advancing tactics throughout the history of war, ranging from conventional war to asymmetric warfare to total war and unconventional warfare. Techniques include hand to hand combat, the use of ranged weapons, naval warfare, and, more recently, air support. Military intelligence has often played a key role in determining victory and defeat. Propaganda, which often includes information, slanted opinion and disinformation, plays a key role both in maintaining unity within a warring group and in sowing discord among opponents. In modern warfare, soldiers and combat vehicles are used to control the land, warships the sea, and aircraft the sky. These fields have also overlapped in the forms of marines, paratroopers, aircraft carriers, and surface-to-air missiles, among others. Satellites in low Earth orbit have made outer space a factor in warfare as well through their use for detailed intelligence gathering; however, no known aggressive actions have been taken from space.
+
+Stone tools were used by proto-humans at least 2.5 million years ago.[286] The controlled use of fire began around 1.5 million years ago. Since then, humans have made major advances, developing complex technology to create tools to aid their lives and allowing for other advancements in culture. Major leaps in technology include the discovery of agriculture—what is known as the Neolithic Revolution, and the invention of automated machines in the Industrial Revolution.
+
+Archaeology attempts to tell the story of past or lost cultures in part by close examination of the artifacts they produced. Early humans left stone tools, pottery, and jewelry that are particular to various regions and times.
+
+Throughout history, humans have altered their appearance by wearing clothing[287] and adornments, by trimming or shaving hair or by means of body modifications.
+
+Body modification is the deliberate altering of the human body for any non-medical reason, such as aesthetics, sexual enhancement, a rite of passage, religious reasons, to display group membership or affiliation, to create body art, shock value, or self-expression.[288] In its most broad definition it includes plastic surgery, socially acceptable decoration (e.g. common ear piercing in many societies), and religious rites of passage (e.g. circumcision in a number of cultures).[288]
+
+Philosophy is a discipline or field of study involving the investigation, analysis, and development of ideas at a general, abstract, or fundamental level. It is the discipline searching for a general understanding of reality, reasoning and values. Major fields of philosophy include logic, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and axiology (which includes ethics and aesthetics). Philosophy covers a very wide range of approaches, and is used to refer to a worldview, to a perspective on an issue, or to the positions argued for by a particular philosopher or school of philosophy.
+
+Religion is generally defined as a belief system concerning the supernatural, sacred or divine, and practices, values, institutions and rituals associated with such belief. Some religions also have a moral code. The evolution and the history of the first religions have recently become areas of active scientific investigation.[289][290][291] However, in the course of its development, religion has taken on many forms that vary by culture and individual perspective. Some of the chief questions and issues religions are concerned with include life after death (commonly involving belief in an afterlife), the origin of life, the nature of the universe (religious cosmology) and its ultimate fate (eschatology), and what is moral or immoral. A common source for answers to these questions are beliefs in transcendent divine beings such as deities or a singular God, although not all religions are theistic. Spirituality, belief or involvement in matters of the soul or spirit, is one of the many different approaches humans take in trying to answer fundamental questions about humankind's place in the universe, the meaning of life, and the ideal way to live one's life. Though these topics have also been addressed by philosophy, and to some extent by science, spirituality is unique in that it focuses on mystical or supernatural concepts such as karma and God.
+
+Although the exact level of religiosity can be hard to measure,[292] a majority of humans professes some variety of religious or spiritual belief, although many (in some countries a majority) are irreligious. This includes humans who have no religious beliefs or do not identify with any religion. Humanism is a philosophy which seeks to include all of humanity and all issues common to humans; it is usually non-religious. Most religions and spiritual beliefs are clearly distinct from science on both a philosophical and methodological level; the two are not generally considered mutually exclusive and a majority of humans hold a mix of both scientific and religious views. The distinction between philosophy and religion, on the other hand, is at times less clear, and the two are linked in such fields as the philosophy of religion and theology.
+
+Humans have been producing art works for at least seventy-three thousand years.[293] Art may be defined as a form of cultural expression and the usage of narratives of liberation and exploration (i.e. art history, art criticism, and art theory) to mediate its boundaries. This distinction may be applied to objects or performances, current or historical, and its prestige extends to those who made, found, exhibit, or own them. In the modern use of the word, art is commonly understood to be the process or result of making material works that, from concept to creation, adhere to the "creative impulse" of human beings.
+
+Music is a natural intuitive phenomenon based on the three distinct and interrelated organization structures of rhythm, harmony, and melody. Listening to music is perhaps the most common and universal form of entertainment, while learning and understanding it are popular disciplines.[citation needed] There are a wide variety of music genres and ethnic musics. Literature, the body of written—and possibly oral—works, especially creative ones, includes prose, poetry and drama, both fiction and non-fiction. Literature includes such genres as epic, legend, myth, ballad, and folklore.
+
+Another unique aspect of human culture and thought is the development of complex methods for acquiring knowledge through observation, quantification, and verification.[294][295] The scientific method has been developed to acquire knowledge of the physical world and the rules, processes and principles of which it consists, and combined with mathematics it enables the prediction of complex patterns of causality and consequence.[citation needed] An understanding of mathematics is unique to humans, although other species of animal have some numerical cognition.[296]
+
+All of science can be divided into three major branches, the formal sciences (e.g., logic and mathematics), which are concerned with formal systems, the applied sciences (e.g., engineering, medicine), which are focused on practical applications, and the empirical sciences, which are based on empirical observation and are in turn divided into natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology) and social sciences (e.g., psychology, economics, sociology).[297] A pseudoscience is an activity or a teaching which is mistakenly regarded as being scientific by its major proponents.[298]

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+In biology, an organism (from Greek: ὀργανισμός, organismos) is any individual entity that embodies the properties of life. It is a synonym for "life form".
+
+Organisms are classified by taxonomy into groups such as multicellular animals, plants, and fungi; or unicellular microorganisms such as protists, bacteria, and archaea.[1] All types of organisms are capable of reproduction, growth and development, maintenance, and some degree of response to stimuli. Humans, squids, mushrooms, and vascular plants are examples of multicellular organisms that differentiate specialized tissues and organs during development.
+
+An organism may be either a prokaryote or a eukaryote. Prokaryotes are represented by two separate domains – bacteria and archaea. Eukaryotic organisms are characterized by the presence of a membrane-bound cell nucleus and contain additional membrane-bound compartments called organelles (such as mitochondria in animals and plants and plastids in plants and algae, all generally considered to be derived from endosymbiotic bacteria).[2] Fungi, animals and plants are examples of kingdoms of organisms within the eukaryotes.
+
+Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 2 million to 1 trillion,[3] of which over 1.7 million have been documented.[4] More than 99% of all species, amounting to over five billion species,[5] that ever lived are estimated to be extinct.[6][7]
+
+In 2016, a set of 355 genes from the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all organisms was identified.[8][9]
+
+The term "organism" (from Greek ὀργανισμός, organismos, from ὄργανον, organon, i.e. "instrument, implement, tool, organ of sense or apprehension")[10][11] first appeared in the English language in 1703 and took on its current definition by 1834 (Oxford English Dictionary). It is directly related to the term "organization". There is a long tradition of defining organisms as self-organizing beings, going back at least to Immanuel Kant's 1790 Critique of Judgment.[12]
+
+An organism may be defined as an assembly of molecules functioning as a more or less stable whole that exhibits the properties of life. Dictionary definitions can be broad, using phrases such as "any living structure, such as a plant, animal, fungus or bacterium, capable of growth and reproduction".[13] Many definitions exclude viruses and possible man-made non-organic life forms, as viruses are dependent on the biochemical machinery of a host cell for reproduction.[14] A superorganism is an organism consisting of many individuals working together as a single functional or social unit.[15]
+
+There has been controversy about the best way to define the organism[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] and indeed about whether or not such a definition is necessary.[26][27] Several contributions[28] are responses to the suggestion that the category of "organism" may well not be adequate in biology.[29][page needed]
+
+Viruses are not typically considered to be organisms because they are incapable of autonomous reproduction, growth or metabolism. Although some organisms are also incapable of independent survival and live as obligatory intracellular parasites, they are capable of independent metabolism and procreation. Although viruses have a few enzymes and molecules characteristic of living organisms, they have no metabolism of their own; they cannot synthesize and organize the organic compounds from which they are formed. Naturally, this rules out autonomous reproduction: they can only be passively replicated by the machinery of the host cell. In this sense, they are similar to inanimate matter.
+
+While viruses sustain no independent metabolism and thus are usually not classified as organisms, they do have their own genes, and they do evolve by mechanisms similar to the evolutionary mechanisms of organisms. Thus, an argument that viruses should be classed as living organisms is their ability to undergo evolution and replicate through self-assembly. However, some scientists argue that viruses neither evolve nor self-reproduce. Instead, viruses are evolved by their host cells, meaning that there was co-evolution of viruses and host cells. If host cells did not exist, viral evolution would be impossible. This is not true for cells. If viruses did not exist, the direction of cellular evolution could be different, but cells would nevertheless be able to evolve. As for the reproduction, viruses totally rely on hosts' machinery to replicate.[30] The discovery of viruses with genes coding for energy metabolism and protein synthesis fuelled the debate about whether viruses are living organisms. The presence of these genes suggested that viruses were once able to metabolize. However, it was found later that the genes coding for energy and protein metabolism have a cellular origin. Most likely, these genes were acquired through horizontal gene transfer from viral hosts.[30]
+
+Organisms are complex chemical systems, organized in ways that promote reproduction and some measure of sustainability or survival. The same laws that govern non-living chemistry govern the chemical processes of life. It is generally the phenomena of entire organisms that determine their fitness to an environment and therefore the survivability of their DNA-based genes.
+
+Organisms clearly owe their origin, metabolism, and many other internal functions to chemical phenomena, especially the chemistry of large organic molecules. Organisms are complex systems of chemical compounds that, through interaction and environment, play a wide variety of roles.
+
+Organisms are semi-closed chemical systems. Although they are individual units of life (as the definition requires), they are not closed to the environment around them. To operate they constantly take in and release energy. Autotrophs produce usable energy (in the form of organic compounds) using light from the sun or inorganic compounds while heterotrophs take in organic compounds from the environment.
+
+The primary chemical element in these compounds is carbon. The chemical properties of this element such as its great affinity for bonding with other small atoms, including other carbon atoms, and its small size making it capable of forming multiple bonds, make it ideal as the basis of organic life. It is able to form small three-atom compounds (such as carbon dioxide), as well as large chains of many thousands of atoms that can store data (nucleic acids), hold cells together, and transmit information (protein).
+
+Compounds that make up organisms may be divided into macromolecules and other, smaller molecules. The four groups of macromolecule are nucleic acids, proteins, carbohydrates and lipids. Nucleic acids (specifically deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA) store genetic data as a sequence of nucleotides. The particular sequence of the four different types of nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine) dictate many characteristics that constitute the organism. The sequence is divided up into codons, each of which is a particular sequence of three nucleotides and corresponds to a particular amino acid. Thus a sequence of DNA codes for a particular protein that, due to the chemical properties of the amino acids it is made from, folds in a particular manner and so performs a particular function.
+
+These protein functions have been recognized:
+
+A bilayer of phospholipids makes up the membrane of cells that constitutes a barrier, containing everything within the cell and preventing compounds from freely passing into, and out of, the cell. Due to the selective permeability of the phospholipid membrane, only specific compounds can pass through it.
+
+All organisms consist of structural units called cells; some contain a single cell (unicellular) and others contain many units (multicellular). Multicellular organisms are able to specialize cells to perform specific functions. A group of such cells is a tissue, and in animals these occur as four basic types, namely epithelium, nervous tissue, muscle tissue, and connective tissue. Several types of tissue work together in the form of an organ to produce a particular function (such as the pumping of the blood by the heart, or as a barrier to the environment as the skin). This pattern continues to a higher level with several organs functioning as an organ system such as the reproductive system, and digestive system. Many multicellular organisms consist of several organ systems, which coordinate to allow for life.
+
+The cell theory, first developed in 1839 by Schleiden and Schwann, states that all organisms are composed of one or more cells; all cells come from preexisting cells; and cells contain the hereditary information necessary for regulating cell functions and for transmitting information to the next generation of cells.
+
+There are two types of cells, eukaryotic and prokaryotic. Prokaryotic cells are usually singletons, while eukaryotic cells are usually found in multicellular organisms. Prokaryotic cells lack a nuclear membrane so DNA is unbound within the cell; eukaryotic cells have nuclear membranes.
+
+All cells, whether prokaryotic or eukaryotic, have a membrane, which envelops the cell, separates its interior from its environment, regulates what moves in and out, and maintains the electric potential of the cell. Inside the membrane, a salty cytoplasm takes up most of the cell volume. All cells possess DNA, the hereditary material of genes, and RNA, containing the information necessary to build various proteins such as enzymes, the cell's primary machinery. There are also other kinds of biomolecules in cells.
+
+All cells share several similar characteristics of:[31]
+
+The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the most recent organism from which all organisms now living on Earth descend.[32] Thus it is the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth. The LUCA is estimated to have lived some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago (sometime in the Paleoarchean era).[33][34] The earliest evidence for life on Earth is graphite found to be biogenic in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks discovered in Western Greenland[35] and microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia.[36][37] Although more than 99 percent of all species that ever lived on the planet are estimated to be extinct,[6][7] there are currently 2 million to 1 trillion species of life on Earth.[3]
+
+Information about the early development of life includes input from many different fields, including geology and planetary science. These sciences provide information about the history of the Earth and the changes produced by life. However, a great deal of information about the early Earth has been destroyed by geological processes over the course of time.
+
+All organisms are descended from a common ancestor or ancestral gene pool. Evidence for common descent may be found in traits shared between all living organisms. In Darwin's day, the evidence of shared traits was based solely on visible observation of morphologic similarities, such as the fact that all birds have wings, even those that do not fly.
+
+There is strong evidence from genetics that all organisms have a common ancestor. For example, every living cell makes use of nucleic acids as its genetic material, and uses the same twenty amino acids as the building blocks for proteins. All organisms use the same genetic code (with some extremely rare and minor deviations) to translate nucleic acid sequences into proteins. The universality of these traits strongly suggests common ancestry, because the selection of many of these traits seems arbitrary. Horizontal gene transfer makes it more difficult to study the last universal ancestor.[38] However, the universal use of the same genetic code, same nucleotides, and same amino acids makes the existence of such an ancestor overwhelmingly likely.[39]
+
+Chlorobacteria (accepted name = Chloroflexi)
+
+Hadobacteria (= Deinococcus-Thermus group)
+
+Cyanobacteria
+
+Spirochaetae
+
+Fibrobacteres
+
+Chlorobi
+
+Bacteroidetes
+
+Planctomycetes
+
+Chlamydiae
+
+Lentisphaerae
+
+Verrucomicrobia
+
+Deferribacteres
+
+Acidobacteria
+
+Deltaproteobacteria
+
+Epsilonproteobacteria
+
+Alphaproteobacteria
+
+Betaproteobacteria
+
+Gammaproteobacteria
+
+Thermotogae
+
+Fusobacteria
+
+Negativicutes
+
+Endobacteria (=Firmicutes, Mollicutes)
+
+Actinobacteria
+
+Archaea
+
+Eukarya
+
+The most commonly accepted location of the root of the tree of life is between a monophyletic domain Bacteria and a clade formed by Archaea and Eukaryota of what is referred to as the "traditional tree of life" based on several molecular studies.[40][41][42][43][44][45] A very small minority of studies have concluded differently, namely that the root is in the domain Bacteria, either in the phylum Firmicutes[46] or that the phylum Chloroflexi is basal to a clade with Archaea and Eukaryotes and the rest of Bacteria as proposed by Thomas Cavalier-Smith.[47]
+
+Research published in 2016, by William F. Martin, by genetically analyzing 6.1 million protein-coding genes from sequenced prokaryotic genomes of various phylogenetic trees, identified 355 protein clusters from amongst 286,514 protein clusters that were probably common to the LUCA. The results "depict LUCA as anaerobic, CO2-fixing, H2-dependent with a Wood–Ljungdahl pathway (the reductive acetyl-coenzyme A pathway), N2-fixing and thermophilic. LUCA's biochemistry was replete with FeS clusters and radical reaction mechanisms. Its cofactors reveal dependence upon transition metals, flavins, S-adenosyl methionine, coenzyme A, ferredoxin, molybdopterin, corrins and selenium. Its genetic code required nucleoside modifications and S-adenosylmethionine-dependent methylations." The results depict methanogenic clostria as a basal clade in the 355 lineages examined, and suggest that the LUCA inhabited an anaerobic hydrothermal vent setting in a geochemically active environment rich in H2, CO2, and iron.[8] However, the identification of these genes as being present in LUCA was criticized, suggesting that many of the proteins assumed to be present in LUCA represent later horizontal gene transfers between archaea and bacteria.[48]
+
+Sexual reproduction is widespread among current eukaryotes, and was likely present in the last common ancestor.[49] This is suggested by the finding of a core set of genes for meiosis in the descendants of lineages that diverged early from the eukaryotic evolutionary tree.[50] and Malik et al.[51] It is further supported by evidence that eukaryotes previously regarded as "ancient asexuals", such as Amoeba, were likely sexual in the past, and that most present day asexual amoeboid lineages likely arose recently and independently.[52]
+
+In prokaryotes, natural bacterial transformation involves the transfer of DNA from one bacterium to another and integration of the donor DNA into the recipient chromosome by recombination. Natural bacterial transformation is considered to be a primitive sexual process and occurs in both bacteria and archaea, although it has been studied mainly in bacteria. Transformation is clearly a bacterial adaptation and not an accidental occurrence, because it depends on numerous gene products that specifically interact with each other to enter a state of natural competence to perform this complex process.[53] Transformation is a common mode of DNA transfer among prokaryotes.[54]
+
+The ancestry of living organisms has traditionally been reconstructed from morphology, but is increasingly supplemented with phylogenetics – the reconstruction of phylogenies by the comparison of genetic (DNA) sequence.
+
+Sequence comparisons suggest recent horizontal transfer of many genes among diverse species including across the boundaries of phylogenetic "domains". Thus determining the phylogenetic history of a species can not be done conclusively by determining evolutionary trees for single genes.[55]
+
+Biologist Peter Gogarten suggests "the original metaphor of a tree no longer fits the data from recent genome research", therefore "biologists (should) use the metaphor of a mosaic to describe the different histories combined in individual genomes and use (the) metaphor of a net to visualize the rich exchange and cooperative effects of HGT among microbes."[56]
+
+Modern biotechnology is challenging traditional concepts of organism and species. Cloning is the process of creating a new multicellular organism, genetically identical to another, with the potential of creating entirely new species of organisms. Cloning is the subject of much ethical debate.
+
+In 2008, the J. Craig Venter Institute assembled a synthetic bacterial genome, Mycoplasma genitalium, by using recombination in yeast of 25 overlapping DNA fragments in a single step. The use of yeast recombination greatly simplifies the assembly of large DNA molecules from both synthetic and natural fragments.[57] Other companies, such as Synthetic Genomics, have already been formed to take advantage of the many commercial uses of custom designed genomes.

en/1887.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,121 @@
+
+
+In biology, an organism (from Greek: ὀργανισμός, organismos) is any individual entity that embodies the properties of life. It is a synonym for "life form".
+
+Organisms are classified by taxonomy into groups such as multicellular animals, plants, and fungi; or unicellular microorganisms such as protists, bacteria, and archaea.[1] All types of organisms are capable of reproduction, growth and development, maintenance, and some degree of response to stimuli. Humans, squids, mushrooms, and vascular plants are examples of multicellular organisms that differentiate specialized tissues and organs during development.
+
+An organism may be either a prokaryote or a eukaryote. Prokaryotes are represented by two separate domains – bacteria and archaea. Eukaryotic organisms are characterized by the presence of a membrane-bound cell nucleus and contain additional membrane-bound compartments called organelles (such as mitochondria in animals and plants and plastids in plants and algae, all generally considered to be derived from endosymbiotic bacteria).[2] Fungi, animals and plants are examples of kingdoms of organisms within the eukaryotes.
+
+Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 2 million to 1 trillion,[3] of which over 1.7 million have been documented.[4] More than 99% of all species, amounting to over five billion species,[5] that ever lived are estimated to be extinct.[6][7]
+
+In 2016, a set of 355 genes from the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all organisms was identified.[8][9]
+
+The term "organism" (from Greek ὀργανισμός, organismos, from ὄργανον, organon, i.e. "instrument, implement, tool, organ of sense or apprehension")[10][11] first appeared in the English language in 1703 and took on its current definition by 1834 (Oxford English Dictionary). It is directly related to the term "organization". There is a long tradition of defining organisms as self-organizing beings, going back at least to Immanuel Kant's 1790 Critique of Judgment.[12]
+
+An organism may be defined as an assembly of molecules functioning as a more or less stable whole that exhibits the properties of life. Dictionary definitions can be broad, using phrases such as "any living structure, such as a plant, animal, fungus or bacterium, capable of growth and reproduction".[13] Many definitions exclude viruses and possible man-made non-organic life forms, as viruses are dependent on the biochemical machinery of a host cell for reproduction.[14] A superorganism is an organism consisting of many individuals working together as a single functional or social unit.[15]
+
+There has been controversy about the best way to define the organism[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] and indeed about whether or not such a definition is necessary.[26][27] Several contributions[28] are responses to the suggestion that the category of "organism" may well not be adequate in biology.[29][page needed]
+
+Viruses are not typically considered to be organisms because they are incapable of autonomous reproduction, growth or metabolism. Although some organisms are also incapable of independent survival and live as obligatory intracellular parasites, they are capable of independent metabolism and procreation. Although viruses have a few enzymes and molecules characteristic of living organisms, they have no metabolism of their own; they cannot synthesize and organize the organic compounds from which they are formed. Naturally, this rules out autonomous reproduction: they can only be passively replicated by the machinery of the host cell. In this sense, they are similar to inanimate matter.
+
+While viruses sustain no independent metabolism and thus are usually not classified as organisms, they do have their own genes, and they do evolve by mechanisms similar to the evolutionary mechanisms of organisms. Thus, an argument that viruses should be classed as living organisms is their ability to undergo evolution and replicate through self-assembly. However, some scientists argue that viruses neither evolve nor self-reproduce. Instead, viruses are evolved by their host cells, meaning that there was co-evolution of viruses and host cells. If host cells did not exist, viral evolution would be impossible. This is not true for cells. If viruses did not exist, the direction of cellular evolution could be different, but cells would nevertheless be able to evolve. As for the reproduction, viruses totally rely on hosts' machinery to replicate.[30] The discovery of viruses with genes coding for energy metabolism and protein synthesis fuelled the debate about whether viruses are living organisms. The presence of these genes suggested that viruses were once able to metabolize. However, it was found later that the genes coding for energy and protein metabolism have a cellular origin. Most likely, these genes were acquired through horizontal gene transfer from viral hosts.[30]
+
+Organisms are complex chemical systems, organized in ways that promote reproduction and some measure of sustainability or survival. The same laws that govern non-living chemistry govern the chemical processes of life. It is generally the phenomena of entire organisms that determine their fitness to an environment and therefore the survivability of their DNA-based genes.
+
+Organisms clearly owe their origin, metabolism, and many other internal functions to chemical phenomena, especially the chemistry of large organic molecules. Organisms are complex systems of chemical compounds that, through interaction and environment, play a wide variety of roles.
+
+Organisms are semi-closed chemical systems. Although they are individual units of life (as the definition requires), they are not closed to the environment around them. To operate they constantly take in and release energy. Autotrophs produce usable energy (in the form of organic compounds) using light from the sun or inorganic compounds while heterotrophs take in organic compounds from the environment.
+
+The primary chemical element in these compounds is carbon. The chemical properties of this element such as its great affinity for bonding with other small atoms, including other carbon atoms, and its small size making it capable of forming multiple bonds, make it ideal as the basis of organic life. It is able to form small three-atom compounds (such as carbon dioxide), as well as large chains of many thousands of atoms that can store data (nucleic acids), hold cells together, and transmit information (protein).
+
+Compounds that make up organisms may be divided into macromolecules and other, smaller molecules. The four groups of macromolecule are nucleic acids, proteins, carbohydrates and lipids. Nucleic acids (specifically deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA) store genetic data as a sequence of nucleotides. The particular sequence of the four different types of nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine) dictate many characteristics that constitute the organism. The sequence is divided up into codons, each of which is a particular sequence of three nucleotides and corresponds to a particular amino acid. Thus a sequence of DNA codes for a particular protein that, due to the chemical properties of the amino acids it is made from, folds in a particular manner and so performs a particular function.
+
+These protein functions have been recognized:
+
+A bilayer of phospholipids makes up the membrane of cells that constitutes a barrier, containing everything within the cell and preventing compounds from freely passing into, and out of, the cell. Due to the selective permeability of the phospholipid membrane, only specific compounds can pass through it.
+
+All organisms consist of structural units called cells; some contain a single cell (unicellular) and others contain many units (multicellular). Multicellular organisms are able to specialize cells to perform specific functions. A group of such cells is a tissue, and in animals these occur as four basic types, namely epithelium, nervous tissue, muscle tissue, and connective tissue. Several types of tissue work together in the form of an organ to produce a particular function (such as the pumping of the blood by the heart, or as a barrier to the environment as the skin). This pattern continues to a higher level with several organs functioning as an organ system such as the reproductive system, and digestive system. Many multicellular organisms consist of several organ systems, which coordinate to allow for life.
+
+The cell theory, first developed in 1839 by Schleiden and Schwann, states that all organisms are composed of one or more cells; all cells come from preexisting cells; and cells contain the hereditary information necessary for regulating cell functions and for transmitting information to the next generation of cells.
+
+There are two types of cells, eukaryotic and prokaryotic. Prokaryotic cells are usually singletons, while eukaryotic cells are usually found in multicellular organisms. Prokaryotic cells lack a nuclear membrane so DNA is unbound within the cell; eukaryotic cells have nuclear membranes.
+
+All cells, whether prokaryotic or eukaryotic, have a membrane, which envelops the cell, separates its interior from its environment, regulates what moves in and out, and maintains the electric potential of the cell. Inside the membrane, a salty cytoplasm takes up most of the cell volume. All cells possess DNA, the hereditary material of genes, and RNA, containing the information necessary to build various proteins such as enzymes, the cell's primary machinery. There are also other kinds of biomolecules in cells.
+
+All cells share several similar characteristics of:[31]
+
+The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the most recent organism from which all organisms now living on Earth descend.[32] Thus it is the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth. The LUCA is estimated to have lived some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago (sometime in the Paleoarchean era).[33][34] The earliest evidence for life on Earth is graphite found to be biogenic in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks discovered in Western Greenland[35] and microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia.[36][37] Although more than 99 percent of all species that ever lived on the planet are estimated to be extinct,[6][7] there are currently 2 million to 1 trillion species of life on Earth.[3]
+
+Information about the early development of life includes input from many different fields, including geology and planetary science. These sciences provide information about the history of the Earth and the changes produced by life. However, a great deal of information about the early Earth has been destroyed by geological processes over the course of time.
+
+All organisms are descended from a common ancestor or ancestral gene pool. Evidence for common descent may be found in traits shared between all living organisms. In Darwin's day, the evidence of shared traits was based solely on visible observation of morphologic similarities, such as the fact that all birds have wings, even those that do not fly.
+
+There is strong evidence from genetics that all organisms have a common ancestor. For example, every living cell makes use of nucleic acids as its genetic material, and uses the same twenty amino acids as the building blocks for proteins. All organisms use the same genetic code (with some extremely rare and minor deviations) to translate nucleic acid sequences into proteins. The universality of these traits strongly suggests common ancestry, because the selection of many of these traits seems arbitrary. Horizontal gene transfer makes it more difficult to study the last universal ancestor.[38] However, the universal use of the same genetic code, same nucleotides, and same amino acids makes the existence of such an ancestor overwhelmingly likely.[39]
+
+Chlorobacteria (accepted name = Chloroflexi)
+
+Hadobacteria (= Deinococcus-Thermus group)
+
+Cyanobacteria
+
+Spirochaetae
+
+Fibrobacteres
+
+Chlorobi
+
+Bacteroidetes
+
+Planctomycetes
+
+Chlamydiae
+
+Lentisphaerae
+
+Verrucomicrobia
+
+Deferribacteres
+
+Acidobacteria
+
+Deltaproteobacteria
+
+Epsilonproteobacteria
+
+Alphaproteobacteria
+
+Betaproteobacteria
+
+Gammaproteobacteria
+
+Thermotogae
+
+Fusobacteria
+
+Negativicutes
+
+Endobacteria (=Firmicutes, Mollicutes)
+
+Actinobacteria
+
+Archaea
+
+Eukarya
+
+The most commonly accepted location of the root of the tree of life is between a monophyletic domain Bacteria and a clade formed by Archaea and Eukaryota of what is referred to as the "traditional tree of life" based on several molecular studies.[40][41][42][43][44][45] A very small minority of studies have concluded differently, namely that the root is in the domain Bacteria, either in the phylum Firmicutes[46] or that the phylum Chloroflexi is basal to a clade with Archaea and Eukaryotes and the rest of Bacteria as proposed by Thomas Cavalier-Smith.[47]
+
+Research published in 2016, by William F. Martin, by genetically analyzing 6.1 million protein-coding genes from sequenced prokaryotic genomes of various phylogenetic trees, identified 355 protein clusters from amongst 286,514 protein clusters that were probably common to the LUCA. The results "depict LUCA as anaerobic, CO2-fixing, H2-dependent with a Wood–Ljungdahl pathway (the reductive acetyl-coenzyme A pathway), N2-fixing and thermophilic. LUCA's biochemistry was replete with FeS clusters and radical reaction mechanisms. Its cofactors reveal dependence upon transition metals, flavins, S-adenosyl methionine, coenzyme A, ferredoxin, molybdopterin, corrins and selenium. Its genetic code required nucleoside modifications and S-adenosylmethionine-dependent methylations." The results depict methanogenic clostria as a basal clade in the 355 lineages examined, and suggest that the LUCA inhabited an anaerobic hydrothermal vent setting in a geochemically active environment rich in H2, CO2, and iron.[8] However, the identification of these genes as being present in LUCA was criticized, suggesting that many of the proteins assumed to be present in LUCA represent later horizontal gene transfers between archaea and bacteria.[48]
+
+Sexual reproduction is widespread among current eukaryotes, and was likely present in the last common ancestor.[49] This is suggested by the finding of a core set of genes for meiosis in the descendants of lineages that diverged early from the eukaryotic evolutionary tree.[50] and Malik et al.[51] It is further supported by evidence that eukaryotes previously regarded as "ancient asexuals", such as Amoeba, were likely sexual in the past, and that most present day asexual amoeboid lineages likely arose recently and independently.[52]
+
+In prokaryotes, natural bacterial transformation involves the transfer of DNA from one bacterium to another and integration of the donor DNA into the recipient chromosome by recombination. Natural bacterial transformation is considered to be a primitive sexual process and occurs in both bacteria and archaea, although it has been studied mainly in bacteria. Transformation is clearly a bacterial adaptation and not an accidental occurrence, because it depends on numerous gene products that specifically interact with each other to enter a state of natural competence to perform this complex process.[53] Transformation is a common mode of DNA transfer among prokaryotes.[54]
+
+The ancestry of living organisms has traditionally been reconstructed from morphology, but is increasingly supplemented with phylogenetics – the reconstruction of phylogenies by the comparison of genetic (DNA) sequence.
+
+Sequence comparisons suggest recent horizontal transfer of many genes among diverse species including across the boundaries of phylogenetic "domains". Thus determining the phylogenetic history of a species can not be done conclusively by determining evolutionary trees for single genes.[55]
+
+Biologist Peter Gogarten suggests "the original metaphor of a tree no longer fits the data from recent genome research", therefore "biologists (should) use the metaphor of a mosaic to describe the different histories combined in individual genomes and use (the) metaphor of a net to visualize the rich exchange and cooperative effects of HGT among microbes."[56]
+
+Modern biotechnology is challenging traditional concepts of organism and species. Cloning is the process of creating a new multicellular organism, genetically identical to another, with the potential of creating entirely new species of organisms. Cloning is the subject of much ethical debate.
+
+In 2008, the J. Craig Venter Institute assembled a synthetic bacterial genome, Mycoplasma genitalium, by using recombination in yeast of 25 overlapping DNA fragments in a single step. The use of yeast recombination greatly simplifies the assembly of large DNA molecules from both synthetic and natural fragments.[57] Other companies, such as Synthetic Genomics, have already been formed to take advantage of the many commercial uses of custom designed genomes.

en/1888.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,121 @@
+
+
+In biology, an organism (from Greek: ὀργανισμός, organismos) is any individual entity that embodies the properties of life. It is a synonym for "life form".
+
+Organisms are classified by taxonomy into groups such as multicellular animals, plants, and fungi; or unicellular microorganisms such as protists, bacteria, and archaea.[1] All types of organisms are capable of reproduction, growth and development, maintenance, and some degree of response to stimuli. Humans, squids, mushrooms, and vascular plants are examples of multicellular organisms that differentiate specialized tissues and organs during development.
+
+An organism may be either a prokaryote or a eukaryote. Prokaryotes are represented by two separate domains – bacteria and archaea. Eukaryotic organisms are characterized by the presence of a membrane-bound cell nucleus and contain additional membrane-bound compartments called organelles (such as mitochondria in animals and plants and plastids in plants and algae, all generally considered to be derived from endosymbiotic bacteria).[2] Fungi, animals and plants are examples of kingdoms of organisms within the eukaryotes.
+
+Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 2 million to 1 trillion,[3] of which over 1.7 million have been documented.[4] More than 99% of all species, amounting to over five billion species,[5] that ever lived are estimated to be extinct.[6][7]
+
+In 2016, a set of 355 genes from the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all organisms was identified.[8][9]
+
+The term "organism" (from Greek ὀργανισμός, organismos, from ὄργανον, organon, i.e. "instrument, implement, tool, organ of sense or apprehension")[10][11] first appeared in the English language in 1703 and took on its current definition by 1834 (Oxford English Dictionary). It is directly related to the term "organization". There is a long tradition of defining organisms as self-organizing beings, going back at least to Immanuel Kant's 1790 Critique of Judgment.[12]
+
+An organism may be defined as an assembly of molecules functioning as a more or less stable whole that exhibits the properties of life. Dictionary definitions can be broad, using phrases such as "any living structure, such as a plant, animal, fungus or bacterium, capable of growth and reproduction".[13] Many definitions exclude viruses and possible man-made non-organic life forms, as viruses are dependent on the biochemical machinery of a host cell for reproduction.[14] A superorganism is an organism consisting of many individuals working together as a single functional or social unit.[15]
+
+There has been controversy about the best way to define the organism[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] and indeed about whether or not such a definition is necessary.[26][27] Several contributions[28] are responses to the suggestion that the category of "organism" may well not be adequate in biology.[29][page needed]
+
+Viruses are not typically considered to be organisms because they are incapable of autonomous reproduction, growth or metabolism. Although some organisms are also incapable of independent survival and live as obligatory intracellular parasites, they are capable of independent metabolism and procreation. Although viruses have a few enzymes and molecules characteristic of living organisms, they have no metabolism of their own; they cannot synthesize and organize the organic compounds from which they are formed. Naturally, this rules out autonomous reproduction: they can only be passively replicated by the machinery of the host cell. In this sense, they are similar to inanimate matter.
+
+While viruses sustain no independent metabolism and thus are usually not classified as organisms, they do have their own genes, and they do evolve by mechanisms similar to the evolutionary mechanisms of organisms. Thus, an argument that viruses should be classed as living organisms is their ability to undergo evolution and replicate through self-assembly. However, some scientists argue that viruses neither evolve nor self-reproduce. Instead, viruses are evolved by their host cells, meaning that there was co-evolution of viruses and host cells. If host cells did not exist, viral evolution would be impossible. This is not true for cells. If viruses did not exist, the direction of cellular evolution could be different, but cells would nevertheless be able to evolve. As for the reproduction, viruses totally rely on hosts' machinery to replicate.[30] The discovery of viruses with genes coding for energy metabolism and protein synthesis fuelled the debate about whether viruses are living organisms. The presence of these genes suggested that viruses were once able to metabolize. However, it was found later that the genes coding for energy and protein metabolism have a cellular origin. Most likely, these genes were acquired through horizontal gene transfer from viral hosts.[30]
+
+Organisms are complex chemical systems, organized in ways that promote reproduction and some measure of sustainability or survival. The same laws that govern non-living chemistry govern the chemical processes of life. It is generally the phenomena of entire organisms that determine their fitness to an environment and therefore the survivability of their DNA-based genes.
+
+Organisms clearly owe their origin, metabolism, and many other internal functions to chemical phenomena, especially the chemistry of large organic molecules. Organisms are complex systems of chemical compounds that, through interaction and environment, play a wide variety of roles.
+
+Organisms are semi-closed chemical systems. Although they are individual units of life (as the definition requires), they are not closed to the environment around them. To operate they constantly take in and release energy. Autotrophs produce usable energy (in the form of organic compounds) using light from the sun or inorganic compounds while heterotrophs take in organic compounds from the environment.
+
+The primary chemical element in these compounds is carbon. The chemical properties of this element such as its great affinity for bonding with other small atoms, including other carbon atoms, and its small size making it capable of forming multiple bonds, make it ideal as the basis of organic life. It is able to form small three-atom compounds (such as carbon dioxide), as well as large chains of many thousands of atoms that can store data (nucleic acids), hold cells together, and transmit information (protein).
+
+Compounds that make up organisms may be divided into macromolecules and other, smaller molecules. The four groups of macromolecule are nucleic acids, proteins, carbohydrates and lipids. Nucleic acids (specifically deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA) store genetic data as a sequence of nucleotides. The particular sequence of the four different types of nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine) dictate many characteristics that constitute the organism. The sequence is divided up into codons, each of which is a particular sequence of three nucleotides and corresponds to a particular amino acid. Thus a sequence of DNA codes for a particular protein that, due to the chemical properties of the amino acids it is made from, folds in a particular manner and so performs a particular function.
+
+These protein functions have been recognized:
+
+A bilayer of phospholipids makes up the membrane of cells that constitutes a barrier, containing everything within the cell and preventing compounds from freely passing into, and out of, the cell. Due to the selective permeability of the phospholipid membrane, only specific compounds can pass through it.
+
+All organisms consist of structural units called cells; some contain a single cell (unicellular) and others contain many units (multicellular). Multicellular organisms are able to specialize cells to perform specific functions. A group of such cells is a tissue, and in animals these occur as four basic types, namely epithelium, nervous tissue, muscle tissue, and connective tissue. Several types of tissue work together in the form of an organ to produce a particular function (such as the pumping of the blood by the heart, or as a barrier to the environment as the skin). This pattern continues to a higher level with several organs functioning as an organ system such as the reproductive system, and digestive system. Many multicellular organisms consist of several organ systems, which coordinate to allow for life.
+
+The cell theory, first developed in 1839 by Schleiden and Schwann, states that all organisms are composed of one or more cells; all cells come from preexisting cells; and cells contain the hereditary information necessary for regulating cell functions and for transmitting information to the next generation of cells.
+
+There are two types of cells, eukaryotic and prokaryotic. Prokaryotic cells are usually singletons, while eukaryotic cells are usually found in multicellular organisms. Prokaryotic cells lack a nuclear membrane so DNA is unbound within the cell; eukaryotic cells have nuclear membranes.
+
+All cells, whether prokaryotic or eukaryotic, have a membrane, which envelops the cell, separates its interior from its environment, regulates what moves in and out, and maintains the electric potential of the cell. Inside the membrane, a salty cytoplasm takes up most of the cell volume. All cells possess DNA, the hereditary material of genes, and RNA, containing the information necessary to build various proteins such as enzymes, the cell's primary machinery. There are also other kinds of biomolecules in cells.
+
+All cells share several similar characteristics of:[31]
+
+The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the most recent organism from which all organisms now living on Earth descend.[32] Thus it is the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth. The LUCA is estimated to have lived some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago (sometime in the Paleoarchean era).[33][34] The earliest evidence for life on Earth is graphite found to be biogenic in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks discovered in Western Greenland[35] and microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia.[36][37] Although more than 99 percent of all species that ever lived on the planet are estimated to be extinct,[6][7] there are currently 2 million to 1 trillion species of life on Earth.[3]
+
+Information about the early development of life includes input from many different fields, including geology and planetary science. These sciences provide information about the history of the Earth and the changes produced by life. However, a great deal of information about the early Earth has been destroyed by geological processes over the course of time.
+
+All organisms are descended from a common ancestor or ancestral gene pool. Evidence for common descent may be found in traits shared between all living organisms. In Darwin's day, the evidence of shared traits was based solely on visible observation of morphologic similarities, such as the fact that all birds have wings, even those that do not fly.
+
+There is strong evidence from genetics that all organisms have a common ancestor. For example, every living cell makes use of nucleic acids as its genetic material, and uses the same twenty amino acids as the building blocks for proteins. All organisms use the same genetic code (with some extremely rare and minor deviations) to translate nucleic acid sequences into proteins. The universality of these traits strongly suggests common ancestry, because the selection of many of these traits seems arbitrary. Horizontal gene transfer makes it more difficult to study the last universal ancestor.[38] However, the universal use of the same genetic code, same nucleotides, and same amino acids makes the existence of such an ancestor overwhelmingly likely.[39]
+
+Chlorobacteria (accepted name = Chloroflexi)
+
+Hadobacteria (= Deinococcus-Thermus group)
+
+Cyanobacteria
+
+Spirochaetae
+
+Fibrobacteres
+
+Chlorobi
+
+Bacteroidetes
+
+Planctomycetes
+
+Chlamydiae
+
+Lentisphaerae
+
+Verrucomicrobia
+
+Deferribacteres
+
+Acidobacteria
+
+Deltaproteobacteria
+
+Epsilonproteobacteria
+
+Alphaproteobacteria
+
+Betaproteobacteria
+
+Gammaproteobacteria
+
+Thermotogae
+
+Fusobacteria
+
+Negativicutes
+
+Endobacteria (=Firmicutes, Mollicutes)
+
+Actinobacteria
+
+Archaea
+
+Eukarya
+
+The most commonly accepted location of the root of the tree of life is between a monophyletic domain Bacteria and a clade formed by Archaea and Eukaryota of what is referred to as the "traditional tree of life" based on several molecular studies.[40][41][42][43][44][45] A very small minority of studies have concluded differently, namely that the root is in the domain Bacteria, either in the phylum Firmicutes[46] or that the phylum Chloroflexi is basal to a clade with Archaea and Eukaryotes and the rest of Bacteria as proposed by Thomas Cavalier-Smith.[47]
+
+Research published in 2016, by William F. Martin, by genetically analyzing 6.1 million protein-coding genes from sequenced prokaryotic genomes of various phylogenetic trees, identified 355 protein clusters from amongst 286,514 protein clusters that were probably common to the LUCA. The results "depict LUCA as anaerobic, CO2-fixing, H2-dependent with a Wood–Ljungdahl pathway (the reductive acetyl-coenzyme A pathway), N2-fixing and thermophilic. LUCA's biochemistry was replete with FeS clusters and radical reaction mechanisms. Its cofactors reveal dependence upon transition metals, flavins, S-adenosyl methionine, coenzyme A, ferredoxin, molybdopterin, corrins and selenium. Its genetic code required nucleoside modifications and S-adenosylmethionine-dependent methylations." The results depict methanogenic clostria as a basal clade in the 355 lineages examined, and suggest that the LUCA inhabited an anaerobic hydrothermal vent setting in a geochemically active environment rich in H2, CO2, and iron.[8] However, the identification of these genes as being present in LUCA was criticized, suggesting that many of the proteins assumed to be present in LUCA represent later horizontal gene transfers between archaea and bacteria.[48]
+
+Sexual reproduction is widespread among current eukaryotes, and was likely present in the last common ancestor.[49] This is suggested by the finding of a core set of genes for meiosis in the descendants of lineages that diverged early from the eukaryotic evolutionary tree.[50] and Malik et al.[51] It is further supported by evidence that eukaryotes previously regarded as "ancient asexuals", such as Amoeba, were likely sexual in the past, and that most present day asexual amoeboid lineages likely arose recently and independently.[52]
+
+In prokaryotes, natural bacterial transformation involves the transfer of DNA from one bacterium to another and integration of the donor DNA into the recipient chromosome by recombination. Natural bacterial transformation is considered to be a primitive sexual process and occurs in both bacteria and archaea, although it has been studied mainly in bacteria. Transformation is clearly a bacterial adaptation and not an accidental occurrence, because it depends on numerous gene products that specifically interact with each other to enter a state of natural competence to perform this complex process.[53] Transformation is a common mode of DNA transfer among prokaryotes.[54]
+
+The ancestry of living organisms has traditionally been reconstructed from morphology, but is increasingly supplemented with phylogenetics – the reconstruction of phylogenies by the comparison of genetic (DNA) sequence.
+
+Sequence comparisons suggest recent horizontal transfer of many genes among diverse species including across the boundaries of phylogenetic "domains". Thus determining the phylogenetic history of a species can not be done conclusively by determining evolutionary trees for single genes.[55]
+
+Biologist Peter Gogarten suggests "the original metaphor of a tree no longer fits the data from recent genome research", therefore "biologists (should) use the metaphor of a mosaic to describe the different histories combined in individual genomes and use (the) metaphor of a net to visualize the rich exchange and cooperative effects of HGT among microbes."[56]
+
+Modern biotechnology is challenging traditional concepts of organism and species. Cloning is the process of creating a new multicellular organism, genetically identical to another, with the potential of creating entirely new species of organisms. Cloning is the subject of much ethical debate.
+
+In 2008, the J. Craig Venter Institute assembled a synthetic bacterial genome, Mycoplasma genitalium, by using recombination in yeast of 25 overlapping DNA fragments in a single step. The use of yeast recombination greatly simplifies the assembly of large DNA molecules from both synthetic and natural fragments.[57] Other companies, such as Synthetic Genomics, have already been formed to take advantage of the many commercial uses of custom designed genomes.

en/1889.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,121 @@
+
+
+In biology, an organism (from Greek: ὀργανισμός, organismos) is any individual entity that embodies the properties of life. It is a synonym for "life form".
+
+Organisms are classified by taxonomy into groups such as multicellular animals, plants, and fungi; or unicellular microorganisms such as protists, bacteria, and archaea.[1] All types of organisms are capable of reproduction, growth and development, maintenance, and some degree of response to stimuli. Humans, squids, mushrooms, and vascular plants are examples of multicellular organisms that differentiate specialized tissues and organs during development.
+
+An organism may be either a prokaryote or a eukaryote. Prokaryotes are represented by two separate domains – bacteria and archaea. Eukaryotic organisms are characterized by the presence of a membrane-bound cell nucleus and contain additional membrane-bound compartments called organelles (such as mitochondria in animals and plants and plastids in plants and algae, all generally considered to be derived from endosymbiotic bacteria).[2] Fungi, animals and plants are examples of kingdoms of organisms within the eukaryotes.
+
+Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 2 million to 1 trillion,[3] of which over 1.7 million have been documented.[4] More than 99% of all species, amounting to over five billion species,[5] that ever lived are estimated to be extinct.[6][7]
+
+In 2016, a set of 355 genes from the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all organisms was identified.[8][9]
+
+The term "organism" (from Greek ὀργανισμός, organismos, from ὄργανον, organon, i.e. "instrument, implement, tool, organ of sense or apprehension")[10][11] first appeared in the English language in 1703 and took on its current definition by 1834 (Oxford English Dictionary). It is directly related to the term "organization". There is a long tradition of defining organisms as self-organizing beings, going back at least to Immanuel Kant's 1790 Critique of Judgment.[12]
+
+An organism may be defined as an assembly of molecules functioning as a more or less stable whole that exhibits the properties of life. Dictionary definitions can be broad, using phrases such as "any living structure, such as a plant, animal, fungus or bacterium, capable of growth and reproduction".[13] Many definitions exclude viruses and possible man-made non-organic life forms, as viruses are dependent on the biochemical machinery of a host cell for reproduction.[14] A superorganism is an organism consisting of many individuals working together as a single functional or social unit.[15]
+
+There has been controversy about the best way to define the organism[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] and indeed about whether or not such a definition is necessary.[26][27] Several contributions[28] are responses to the suggestion that the category of "organism" may well not be adequate in biology.[29][page needed]
+
+Viruses are not typically considered to be organisms because they are incapable of autonomous reproduction, growth or metabolism. Although some organisms are also incapable of independent survival and live as obligatory intracellular parasites, they are capable of independent metabolism and procreation. Although viruses have a few enzymes and molecules characteristic of living organisms, they have no metabolism of their own; they cannot synthesize and organize the organic compounds from which they are formed. Naturally, this rules out autonomous reproduction: they can only be passively replicated by the machinery of the host cell. In this sense, they are similar to inanimate matter.
+
+While viruses sustain no independent metabolism and thus are usually not classified as organisms, they do have their own genes, and they do evolve by mechanisms similar to the evolutionary mechanisms of organisms. Thus, an argument that viruses should be classed as living organisms is their ability to undergo evolution and replicate through self-assembly. However, some scientists argue that viruses neither evolve nor self-reproduce. Instead, viruses are evolved by their host cells, meaning that there was co-evolution of viruses and host cells. If host cells did not exist, viral evolution would be impossible. This is not true for cells. If viruses did not exist, the direction of cellular evolution could be different, but cells would nevertheless be able to evolve. As for the reproduction, viruses totally rely on hosts' machinery to replicate.[30] The discovery of viruses with genes coding for energy metabolism and protein synthesis fuelled the debate about whether viruses are living organisms. The presence of these genes suggested that viruses were once able to metabolize. However, it was found later that the genes coding for energy and protein metabolism have a cellular origin. Most likely, these genes were acquired through horizontal gene transfer from viral hosts.[30]
+
+Organisms are complex chemical systems, organized in ways that promote reproduction and some measure of sustainability or survival. The same laws that govern non-living chemistry govern the chemical processes of life. It is generally the phenomena of entire organisms that determine their fitness to an environment and therefore the survivability of their DNA-based genes.
+
+Organisms clearly owe their origin, metabolism, and many other internal functions to chemical phenomena, especially the chemistry of large organic molecules. Organisms are complex systems of chemical compounds that, through interaction and environment, play a wide variety of roles.
+
+Organisms are semi-closed chemical systems. Although they are individual units of life (as the definition requires), they are not closed to the environment around them. To operate they constantly take in and release energy. Autotrophs produce usable energy (in the form of organic compounds) using light from the sun or inorganic compounds while heterotrophs take in organic compounds from the environment.
+
+The primary chemical element in these compounds is carbon. The chemical properties of this element such as its great affinity for bonding with other small atoms, including other carbon atoms, and its small size making it capable of forming multiple bonds, make it ideal as the basis of organic life. It is able to form small three-atom compounds (such as carbon dioxide), as well as large chains of many thousands of atoms that can store data (nucleic acids), hold cells together, and transmit information (protein).
+
+Compounds that make up organisms may be divided into macromolecules and other, smaller molecules. The four groups of macromolecule are nucleic acids, proteins, carbohydrates and lipids. Nucleic acids (specifically deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA) store genetic data as a sequence of nucleotides. The particular sequence of the four different types of nucleotides (adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine) dictate many characteristics that constitute the organism. The sequence is divided up into codons, each of which is a particular sequence of three nucleotides and corresponds to a particular amino acid. Thus a sequence of DNA codes for a particular protein that, due to the chemical properties of the amino acids it is made from, folds in a particular manner and so performs a particular function.
+
+These protein functions have been recognized:
+
+A bilayer of phospholipids makes up the membrane of cells that constitutes a barrier, containing everything within the cell and preventing compounds from freely passing into, and out of, the cell. Due to the selective permeability of the phospholipid membrane, only specific compounds can pass through it.
+
+All organisms consist of structural units called cells; some contain a single cell (unicellular) and others contain many units (multicellular). Multicellular organisms are able to specialize cells to perform specific functions. A group of such cells is a tissue, and in animals these occur as four basic types, namely epithelium, nervous tissue, muscle tissue, and connective tissue. Several types of tissue work together in the form of an organ to produce a particular function (such as the pumping of the blood by the heart, or as a barrier to the environment as the skin). This pattern continues to a higher level with several organs functioning as an organ system such as the reproductive system, and digestive system. Many multicellular organisms consist of several organ systems, which coordinate to allow for life.
+
+The cell theory, first developed in 1839 by Schleiden and Schwann, states that all organisms are composed of one or more cells; all cells come from preexisting cells; and cells contain the hereditary information necessary for regulating cell functions and for transmitting information to the next generation of cells.
+
+There are two types of cells, eukaryotic and prokaryotic. Prokaryotic cells are usually singletons, while eukaryotic cells are usually found in multicellular organisms. Prokaryotic cells lack a nuclear membrane so DNA is unbound within the cell; eukaryotic cells have nuclear membranes.
+
+All cells, whether prokaryotic or eukaryotic, have a membrane, which envelops the cell, separates its interior from its environment, regulates what moves in and out, and maintains the electric potential of the cell. Inside the membrane, a salty cytoplasm takes up most of the cell volume. All cells possess DNA, the hereditary material of genes, and RNA, containing the information necessary to build various proteins such as enzymes, the cell's primary machinery. There are also other kinds of biomolecules in cells.
+
+All cells share several similar characteristics of:[31]
+
+The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the most recent organism from which all organisms now living on Earth descend.[32] Thus it is the most recent common ancestor of all current life on Earth. The LUCA is estimated to have lived some 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago (sometime in the Paleoarchean era).[33][34] The earliest evidence for life on Earth is graphite found to be biogenic in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks discovered in Western Greenland[35] and microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia.[36][37] Although more than 99 percent of all species that ever lived on the planet are estimated to be extinct,[6][7] there are currently 2 million to 1 trillion species of life on Earth.[3]
+
+Information about the early development of life includes input from many different fields, including geology and planetary science. These sciences provide information about the history of the Earth and the changes produced by life. However, a great deal of information about the early Earth has been destroyed by geological processes over the course of time.
+
+All organisms are descended from a common ancestor or ancestral gene pool. Evidence for common descent may be found in traits shared between all living organisms. In Darwin's day, the evidence of shared traits was based solely on visible observation of morphologic similarities, such as the fact that all birds have wings, even those that do not fly.
+
+There is strong evidence from genetics that all organisms have a common ancestor. For example, every living cell makes use of nucleic acids as its genetic material, and uses the same twenty amino acids as the building blocks for proteins. All organisms use the same genetic code (with some extremely rare and minor deviations) to translate nucleic acid sequences into proteins. The universality of these traits strongly suggests common ancestry, because the selection of many of these traits seems arbitrary. Horizontal gene transfer makes it more difficult to study the last universal ancestor.[38] However, the universal use of the same genetic code, same nucleotides, and same amino acids makes the existence of such an ancestor overwhelmingly likely.[39]
+
+Chlorobacteria (accepted name = Chloroflexi)
+
+Hadobacteria (= Deinococcus-Thermus group)
+
+Cyanobacteria
+
+Spirochaetae
+
+Fibrobacteres
+
+Chlorobi
+
+Bacteroidetes
+
+Planctomycetes
+
+Chlamydiae
+
+Lentisphaerae
+
+Verrucomicrobia
+
+Deferribacteres
+
+Acidobacteria
+
+Deltaproteobacteria
+
+Epsilonproteobacteria
+
+Alphaproteobacteria
+
+Betaproteobacteria
+
+Gammaproteobacteria
+
+Thermotogae
+
+Fusobacteria
+
+Negativicutes
+
+Endobacteria (=Firmicutes, Mollicutes)
+
+Actinobacteria
+
+Archaea
+
+Eukarya
+
+The most commonly accepted location of the root of the tree of life is between a monophyletic domain Bacteria and a clade formed by Archaea and Eukaryota of what is referred to as the "traditional tree of life" based on several molecular studies.[40][41][42][43][44][45] A very small minority of studies have concluded differently, namely that the root is in the domain Bacteria, either in the phylum Firmicutes[46] or that the phylum Chloroflexi is basal to a clade with Archaea and Eukaryotes and the rest of Bacteria as proposed by Thomas Cavalier-Smith.[47]
+
+Research published in 2016, by William F. Martin, by genetically analyzing 6.1 million protein-coding genes from sequenced prokaryotic genomes of various phylogenetic trees, identified 355 protein clusters from amongst 286,514 protein clusters that were probably common to the LUCA. The results "depict LUCA as anaerobic, CO2-fixing, H2-dependent with a Wood–Ljungdahl pathway (the reductive acetyl-coenzyme A pathway), N2-fixing and thermophilic. LUCA's biochemistry was replete with FeS clusters and radical reaction mechanisms. Its cofactors reveal dependence upon transition metals, flavins, S-adenosyl methionine, coenzyme A, ferredoxin, molybdopterin, corrins and selenium. Its genetic code required nucleoside modifications and S-adenosylmethionine-dependent methylations." The results depict methanogenic clostria as a basal clade in the 355 lineages examined, and suggest that the LUCA inhabited an anaerobic hydrothermal vent setting in a geochemically active environment rich in H2, CO2, and iron.[8] However, the identification of these genes as being present in LUCA was criticized, suggesting that many of the proteins assumed to be present in LUCA represent later horizontal gene transfers between archaea and bacteria.[48]
+
+Sexual reproduction is widespread among current eukaryotes, and was likely present in the last common ancestor.[49] This is suggested by the finding of a core set of genes for meiosis in the descendants of lineages that diverged early from the eukaryotic evolutionary tree.[50] and Malik et al.[51] It is further supported by evidence that eukaryotes previously regarded as "ancient asexuals", such as Amoeba, were likely sexual in the past, and that most present day asexual amoeboid lineages likely arose recently and independently.[52]
+
+In prokaryotes, natural bacterial transformation involves the transfer of DNA from one bacterium to another and integration of the donor DNA into the recipient chromosome by recombination. Natural bacterial transformation is considered to be a primitive sexual process and occurs in both bacteria and archaea, although it has been studied mainly in bacteria. Transformation is clearly a bacterial adaptation and not an accidental occurrence, because it depends on numerous gene products that specifically interact with each other to enter a state of natural competence to perform this complex process.[53] Transformation is a common mode of DNA transfer among prokaryotes.[54]
+
+The ancestry of living organisms has traditionally been reconstructed from morphology, but is increasingly supplemented with phylogenetics – the reconstruction of phylogenies by the comparison of genetic (DNA) sequence.
+
+Sequence comparisons suggest recent horizontal transfer of many genes among diverse species including across the boundaries of phylogenetic "domains". Thus determining the phylogenetic history of a species can not be done conclusively by determining evolutionary trees for single genes.[55]
+
+Biologist Peter Gogarten suggests "the original metaphor of a tree no longer fits the data from recent genome research", therefore "biologists (should) use the metaphor of a mosaic to describe the different histories combined in individual genomes and use (the) metaphor of a net to visualize the rich exchange and cooperative effects of HGT among microbes."[56]
+
+Modern biotechnology is challenging traditional concepts of organism and species. Cloning is the process of creating a new multicellular organism, genetically identical to another, with the potential of creating entirely new species of organisms. Cloning is the subject of much ethical debate.
+
+In 2008, the J. Craig Venter Institute assembled a synthetic bacterial genome, Mycoplasma genitalium, by using recombination in yeast of 25 overlapping DNA fragments in a single step. The use of yeast recombination greatly simplifies the assembly of large DNA molecules from both synthetic and natural fragments.[57] Other companies, such as Synthetic Genomics, have already been formed to take advantage of the many commercial uses of custom designed genomes.

en/189.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+Native Americans may refer to:

en/1890.html.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,109 @@
+Timeline
+
+The Etruscan civilization (/ɪˈtrʌskən/) was a civilization of ancient Italy whose territory covered roughly what is now Tuscany, western Umbria, and northern Lazio,[1][2] as well as parts of what are now the Po Valley, Emilia-Romagna, south-eastern Lombardy, southern Veneto, and Campania.[3]
+
+The earliest evidence of a culture that is identifiably Etruscan dates from about 900 BC. This is the period of the Iron Age Villanovan culture, considered to be the earliest phase of Etruscan civilization,[4][5][6][7][8] which itself developed from the previous late Bronze Age Proto-Villanovan culture in the same region.[9] Etruscan civilization endured until it was assimilated into Roman society. Assimilation began in the late 4th century BC as a result of the Roman–Etruscan Wars;[10] it accelerated with the grant of Roman citizenship in 90 BC, and became complete in 27 BC, when the Etruscans’ territory was incorporated into the newly established Roman Empire.[11]
+
+Etruscan culture was influenced by Ancient Greek culture, beginning around 750 BC (during the last phase of the Villanovan period), when the Greeks, who were at this time in their Archaic Orientalizing period, started founding colonies in southern Italy. Greek influence also occurred in the 4th and 5th centuries BC during Greece’s Classical period.
+
+The territorial extent of Etruscan civilization reached its maximum around 750 BC, during the foundational period of the Roman Kingdom. Its culture flourished in three confederacies of cities: that of Etruria (Tuscany, Latium and Umbria), that of the Po Valley with the eastern Alps, and that of Campania.[12][13] The league in northern Italy is mentioned in Livy.[14][15][16] The reduction in Etruscan territory was gradual, but after 500 BC the political balance of power on the Italian peninsula shifted away from the Etruscans in favor of the rising Roman Republic.[17]
+
+The earliest known examples of Etruscan writing are inscriptions found in southern Etruria that date to around 700 BC.[10][18] The Etruscans developed a system of writing which uses symbols borrowed from Euboean Greek script, but the Etruscan language remains only partly understood, making modern understanding of their society and culture heavily dependent on much later and generally disapproving Roman and Greek sources. In the Etruscan political system, authority resided in its individual small cities, and probably in its prominent individual families. At the height of Etruscan power, elite Etruscan families grew very rich through trade with the Celtic world to the north and the Greeks to the south, and they filled their large family tombs with imported luxuries. Judging from archaeological remains, Archaic Greece had a huge influence on their art and architecture, and Greek mythology was evidently very familiar to them.
+
+The Etruscans called themselves Rasenna, which was shortened to Rasna or Raśna (etymology unknown).[19][20][21]
+
+In Attic Greek, the Etruscans were known as Tyrrhenians (Τυρρηνοί, Turrhēnoi, earlier Τυρσηνοί Tursēnoi), from which the Romans derived the names Tyrrhēnī, Tyrrhēnia (Etruria), and Mare Tyrrhēnum (Tyrrhenian Sea),[22][full citation needed] prompting some to associate them with the Teresh (one of the Sea Peoples named by the Egyptians).
+
+The ancient Romans referred to the Etruscans as the Tuscī or Etruscī (singular Tuscus).[23][24] Their Roman name is the origin of the terms "Toscana", which refers to their heartland, and "Etruria", which can refer to their wider region. The term Tusci is thought by linguists to have been the Umbrian word for “Etruscan,” based an inscription on an ancient bronze tablet from a nearby region.[25] The inscription contains the phrase turskum ... nomen, literally "the Tuscan name". Based on a knowledge of Umbrian grammar, linguists can infer that the base form of the word turksum is *Tursci,[26] which would, through metathesis and a word-initial epenthesis, be likely to lead to the form, E-trus-ci.[27]
+
+As for the original meaning of the root, *Turs-, a widely cited hypothesis is that it, like the word Latin turris, means "tower", and comes from the Greek word for tower: τύρσις.[28] On this hypothesis, the Tusci were called the "people who build towers"[28] or "the tower builders".[29] This proposed etymology is made the more plausible because the Etruscans preferred to build their towns on high precipices reinforced  by walls. Alternatively, Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante have speculated that Etruscan houses may have seemed like towers to the simple Latins.[30] The proposed etymology has a long history, Dionysius of Halicarnassus having observed long ago, "[T]here is no reason that the Greeks should not have called [the Etruscans] by this name, both from their living in towers and from the name of one of their rulers."[31]
+
+Literary and historical texts in the Etruscan language have not survived, and the language itself is only partially understood by modern scholars. As previously noted, this makes modern understanding of their society and culture heavily dependent on much later and generally disapproving Roman and Greek sources. These ancient writers differed in their theories about the origin of the Etruscan people. Some suggested they were Pelasgians who had migrated there from Greece. Others maintained that they were indigenous to central Italy and were not from Greece.
+
+The first Greek author to mention the Etruscans, whom the Ancient Greeks called Tyrrhenians, was the 8th-century BC poet Hesiod, in his work, the Theogony. He merely described them as residing in central Italy alongside the Latins.[32] The 7th-century BC Homeric Hymn to Dionysus[33] referred to them merely as pirates.[34] Unlike later Greek authors, these authors did not suggest that Etruscans had migrated to Italy from the east, and did not associate them with the Pelasgians.
+
+It was only in the 5th century BC, when the Etruscan civilization had been established for several centuries, that Greek writers started associating the name “Tyrrhenians” with the “Pelasgians,” and even then, some did so in a way that suggests they were meant only as generic, descriptive labels for “non-Greek” and “indigenous ancestors of Greeks,” respectively.[35]
+
+The 5th-century BC historians Thucydides[36] and Herodotus,[37] and the 1st-century BC historian Strabo[38][full citation needed], did seem to suggest that the Tyrrhenians were originally Pelasgians who migrated to Italy from Lydia by way of the Greek island of Lemnos. They all described Lemnos as having been settled by Pelasgians, whom Thucydides identified as "belonging to the Tyrrhenians" (τὸ δὲ πλεῖστον Πελασγικόν, τῶν καὶ Λῆμνόν ποτε καὶ Ἀθήνας Τυρσηνῶν). As Strabo and Herodotus told it,[39] the migration to Lemnos was led by Tyrrhenus / Tyrsenos, the son of Atys (who was king of Lydia). Strabo[38] added that the Pelasgians of Lemnos and Imbros then followed Tyrrhenus to the Italian Peninsula. And, according to the logographer Hellanicus of Lesbos, there was a Pelasgian migration from Thessaly in Greece to the Italian peninsula, as part of which the Pelasgians colonized the area he called Tyrrhenia, and they then came to be called Tyrrhenians.[40]
+
+There is some evidence suggesting a link between the island of Lemnos and the Tyrrhenians. The Lemnos Stele bears inscriptions in a language with strong structural resemblances to the language of the Etruscans.[41] The discovery of these inscriptions in modern times has led to the suggestion of a "Tyrrhenian language group" comprising Etruscan, Lemnian, and the Raetic spoken in the Alps.
+
+However, the 1st-century BC historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek living in Rome, dismissed many of the ancient theories of other Greek historians and postulated that the Etruscans were indigenous people who had always lived in Etruria and were different from both the Pelasgians and the Lydians.[42] Dionysius noted that the 5th-century historian Xanthus of Lydia, who was originally from Sardis and was regarded as an important source and authority for the history of Lydia, never suggested a Lydian origin of the Etruscans and never named Tyrrhenus as a ruler of the Lydians.[42]
+
+For this reason, therefore, I am persuaded that the Pelasgians are a different people from the Tyrrhenians. And I do not believe, either, that the Tyrrhenians were a colony of the Lydians; for they do not use the same language as the latter, nor can it be alleged that, though they no longer speak a similar tongue, they still retain some other indications of their mother country. For they neither worship the same gods as the Lydians nor make use of similar laws or institutions, but in these very respects they differ more from the Lydians than from the Pelasgians. Indeed, those probably come nearest to the truth who declare that the nation migrated from nowhere else, but was native to the country, since it is found to be a very ancient nation and to agree with no other either in its language or in its manner of living.
+
+The credibility of Dionysius of Halicarnassus is arguably bolstered by the fact that he was the first ancient writer to report the endonym of the Etruscans: Rasenna.
+
+The Romans, however, give them other names: from the country they once inhabited, named Etruria, they call them Etruscans, and from their knowledge of the ceremonies relating to divine worship, in which they excel others, they now call them, rather inaccurately, Tusci, but formerly, with the same accuracy as the Greeks, they called them Thyoscoï [an earlier form of Tusci]. Their own name for themselves, however, is the same as that of one of their leaders, Rasenna.
+
+Similarly, the 1st-century BC historian Livy, in his Ab Urbe Condita Libri, said that the Rhaetians were Etruscans who had been driven into the mountains by the invading Gauls; and he asserted that the inhabitants of Raetia were of Etruscan origin.[43]
+
+The Alpine tribes have also, no doubt, the same origin (of the Etruscans), especially the Raetians; who have been rendered so savage by the very nature of the country as to retain nothing of their ancient character save the sound of their speech, and even that is corrupted.
+
+First-century historian Pliny the Elder also put the Etruscans in the context of the Rhaetian people to the north, and wrote in his Natural History (AD 79):[44]
+
+Adjoining these the (Alpine) Noricans are the Raeti and Vindelici. All are divided into a number of states. The Raeti are believed to be people of Tuscan race driven out by the Gauls, their leader was named Raetus.
+
+The question of Etruscan origins has long been a subject of interest and debate among historians. In modern times, all the evidence gathered so far by etruscologists points to an indigenous origin of the Etruscans.[45][46] Archaeologically there is no evidence for a migration of the Lydians or the Pelasgians into Etruria.[45][46] Modern etruscologists and archeologists, such as Massimo Pallottino (1947), have shown that early historians’ assumptions and assertions on the subject were groundless.[47] In 2000, the etruscologist Dominique Briquel explained in detail why he believes that ancient Greek historians’ writings on Etruscan origins should not even count as historical documents.[48] He argues that the ancient story of the Etruscans’ 'Lydian origins' was a deliberate,  politically motivated fabrication, and that ancient Greeks inferred a connection between the Tyrrhenians and the Pelasgians solely on the  basis of certain Greek and local traditions and on the mere fact that there had been trade between the Etruscans and Greeks.[49][50] He noted that, even if these stories include historical facts suggesting contact, such contact is more plausibly traceable to cultural exchange than to migration.[51]
+
+Several archaeologists who have analyzed Bronze Age and Iron Age remains that were excavated in the territory of historical Etruria have pointed out that no evidence has been found, related either to material culture or to social practices, that can support a migration theory.[52] The most marked and radical change that has been archaeologically attested in the area is the adoption, starting in about the 12th century BC, of the funeral rite of incineration in terracotta urns, which is a Continental European practice, derived from the Urnfield culture; there is nothing about it that suggests an ethnic contribution from Asia Minor or the Near East.[52]
+
+A 2012 survey of the previous 30 years’ archaeological findings, based on excavations of the major Etruscan cities, showed a continuity of culture from the last phase of the Bronze Age (11th–10th century BC) to the Iron Age (9th–8th century BC). This is evidence that the Etruscan civilization, which emerged around 900 BC, was built by people whose ancestors had inhabited that region for at least the previous 200 years.[53] Based on this cultural continuity, there is now a consensus among archeologists that Proto-Etruscan culture developed, during the last phase of the Bronze Age, from the indigenous Proto-Villanovan culture, and that the subsequent Iron Age Villanovan culture is most accurately described as an  early phase of the Etruscan civilization.[9] It is possible that there were contacts between northern-central Italy and the Mycenaean world at the end of the Bronze Age. However contacts between the inhabitants of Etruria and inhabitants of Greece, Aegean Sea Islands, Asia Minor, and the Near East are attested only centuries later, when Etruscan civilization was already flourishing and Etruscan ethnogenesis was well established. The first of these attested contacts relate to the Greek colonies in Southern Italy and the consequent orientalizing period.[54]
+
+A mtDNA study in 2004 stated that the Etruscans had no significant heterogeneity, and that all mitochondrial lineages observed among the Etruscan samples appear typically European or West Asian, but only a few haplotypes were shared with modern populations. Allele sharing between the Etruscans and modern populations is highest among Germans (seven haplotypes in common), the Cornish from South West England (five haplotypes in common), the Turks (four haplotypes in common), and the Tuscans (two haplotypes in common).[55]
+
+A mitochondrial DNA study (2013) also concluded that the Etruscans were an indigenous population, showing that Etruscans' mtDNA appear to fall very close to a Neolithic population from Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Hungary) and to other Tuscan populations, strongly suggesting that the Etruscan civilization developed locally from the Villanovan culture, as already supported by archaeological evidence and anthropological research,[9][56] and that genetic links between Tuscany and western Anatolia date back to at least 5,000 years ago during the Neolithic and the "most likely separation time between Tuscany and Western Anatolia falls around 7,600 years ago", at the time of the migrations of Early European Farmers (EEF) from Anatolia to Europe in the early Neolithic. The ancient Etruscan samples had mitochondrial DNA haplogroups (mtDNA) JT (subclades of J and T) and U5, with a minority of mtDNA H1b.[57][58] According to British archeologist Phil Perkins, "there are indications that the evidence of DNA can support the theory that Etruscan people are autochthonous in central Italy".[59][60]
+
+A 2019 genetic study  published in the journal Science analyzed the remains of eleven Iron Age individuals from the areas around Rome, of which four were Etruscan individuals, one buried in Veio Grotta Gramiccia from the Villanovan era (900-800 BC) and three buried in La Mattonara Necropolis near Civitavecchia from the Orientalizing period (700-600 BC). The study concluded that Etruscans (900–600 BC) and the Latins (900–500 BC) from Latium vetus were genetically similar.[61], genetic differences between the examined Etruscans and Latins were found to be insignificant.[62] The Etruscan individuals and contemporary Latins were distinguished from preceding populations of Italy by the presence of ca. 30-40% steppe ancestry.[63] Their DNA was a mixture of two-thirds Copper Age ancestry (EEF + WHG; Etruscans ~66–72%, Latins ~62–75%) and one-third Steppe-related ancestry (Etruscans ~27–33%, Latins ~24–37%).[61] The only sample of Y-DNA extracted belonged to haplogroup J-M12 (J2b-L283), found in an individual dated 700-600 BC, and carried exactly the M314 derived allele also found in a Middle Bronze Age individual from Croatia (1631-1531 calBCE). While the four samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to haplogroups U5a1, H, T2b32, K1a4.[64] Therefore, Etruscans had also Steppe-related ancestry despite speaking a pre-Indo-European language.
+
+The Etruscan civilization begins with the Villanovan culture, regarded as the oldest phase.[4][5][6][7][8] The Etruscans themselves dated the origin of the Etruscan nation to a date corresponding to the 11th or 10th century BC.[5][65] The Villanovan culture emerges with the phenomenon of regionalization from the late Bronze Age culture called "Proto-Villanovan", part of the central European Urnfield culture system. In the last Villanovan phase, called the recent phase (about 770–730 BC), the Etruscans established relations of a certain consistency with the first Greek immigrants in southern Italy (in Pithecusa and then in Cuma), so much so as to initially absorb techniques and figurative models and soon more properly cultural models, with the introduction, for example, of writing, of a new way of banqueting, of a heroic funerary ideology, that is, a new aristocratic way of life, such as to profoundly change the physiognomy of Etruscan society.[65] Thus, thanks to the growing number of contacts with the Greeks, the Etruscans entered what is called the Orientalizing phase. In this phase, there was a heavy influence in Greece, most of Italy and some areas of Spain, from the most advanced areas of the eastern Mediterranean and the ancient Near East.[66] Also directly Phoenician, or otherwise Near Eastern, craftsmen, merchants and artists contributed to the spread in southern Europe of Near Eastern cultural and artistic motifs. The last three phases of Etruscan civilization are called, respectively, Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic, which roughly correspond to the homonymous phases of the ancient Greek civilization.
+
+Etruscan expansion was focused both to the north beyond the Apennine Mountains and into Campania. Some small towns in the sixth century BC disappeared during this time, ostensibly subsumed by greater, more powerful neighbours. However, it is certain that the political structure of the Etruscan culture was similar to, albeit more aristocratic than, Magna Graecia in the south. The mining and commerce of metal, especially copper and iron, led to an enrichment of the Etruscans and to the expansion of their influence in the Italian peninsula and the western Mediterranean Sea. Here, their interests collided with those of the Greeks, especially in the sixth century BC, when Phocaeans of Italy founded colonies along the coast of Sardinia, Spain and Corsica. This led the Etruscans to ally themselves with Carthage, whose interests also collided with the Greeks.[68][69]
+
+Around 540 BC, the Battle of Alalia led to a new distribution of power in the western Mediterranean. Though the battle had no clear winner, Carthage managed to expand its sphere of influence at the expense of the Greeks, and Etruria saw itself relegated to the northern Tyrrhenian Sea with full ownership of Corsica. From the first half of the 5th century BC, the new political situation meant the beginning of the Etruscan decline after losing their southern provinces. In 480 BC, Etruria's ally Carthage was defeated by a coalition of Magna Graecia cities led by Syracuse, Sicily. A few years later, in 474 BC, Syracuse's tyrant Hiero defeated the Etruscans at the Battle of Cumae. Etruria's influence over the cities of Latium and Campania weakened, and the area was taken over by Romans and Samnites.
+
+In the 4th century BC, Etruria saw a Gallic invasion end its influence over the Po Valley and the Adriatic coast. Meanwhile, Rome had started annexing Etruscan cities. This led to the loss of the northern Etruscan provinces. During the Roman–Etruscan Wars, Etruria was conquered by Rome in the 3rd century BC.[68][69]
+
+According to legend,[70] there was a period between 600 BC and 500 BC in which an alliance was formed among twelve Etruscan settlements, known today as the Etruscan League, Etruscan Federation, or Dodecapolis (in Greek Δωδεκάπολις). According to a legend the Etruscan League of twelve cities was founded by Tarchon and his brother Tyrrhenus. Tarchon lent his name to the city of Tarchna, or Tarquinnii, as it was known by the Romans. Tyrrhenus gave his name to the Tyrrhenians, the alternative name for the Etruscans. Although there is no consensus on which cities were in the league, the following list may be close to the mark: Arretium, Caisra, Clevsin, Curtun, Perusna, Pupluna, Veii, Tarchna, Vetluna, Volterra, Velzna, and Velch. Some modern authors include Rusellae.[71] The league was mostly an economic and religious league, or a loose confederation, similar to the Greek states. During the later imperial times, when Etruria was just one of many regions controlled by Rome, the number of cities in the league increased by three. This is noted on many later grave stones from the 2nd century BC onwards. According to Livy, the twelve city-states met once a year at the Fanum Voltumnae at Volsinii, where a leader was chosen to represent the league.[72]
+
+There were two other Etruscan leagues ("Lega dei popoli"): that of Campania, the main city of which was Capua, and the Po Valley city-states in northern Italy, which included Bologna, Spina and Adria.
+
+Those who subscribe to a Latin foundation of Rome followed by an Etruscan invasion typically speak of an Etruscan "influence" on Roman culture – that is, cultural objects which were adopted by Rome from neighbouring Etruria. The prevailing view is that Rome was founded by Latins who later merged with Etruscans. In this interpretation, Etruscan cultural objects are considered influences rather than part of a heritage.[73] Rome was probably a small settlement until the arrival of the Etruscans, who constructed the first elements of its urban infrastructure such as the drainage system.[74][75]
+
+The main criterion for deciding whether an object originated at Rome and traveled by influence to the Etruscans, or descended to the Romans from the Etruscans, is date. Many, if not most, of the Etruscan cities were older than Rome. If one finds that a given feature was there first, it cannot have originated at Rome. A second criterion is the opinion of the ancient sources. These would indicate that certain institutions and customs came directly from the Etruscans. Rome is located on the edge of what was Etruscan territory. When Etruscan settlements turned up south of the border, it was presumed that the Etruscans spread there after the foundation of Rome, but the settlements are now known to have preceded Rome.
+
+Etruscan settlements were frequently built on hills – the steeper the better – and surrounded by thick walls. According to Roman mythology, when Romulus and Remus founded Rome, they did so on the Palatine Hill according to Etruscan ritual; that is, they began with a pomerium or sacred ditch. Then, they proceeded to the walls. Romulus was required to kill Remus when the latter jumped over the wall, breaking its magic spell (see also under Pons Sublicius). The name of Rome is attested in Etruscan in the form Ruma-χ meaning 'Roman', a form that mirrors other attested ethnonyms in that language with the same suffix -χ: Velzna-χ '(someone) from Volsinii' and Sveama-χ '(someone) from Sovana'. This in itself, however, is not enough to prove Etruscan origin conclusively. If Tiberius is from θefarie, then Ruma would have been placed on the Thefar (Tiber) river. A heavily discussed topic among scholars is who was the founding population of Rome. In 390 BC, the city of Rome was attacked by the Gauls, and as a result may have lost many – though not all – of its earlier records. Certainly, the history of Rome before that date is not as secure as it later becomes, but enough material remains to give a good picture of the development of the city and its institutions.[citation needed]
+
+Later history relates that some Etruscans lived in the Vicus Tuscus,[76] the "Etruscan quarter", and that there was an Etruscan line of kings (albeit ones descended from a Greek, Demaratus of Corinth) that succeeded kings of Latin and Sabine origin. Etruscophile historians would argue that this, together with evidence for institutions, religious elements and other cultural elements, proves that Rome was founded by Italics. The true picture is rather more complicated, not least because the Etruscan cities were separate entities which never came together to form a single Etruscan state. Furthermore, there were strong Latin and Italic elements to Roman culture, and later Romans proudly celebrated these multiple, 'multicultural' influences on the city.
+
+Under Romulus and Numa Pompilius, the people were said to have been divided into thirty curiae and three tribes. Few Etruscan words entered Latin, but the names of at least two of the tribes – Ramnes and Luceres – seem to be Etruscan. The last kings may have borne the Etruscan title lucumo, while the regalia were traditionally considered of Etruscan origin – the golden crown, the sceptre, the toga palmata (a special robe), the sella curulis (curule chair), and above all the primary symbol of state power: The fasces. The latter was a bundle of whipping rods surrounding a double-bladed axe, carried by the king's lictors. An example of the fasces are the remains of bronze rods and the axe from a tomb in Etruscan Vetulonia. This allowed archaeologists to identify the depiction of a fasces on the grave stele of Avele Feluske, who is shown as a warrior wielding the fasces. The most telling Etruscan feature is the word populus, which appears as an Etruscan deity, Fufluns. Populus seems to mean the people assembled in a military body, rather than the general populace.[citation needed]
+
+The historical Etruscans had achieved a state system of society, with remnants of the chiefdom and tribal forms. In this, they were different from the surrounding Italics, who had chiefs and tribes.[citation needed] Rome was in a sense the first Italic state, but it began as an Etruscan one. It is believed that the Etruscan government style changed from total monarchy to oligarchic republic (as the Roman Republic) in the 6th century BC, although it is important to note this did not happen to all the city-states.[citation needed]
+
+The government was viewed as being a central authority, ruling over all tribal and clan organizations. It retained the power of life and death; in fact, the gorgon, an ancient symbol of that power, appears as a motif in Etruscan decoration. The adherents to this state power were united by a common religion. Political unity in Etruscan society was the city-state, which was probably the referent of methlum, "district". Etruscan texts name quite a number of magistrates, without much of a hint as to their function: The camthi, the parnich, the purth, the tamera, the macstrev, and so on. The people were the mech. The chief ruler of a methlum was perhaps a zilach.[citation needed]
+
+The princely tombs were not of individuals. The inscription evidence shows that families were interred there over long periods, marking the growth of the aristocratic family as a fixed institution, parallel to the gens at Rome and perhaps even its model. The Etruscans could have used any model of the eastern Mediterranean. That the growth of this class is related to the new acquisition of wealth through trade is unquestioned. The wealthiest cities were located near the coast. At the centre of the society was the married couple, tusurthir. The Etruscans were a monogamous society that emphasized pairing.
+
+Similarly, the behaviour of some wealthy women is not uniquely Etruscan. The apparent promiscuous revelry has a spiritual explanation. Swaddling and Bonfante (among others) explain that depictions of the nude embrace, or symplegma, "had the power to ward off evil", as did baring the breast, which was adopted by western culture as an apotropaic device, appearing finally on the figureheads of sailing ships as a nude female upper torso. It is also possible that Greek and Roman attitudes to the Etruscans were based on a misunderstanding of the place of women within their society. In both Greece and the Earliest Republican Rome, respectable women were confined to the house and mixed-sex socialising did not occur. Thus, the freedom of women within Etruscan society could have been misunderstood as implying their sexual availability.[77] It is worth noting that a number of Etruscan tombs carry funerary inscriptions in the form "X son of (father) and (mother)", indicating the importance of the mother's side of the family.[77]
+
+The Etruscans, like the contemporary cultures of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, had a significant military tradition. In addition to marking the rank and power of certain individuals, warfare was a considerable economic advantage to Etruscan civilization. Like many ancient societies, the Etruscans conducted campaigns during summer months, raiding neighboring areas, attempting to gain territory and combating piracy as a means of acquiring valuable resources, such as land, prestige, goods, and slaves. It is likely that individuals taken in battle would be ransomed back to their families and clans at high cost. Prisoners could also potentially be sacrificed on tombs as an honor to fallen leaders of Etruscan society, not unlike the sacrifices made by Achilles for Patrocles.[78][79][80]
+
+The range of Etruscan civilization is marked by its cities. They were entirely assimilated by Italic, Celtic, or Roman ethnic groups, but the names survive from inscriptions and their ruins are of aesthetic and historic interest in most of the cities of central Italy. Etruscan cities flourished over most of Italy during the Roman Iron Age, marking the farthest extent of Etruscan civilization. They were gradually assimilated first by Italics in the south, then by Celts in the north and finally in Etruria itself by the growing Roman Republic.[78]
+
+That many Roman cities were formerly Etruscan was well known to all the Roman authors. Some cities were founded by Etruscans in prehistoric times, and bore entirely Etruscan names. Others were colonized by Etruscans who Etruscanized the name, usually Italic.[79]
+
+The Etruscan system of belief was an immanent polytheism; that is, all visible phenomena were considered to be a manifestation of divine power and that power was subdivided into deities that acted continually on the world of man and could be dissuaded or persuaded in favour of human affairs. How to understand the will of deities, and how to behave, had been revealed to the Etruscans by two initiators, Tages, a childlike figure born from tilled land and immediately gifted with prescience, and Vegoia, a female figure. Their teachings were kept in a series of sacred books. Three layers of deities are evident in the extensive Etruscan art motifs. One appears to be divinities of an indigenous nature: Catha and Usil, the sun; Tivr, the moon; Selvans, a civil god; Turan, the goddess of love; Laran, the god of war; Leinth, the goddess of death; Maris; Thalna; Turms; and the ever-popular Fufluns, whose name is related in some way to the city of Populonia and the populus Romanus, possibly, the god of the people.[81][82]
+
+Ruling over this pantheon of lesser deities were higher ones that seem to reflect the Indo-European system: Tin or Tinia, the sky, Uni his wife (Juno), and Cel, the earth goddess. In addition, some Greek and Roman gods were taken into the Etruscan system: Aritimi (Artemis), Menrva (Minerva), Pacha (Dionysus). The Greek heroes taken from Homer also appear extensively in art motifs.[81][82]
+
+Relatively little is known about the architecture of the ancient Etruscans. They adapted the native Italic styles with influence from the external appearance of Greek architecture. In turn, ancient Roman architecture began with Etruscan styles, and then accepted still further Greek influence. Roman temples show many of the same differences in form to Greek ones that Etruscan temples do, but like the Greeks, use stone, in which they closely copy Greek conventions. The houses of the wealthy were evidently often large and comfortable, but the burial chambers of tombs, often filled with grave-goods, are the nearest approach to them to survive. In the southern Etruscan area, tombs have large rock-cut chambers under a tumulus in large necropoleis, and these, together with some city walls, are the only Etruscan constructions to survive. Etruscan architecture is not generally considered as part of the body of Greco-Roman classical architecture.[83]
+
+Etruscan art was produced by the Etruscan civilization between the 9th and 2nd centuries BC. Particularly strong in this tradition were figurative sculpture in terracotta (particularly lifesize on sarcophagi or temples), wall-painting and metalworking (especially engraved bronze mirrors). Etruscan sculpture in cast bronze was famous and widely exported, but few large examples have survived (the material was too valuable, and recycled later). In contrast to terracotta and bronze, there was apparently little Etruscan sculpture in stone, despite the Etruscans controlling fine sources of marble, including Carrara marble, which seems not to have been exploited until the Romans. Most surviving Etruscan art comes from tombs, including all the fresco wall-paintings, which show scenes of feasting and some narrative mythological subjects.[citation needed]
+
+Bucchero wares in black were the early and native styles of fine Etruscan pottery. There was also a tradition of elaborate Etruscan vase painting, which sprung from its Greek equivalent; the Etruscans were the main export market for Greek vases. Etruscan temples were heavily decorated with colourfully painted terracotta antefixes and other fittings, which survive in large numbers where the wooden superstructure has vanished. Etruscan art was strongly connected to religion; the afterlife was of major importance in Etruscan art.[84]
+
+The Etruscan musical instruments seen in frescoes and bas-reliefs are different types of pipes, such as the plagiaulos (the pipes of Pan or Syrinx), the alabaster pipe and the famous double pipes, accompanied on percussion instruments such as the tintinnabulum, tympanum and crotales, and later by stringed instruments like the lyre and kithara.
+
+Etruscans left around 13,000 inscriptions which have been found so far, only a small minority of which are of significant length. Attested from 700 BC to AD 50, the relation of Etruscan to other languages has been a source of long-running speculation and study. The Etruscans are believed to have spoken a pre–Indo-European language,[85][86][87] and the majority consensus is that Etruscan is related only to other members of what is called the Tyrsenian language family, which in itself is an isolate family, that is, unrelated directly to other known language groups. Since Rix (1998), it is widely accepted that the Tyrsenian family groups Raetic and Lemnian are related to Etruscan.[10]
+
+Etruscan texts, written in a space of seven centuries, use a form of the Greek alphabet due to close contact between the Etruscans and the Greek colonies at Pithecusae and Cumae in the 8th century BC (until it was no longer used, at the beginning of the 1st century AD). Etruscan inscriptions disappeared from Chiusi, Perugia and Arezzo around this time. Only a few fragments survive, religious and especially funeral texts most of which are late (from the 4th century BC). In addition to the original texts that have survived to this day, we have a large number of quotations and allusions from classical authors. In the 1st century BC, Diodorus Siculus wrote that literary culture was one of the great achievements of the Etruscans. Little is known of it and even what is known of their language is due to the repetition of the same few words in the many inscriptions found (by way of the modern epitaphs) contrasted in bilingual or trilingual texts with Latin and Punic. Out of the aforementioned genres, is just one such Volnio (Volnius) cited in classical sources mention.[88] With a few exceptions, such as the Liber Linteus, the only written records in the Etruscan language that remain are inscriptions, mainly funerary. The language is written in the Etruscan alphabet, a script related to the early Euboean Greek alphabet.[89] Many thousand inscriptions in Etruscan are known, mostly epitaphs, and a few very short texts have survived, which are mainly religious. Etruscan imaginative literature is evidenced only in references by later Roman authors, but it is evident from their visual art that the Greek myths were well-known.[90]

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+The Etruscan civilization (/ɪˈtrʌskən/) was a civilization of ancient Italy whose territory covered roughly what is now Tuscany, western Umbria, and northern Lazio,[1][2] as well as parts of what are now the Po Valley, Emilia-Romagna, south-eastern Lombardy, southern Veneto, and Campania.[3]
+
+The earliest evidence of a culture that is identifiably Etruscan dates from about 900 BC. This is the period of the Iron Age Villanovan culture, considered to be the earliest phase of Etruscan civilization,[4][5][6][7][8] which itself developed from the previous late Bronze Age Proto-Villanovan culture in the same region.[9] Etruscan civilization endured until it was assimilated into Roman society. Assimilation began in the late 4th century BC as a result of the Roman–Etruscan Wars;[10] it accelerated with the grant of Roman citizenship in 90 BC, and became complete in 27 BC, when the Etruscans’ territory was incorporated into the newly established Roman Empire.[11]
+
+Etruscan culture was influenced by Ancient Greek culture, beginning around 750 BC (during the last phase of the Villanovan period), when the Greeks, who were at this time in their Archaic Orientalizing period, started founding colonies in southern Italy. Greek influence also occurred in the 4th and 5th centuries BC during Greece’s Classical period.
+
+The territorial extent of Etruscan civilization reached its maximum around 750 BC, during the foundational period of the Roman Kingdom. Its culture flourished in three confederacies of cities: that of Etruria (Tuscany, Latium and Umbria), that of the Po Valley with the eastern Alps, and that of Campania.[12][13] The league in northern Italy is mentioned in Livy.[14][15][16] The reduction in Etruscan territory was gradual, but after 500 BC the political balance of power on the Italian peninsula shifted away from the Etruscans in favor of the rising Roman Republic.[17]
+
+The earliest known examples of Etruscan writing are inscriptions found in southern Etruria that date to around 700 BC.[10][18] The Etruscans developed a system of writing which uses symbols borrowed from Euboean Greek script, but the Etruscan language remains only partly understood, making modern understanding of their society and culture heavily dependent on much later and generally disapproving Roman and Greek sources. In the Etruscan political system, authority resided in its individual small cities, and probably in its prominent individual families. At the height of Etruscan power, elite Etruscan families grew very rich through trade with the Celtic world to the north and the Greeks to the south, and they filled their large family tombs with imported luxuries. Judging from archaeological remains, Archaic Greece had a huge influence on their art and architecture, and Greek mythology was evidently very familiar to them.
+
+The Etruscans called themselves Rasenna, which was shortened to Rasna or Raśna (etymology unknown).[19][20][21]
+
+In Attic Greek, the Etruscans were known as Tyrrhenians (Τυρρηνοί, Turrhēnoi, earlier Τυρσηνοί Tursēnoi), from which the Romans derived the names Tyrrhēnī, Tyrrhēnia (Etruria), and Mare Tyrrhēnum (Tyrrhenian Sea),[22][full citation needed] prompting some to associate them with the Teresh (one of the Sea Peoples named by the Egyptians).
+
+The ancient Romans referred to the Etruscans as the Tuscī or Etruscī (singular Tuscus).[23][24] Their Roman name is the origin of the terms "Toscana", which refers to their heartland, and "Etruria", which can refer to their wider region. The term Tusci is thought by linguists to have been the Umbrian word for “Etruscan,” based an inscription on an ancient bronze tablet from a nearby region.[25] The inscription contains the phrase turskum ... nomen, literally "the Tuscan name". Based on a knowledge of Umbrian grammar, linguists can infer that the base form of the word turksum is *Tursci,[26] which would, through metathesis and a word-initial epenthesis, be likely to lead to the form, E-trus-ci.[27]
+
+As for the original meaning of the root, *Turs-, a widely cited hypothesis is that it, like the word Latin turris, means "tower", and comes from the Greek word for tower: τύρσις.[28] On this hypothesis, the Tusci were called the "people who build towers"[28] or "the tower builders".[29] This proposed etymology is made the more plausible because the Etruscans preferred to build their towns on high precipices reinforced  by walls. Alternatively, Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante have speculated that Etruscan houses may have seemed like towers to the simple Latins.[30] The proposed etymology has a long history, Dionysius of Halicarnassus having observed long ago, "[T]here is no reason that the Greeks should not have called [the Etruscans] by this name, both from their living in towers and from the name of one of their rulers."[31]
+
+Literary and historical texts in the Etruscan language have not survived, and the language itself is only partially understood by modern scholars. As previously noted, this makes modern understanding of their society and culture heavily dependent on much later and generally disapproving Roman and Greek sources. These ancient writers differed in their theories about the origin of the Etruscan people. Some suggested they were Pelasgians who had migrated there from Greece. Others maintained that they were indigenous to central Italy and were not from Greece.
+
+The first Greek author to mention the Etruscans, whom the Ancient Greeks called Tyrrhenians, was the 8th-century BC poet Hesiod, in his work, the Theogony. He merely described them as residing in central Italy alongside the Latins.[32] The 7th-century BC Homeric Hymn to Dionysus[33] referred to them merely as pirates.[34] Unlike later Greek authors, these authors did not suggest that Etruscans had migrated to Italy from the east, and did not associate them with the Pelasgians.
+
+It was only in the 5th century BC, when the Etruscan civilization had been established for several centuries, that Greek writers started associating the name “Tyrrhenians” with the “Pelasgians,” and even then, some did so in a way that suggests they were meant only as generic, descriptive labels for “non-Greek” and “indigenous ancestors of Greeks,” respectively.[35]
+
+The 5th-century BC historians Thucydides[36] and Herodotus,[37] and the 1st-century BC historian Strabo[38][full citation needed], did seem to suggest that the Tyrrhenians were originally Pelasgians who migrated to Italy from Lydia by way of the Greek island of Lemnos. They all described Lemnos as having been settled by Pelasgians, whom Thucydides identified as "belonging to the Tyrrhenians" (τὸ δὲ πλεῖστον Πελασγικόν, τῶν καὶ Λῆμνόν ποτε καὶ Ἀθήνας Τυρσηνῶν). As Strabo and Herodotus told it,[39] the migration to Lemnos was led by Tyrrhenus / Tyrsenos, the son of Atys (who was king of Lydia). Strabo[38] added that the Pelasgians of Lemnos and Imbros then followed Tyrrhenus to the Italian Peninsula. And, according to the logographer Hellanicus of Lesbos, there was a Pelasgian migration from Thessaly in Greece to the Italian peninsula, as part of which the Pelasgians colonized the area he called Tyrrhenia, and they then came to be called Tyrrhenians.[40]
+
+There is some evidence suggesting a link between the island of Lemnos and the Tyrrhenians. The Lemnos Stele bears inscriptions in a language with strong structural resemblances to the language of the Etruscans.[41] The discovery of these inscriptions in modern times has led to the suggestion of a "Tyrrhenian language group" comprising Etruscan, Lemnian, and the Raetic spoken in the Alps.
+
+However, the 1st-century BC historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek living in Rome, dismissed many of the ancient theories of other Greek historians and postulated that the Etruscans were indigenous people who had always lived in Etruria and were different from both the Pelasgians and the Lydians.[42] Dionysius noted that the 5th-century historian Xanthus of Lydia, who was originally from Sardis and was regarded as an important source and authority for the history of Lydia, never suggested a Lydian origin of the Etruscans and never named Tyrrhenus as a ruler of the Lydians.[42]
+
+For this reason, therefore, I am persuaded that the Pelasgians are a different people from the Tyrrhenians. And I do not believe, either, that the Tyrrhenians were a colony of the Lydians; for they do not use the same language as the latter, nor can it be alleged that, though they no longer speak a similar tongue, they still retain some other indications of their mother country. For they neither worship the same gods as the Lydians nor make use of similar laws or institutions, but in these very respects they differ more from the Lydians than from the Pelasgians. Indeed, those probably come nearest to the truth who declare that the nation migrated from nowhere else, but was native to the country, since it is found to be a very ancient nation and to agree with no other either in its language or in its manner of living.
+
+The credibility of Dionysius of Halicarnassus is arguably bolstered by the fact that he was the first ancient writer to report the endonym of the Etruscans: Rasenna.
+
+The Romans, however, give them other names: from the country they once inhabited, named Etruria, they call them Etruscans, and from their knowledge of the ceremonies relating to divine worship, in which they excel others, they now call them, rather inaccurately, Tusci, but formerly, with the same accuracy as the Greeks, they called them Thyoscoï [an earlier form of Tusci]. Their own name for themselves, however, is the same as that of one of their leaders, Rasenna.
+
+Similarly, the 1st-century BC historian Livy, in his Ab Urbe Condita Libri, said that the Rhaetians were Etruscans who had been driven into the mountains by the invading Gauls; and he asserted that the inhabitants of Raetia were of Etruscan origin.[43]
+
+The Alpine tribes have also, no doubt, the same origin (of the Etruscans), especially the Raetians; who have been rendered so savage by the very nature of the country as to retain nothing of their ancient character save the sound of their speech, and even that is corrupted.
+
+First-century historian Pliny the Elder also put the Etruscans in the context of the Rhaetian people to the north, and wrote in his Natural History (AD 79):[44]
+
+Adjoining these the (Alpine) Noricans are the Raeti and Vindelici. All are divided into a number of states. The Raeti are believed to be people of Tuscan race driven out by the Gauls, their leader was named Raetus.
+
+The question of Etruscan origins has long been a subject of interest and debate among historians. In modern times, all the evidence gathered so far by etruscologists points to an indigenous origin of the Etruscans.[45][46] Archaeologically there is no evidence for a migration of the Lydians or the Pelasgians into Etruria.[45][46] Modern etruscologists and archeologists, such as Massimo Pallottino (1947), have shown that early historians’ assumptions and assertions on the subject were groundless.[47] In 2000, the etruscologist Dominique Briquel explained in detail why he believes that ancient Greek historians’ writings on Etruscan origins should not even count as historical documents.[48] He argues that the ancient story of the Etruscans’ 'Lydian origins' was a deliberate,  politically motivated fabrication, and that ancient Greeks inferred a connection between the Tyrrhenians and the Pelasgians solely on the  basis of certain Greek and local traditions and on the mere fact that there had been trade between the Etruscans and Greeks.[49][50] He noted that, even if these stories include historical facts suggesting contact, such contact is more plausibly traceable to cultural exchange than to migration.[51]
+
+Several archaeologists who have analyzed Bronze Age and Iron Age remains that were excavated in the territory of historical Etruria have pointed out that no evidence has been found, related either to material culture or to social practices, that can support a migration theory.[52] The most marked and radical change that has been archaeologically attested in the area is the adoption, starting in about the 12th century BC, of the funeral rite of incineration in terracotta urns, which is a Continental European practice, derived from the Urnfield culture; there is nothing about it that suggests an ethnic contribution from Asia Minor or the Near East.[52]
+
+A 2012 survey of the previous 30 years’ archaeological findings, based on excavations of the major Etruscan cities, showed a continuity of culture from the last phase of the Bronze Age (11th–10th century BC) to the Iron Age (9th–8th century BC). This is evidence that the Etruscan civilization, which emerged around 900 BC, was built by people whose ancestors had inhabited that region for at least the previous 200 years.[53] Based on this cultural continuity, there is now a consensus among archeologists that Proto-Etruscan culture developed, during the last phase of the Bronze Age, from the indigenous Proto-Villanovan culture, and that the subsequent Iron Age Villanovan culture is most accurately described as an  early phase of the Etruscan civilization.[9] It is possible that there were contacts between northern-central Italy and the Mycenaean world at the end of the Bronze Age. However contacts between the inhabitants of Etruria and inhabitants of Greece, Aegean Sea Islands, Asia Minor, and the Near East are attested only centuries later, when Etruscan civilization was already flourishing and Etruscan ethnogenesis was well established. The first of these attested contacts relate to the Greek colonies in Southern Italy and the consequent orientalizing period.[54]
+
+A mtDNA study in 2004 stated that the Etruscans had no significant heterogeneity, and that all mitochondrial lineages observed among the Etruscan samples appear typically European or West Asian, but only a few haplotypes were shared with modern populations. Allele sharing between the Etruscans and modern populations is highest among Germans (seven haplotypes in common), the Cornish from South West England (five haplotypes in common), the Turks (four haplotypes in common), and the Tuscans (two haplotypes in common).[55]
+
+A mitochondrial DNA study (2013) also concluded that the Etruscans were an indigenous population, showing that Etruscans' mtDNA appear to fall very close to a Neolithic population from Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Hungary) and to other Tuscan populations, strongly suggesting that the Etruscan civilization developed locally from the Villanovan culture, as already supported by archaeological evidence and anthropological research,[9][56] and that genetic links between Tuscany and western Anatolia date back to at least 5,000 years ago during the Neolithic and the "most likely separation time between Tuscany and Western Anatolia falls around 7,600 years ago", at the time of the migrations of Early European Farmers (EEF) from Anatolia to Europe in the early Neolithic. The ancient Etruscan samples had mitochondrial DNA haplogroups (mtDNA) JT (subclades of J and T) and U5, with a minority of mtDNA H1b.[57][58] According to British archeologist Phil Perkins, "there are indications that the evidence of DNA can support the theory that Etruscan people are autochthonous in central Italy".[59][60]
+
+A 2019 genetic study  published in the journal Science analyzed the remains of eleven Iron Age individuals from the areas around Rome, of which four were Etruscan individuals, one buried in Veio Grotta Gramiccia from the Villanovan era (900-800 BC) and three buried in La Mattonara Necropolis near Civitavecchia from the Orientalizing period (700-600 BC). The study concluded that Etruscans (900–600 BC) and the Latins (900–500 BC) from Latium vetus were genetically similar.[61], genetic differences between the examined Etruscans and Latins were found to be insignificant.[62] The Etruscan individuals and contemporary Latins were distinguished from preceding populations of Italy by the presence of ca. 30-40% steppe ancestry.[63] Their DNA was a mixture of two-thirds Copper Age ancestry (EEF + WHG; Etruscans ~66–72%, Latins ~62–75%) and one-third Steppe-related ancestry (Etruscans ~27–33%, Latins ~24–37%).[61] The only sample of Y-DNA extracted belonged to haplogroup J-M12 (J2b-L283), found in an individual dated 700-600 BC, and carried exactly the M314 derived allele also found in a Middle Bronze Age individual from Croatia (1631-1531 calBCE). While the four samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to haplogroups U5a1, H, T2b32, K1a4.[64] Therefore, Etruscans had also Steppe-related ancestry despite speaking a pre-Indo-European language.
+
+The Etruscan civilization begins with the Villanovan culture, regarded as the oldest phase.[4][5][6][7][8] The Etruscans themselves dated the origin of the Etruscan nation to a date corresponding to the 11th or 10th century BC.[5][65] The Villanovan culture emerges with the phenomenon of regionalization from the late Bronze Age culture called "Proto-Villanovan", part of the central European Urnfield culture system. In the last Villanovan phase, called the recent phase (about 770–730 BC), the Etruscans established relations of a certain consistency with the first Greek immigrants in southern Italy (in Pithecusa and then in Cuma), so much so as to initially absorb techniques and figurative models and soon more properly cultural models, with the introduction, for example, of writing, of a new way of banqueting, of a heroic funerary ideology, that is, a new aristocratic way of life, such as to profoundly change the physiognomy of Etruscan society.[65] Thus, thanks to the growing number of contacts with the Greeks, the Etruscans entered what is called the Orientalizing phase. In this phase, there was a heavy influence in Greece, most of Italy and some areas of Spain, from the most advanced areas of the eastern Mediterranean and the ancient Near East.[66] Also directly Phoenician, or otherwise Near Eastern, craftsmen, merchants and artists contributed to the spread in southern Europe of Near Eastern cultural and artistic motifs. The last three phases of Etruscan civilization are called, respectively, Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic, which roughly correspond to the homonymous phases of the ancient Greek civilization.
+
+Etruscan expansion was focused both to the north beyond the Apennine Mountains and into Campania. Some small towns in the sixth century BC disappeared during this time, ostensibly subsumed by greater, more powerful neighbours. However, it is certain that the political structure of the Etruscan culture was similar to, albeit more aristocratic than, Magna Graecia in the south. The mining and commerce of metal, especially copper and iron, led to an enrichment of the Etruscans and to the expansion of their influence in the Italian peninsula and the western Mediterranean Sea. Here, their interests collided with those of the Greeks, especially in the sixth century BC, when Phocaeans of Italy founded colonies along the coast of Sardinia, Spain and Corsica. This led the Etruscans to ally themselves with Carthage, whose interests also collided with the Greeks.[68][69]
+
+Around 540 BC, the Battle of Alalia led to a new distribution of power in the western Mediterranean. Though the battle had no clear winner, Carthage managed to expand its sphere of influence at the expense of the Greeks, and Etruria saw itself relegated to the northern Tyrrhenian Sea with full ownership of Corsica. From the first half of the 5th century BC, the new political situation meant the beginning of the Etruscan decline after losing their southern provinces. In 480 BC, Etruria's ally Carthage was defeated by a coalition of Magna Graecia cities led by Syracuse, Sicily. A few years later, in 474 BC, Syracuse's tyrant Hiero defeated the Etruscans at the Battle of Cumae. Etruria's influence over the cities of Latium and Campania weakened, and the area was taken over by Romans and Samnites.
+
+In the 4th century BC, Etruria saw a Gallic invasion end its influence over the Po Valley and the Adriatic coast. Meanwhile, Rome had started annexing Etruscan cities. This led to the loss of the northern Etruscan provinces. During the Roman–Etruscan Wars, Etruria was conquered by Rome in the 3rd century BC.[68][69]
+
+According to legend,[70] there was a period between 600 BC and 500 BC in which an alliance was formed among twelve Etruscan settlements, known today as the Etruscan League, Etruscan Federation, or Dodecapolis (in Greek Δωδεκάπολις). According to a legend the Etruscan League of twelve cities was founded by Tarchon and his brother Tyrrhenus. Tarchon lent his name to the city of Tarchna, or Tarquinnii, as it was known by the Romans. Tyrrhenus gave his name to the Tyrrhenians, the alternative name for the Etruscans. Although there is no consensus on which cities were in the league, the following list may be close to the mark: Arretium, Caisra, Clevsin, Curtun, Perusna, Pupluna, Veii, Tarchna, Vetluna, Volterra, Velzna, and Velch. Some modern authors include Rusellae.[71] The league was mostly an economic and religious league, or a loose confederation, similar to the Greek states. During the later imperial times, when Etruria was just one of many regions controlled by Rome, the number of cities in the league increased by three. This is noted on many later grave stones from the 2nd century BC onwards. According to Livy, the twelve city-states met once a year at the Fanum Voltumnae at Volsinii, where a leader was chosen to represent the league.[72]
+
+There were two other Etruscan leagues ("Lega dei popoli"): that of Campania, the main city of which was Capua, and the Po Valley city-states in northern Italy, which included Bologna, Spina and Adria.
+
+Those who subscribe to a Latin foundation of Rome followed by an Etruscan invasion typically speak of an Etruscan "influence" on Roman culture – that is, cultural objects which were adopted by Rome from neighbouring Etruria. The prevailing view is that Rome was founded by Latins who later merged with Etruscans. In this interpretation, Etruscan cultural objects are considered influences rather than part of a heritage.[73] Rome was probably a small settlement until the arrival of the Etruscans, who constructed the first elements of its urban infrastructure such as the drainage system.[74][75]
+
+The main criterion for deciding whether an object originated at Rome and traveled by influence to the Etruscans, or descended to the Romans from the Etruscans, is date. Many, if not most, of the Etruscan cities were older than Rome. If one finds that a given feature was there first, it cannot have originated at Rome. A second criterion is the opinion of the ancient sources. These would indicate that certain institutions and customs came directly from the Etruscans. Rome is located on the edge of what was Etruscan territory. When Etruscan settlements turned up south of the border, it was presumed that the Etruscans spread there after the foundation of Rome, but the settlements are now known to have preceded Rome.
+
+Etruscan settlements were frequently built on hills – the steeper the better – and surrounded by thick walls. According to Roman mythology, when Romulus and Remus founded Rome, they did so on the Palatine Hill according to Etruscan ritual; that is, they began with a pomerium or sacred ditch. Then, they proceeded to the walls. Romulus was required to kill Remus when the latter jumped over the wall, breaking its magic spell (see also under Pons Sublicius). The name of Rome is attested in Etruscan in the form Ruma-χ meaning 'Roman', a form that mirrors other attested ethnonyms in that language with the same suffix -χ: Velzna-χ '(someone) from Volsinii' and Sveama-χ '(someone) from Sovana'. This in itself, however, is not enough to prove Etruscan origin conclusively. If Tiberius is from θefarie, then Ruma would have been placed on the Thefar (Tiber) river. A heavily discussed topic among scholars is who was the founding population of Rome. In 390 BC, the city of Rome was attacked by the Gauls, and as a result may have lost many – though not all – of its earlier records. Certainly, the history of Rome before that date is not as secure as it later becomes, but enough material remains to give a good picture of the development of the city and its institutions.[citation needed]
+
+Later history relates that some Etruscans lived in the Vicus Tuscus,[76] the "Etruscan quarter", and that there was an Etruscan line of kings (albeit ones descended from a Greek, Demaratus of Corinth) that succeeded kings of Latin and Sabine origin. Etruscophile historians would argue that this, together with evidence for institutions, religious elements and other cultural elements, proves that Rome was founded by Italics. The true picture is rather more complicated, not least because the Etruscan cities were separate entities which never came together to form a single Etruscan state. Furthermore, there were strong Latin and Italic elements to Roman culture, and later Romans proudly celebrated these multiple, 'multicultural' influences on the city.
+
+Under Romulus and Numa Pompilius, the people were said to have been divided into thirty curiae and three tribes. Few Etruscan words entered Latin, but the names of at least two of the tribes – Ramnes and Luceres – seem to be Etruscan. The last kings may have borne the Etruscan title lucumo, while the regalia were traditionally considered of Etruscan origin – the golden crown, the sceptre, the toga palmata (a special robe), the sella curulis (curule chair), and above all the primary symbol of state power: The fasces. The latter was a bundle of whipping rods surrounding a double-bladed axe, carried by the king's lictors. An example of the fasces are the remains of bronze rods and the axe from a tomb in Etruscan Vetulonia. This allowed archaeologists to identify the depiction of a fasces on the grave stele of Avele Feluske, who is shown as a warrior wielding the fasces. The most telling Etruscan feature is the word populus, which appears as an Etruscan deity, Fufluns. Populus seems to mean the people assembled in a military body, rather than the general populace.[citation needed]
+
+The historical Etruscans had achieved a state system of society, with remnants of the chiefdom and tribal forms. In this, they were different from the surrounding Italics, who had chiefs and tribes.[citation needed] Rome was in a sense the first Italic state, but it began as an Etruscan one. It is believed that the Etruscan government style changed from total monarchy to oligarchic republic (as the Roman Republic) in the 6th century BC, although it is important to note this did not happen to all the city-states.[citation needed]
+
+The government was viewed as being a central authority, ruling over all tribal and clan organizations. It retained the power of life and death; in fact, the gorgon, an ancient symbol of that power, appears as a motif in Etruscan decoration. The adherents to this state power were united by a common religion. Political unity in Etruscan society was the city-state, which was probably the referent of methlum, "district". Etruscan texts name quite a number of magistrates, without much of a hint as to their function: The camthi, the parnich, the purth, the tamera, the macstrev, and so on. The people were the mech. The chief ruler of a methlum was perhaps a zilach.[citation needed]
+
+The princely tombs were not of individuals. The inscription evidence shows that families were interred there over long periods, marking the growth of the aristocratic family as a fixed institution, parallel to the gens at Rome and perhaps even its model. The Etruscans could have used any model of the eastern Mediterranean. That the growth of this class is related to the new acquisition of wealth through trade is unquestioned. The wealthiest cities were located near the coast. At the centre of the society was the married couple, tusurthir. The Etruscans were a monogamous society that emphasized pairing.
+
+Similarly, the behaviour of some wealthy women is not uniquely Etruscan. The apparent promiscuous revelry has a spiritual explanation. Swaddling and Bonfante (among others) explain that depictions of the nude embrace, or symplegma, "had the power to ward off evil", as did baring the breast, which was adopted by western culture as an apotropaic device, appearing finally on the figureheads of sailing ships as a nude female upper torso. It is also possible that Greek and Roman attitudes to the Etruscans were based on a misunderstanding of the place of women within their society. In both Greece and the Earliest Republican Rome, respectable women were confined to the house and mixed-sex socialising did not occur. Thus, the freedom of women within Etruscan society could have been misunderstood as implying their sexual availability.[77] It is worth noting that a number of Etruscan tombs carry funerary inscriptions in the form "X son of (father) and (mother)", indicating the importance of the mother's side of the family.[77]
+
+The Etruscans, like the contemporary cultures of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, had a significant military tradition. In addition to marking the rank and power of certain individuals, warfare was a considerable economic advantage to Etruscan civilization. Like many ancient societies, the Etruscans conducted campaigns during summer months, raiding neighboring areas, attempting to gain territory and combating piracy as a means of acquiring valuable resources, such as land, prestige, goods, and slaves. It is likely that individuals taken in battle would be ransomed back to their families and clans at high cost. Prisoners could also potentially be sacrificed on tombs as an honor to fallen leaders of Etruscan society, not unlike the sacrifices made by Achilles for Patrocles.[78][79][80]
+
+The range of Etruscan civilization is marked by its cities. They were entirely assimilated by Italic, Celtic, or Roman ethnic groups, but the names survive from inscriptions and their ruins are of aesthetic and historic interest in most of the cities of central Italy. Etruscan cities flourished over most of Italy during the Roman Iron Age, marking the farthest extent of Etruscan civilization. They were gradually assimilated first by Italics in the south, then by Celts in the north and finally in Etruria itself by the growing Roman Republic.[78]
+
+That many Roman cities were formerly Etruscan was well known to all the Roman authors. Some cities were founded by Etruscans in prehistoric times, and bore entirely Etruscan names. Others were colonized by Etruscans who Etruscanized the name, usually Italic.[79]
+
+The Etruscan system of belief was an immanent polytheism; that is, all visible phenomena were considered to be a manifestation of divine power and that power was subdivided into deities that acted continually on the world of man and could be dissuaded or persuaded in favour of human affairs. How to understand the will of deities, and how to behave, had been revealed to the Etruscans by two initiators, Tages, a childlike figure born from tilled land and immediately gifted with prescience, and Vegoia, a female figure. Their teachings were kept in a series of sacred books. Three layers of deities are evident in the extensive Etruscan art motifs. One appears to be divinities of an indigenous nature: Catha and Usil, the sun; Tivr, the moon; Selvans, a civil god; Turan, the goddess of love; Laran, the god of war; Leinth, the goddess of death; Maris; Thalna; Turms; and the ever-popular Fufluns, whose name is related in some way to the city of Populonia and the populus Romanus, possibly, the god of the people.[81][82]
+
+Ruling over this pantheon of lesser deities were higher ones that seem to reflect the Indo-European system: Tin or Tinia, the sky, Uni his wife (Juno), and Cel, the earth goddess. In addition, some Greek and Roman gods were taken into the Etruscan system: Aritimi (Artemis), Menrva (Minerva), Pacha (Dionysus). The Greek heroes taken from Homer also appear extensively in art motifs.[81][82]
+
+Relatively little is known about the architecture of the ancient Etruscans. They adapted the native Italic styles with influence from the external appearance of Greek architecture. In turn, ancient Roman architecture began with Etruscan styles, and then accepted still further Greek influence. Roman temples show many of the same differences in form to Greek ones that Etruscan temples do, but like the Greeks, use stone, in which they closely copy Greek conventions. The houses of the wealthy were evidently often large and comfortable, but the burial chambers of tombs, often filled with grave-goods, are the nearest approach to them to survive. In the southern Etruscan area, tombs have large rock-cut chambers under a tumulus in large necropoleis, and these, together with some city walls, are the only Etruscan constructions to survive. Etruscan architecture is not generally considered as part of the body of Greco-Roman classical architecture.[83]
+
+Etruscan art was produced by the Etruscan civilization between the 9th and 2nd centuries BC. Particularly strong in this tradition were figurative sculpture in terracotta (particularly lifesize on sarcophagi or temples), wall-painting and metalworking (especially engraved bronze mirrors). Etruscan sculpture in cast bronze was famous and widely exported, but few large examples have survived (the material was too valuable, and recycled later). In contrast to terracotta and bronze, there was apparently little Etruscan sculpture in stone, despite the Etruscans controlling fine sources of marble, including Carrara marble, which seems not to have been exploited until the Romans. Most surviving Etruscan art comes from tombs, including all the fresco wall-paintings, which show scenes of feasting and some narrative mythological subjects.[citation needed]
+
+Bucchero wares in black were the early and native styles of fine Etruscan pottery. There was also a tradition of elaborate Etruscan vase painting, which sprung from its Greek equivalent; the Etruscans were the main export market for Greek vases. Etruscan temples were heavily decorated with colourfully painted terracotta antefixes and other fittings, which survive in large numbers where the wooden superstructure has vanished. Etruscan art was strongly connected to religion; the afterlife was of major importance in Etruscan art.[84]
+
+The Etruscan musical instruments seen in frescoes and bas-reliefs are different types of pipes, such as the plagiaulos (the pipes of Pan or Syrinx), the alabaster pipe and the famous double pipes, accompanied on percussion instruments such as the tintinnabulum, tympanum and crotales, and later by stringed instruments like the lyre and kithara.
+
+Etruscans left around 13,000 inscriptions which have been found so far, only a small minority of which are of significant length. Attested from 700 BC to AD 50, the relation of Etruscan to other languages has been a source of long-running speculation and study. The Etruscans are believed to have spoken a pre–Indo-European language,[85][86][87] and the majority consensus is that Etruscan is related only to other members of what is called the Tyrsenian language family, which in itself is an isolate family, that is, unrelated directly to other known language groups. Since Rix (1998), it is widely accepted that the Tyrsenian family groups Raetic and Lemnian are related to Etruscan.[10]
+
+Etruscan texts, written in a space of seven centuries, use a form of the Greek alphabet due to close contact between the Etruscans and the Greek colonies at Pithecusae and Cumae in the 8th century BC (until it was no longer used, at the beginning of the 1st century AD). Etruscan inscriptions disappeared from Chiusi, Perugia and Arezzo around this time. Only a few fragments survive, religious and especially funeral texts most of which are late (from the 4th century BC). In addition to the original texts that have survived to this day, we have a large number of quotations and allusions from classical authors. In the 1st century BC, Diodorus Siculus wrote that literary culture was one of the great achievements of the Etruscans. Little is known of it and even what is known of their language is due to the repetition of the same few words in the many inscriptions found (by way of the modern epitaphs) contrasted in bilingual or trilingual texts with Latin and Punic. Out of the aforementioned genres, is just one such Volnio (Volnius) cited in classical sources mention.[88] With a few exceptions, such as the Liber Linteus, the only written records in the Etruscan language that remain are inscriptions, mainly funerary. The language is written in the Etruscan alphabet, a script related to the early Euboean Greek alphabet.[89] Many thousand inscriptions in Etruscan are known, mostly epitaphs, and a few very short texts have survived, which are mainly religious. Etruscan imaginative literature is evidenced only in references by later Roman authors, but it is evident from their visual art that the Greek myths were well-known.[90]

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+The Etruscan civilization (/ɪˈtrʌskən/) was a civilization of ancient Italy whose territory covered roughly what is now Tuscany, western Umbria, and northern Lazio,[1][2] as well as parts of what are now the Po Valley, Emilia-Romagna, south-eastern Lombardy, southern Veneto, and Campania.[3]
+
+The earliest evidence of a culture that is identifiably Etruscan dates from about 900 BC. This is the period of the Iron Age Villanovan culture, considered to be the earliest phase of Etruscan civilization,[4][5][6][7][8] which itself developed from the previous late Bronze Age Proto-Villanovan culture in the same region.[9] Etruscan civilization endured until it was assimilated into Roman society. Assimilation began in the late 4th century BC as a result of the Roman–Etruscan Wars;[10] it accelerated with the grant of Roman citizenship in 90 BC, and became complete in 27 BC, when the Etruscans’ territory was incorporated into the newly established Roman Empire.[11]
+
+Etruscan culture was influenced by Ancient Greek culture, beginning around 750 BC (during the last phase of the Villanovan period), when the Greeks, who were at this time in their Archaic Orientalizing period, started founding colonies in southern Italy. Greek influence also occurred in the 4th and 5th centuries BC during Greece’s Classical period.
+
+The territorial extent of Etruscan civilization reached its maximum around 750 BC, during the foundational period of the Roman Kingdom. Its culture flourished in three confederacies of cities: that of Etruria (Tuscany, Latium and Umbria), that of the Po Valley with the eastern Alps, and that of Campania.[12][13] The league in northern Italy is mentioned in Livy.[14][15][16] The reduction in Etruscan territory was gradual, but after 500 BC the political balance of power on the Italian peninsula shifted away from the Etruscans in favor of the rising Roman Republic.[17]
+
+The earliest known examples of Etruscan writing are inscriptions found in southern Etruria that date to around 700 BC.[10][18] The Etruscans developed a system of writing which uses symbols borrowed from Euboean Greek script, but the Etruscan language remains only partly understood, making modern understanding of their society and culture heavily dependent on much later and generally disapproving Roman and Greek sources. In the Etruscan political system, authority resided in its individual small cities, and probably in its prominent individual families. At the height of Etruscan power, elite Etruscan families grew very rich through trade with the Celtic world to the north and the Greeks to the south, and they filled their large family tombs with imported luxuries. Judging from archaeological remains, Archaic Greece had a huge influence on their art and architecture, and Greek mythology was evidently very familiar to them.
+
+The Etruscans called themselves Rasenna, which was shortened to Rasna or Raśna (etymology unknown).[19][20][21]
+
+In Attic Greek, the Etruscans were known as Tyrrhenians (Τυρρηνοί, Turrhēnoi, earlier Τυρσηνοί Tursēnoi), from which the Romans derived the names Tyrrhēnī, Tyrrhēnia (Etruria), and Mare Tyrrhēnum (Tyrrhenian Sea),[22][full citation needed] prompting some to associate them with the Teresh (one of the Sea Peoples named by the Egyptians).
+
+The ancient Romans referred to the Etruscans as the Tuscī or Etruscī (singular Tuscus).[23][24] Their Roman name is the origin of the terms "Toscana", which refers to their heartland, and "Etruria", which can refer to their wider region. The term Tusci is thought by linguists to have been the Umbrian word for “Etruscan,” based an inscription on an ancient bronze tablet from a nearby region.[25] The inscription contains the phrase turskum ... nomen, literally "the Tuscan name". Based on a knowledge of Umbrian grammar, linguists can infer that the base form of the word turksum is *Tursci,[26] which would, through metathesis and a word-initial epenthesis, be likely to lead to the form, E-trus-ci.[27]
+
+As for the original meaning of the root, *Turs-, a widely cited hypothesis is that it, like the word Latin turris, means "tower", and comes from the Greek word for tower: τύρσις.[28] On this hypothesis, the Tusci were called the "people who build towers"[28] or "the tower builders".[29] This proposed etymology is made the more plausible because the Etruscans preferred to build their towns on high precipices reinforced  by walls. Alternatively, Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante have speculated that Etruscan houses may have seemed like towers to the simple Latins.[30] The proposed etymology has a long history, Dionysius of Halicarnassus having observed long ago, "[T]here is no reason that the Greeks should not have called [the Etruscans] by this name, both from their living in towers and from the name of one of their rulers."[31]
+
+Literary and historical texts in the Etruscan language have not survived, and the language itself is only partially understood by modern scholars. As previously noted, this makes modern understanding of their society and culture heavily dependent on much later and generally disapproving Roman and Greek sources. These ancient writers differed in their theories about the origin of the Etruscan people. Some suggested they were Pelasgians who had migrated there from Greece. Others maintained that they were indigenous to central Italy and were not from Greece.
+
+The first Greek author to mention the Etruscans, whom the Ancient Greeks called Tyrrhenians, was the 8th-century BC poet Hesiod, in his work, the Theogony. He merely described them as residing in central Italy alongside the Latins.[32] The 7th-century BC Homeric Hymn to Dionysus[33] referred to them merely as pirates.[34] Unlike later Greek authors, these authors did not suggest that Etruscans had migrated to Italy from the east, and did not associate them with the Pelasgians.
+
+It was only in the 5th century BC, when the Etruscan civilization had been established for several centuries, that Greek writers started associating the name “Tyrrhenians” with the “Pelasgians,” and even then, some did so in a way that suggests they were meant only as generic, descriptive labels for “non-Greek” and “indigenous ancestors of Greeks,” respectively.[35]
+
+The 5th-century BC historians Thucydides[36] and Herodotus,[37] and the 1st-century BC historian Strabo[38][full citation needed], did seem to suggest that the Tyrrhenians were originally Pelasgians who migrated to Italy from Lydia by way of the Greek island of Lemnos. They all described Lemnos as having been settled by Pelasgians, whom Thucydides identified as "belonging to the Tyrrhenians" (τὸ δὲ πλεῖστον Πελασγικόν, τῶν καὶ Λῆμνόν ποτε καὶ Ἀθήνας Τυρσηνῶν). As Strabo and Herodotus told it,[39] the migration to Lemnos was led by Tyrrhenus / Tyrsenos, the son of Atys (who was king of Lydia). Strabo[38] added that the Pelasgians of Lemnos and Imbros then followed Tyrrhenus to the Italian Peninsula. And, according to the logographer Hellanicus of Lesbos, there was a Pelasgian migration from Thessaly in Greece to the Italian peninsula, as part of which the Pelasgians colonized the area he called Tyrrhenia, and they then came to be called Tyrrhenians.[40]
+
+There is some evidence suggesting a link between the island of Lemnos and the Tyrrhenians. The Lemnos Stele bears inscriptions in a language with strong structural resemblances to the language of the Etruscans.[41] The discovery of these inscriptions in modern times has led to the suggestion of a "Tyrrhenian language group" comprising Etruscan, Lemnian, and the Raetic spoken in the Alps.
+
+However, the 1st-century BC historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek living in Rome, dismissed many of the ancient theories of other Greek historians and postulated that the Etruscans were indigenous people who had always lived in Etruria and were different from both the Pelasgians and the Lydians.[42] Dionysius noted that the 5th-century historian Xanthus of Lydia, who was originally from Sardis and was regarded as an important source and authority for the history of Lydia, never suggested a Lydian origin of the Etruscans and never named Tyrrhenus as a ruler of the Lydians.[42]
+
+For this reason, therefore, I am persuaded that the Pelasgians are a different people from the Tyrrhenians. And I do not believe, either, that the Tyrrhenians were a colony of the Lydians; for they do not use the same language as the latter, nor can it be alleged that, though they no longer speak a similar tongue, they still retain some other indications of their mother country. For they neither worship the same gods as the Lydians nor make use of similar laws or institutions, but in these very respects they differ more from the Lydians than from the Pelasgians. Indeed, those probably come nearest to the truth who declare that the nation migrated from nowhere else, but was native to the country, since it is found to be a very ancient nation and to agree with no other either in its language or in its manner of living.
+
+The credibility of Dionysius of Halicarnassus is arguably bolstered by the fact that he was the first ancient writer to report the endonym of the Etruscans: Rasenna.
+
+The Romans, however, give them other names: from the country they once inhabited, named Etruria, they call them Etruscans, and from their knowledge of the ceremonies relating to divine worship, in which they excel others, they now call them, rather inaccurately, Tusci, but formerly, with the same accuracy as the Greeks, they called them Thyoscoï [an earlier form of Tusci]. Their own name for themselves, however, is the same as that of one of their leaders, Rasenna.
+
+Similarly, the 1st-century BC historian Livy, in his Ab Urbe Condita Libri, said that the Rhaetians were Etruscans who had been driven into the mountains by the invading Gauls; and he asserted that the inhabitants of Raetia were of Etruscan origin.[43]
+
+The Alpine tribes have also, no doubt, the same origin (of the Etruscans), especially the Raetians; who have been rendered so savage by the very nature of the country as to retain nothing of their ancient character save the sound of their speech, and even that is corrupted.
+
+First-century historian Pliny the Elder also put the Etruscans in the context of the Rhaetian people to the north, and wrote in his Natural History (AD 79):[44]
+
+Adjoining these the (Alpine) Noricans are the Raeti and Vindelici. All are divided into a number of states. The Raeti are believed to be people of Tuscan race driven out by the Gauls, their leader was named Raetus.
+
+The question of Etruscan origins has long been a subject of interest and debate among historians. In modern times, all the evidence gathered so far by etruscologists points to an indigenous origin of the Etruscans.[45][46] Archaeologically there is no evidence for a migration of the Lydians or the Pelasgians into Etruria.[45][46] Modern etruscologists and archeologists, such as Massimo Pallottino (1947), have shown that early historians’ assumptions and assertions on the subject were groundless.[47] In 2000, the etruscologist Dominique Briquel explained in detail why he believes that ancient Greek historians’ writings on Etruscan origins should not even count as historical documents.[48] He argues that the ancient story of the Etruscans’ 'Lydian origins' was a deliberate,  politically motivated fabrication, and that ancient Greeks inferred a connection between the Tyrrhenians and the Pelasgians solely on the  basis of certain Greek and local traditions and on the mere fact that there had been trade between the Etruscans and Greeks.[49][50] He noted that, even if these stories include historical facts suggesting contact, such contact is more plausibly traceable to cultural exchange than to migration.[51]
+
+Several archaeologists who have analyzed Bronze Age and Iron Age remains that were excavated in the territory of historical Etruria have pointed out that no evidence has been found, related either to material culture or to social practices, that can support a migration theory.[52] The most marked and radical change that has been archaeologically attested in the area is the adoption, starting in about the 12th century BC, of the funeral rite of incineration in terracotta urns, which is a Continental European practice, derived from the Urnfield culture; there is nothing about it that suggests an ethnic contribution from Asia Minor or the Near East.[52]
+
+A 2012 survey of the previous 30 years’ archaeological findings, based on excavations of the major Etruscan cities, showed a continuity of culture from the last phase of the Bronze Age (11th–10th century BC) to the Iron Age (9th–8th century BC). This is evidence that the Etruscan civilization, which emerged around 900 BC, was built by people whose ancestors had inhabited that region for at least the previous 200 years.[53] Based on this cultural continuity, there is now a consensus among archeologists that Proto-Etruscan culture developed, during the last phase of the Bronze Age, from the indigenous Proto-Villanovan culture, and that the subsequent Iron Age Villanovan culture is most accurately described as an  early phase of the Etruscan civilization.[9] It is possible that there were contacts between northern-central Italy and the Mycenaean world at the end of the Bronze Age. However contacts between the inhabitants of Etruria and inhabitants of Greece, Aegean Sea Islands, Asia Minor, and the Near East are attested only centuries later, when Etruscan civilization was already flourishing and Etruscan ethnogenesis was well established. The first of these attested contacts relate to the Greek colonies in Southern Italy and the consequent orientalizing period.[54]
+
+A mtDNA study in 2004 stated that the Etruscans had no significant heterogeneity, and that all mitochondrial lineages observed among the Etruscan samples appear typically European or West Asian, but only a few haplotypes were shared with modern populations. Allele sharing between the Etruscans and modern populations is highest among Germans (seven haplotypes in common), the Cornish from South West England (five haplotypes in common), the Turks (four haplotypes in common), and the Tuscans (two haplotypes in common).[55]
+
+A mitochondrial DNA study (2013) also concluded that the Etruscans were an indigenous population, showing that Etruscans' mtDNA appear to fall very close to a Neolithic population from Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Hungary) and to other Tuscan populations, strongly suggesting that the Etruscan civilization developed locally from the Villanovan culture, as already supported by archaeological evidence and anthropological research,[9][56] and that genetic links between Tuscany and western Anatolia date back to at least 5,000 years ago during the Neolithic and the "most likely separation time between Tuscany and Western Anatolia falls around 7,600 years ago", at the time of the migrations of Early European Farmers (EEF) from Anatolia to Europe in the early Neolithic. The ancient Etruscan samples had mitochondrial DNA haplogroups (mtDNA) JT (subclades of J and T) and U5, with a minority of mtDNA H1b.[57][58] According to British archeologist Phil Perkins, "there are indications that the evidence of DNA can support the theory that Etruscan people are autochthonous in central Italy".[59][60]
+
+A 2019 genetic study  published in the journal Science analyzed the remains of eleven Iron Age individuals from the areas around Rome, of which four were Etruscan individuals, one buried in Veio Grotta Gramiccia from the Villanovan era (900-800 BC) and three buried in La Mattonara Necropolis near Civitavecchia from the Orientalizing period (700-600 BC). The study concluded that Etruscans (900–600 BC) and the Latins (900–500 BC) from Latium vetus were genetically similar.[61], genetic differences between the examined Etruscans and Latins were found to be insignificant.[62] The Etruscan individuals and contemporary Latins were distinguished from preceding populations of Italy by the presence of ca. 30-40% steppe ancestry.[63] Their DNA was a mixture of two-thirds Copper Age ancestry (EEF + WHG; Etruscans ~66–72%, Latins ~62–75%) and one-third Steppe-related ancestry (Etruscans ~27–33%, Latins ~24–37%).[61] The only sample of Y-DNA extracted belonged to haplogroup J-M12 (J2b-L283), found in an individual dated 700-600 BC, and carried exactly the M314 derived allele also found in a Middle Bronze Age individual from Croatia (1631-1531 calBCE). While the four samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to haplogroups U5a1, H, T2b32, K1a4.[64] Therefore, Etruscans had also Steppe-related ancestry despite speaking a pre-Indo-European language.
+
+The Etruscan civilization begins with the Villanovan culture, regarded as the oldest phase.[4][5][6][7][8] The Etruscans themselves dated the origin of the Etruscan nation to a date corresponding to the 11th or 10th century BC.[5][65] The Villanovan culture emerges with the phenomenon of regionalization from the late Bronze Age culture called "Proto-Villanovan", part of the central European Urnfield culture system. In the last Villanovan phase, called the recent phase (about 770–730 BC), the Etruscans established relations of a certain consistency with the first Greek immigrants in southern Italy (in Pithecusa and then in Cuma), so much so as to initially absorb techniques and figurative models and soon more properly cultural models, with the introduction, for example, of writing, of a new way of banqueting, of a heroic funerary ideology, that is, a new aristocratic way of life, such as to profoundly change the physiognomy of Etruscan society.[65] Thus, thanks to the growing number of contacts with the Greeks, the Etruscans entered what is called the Orientalizing phase. In this phase, there was a heavy influence in Greece, most of Italy and some areas of Spain, from the most advanced areas of the eastern Mediterranean and the ancient Near East.[66] Also directly Phoenician, or otherwise Near Eastern, craftsmen, merchants and artists contributed to the spread in southern Europe of Near Eastern cultural and artistic motifs. The last three phases of Etruscan civilization are called, respectively, Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic, which roughly correspond to the homonymous phases of the ancient Greek civilization.
+
+Etruscan expansion was focused both to the north beyond the Apennine Mountains and into Campania. Some small towns in the sixth century BC disappeared during this time, ostensibly subsumed by greater, more powerful neighbours. However, it is certain that the political structure of the Etruscan culture was similar to, albeit more aristocratic than, Magna Graecia in the south. The mining and commerce of metal, especially copper and iron, led to an enrichment of the Etruscans and to the expansion of their influence in the Italian peninsula and the western Mediterranean Sea. Here, their interests collided with those of the Greeks, especially in the sixth century BC, when Phocaeans of Italy founded colonies along the coast of Sardinia, Spain and Corsica. This led the Etruscans to ally themselves with Carthage, whose interests also collided with the Greeks.[68][69]
+
+Around 540 BC, the Battle of Alalia led to a new distribution of power in the western Mediterranean. Though the battle had no clear winner, Carthage managed to expand its sphere of influence at the expense of the Greeks, and Etruria saw itself relegated to the northern Tyrrhenian Sea with full ownership of Corsica. From the first half of the 5th century BC, the new political situation meant the beginning of the Etruscan decline after losing their southern provinces. In 480 BC, Etruria's ally Carthage was defeated by a coalition of Magna Graecia cities led by Syracuse, Sicily. A few years later, in 474 BC, Syracuse's tyrant Hiero defeated the Etruscans at the Battle of Cumae. Etruria's influence over the cities of Latium and Campania weakened, and the area was taken over by Romans and Samnites.
+
+In the 4th century BC, Etruria saw a Gallic invasion end its influence over the Po Valley and the Adriatic coast. Meanwhile, Rome had started annexing Etruscan cities. This led to the loss of the northern Etruscan provinces. During the Roman–Etruscan Wars, Etruria was conquered by Rome in the 3rd century BC.[68][69]
+
+According to legend,[70] there was a period between 600 BC and 500 BC in which an alliance was formed among twelve Etruscan settlements, known today as the Etruscan League, Etruscan Federation, or Dodecapolis (in Greek Δωδεκάπολις). According to a legend the Etruscan League of twelve cities was founded by Tarchon and his brother Tyrrhenus. Tarchon lent his name to the city of Tarchna, or Tarquinnii, as it was known by the Romans. Tyrrhenus gave his name to the Tyrrhenians, the alternative name for the Etruscans. Although there is no consensus on which cities were in the league, the following list may be close to the mark: Arretium, Caisra, Clevsin, Curtun, Perusna, Pupluna, Veii, Tarchna, Vetluna, Volterra, Velzna, and Velch. Some modern authors include Rusellae.[71] The league was mostly an economic and religious league, or a loose confederation, similar to the Greek states. During the later imperial times, when Etruria was just one of many regions controlled by Rome, the number of cities in the league increased by three. This is noted on many later grave stones from the 2nd century BC onwards. According to Livy, the twelve city-states met once a year at the Fanum Voltumnae at Volsinii, where a leader was chosen to represent the league.[72]
+
+There were two other Etruscan leagues ("Lega dei popoli"): that of Campania, the main city of which was Capua, and the Po Valley city-states in northern Italy, which included Bologna, Spina and Adria.
+
+Those who subscribe to a Latin foundation of Rome followed by an Etruscan invasion typically speak of an Etruscan "influence" on Roman culture – that is, cultural objects which were adopted by Rome from neighbouring Etruria. The prevailing view is that Rome was founded by Latins who later merged with Etruscans. In this interpretation, Etruscan cultural objects are considered influences rather than part of a heritage.[73] Rome was probably a small settlement until the arrival of the Etruscans, who constructed the first elements of its urban infrastructure such as the drainage system.[74][75]
+
+The main criterion for deciding whether an object originated at Rome and traveled by influence to the Etruscans, or descended to the Romans from the Etruscans, is date. Many, if not most, of the Etruscan cities were older than Rome. If one finds that a given feature was there first, it cannot have originated at Rome. A second criterion is the opinion of the ancient sources. These would indicate that certain institutions and customs came directly from the Etruscans. Rome is located on the edge of what was Etruscan territory. When Etruscan settlements turned up south of the border, it was presumed that the Etruscans spread there after the foundation of Rome, but the settlements are now known to have preceded Rome.
+
+Etruscan settlements were frequently built on hills – the steeper the better – and surrounded by thick walls. According to Roman mythology, when Romulus and Remus founded Rome, they did so on the Palatine Hill according to Etruscan ritual; that is, they began with a pomerium or sacred ditch. Then, they proceeded to the walls. Romulus was required to kill Remus when the latter jumped over the wall, breaking its magic spell (see also under Pons Sublicius). The name of Rome is attested in Etruscan in the form Ruma-χ meaning 'Roman', a form that mirrors other attested ethnonyms in that language with the same suffix -χ: Velzna-χ '(someone) from Volsinii' and Sveama-χ '(someone) from Sovana'. This in itself, however, is not enough to prove Etruscan origin conclusively. If Tiberius is from θefarie, then Ruma would have been placed on the Thefar (Tiber) river. A heavily discussed topic among scholars is who was the founding population of Rome. In 390 BC, the city of Rome was attacked by the Gauls, and as a result may have lost many – though not all – of its earlier records. Certainly, the history of Rome before that date is not as secure as it later becomes, but enough material remains to give a good picture of the development of the city and its institutions.[citation needed]
+
+Later history relates that some Etruscans lived in the Vicus Tuscus,[76] the "Etruscan quarter", and that there was an Etruscan line of kings (albeit ones descended from a Greek, Demaratus of Corinth) that succeeded kings of Latin and Sabine origin. Etruscophile historians would argue that this, together with evidence for institutions, religious elements and other cultural elements, proves that Rome was founded by Italics. The true picture is rather more complicated, not least because the Etruscan cities were separate entities which never came together to form a single Etruscan state. Furthermore, there were strong Latin and Italic elements to Roman culture, and later Romans proudly celebrated these multiple, 'multicultural' influences on the city.
+
+Under Romulus and Numa Pompilius, the people were said to have been divided into thirty curiae and three tribes. Few Etruscan words entered Latin, but the names of at least two of the tribes – Ramnes and Luceres – seem to be Etruscan. The last kings may have borne the Etruscan title lucumo, while the regalia were traditionally considered of Etruscan origin – the golden crown, the sceptre, the toga palmata (a special robe), the sella curulis (curule chair), and above all the primary symbol of state power: The fasces. The latter was a bundle of whipping rods surrounding a double-bladed axe, carried by the king's lictors. An example of the fasces are the remains of bronze rods and the axe from a tomb in Etruscan Vetulonia. This allowed archaeologists to identify the depiction of a fasces on the grave stele of Avele Feluske, who is shown as a warrior wielding the fasces. The most telling Etruscan feature is the word populus, which appears as an Etruscan deity, Fufluns. Populus seems to mean the people assembled in a military body, rather than the general populace.[citation needed]
+
+The historical Etruscans had achieved a state system of society, with remnants of the chiefdom and tribal forms. In this, they were different from the surrounding Italics, who had chiefs and tribes.[citation needed] Rome was in a sense the first Italic state, but it began as an Etruscan one. It is believed that the Etruscan government style changed from total monarchy to oligarchic republic (as the Roman Republic) in the 6th century BC, although it is important to note this did not happen to all the city-states.[citation needed]
+
+The government was viewed as being a central authority, ruling over all tribal and clan organizations. It retained the power of life and death; in fact, the gorgon, an ancient symbol of that power, appears as a motif in Etruscan decoration. The adherents to this state power were united by a common religion. Political unity in Etruscan society was the city-state, which was probably the referent of methlum, "district". Etruscan texts name quite a number of magistrates, without much of a hint as to their function: The camthi, the parnich, the purth, the tamera, the macstrev, and so on. The people were the mech. The chief ruler of a methlum was perhaps a zilach.[citation needed]
+
+The princely tombs were not of individuals. The inscription evidence shows that families were interred there over long periods, marking the growth of the aristocratic family as a fixed institution, parallel to the gens at Rome and perhaps even its model. The Etruscans could have used any model of the eastern Mediterranean. That the growth of this class is related to the new acquisition of wealth through trade is unquestioned. The wealthiest cities were located near the coast. At the centre of the society was the married couple, tusurthir. The Etruscans were a monogamous society that emphasized pairing.
+
+Similarly, the behaviour of some wealthy women is not uniquely Etruscan. The apparent promiscuous revelry has a spiritual explanation. Swaddling and Bonfante (among others) explain that depictions of the nude embrace, or symplegma, "had the power to ward off evil", as did baring the breast, which was adopted by western culture as an apotropaic device, appearing finally on the figureheads of sailing ships as a nude female upper torso. It is also possible that Greek and Roman attitudes to the Etruscans were based on a misunderstanding of the place of women within their society. In both Greece and the Earliest Republican Rome, respectable women were confined to the house and mixed-sex socialising did not occur. Thus, the freedom of women within Etruscan society could have been misunderstood as implying their sexual availability.[77] It is worth noting that a number of Etruscan tombs carry funerary inscriptions in the form "X son of (father) and (mother)", indicating the importance of the mother's side of the family.[77]
+
+The Etruscans, like the contemporary cultures of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, had a significant military tradition. In addition to marking the rank and power of certain individuals, warfare was a considerable economic advantage to Etruscan civilization. Like many ancient societies, the Etruscans conducted campaigns during summer months, raiding neighboring areas, attempting to gain territory and combating piracy as a means of acquiring valuable resources, such as land, prestige, goods, and slaves. It is likely that individuals taken in battle would be ransomed back to their families and clans at high cost. Prisoners could also potentially be sacrificed on tombs as an honor to fallen leaders of Etruscan society, not unlike the sacrifices made by Achilles for Patrocles.[78][79][80]
+
+The range of Etruscan civilization is marked by its cities. They were entirely assimilated by Italic, Celtic, or Roman ethnic groups, but the names survive from inscriptions and their ruins are of aesthetic and historic interest in most of the cities of central Italy. Etruscan cities flourished over most of Italy during the Roman Iron Age, marking the farthest extent of Etruscan civilization. They were gradually assimilated first by Italics in the south, then by Celts in the north and finally in Etruria itself by the growing Roman Republic.[78]
+
+That many Roman cities were formerly Etruscan was well known to all the Roman authors. Some cities were founded by Etruscans in prehistoric times, and bore entirely Etruscan names. Others were colonized by Etruscans who Etruscanized the name, usually Italic.[79]
+
+The Etruscan system of belief was an immanent polytheism; that is, all visible phenomena were considered to be a manifestation of divine power and that power was subdivided into deities that acted continually on the world of man and could be dissuaded or persuaded in favour of human affairs. How to understand the will of deities, and how to behave, had been revealed to the Etruscans by two initiators, Tages, a childlike figure born from tilled land and immediately gifted with prescience, and Vegoia, a female figure. Their teachings were kept in a series of sacred books. Three layers of deities are evident in the extensive Etruscan art motifs. One appears to be divinities of an indigenous nature: Catha and Usil, the sun; Tivr, the moon; Selvans, a civil god; Turan, the goddess of love; Laran, the god of war; Leinth, the goddess of death; Maris; Thalna; Turms; and the ever-popular Fufluns, whose name is related in some way to the city of Populonia and the populus Romanus, possibly, the god of the people.[81][82]
+
+Ruling over this pantheon of lesser deities were higher ones that seem to reflect the Indo-European system: Tin or Tinia, the sky, Uni his wife (Juno), and Cel, the earth goddess. In addition, some Greek and Roman gods were taken into the Etruscan system: Aritimi (Artemis), Menrva (Minerva), Pacha (Dionysus). The Greek heroes taken from Homer also appear extensively in art motifs.[81][82]
+
+Relatively little is known about the architecture of the ancient Etruscans. They adapted the native Italic styles with influence from the external appearance of Greek architecture. In turn, ancient Roman architecture began with Etruscan styles, and then accepted still further Greek influence. Roman temples show many of the same differences in form to Greek ones that Etruscan temples do, but like the Greeks, use stone, in which they closely copy Greek conventions. The houses of the wealthy were evidently often large and comfortable, but the burial chambers of tombs, often filled with grave-goods, are the nearest approach to them to survive. In the southern Etruscan area, tombs have large rock-cut chambers under a tumulus in large necropoleis, and these, together with some city walls, are the only Etruscan constructions to survive. Etruscan architecture is not generally considered as part of the body of Greco-Roman classical architecture.[83]
+
+Etruscan art was produced by the Etruscan civilization between the 9th and 2nd centuries BC. Particularly strong in this tradition were figurative sculpture in terracotta (particularly lifesize on sarcophagi or temples), wall-painting and metalworking (especially engraved bronze mirrors). Etruscan sculpture in cast bronze was famous and widely exported, but few large examples have survived (the material was too valuable, and recycled later). In contrast to terracotta and bronze, there was apparently little Etruscan sculpture in stone, despite the Etruscans controlling fine sources of marble, including Carrara marble, which seems not to have been exploited until the Romans. Most surviving Etruscan art comes from tombs, including all the fresco wall-paintings, which show scenes of feasting and some narrative mythological subjects.[citation needed]
+
+Bucchero wares in black were the early and native styles of fine Etruscan pottery. There was also a tradition of elaborate Etruscan vase painting, which sprung from its Greek equivalent; the Etruscans were the main export market for Greek vases. Etruscan temples were heavily decorated with colourfully painted terracotta antefixes and other fittings, which survive in large numbers where the wooden superstructure has vanished. Etruscan art was strongly connected to religion; the afterlife was of major importance in Etruscan art.[84]
+
+The Etruscan musical instruments seen in frescoes and bas-reliefs are different types of pipes, such as the plagiaulos (the pipes of Pan or Syrinx), the alabaster pipe and the famous double pipes, accompanied on percussion instruments such as the tintinnabulum, tympanum and crotales, and later by stringed instruments like the lyre and kithara.
+
+Etruscans left around 13,000 inscriptions which have been found so far, only a small minority of which are of significant length. Attested from 700 BC to AD 50, the relation of Etruscan to other languages has been a source of long-running speculation and study. The Etruscans are believed to have spoken a pre–Indo-European language,[85][86][87] and the majority consensus is that Etruscan is related only to other members of what is called the Tyrsenian language family, which in itself is an isolate family, that is, unrelated directly to other known language groups. Since Rix (1998), it is widely accepted that the Tyrsenian family groups Raetic and Lemnian are related to Etruscan.[10]
+
+Etruscan texts, written in a space of seven centuries, use a form of the Greek alphabet due to close contact between the Etruscans and the Greek colonies at Pithecusae and Cumae in the 8th century BC (until it was no longer used, at the beginning of the 1st century AD). Etruscan inscriptions disappeared from Chiusi, Perugia and Arezzo around this time. Only a few fragments survive, religious and especially funeral texts most of which are late (from the 4th century BC). In addition to the original texts that have survived to this day, we have a large number of quotations and allusions from classical authors. In the 1st century BC, Diodorus Siculus wrote that literary culture was one of the great achievements of the Etruscans. Little is known of it and even what is known of their language is due to the repetition of the same few words in the many inscriptions found (by way of the modern epitaphs) contrasted in bilingual or trilingual texts with Latin and Punic. Out of the aforementioned genres, is just one such Volnio (Volnius) cited in classical sources mention.[88] With a few exceptions, such as the Liber Linteus, the only written records in the Etruscan language that remain are inscriptions, mainly funerary. The language is written in the Etruscan alphabet, a script related to the early Euboean Greek alphabet.[89] Many thousand inscriptions in Etruscan are known, mostly epitaphs, and a few very short texts have survived, which are mainly religious. Etruscan imaginative literature is evidenced only in references by later Roman authors, but it is evident from their visual art that the Greek myths were well-known.[90]

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+The Etruscan civilization (/ɪˈtrʌskən/) was a civilization of ancient Italy whose territory covered roughly what is now Tuscany, western Umbria, and northern Lazio,[1][2] as well as parts of what are now the Po Valley, Emilia-Romagna, south-eastern Lombardy, southern Veneto, and Campania.[3]
+
+The earliest evidence of a culture that is identifiably Etruscan dates from about 900 BC. This is the period of the Iron Age Villanovan culture, considered to be the earliest phase of Etruscan civilization,[4][5][6][7][8] which itself developed from the previous late Bronze Age Proto-Villanovan culture in the same region.[9] Etruscan civilization endured until it was assimilated into Roman society. Assimilation began in the late 4th century BC as a result of the Roman–Etruscan Wars;[10] it accelerated with the grant of Roman citizenship in 90 BC, and became complete in 27 BC, when the Etruscans’ territory was incorporated into the newly established Roman Empire.[11]
+
+Etruscan culture was influenced by Ancient Greek culture, beginning around 750 BC (during the last phase of the Villanovan period), when the Greeks, who were at this time in their Archaic Orientalizing period, started founding colonies in southern Italy. Greek influence also occurred in the 4th and 5th centuries BC during Greece’s Classical period.
+
+The territorial extent of Etruscan civilization reached its maximum around 750 BC, during the foundational period of the Roman Kingdom. Its culture flourished in three confederacies of cities: that of Etruria (Tuscany, Latium and Umbria), that of the Po Valley with the eastern Alps, and that of Campania.[12][13] The league in northern Italy is mentioned in Livy.[14][15][16] The reduction in Etruscan territory was gradual, but after 500 BC the political balance of power on the Italian peninsula shifted away from the Etruscans in favor of the rising Roman Republic.[17]
+
+The earliest known examples of Etruscan writing are inscriptions found in southern Etruria that date to around 700 BC.[10][18] The Etruscans developed a system of writing which uses symbols borrowed from Euboean Greek script, but the Etruscan language remains only partly understood, making modern understanding of their society and culture heavily dependent on much later and generally disapproving Roman and Greek sources. In the Etruscan political system, authority resided in its individual small cities, and probably in its prominent individual families. At the height of Etruscan power, elite Etruscan families grew very rich through trade with the Celtic world to the north and the Greeks to the south, and they filled their large family tombs with imported luxuries. Judging from archaeological remains, Archaic Greece had a huge influence on their art and architecture, and Greek mythology was evidently very familiar to them.
+
+The Etruscans called themselves Rasenna, which was shortened to Rasna or Raśna (etymology unknown).[19][20][21]
+
+In Attic Greek, the Etruscans were known as Tyrrhenians (Τυρρηνοί, Turrhēnoi, earlier Τυρσηνοί Tursēnoi), from which the Romans derived the names Tyrrhēnī, Tyrrhēnia (Etruria), and Mare Tyrrhēnum (Tyrrhenian Sea),[22][full citation needed] prompting some to associate them with the Teresh (one of the Sea Peoples named by the Egyptians).
+
+The ancient Romans referred to the Etruscans as the Tuscī or Etruscī (singular Tuscus).[23][24] Their Roman name is the origin of the terms "Toscana", which refers to their heartland, and "Etruria", which can refer to their wider region. The term Tusci is thought by linguists to have been the Umbrian word for “Etruscan,” based an inscription on an ancient bronze tablet from a nearby region.[25] The inscription contains the phrase turskum ... nomen, literally "the Tuscan name". Based on a knowledge of Umbrian grammar, linguists can infer that the base form of the word turksum is *Tursci,[26] which would, through metathesis and a word-initial epenthesis, be likely to lead to the form, E-trus-ci.[27]
+
+As for the original meaning of the root, *Turs-, a widely cited hypothesis is that it, like the word Latin turris, means "tower", and comes from the Greek word for tower: τύρσις.[28] On this hypothesis, the Tusci were called the "people who build towers"[28] or "the tower builders".[29] This proposed etymology is made the more plausible because the Etruscans preferred to build their towns on high precipices reinforced  by walls. Alternatively, Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante have speculated that Etruscan houses may have seemed like towers to the simple Latins.[30] The proposed etymology has a long history, Dionysius of Halicarnassus having observed long ago, "[T]here is no reason that the Greeks should not have called [the Etruscans] by this name, both from their living in towers and from the name of one of their rulers."[31]
+
+Literary and historical texts in the Etruscan language have not survived, and the language itself is only partially understood by modern scholars. As previously noted, this makes modern understanding of their society and culture heavily dependent on much later and generally disapproving Roman and Greek sources. These ancient writers differed in their theories about the origin of the Etruscan people. Some suggested they were Pelasgians who had migrated there from Greece. Others maintained that they were indigenous to central Italy and were not from Greece.
+
+The first Greek author to mention the Etruscans, whom the Ancient Greeks called Tyrrhenians, was the 8th-century BC poet Hesiod, in his work, the Theogony. He merely described them as residing in central Italy alongside the Latins.[32] The 7th-century BC Homeric Hymn to Dionysus[33] referred to them merely as pirates.[34] Unlike later Greek authors, these authors did not suggest that Etruscans had migrated to Italy from the east, and did not associate them with the Pelasgians.
+
+It was only in the 5th century BC, when the Etruscan civilization had been established for several centuries, that Greek writers started associating the name “Tyrrhenians” with the “Pelasgians,” and even then, some did so in a way that suggests they were meant only as generic, descriptive labels for “non-Greek” and “indigenous ancestors of Greeks,” respectively.[35]
+
+The 5th-century BC historians Thucydides[36] and Herodotus,[37] and the 1st-century BC historian Strabo[38][full citation needed], did seem to suggest that the Tyrrhenians were originally Pelasgians who migrated to Italy from Lydia by way of the Greek island of Lemnos. They all described Lemnos as having been settled by Pelasgians, whom Thucydides identified as "belonging to the Tyrrhenians" (τὸ δὲ πλεῖστον Πελασγικόν, τῶν καὶ Λῆμνόν ποτε καὶ Ἀθήνας Τυρσηνῶν). As Strabo and Herodotus told it,[39] the migration to Lemnos was led by Tyrrhenus / Tyrsenos, the son of Atys (who was king of Lydia). Strabo[38] added that the Pelasgians of Lemnos and Imbros then followed Tyrrhenus to the Italian Peninsula. And, according to the logographer Hellanicus of Lesbos, there was a Pelasgian migration from Thessaly in Greece to the Italian peninsula, as part of which the Pelasgians colonized the area he called Tyrrhenia, and they then came to be called Tyrrhenians.[40]
+
+There is some evidence suggesting a link between the island of Lemnos and the Tyrrhenians. The Lemnos Stele bears inscriptions in a language with strong structural resemblances to the language of the Etruscans.[41] The discovery of these inscriptions in modern times has led to the suggestion of a "Tyrrhenian language group" comprising Etruscan, Lemnian, and the Raetic spoken in the Alps.
+
+However, the 1st-century BC historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek living in Rome, dismissed many of the ancient theories of other Greek historians and postulated that the Etruscans were indigenous people who had always lived in Etruria and were different from both the Pelasgians and the Lydians.[42] Dionysius noted that the 5th-century historian Xanthus of Lydia, who was originally from Sardis and was regarded as an important source and authority for the history of Lydia, never suggested a Lydian origin of the Etruscans and never named Tyrrhenus as a ruler of the Lydians.[42]
+
+For this reason, therefore, I am persuaded that the Pelasgians are a different people from the Tyrrhenians. And I do not believe, either, that the Tyrrhenians were a colony of the Lydians; for they do not use the same language as the latter, nor can it be alleged that, though they no longer speak a similar tongue, they still retain some other indications of their mother country. For they neither worship the same gods as the Lydians nor make use of similar laws or institutions, but in these very respects they differ more from the Lydians than from the Pelasgians. Indeed, those probably come nearest to the truth who declare that the nation migrated from nowhere else, but was native to the country, since it is found to be a very ancient nation and to agree with no other either in its language or in its manner of living.
+
+The credibility of Dionysius of Halicarnassus is arguably bolstered by the fact that he was the first ancient writer to report the endonym of the Etruscans: Rasenna.
+
+The Romans, however, give them other names: from the country they once inhabited, named Etruria, they call them Etruscans, and from their knowledge of the ceremonies relating to divine worship, in which they excel others, they now call them, rather inaccurately, Tusci, but formerly, with the same accuracy as the Greeks, they called them Thyoscoï [an earlier form of Tusci]. Their own name for themselves, however, is the same as that of one of their leaders, Rasenna.
+
+Similarly, the 1st-century BC historian Livy, in his Ab Urbe Condita Libri, said that the Rhaetians were Etruscans who had been driven into the mountains by the invading Gauls; and he asserted that the inhabitants of Raetia were of Etruscan origin.[43]
+
+The Alpine tribes have also, no doubt, the same origin (of the Etruscans), especially the Raetians; who have been rendered so savage by the very nature of the country as to retain nothing of their ancient character save the sound of their speech, and even that is corrupted.
+
+First-century historian Pliny the Elder also put the Etruscans in the context of the Rhaetian people to the north, and wrote in his Natural History (AD 79):[44]
+
+Adjoining these the (Alpine) Noricans are the Raeti and Vindelici. All are divided into a number of states. The Raeti are believed to be people of Tuscan race driven out by the Gauls, their leader was named Raetus.
+
+The question of Etruscan origins has long been a subject of interest and debate among historians. In modern times, all the evidence gathered so far by etruscologists points to an indigenous origin of the Etruscans.[45][46] Archaeologically there is no evidence for a migration of the Lydians or the Pelasgians into Etruria.[45][46] Modern etruscologists and archeologists, such as Massimo Pallottino (1947), have shown that early historians’ assumptions and assertions on the subject were groundless.[47] In 2000, the etruscologist Dominique Briquel explained in detail why he believes that ancient Greek historians’ writings on Etruscan origins should not even count as historical documents.[48] He argues that the ancient story of the Etruscans’ 'Lydian origins' was a deliberate,  politically motivated fabrication, and that ancient Greeks inferred a connection between the Tyrrhenians and the Pelasgians solely on the  basis of certain Greek and local traditions and on the mere fact that there had been trade between the Etruscans and Greeks.[49][50] He noted that, even if these stories include historical facts suggesting contact, such contact is more plausibly traceable to cultural exchange than to migration.[51]
+
+Several archaeologists who have analyzed Bronze Age and Iron Age remains that were excavated in the territory of historical Etruria have pointed out that no evidence has been found, related either to material culture or to social practices, that can support a migration theory.[52] The most marked and radical change that has been archaeologically attested in the area is the adoption, starting in about the 12th century BC, of the funeral rite of incineration in terracotta urns, which is a Continental European practice, derived from the Urnfield culture; there is nothing about it that suggests an ethnic contribution from Asia Minor or the Near East.[52]
+
+A 2012 survey of the previous 30 years’ archaeological findings, based on excavations of the major Etruscan cities, showed a continuity of culture from the last phase of the Bronze Age (11th–10th century BC) to the Iron Age (9th–8th century BC). This is evidence that the Etruscan civilization, which emerged around 900 BC, was built by people whose ancestors had inhabited that region for at least the previous 200 years.[53] Based on this cultural continuity, there is now a consensus among archeologists that Proto-Etruscan culture developed, during the last phase of the Bronze Age, from the indigenous Proto-Villanovan culture, and that the subsequent Iron Age Villanovan culture is most accurately described as an  early phase of the Etruscan civilization.[9] It is possible that there were contacts between northern-central Italy and the Mycenaean world at the end of the Bronze Age. However contacts between the inhabitants of Etruria and inhabitants of Greece, Aegean Sea Islands, Asia Minor, and the Near East are attested only centuries later, when Etruscan civilization was already flourishing and Etruscan ethnogenesis was well established. The first of these attested contacts relate to the Greek colonies in Southern Italy and the consequent orientalizing period.[54]
+
+A mtDNA study in 2004 stated that the Etruscans had no significant heterogeneity, and that all mitochondrial lineages observed among the Etruscan samples appear typically European or West Asian, but only a few haplotypes were shared with modern populations. Allele sharing between the Etruscans and modern populations is highest among Germans (seven haplotypes in common), the Cornish from South West England (five haplotypes in common), the Turks (four haplotypes in common), and the Tuscans (two haplotypes in common).[55]
+
+A mitochondrial DNA study (2013) also concluded that the Etruscans were an indigenous population, showing that Etruscans' mtDNA appear to fall very close to a Neolithic population from Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Hungary) and to other Tuscan populations, strongly suggesting that the Etruscan civilization developed locally from the Villanovan culture, as already supported by archaeological evidence and anthropological research,[9][56] and that genetic links between Tuscany and western Anatolia date back to at least 5,000 years ago during the Neolithic and the "most likely separation time between Tuscany and Western Anatolia falls around 7,600 years ago", at the time of the migrations of Early European Farmers (EEF) from Anatolia to Europe in the early Neolithic. The ancient Etruscan samples had mitochondrial DNA haplogroups (mtDNA) JT (subclades of J and T) and U5, with a minority of mtDNA H1b.[57][58] According to British archeologist Phil Perkins, "there are indications that the evidence of DNA can support the theory that Etruscan people are autochthonous in central Italy".[59][60]
+
+A 2019 genetic study  published in the journal Science analyzed the remains of eleven Iron Age individuals from the areas around Rome, of which four were Etruscan individuals, one buried in Veio Grotta Gramiccia from the Villanovan era (900-800 BC) and three buried in La Mattonara Necropolis near Civitavecchia from the Orientalizing period (700-600 BC). The study concluded that Etruscans (900–600 BC) and the Latins (900–500 BC) from Latium vetus were genetically similar.[61], genetic differences between the examined Etruscans and Latins were found to be insignificant.[62] The Etruscan individuals and contemporary Latins were distinguished from preceding populations of Italy by the presence of ca. 30-40% steppe ancestry.[63] Their DNA was a mixture of two-thirds Copper Age ancestry (EEF + WHG; Etruscans ~66–72%, Latins ~62–75%) and one-third Steppe-related ancestry (Etruscans ~27–33%, Latins ~24–37%).[61] The only sample of Y-DNA extracted belonged to haplogroup J-M12 (J2b-L283), found in an individual dated 700-600 BC, and carried exactly the M314 derived allele also found in a Middle Bronze Age individual from Croatia (1631-1531 calBCE). While the four samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to haplogroups U5a1, H, T2b32, K1a4.[64] Therefore, Etruscans had also Steppe-related ancestry despite speaking a pre-Indo-European language.
+
+The Etruscan civilization begins with the Villanovan culture, regarded as the oldest phase.[4][5][6][7][8] The Etruscans themselves dated the origin of the Etruscan nation to a date corresponding to the 11th or 10th century BC.[5][65] The Villanovan culture emerges with the phenomenon of regionalization from the late Bronze Age culture called "Proto-Villanovan", part of the central European Urnfield culture system. In the last Villanovan phase, called the recent phase (about 770–730 BC), the Etruscans established relations of a certain consistency with the first Greek immigrants in southern Italy (in Pithecusa and then in Cuma), so much so as to initially absorb techniques and figurative models and soon more properly cultural models, with the introduction, for example, of writing, of a new way of banqueting, of a heroic funerary ideology, that is, a new aristocratic way of life, such as to profoundly change the physiognomy of Etruscan society.[65] Thus, thanks to the growing number of contacts with the Greeks, the Etruscans entered what is called the Orientalizing phase. In this phase, there was a heavy influence in Greece, most of Italy and some areas of Spain, from the most advanced areas of the eastern Mediterranean and the ancient Near East.[66] Also directly Phoenician, or otherwise Near Eastern, craftsmen, merchants and artists contributed to the spread in southern Europe of Near Eastern cultural and artistic motifs. The last three phases of Etruscan civilization are called, respectively, Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic, which roughly correspond to the homonymous phases of the ancient Greek civilization.
+
+Etruscan expansion was focused both to the north beyond the Apennine Mountains and into Campania. Some small towns in the sixth century BC disappeared during this time, ostensibly subsumed by greater, more powerful neighbours. However, it is certain that the political structure of the Etruscan culture was similar to, albeit more aristocratic than, Magna Graecia in the south. The mining and commerce of metal, especially copper and iron, led to an enrichment of the Etruscans and to the expansion of their influence in the Italian peninsula and the western Mediterranean Sea. Here, their interests collided with those of the Greeks, especially in the sixth century BC, when Phocaeans of Italy founded colonies along the coast of Sardinia, Spain and Corsica. This led the Etruscans to ally themselves with Carthage, whose interests also collided with the Greeks.[68][69]
+
+Around 540 BC, the Battle of Alalia led to a new distribution of power in the western Mediterranean. Though the battle had no clear winner, Carthage managed to expand its sphere of influence at the expense of the Greeks, and Etruria saw itself relegated to the northern Tyrrhenian Sea with full ownership of Corsica. From the first half of the 5th century BC, the new political situation meant the beginning of the Etruscan decline after losing their southern provinces. In 480 BC, Etruria's ally Carthage was defeated by a coalition of Magna Graecia cities led by Syracuse, Sicily. A few years later, in 474 BC, Syracuse's tyrant Hiero defeated the Etruscans at the Battle of Cumae. Etruria's influence over the cities of Latium and Campania weakened, and the area was taken over by Romans and Samnites.
+
+In the 4th century BC, Etruria saw a Gallic invasion end its influence over the Po Valley and the Adriatic coast. Meanwhile, Rome had started annexing Etruscan cities. This led to the loss of the northern Etruscan provinces. During the Roman–Etruscan Wars, Etruria was conquered by Rome in the 3rd century BC.[68][69]
+
+According to legend,[70] there was a period between 600 BC and 500 BC in which an alliance was formed among twelve Etruscan settlements, known today as the Etruscan League, Etruscan Federation, or Dodecapolis (in Greek Δωδεκάπολις). According to a legend the Etruscan League of twelve cities was founded by Tarchon and his brother Tyrrhenus. Tarchon lent his name to the city of Tarchna, or Tarquinnii, as it was known by the Romans. Tyrrhenus gave his name to the Tyrrhenians, the alternative name for the Etruscans. Although there is no consensus on which cities were in the league, the following list may be close to the mark: Arretium, Caisra, Clevsin, Curtun, Perusna, Pupluna, Veii, Tarchna, Vetluna, Volterra, Velzna, and Velch. Some modern authors include Rusellae.[71] The league was mostly an economic and religious league, or a loose confederation, similar to the Greek states. During the later imperial times, when Etruria was just one of many regions controlled by Rome, the number of cities in the league increased by three. This is noted on many later grave stones from the 2nd century BC onwards. According to Livy, the twelve city-states met once a year at the Fanum Voltumnae at Volsinii, where a leader was chosen to represent the league.[72]
+
+There were two other Etruscan leagues ("Lega dei popoli"): that of Campania, the main city of which was Capua, and the Po Valley city-states in northern Italy, which included Bologna, Spina and Adria.
+
+Those who subscribe to a Latin foundation of Rome followed by an Etruscan invasion typically speak of an Etruscan "influence" on Roman culture – that is, cultural objects which were adopted by Rome from neighbouring Etruria. The prevailing view is that Rome was founded by Latins who later merged with Etruscans. In this interpretation, Etruscan cultural objects are considered influences rather than part of a heritage.[73] Rome was probably a small settlement until the arrival of the Etruscans, who constructed the first elements of its urban infrastructure such as the drainage system.[74][75]
+
+The main criterion for deciding whether an object originated at Rome and traveled by influence to the Etruscans, or descended to the Romans from the Etruscans, is date. Many, if not most, of the Etruscan cities were older than Rome. If one finds that a given feature was there first, it cannot have originated at Rome. A second criterion is the opinion of the ancient sources. These would indicate that certain institutions and customs came directly from the Etruscans. Rome is located on the edge of what was Etruscan territory. When Etruscan settlements turned up south of the border, it was presumed that the Etruscans spread there after the foundation of Rome, but the settlements are now known to have preceded Rome.
+
+Etruscan settlements were frequently built on hills – the steeper the better – and surrounded by thick walls. According to Roman mythology, when Romulus and Remus founded Rome, they did so on the Palatine Hill according to Etruscan ritual; that is, they began with a pomerium or sacred ditch. Then, they proceeded to the walls. Romulus was required to kill Remus when the latter jumped over the wall, breaking its magic spell (see also under Pons Sublicius). The name of Rome is attested in Etruscan in the form Ruma-χ meaning 'Roman', a form that mirrors other attested ethnonyms in that language with the same suffix -χ: Velzna-χ '(someone) from Volsinii' and Sveama-χ '(someone) from Sovana'. This in itself, however, is not enough to prove Etruscan origin conclusively. If Tiberius is from θefarie, then Ruma would have been placed on the Thefar (Tiber) river. A heavily discussed topic among scholars is who was the founding population of Rome. In 390 BC, the city of Rome was attacked by the Gauls, and as a result may have lost many – though not all – of its earlier records. Certainly, the history of Rome before that date is not as secure as it later becomes, but enough material remains to give a good picture of the development of the city and its institutions.[citation needed]
+
+Later history relates that some Etruscans lived in the Vicus Tuscus,[76] the "Etruscan quarter", and that there was an Etruscan line of kings (albeit ones descended from a Greek, Demaratus of Corinth) that succeeded kings of Latin and Sabine origin. Etruscophile historians would argue that this, together with evidence for institutions, religious elements and other cultural elements, proves that Rome was founded by Italics. The true picture is rather more complicated, not least because the Etruscan cities were separate entities which never came together to form a single Etruscan state. Furthermore, there were strong Latin and Italic elements to Roman culture, and later Romans proudly celebrated these multiple, 'multicultural' influences on the city.
+
+Under Romulus and Numa Pompilius, the people were said to have been divided into thirty curiae and three tribes. Few Etruscan words entered Latin, but the names of at least two of the tribes – Ramnes and Luceres – seem to be Etruscan. The last kings may have borne the Etruscan title lucumo, while the regalia were traditionally considered of Etruscan origin – the golden crown, the sceptre, the toga palmata (a special robe), the sella curulis (curule chair), and above all the primary symbol of state power: The fasces. The latter was a bundle of whipping rods surrounding a double-bladed axe, carried by the king's lictors. An example of the fasces are the remains of bronze rods and the axe from a tomb in Etruscan Vetulonia. This allowed archaeologists to identify the depiction of a fasces on the grave stele of Avele Feluske, who is shown as a warrior wielding the fasces. The most telling Etruscan feature is the word populus, which appears as an Etruscan deity, Fufluns. Populus seems to mean the people assembled in a military body, rather than the general populace.[citation needed]
+
+The historical Etruscans had achieved a state system of society, with remnants of the chiefdom and tribal forms. In this, they were different from the surrounding Italics, who had chiefs and tribes.[citation needed] Rome was in a sense the first Italic state, but it began as an Etruscan one. It is believed that the Etruscan government style changed from total monarchy to oligarchic republic (as the Roman Republic) in the 6th century BC, although it is important to note this did not happen to all the city-states.[citation needed]
+
+The government was viewed as being a central authority, ruling over all tribal and clan organizations. It retained the power of life and death; in fact, the gorgon, an ancient symbol of that power, appears as a motif in Etruscan decoration. The adherents to this state power were united by a common religion. Political unity in Etruscan society was the city-state, which was probably the referent of methlum, "district". Etruscan texts name quite a number of magistrates, without much of a hint as to their function: The camthi, the parnich, the purth, the tamera, the macstrev, and so on. The people were the mech. The chief ruler of a methlum was perhaps a zilach.[citation needed]
+
+The princely tombs were not of individuals. The inscription evidence shows that families were interred there over long periods, marking the growth of the aristocratic family as a fixed institution, parallel to the gens at Rome and perhaps even its model. The Etruscans could have used any model of the eastern Mediterranean. That the growth of this class is related to the new acquisition of wealth through trade is unquestioned. The wealthiest cities were located near the coast. At the centre of the society was the married couple, tusurthir. The Etruscans were a monogamous society that emphasized pairing.
+
+Similarly, the behaviour of some wealthy women is not uniquely Etruscan. The apparent promiscuous revelry has a spiritual explanation. Swaddling and Bonfante (among others) explain that depictions of the nude embrace, or symplegma, "had the power to ward off evil", as did baring the breast, which was adopted by western culture as an apotropaic device, appearing finally on the figureheads of sailing ships as a nude female upper torso. It is also possible that Greek and Roman attitudes to the Etruscans were based on a misunderstanding of the place of women within their society. In both Greece and the Earliest Republican Rome, respectable women were confined to the house and mixed-sex socialising did not occur. Thus, the freedom of women within Etruscan society could have been misunderstood as implying their sexual availability.[77] It is worth noting that a number of Etruscan tombs carry funerary inscriptions in the form "X son of (father) and (mother)", indicating the importance of the mother's side of the family.[77]
+
+The Etruscans, like the contemporary cultures of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, had a significant military tradition. In addition to marking the rank and power of certain individuals, warfare was a considerable economic advantage to Etruscan civilization. Like many ancient societies, the Etruscans conducted campaigns during summer months, raiding neighboring areas, attempting to gain territory and combating piracy as a means of acquiring valuable resources, such as land, prestige, goods, and slaves. It is likely that individuals taken in battle would be ransomed back to their families and clans at high cost. Prisoners could also potentially be sacrificed on tombs as an honor to fallen leaders of Etruscan society, not unlike the sacrifices made by Achilles for Patrocles.[78][79][80]
+
+The range of Etruscan civilization is marked by its cities. They were entirely assimilated by Italic, Celtic, or Roman ethnic groups, but the names survive from inscriptions and their ruins are of aesthetic and historic interest in most of the cities of central Italy. Etruscan cities flourished over most of Italy during the Roman Iron Age, marking the farthest extent of Etruscan civilization. They were gradually assimilated first by Italics in the south, then by Celts in the north and finally in Etruria itself by the growing Roman Republic.[78]
+
+That many Roman cities were formerly Etruscan was well known to all the Roman authors. Some cities were founded by Etruscans in prehistoric times, and bore entirely Etruscan names. Others were colonized by Etruscans who Etruscanized the name, usually Italic.[79]
+
+The Etruscan system of belief was an immanent polytheism; that is, all visible phenomena were considered to be a manifestation of divine power and that power was subdivided into deities that acted continually on the world of man and could be dissuaded or persuaded in favour of human affairs. How to understand the will of deities, and how to behave, had been revealed to the Etruscans by two initiators, Tages, a childlike figure born from tilled land and immediately gifted with prescience, and Vegoia, a female figure. Their teachings were kept in a series of sacred books. Three layers of deities are evident in the extensive Etruscan art motifs. One appears to be divinities of an indigenous nature: Catha and Usil, the sun; Tivr, the moon; Selvans, a civil god; Turan, the goddess of love; Laran, the god of war; Leinth, the goddess of death; Maris; Thalna; Turms; and the ever-popular Fufluns, whose name is related in some way to the city of Populonia and the populus Romanus, possibly, the god of the people.[81][82]
+
+Ruling over this pantheon of lesser deities were higher ones that seem to reflect the Indo-European system: Tin or Tinia, the sky, Uni his wife (Juno), and Cel, the earth goddess. In addition, some Greek and Roman gods were taken into the Etruscan system: Aritimi (Artemis), Menrva (Minerva), Pacha (Dionysus). The Greek heroes taken from Homer also appear extensively in art motifs.[81][82]
+
+Relatively little is known about the architecture of the ancient Etruscans. They adapted the native Italic styles with influence from the external appearance of Greek architecture. In turn, ancient Roman architecture began with Etruscan styles, and then accepted still further Greek influence. Roman temples show many of the same differences in form to Greek ones that Etruscan temples do, but like the Greeks, use stone, in which they closely copy Greek conventions. The houses of the wealthy were evidently often large and comfortable, but the burial chambers of tombs, often filled with grave-goods, are the nearest approach to them to survive. In the southern Etruscan area, tombs have large rock-cut chambers under a tumulus in large necropoleis, and these, together with some city walls, are the only Etruscan constructions to survive. Etruscan architecture is not generally considered as part of the body of Greco-Roman classical architecture.[83]
+
+Etruscan art was produced by the Etruscan civilization between the 9th and 2nd centuries BC. Particularly strong in this tradition were figurative sculpture in terracotta (particularly lifesize on sarcophagi or temples), wall-painting and metalworking (especially engraved bronze mirrors). Etruscan sculpture in cast bronze was famous and widely exported, but few large examples have survived (the material was too valuable, and recycled later). In contrast to terracotta and bronze, there was apparently little Etruscan sculpture in stone, despite the Etruscans controlling fine sources of marble, including Carrara marble, which seems not to have been exploited until the Romans. Most surviving Etruscan art comes from tombs, including all the fresco wall-paintings, which show scenes of feasting and some narrative mythological subjects.[citation needed]
+
+Bucchero wares in black were the early and native styles of fine Etruscan pottery. There was also a tradition of elaborate Etruscan vase painting, which sprung from its Greek equivalent; the Etruscans were the main export market for Greek vases. Etruscan temples were heavily decorated with colourfully painted terracotta antefixes and other fittings, which survive in large numbers where the wooden superstructure has vanished. Etruscan art was strongly connected to religion; the afterlife was of major importance in Etruscan art.[84]
+
+The Etruscan musical instruments seen in frescoes and bas-reliefs are different types of pipes, such as the plagiaulos (the pipes of Pan or Syrinx), the alabaster pipe and the famous double pipes, accompanied on percussion instruments such as the tintinnabulum, tympanum and crotales, and later by stringed instruments like the lyre and kithara.
+
+Etruscans left around 13,000 inscriptions which have been found so far, only a small minority of which are of significant length. Attested from 700 BC to AD 50, the relation of Etruscan to other languages has been a source of long-running speculation and study. The Etruscans are believed to have spoken a pre–Indo-European language,[85][86][87] and the majority consensus is that Etruscan is related only to other members of what is called the Tyrsenian language family, which in itself is an isolate family, that is, unrelated directly to other known language groups. Since Rix (1998), it is widely accepted that the Tyrsenian family groups Raetic and Lemnian are related to Etruscan.[10]
+
+Etruscan texts, written in a space of seven centuries, use a form of the Greek alphabet due to close contact between the Etruscans and the Greek colonies at Pithecusae and Cumae in the 8th century BC (until it was no longer used, at the beginning of the 1st century AD). Etruscan inscriptions disappeared from Chiusi, Perugia and Arezzo around this time. Only a few fragments survive, religious and especially funeral texts most of which are late (from the 4th century BC). In addition to the original texts that have survived to this day, we have a large number of quotations and allusions from classical authors. In the 1st century BC, Diodorus Siculus wrote that literary culture was one of the great achievements of the Etruscans. Little is known of it and even what is known of their language is due to the repetition of the same few words in the many inscriptions found (by way of the modern epitaphs) contrasted in bilingual or trilingual texts with Latin and Punic. Out of the aforementioned genres, is just one such Volnio (Volnius) cited in classical sources mention.[88] With a few exceptions, such as the Liber Linteus, the only written records in the Etruscan language that remain are inscriptions, mainly funerary. The language is written in the Etruscan alphabet, a script related to the early Euboean Greek alphabet.[89] Many thousand inscriptions in Etruscan are known, mostly epitaphs, and a few very short texts have survived, which are mainly religious. Etruscan imaginative literature is evidenced only in references by later Roman authors, but it is evident from their visual art that the Greek myths were well-known.[90]

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+The Etruscan civilization (/ɪˈtrʌskən/) was a civilization of ancient Italy whose territory covered roughly what is now Tuscany, western Umbria, and northern Lazio,[1][2] as well as parts of what are now the Po Valley, Emilia-Romagna, south-eastern Lombardy, southern Veneto, and Campania.[3]
+
+The earliest evidence of a culture that is identifiably Etruscan dates from about 900 BC. This is the period of the Iron Age Villanovan culture, considered to be the earliest phase of Etruscan civilization,[4][5][6][7][8] which itself developed from the previous late Bronze Age Proto-Villanovan culture in the same region.[9] Etruscan civilization endured until it was assimilated into Roman society. Assimilation began in the late 4th century BC as a result of the Roman–Etruscan Wars;[10] it accelerated with the grant of Roman citizenship in 90 BC, and became complete in 27 BC, when the Etruscans’ territory was incorporated into the newly established Roman Empire.[11]
+
+Etruscan culture was influenced by Ancient Greek culture, beginning around 750 BC (during the last phase of the Villanovan period), when the Greeks, who were at this time in their Archaic Orientalizing period, started founding colonies in southern Italy. Greek influence also occurred in the 4th and 5th centuries BC during Greece’s Classical period.
+
+The territorial extent of Etruscan civilization reached its maximum around 750 BC, during the foundational period of the Roman Kingdom. Its culture flourished in three confederacies of cities: that of Etruria (Tuscany, Latium and Umbria), that of the Po Valley with the eastern Alps, and that of Campania.[12][13] The league in northern Italy is mentioned in Livy.[14][15][16] The reduction in Etruscan territory was gradual, but after 500 BC the political balance of power on the Italian peninsula shifted away from the Etruscans in favor of the rising Roman Republic.[17]
+
+The earliest known examples of Etruscan writing are inscriptions found in southern Etruria that date to around 700 BC.[10][18] The Etruscans developed a system of writing which uses symbols borrowed from Euboean Greek script, but the Etruscan language remains only partly understood, making modern understanding of their society and culture heavily dependent on much later and generally disapproving Roman and Greek sources. In the Etruscan political system, authority resided in its individual small cities, and probably in its prominent individual families. At the height of Etruscan power, elite Etruscan families grew very rich through trade with the Celtic world to the north and the Greeks to the south, and they filled their large family tombs with imported luxuries. Judging from archaeological remains, Archaic Greece had a huge influence on their art and architecture, and Greek mythology was evidently very familiar to them.
+
+The Etruscans called themselves Rasenna, which was shortened to Rasna or Raśna (etymology unknown).[19][20][21]
+
+In Attic Greek, the Etruscans were known as Tyrrhenians (Τυρρηνοί, Turrhēnoi, earlier Τυρσηνοί Tursēnoi), from which the Romans derived the names Tyrrhēnī, Tyrrhēnia (Etruria), and Mare Tyrrhēnum (Tyrrhenian Sea),[22][full citation needed] prompting some to associate them with the Teresh (one of the Sea Peoples named by the Egyptians).
+
+The ancient Romans referred to the Etruscans as the Tuscī or Etruscī (singular Tuscus).[23][24] Their Roman name is the origin of the terms "Toscana", which refers to their heartland, and "Etruria", which can refer to their wider region. The term Tusci is thought by linguists to have been the Umbrian word for “Etruscan,” based an inscription on an ancient bronze tablet from a nearby region.[25] The inscription contains the phrase turskum ... nomen, literally "the Tuscan name". Based on a knowledge of Umbrian grammar, linguists can infer that the base form of the word turksum is *Tursci,[26] which would, through metathesis and a word-initial epenthesis, be likely to lead to the form, E-trus-ci.[27]
+
+As for the original meaning of the root, *Turs-, a widely cited hypothesis is that it, like the word Latin turris, means "tower", and comes from the Greek word for tower: τύρσις.[28] On this hypothesis, the Tusci were called the "people who build towers"[28] or "the tower builders".[29] This proposed etymology is made the more plausible because the Etruscans preferred to build their towns on high precipices reinforced  by walls. Alternatively, Giuliano and Larissa Bonfante have speculated that Etruscan houses may have seemed like towers to the simple Latins.[30] The proposed etymology has a long history, Dionysius of Halicarnassus having observed long ago, "[T]here is no reason that the Greeks should not have called [the Etruscans] by this name, both from their living in towers and from the name of one of their rulers."[31]
+
+Literary and historical texts in the Etruscan language have not survived, and the language itself is only partially understood by modern scholars. As previously noted, this makes modern understanding of their society and culture heavily dependent on much later and generally disapproving Roman and Greek sources. These ancient writers differed in their theories about the origin of the Etruscan people. Some suggested they were Pelasgians who had migrated there from Greece. Others maintained that they were indigenous to central Italy and were not from Greece.
+
+The first Greek author to mention the Etruscans, whom the Ancient Greeks called Tyrrhenians, was the 8th-century BC poet Hesiod, in his work, the Theogony. He merely described them as residing in central Italy alongside the Latins.[32] The 7th-century BC Homeric Hymn to Dionysus[33] referred to them merely as pirates.[34] Unlike later Greek authors, these authors did not suggest that Etruscans had migrated to Italy from the east, and did not associate them with the Pelasgians.
+
+It was only in the 5th century BC, when the Etruscan civilization had been established for several centuries, that Greek writers started associating the name “Tyrrhenians” with the “Pelasgians,” and even then, some did so in a way that suggests they were meant only as generic, descriptive labels for “non-Greek” and “indigenous ancestors of Greeks,” respectively.[35]
+
+The 5th-century BC historians Thucydides[36] and Herodotus,[37] and the 1st-century BC historian Strabo[38][full citation needed], did seem to suggest that the Tyrrhenians were originally Pelasgians who migrated to Italy from Lydia by way of the Greek island of Lemnos. They all described Lemnos as having been settled by Pelasgians, whom Thucydides identified as "belonging to the Tyrrhenians" (τὸ δὲ πλεῖστον Πελασγικόν, τῶν καὶ Λῆμνόν ποτε καὶ Ἀθήνας Τυρσηνῶν). As Strabo and Herodotus told it,[39] the migration to Lemnos was led by Tyrrhenus / Tyrsenos, the son of Atys (who was king of Lydia). Strabo[38] added that the Pelasgians of Lemnos and Imbros then followed Tyrrhenus to the Italian Peninsula. And, according to the logographer Hellanicus of Lesbos, there was a Pelasgian migration from Thessaly in Greece to the Italian peninsula, as part of which the Pelasgians colonized the area he called Tyrrhenia, and they then came to be called Tyrrhenians.[40]
+
+There is some evidence suggesting a link between the island of Lemnos and the Tyrrhenians. The Lemnos Stele bears inscriptions in a language with strong structural resemblances to the language of the Etruscans.[41] The discovery of these inscriptions in modern times has led to the suggestion of a "Tyrrhenian language group" comprising Etruscan, Lemnian, and the Raetic spoken in the Alps.
+
+However, the 1st-century BC historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek living in Rome, dismissed many of the ancient theories of other Greek historians and postulated that the Etruscans were indigenous people who had always lived in Etruria and were different from both the Pelasgians and the Lydians.[42] Dionysius noted that the 5th-century historian Xanthus of Lydia, who was originally from Sardis and was regarded as an important source and authority for the history of Lydia, never suggested a Lydian origin of the Etruscans and never named Tyrrhenus as a ruler of the Lydians.[42]
+
+For this reason, therefore, I am persuaded that the Pelasgians are a different people from the Tyrrhenians. And I do not believe, either, that the Tyrrhenians were a colony of the Lydians; for they do not use the same language as the latter, nor can it be alleged that, though they no longer speak a similar tongue, they still retain some other indications of their mother country. For they neither worship the same gods as the Lydians nor make use of similar laws or institutions, but in these very respects they differ more from the Lydians than from the Pelasgians. Indeed, those probably come nearest to the truth who declare that the nation migrated from nowhere else, but was native to the country, since it is found to be a very ancient nation and to agree with no other either in its language or in its manner of living.
+
+The credibility of Dionysius of Halicarnassus is arguably bolstered by the fact that he was the first ancient writer to report the endonym of the Etruscans: Rasenna.
+
+The Romans, however, give them other names: from the country they once inhabited, named Etruria, they call them Etruscans, and from their knowledge of the ceremonies relating to divine worship, in which they excel others, they now call them, rather inaccurately, Tusci, but formerly, with the same accuracy as the Greeks, they called them Thyoscoï [an earlier form of Tusci]. Their own name for themselves, however, is the same as that of one of their leaders, Rasenna.
+
+Similarly, the 1st-century BC historian Livy, in his Ab Urbe Condita Libri, said that the Rhaetians were Etruscans who had been driven into the mountains by the invading Gauls; and he asserted that the inhabitants of Raetia were of Etruscan origin.[43]
+
+The Alpine tribes have also, no doubt, the same origin (of the Etruscans), especially the Raetians; who have been rendered so savage by the very nature of the country as to retain nothing of their ancient character save the sound of their speech, and even that is corrupted.
+
+First-century historian Pliny the Elder also put the Etruscans in the context of the Rhaetian people to the north, and wrote in his Natural History (AD 79):[44]
+
+Adjoining these the (Alpine) Noricans are the Raeti and Vindelici. All are divided into a number of states. The Raeti are believed to be people of Tuscan race driven out by the Gauls, their leader was named Raetus.
+
+The question of Etruscan origins has long been a subject of interest and debate among historians. In modern times, all the evidence gathered so far by etruscologists points to an indigenous origin of the Etruscans.[45][46] Archaeologically there is no evidence for a migration of the Lydians or the Pelasgians into Etruria.[45][46] Modern etruscologists and archeologists, such as Massimo Pallottino (1947), have shown that early historians’ assumptions and assertions on the subject were groundless.[47] In 2000, the etruscologist Dominique Briquel explained in detail why he believes that ancient Greek historians’ writings on Etruscan origins should not even count as historical documents.[48] He argues that the ancient story of the Etruscans’ 'Lydian origins' was a deliberate,  politically motivated fabrication, and that ancient Greeks inferred a connection between the Tyrrhenians and the Pelasgians solely on the  basis of certain Greek and local traditions and on the mere fact that there had been trade between the Etruscans and Greeks.[49][50] He noted that, even if these stories include historical facts suggesting contact, such contact is more plausibly traceable to cultural exchange than to migration.[51]
+
+Several archaeologists who have analyzed Bronze Age and Iron Age remains that were excavated in the territory of historical Etruria have pointed out that no evidence has been found, related either to material culture or to social practices, that can support a migration theory.[52] The most marked and radical change that has been archaeologically attested in the area is the adoption, starting in about the 12th century BC, of the funeral rite of incineration in terracotta urns, which is a Continental European practice, derived from the Urnfield culture; there is nothing about it that suggests an ethnic contribution from Asia Minor or the Near East.[52]
+
+A 2012 survey of the previous 30 years’ archaeological findings, based on excavations of the major Etruscan cities, showed a continuity of culture from the last phase of the Bronze Age (11th–10th century BC) to the Iron Age (9th–8th century BC). This is evidence that the Etruscan civilization, which emerged around 900 BC, was built by people whose ancestors had inhabited that region for at least the previous 200 years.[53] Based on this cultural continuity, there is now a consensus among archeologists that Proto-Etruscan culture developed, during the last phase of the Bronze Age, from the indigenous Proto-Villanovan culture, and that the subsequent Iron Age Villanovan culture is most accurately described as an  early phase of the Etruscan civilization.[9] It is possible that there were contacts between northern-central Italy and the Mycenaean world at the end of the Bronze Age. However contacts between the inhabitants of Etruria and inhabitants of Greece, Aegean Sea Islands, Asia Minor, and the Near East are attested only centuries later, when Etruscan civilization was already flourishing and Etruscan ethnogenesis was well established. The first of these attested contacts relate to the Greek colonies in Southern Italy and the consequent orientalizing period.[54]
+
+A mtDNA study in 2004 stated that the Etruscans had no significant heterogeneity, and that all mitochondrial lineages observed among the Etruscan samples appear typically European or West Asian, but only a few haplotypes were shared with modern populations. Allele sharing between the Etruscans and modern populations is highest among Germans (seven haplotypes in common), the Cornish from South West England (five haplotypes in common), the Turks (four haplotypes in common), and the Tuscans (two haplotypes in common).[55]
+
+A mitochondrial DNA study (2013) also concluded that the Etruscans were an indigenous population, showing that Etruscans' mtDNA appear to fall very close to a Neolithic population from Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Hungary) and to other Tuscan populations, strongly suggesting that the Etruscan civilization developed locally from the Villanovan culture, as already supported by archaeological evidence and anthropological research,[9][56] and that genetic links between Tuscany and western Anatolia date back to at least 5,000 years ago during the Neolithic and the "most likely separation time between Tuscany and Western Anatolia falls around 7,600 years ago", at the time of the migrations of Early European Farmers (EEF) from Anatolia to Europe in the early Neolithic. The ancient Etruscan samples had mitochondrial DNA haplogroups (mtDNA) JT (subclades of J and T) and U5, with a minority of mtDNA H1b.[57][58] According to British archeologist Phil Perkins, "there are indications that the evidence of DNA can support the theory that Etruscan people are autochthonous in central Italy".[59][60]
+
+A 2019 genetic study  published in the journal Science analyzed the remains of eleven Iron Age individuals from the areas around Rome, of which four were Etruscan individuals, one buried in Veio Grotta Gramiccia from the Villanovan era (900-800 BC) and three buried in La Mattonara Necropolis near Civitavecchia from the Orientalizing period (700-600 BC). The study concluded that Etruscans (900–600 BC) and the Latins (900–500 BC) from Latium vetus were genetically similar.[61], genetic differences between the examined Etruscans and Latins were found to be insignificant.[62] The Etruscan individuals and contemporary Latins were distinguished from preceding populations of Italy by the presence of ca. 30-40% steppe ancestry.[63] Their DNA was a mixture of two-thirds Copper Age ancestry (EEF + WHG; Etruscans ~66–72%, Latins ~62–75%) and one-third Steppe-related ancestry (Etruscans ~27–33%, Latins ~24–37%).[61] The only sample of Y-DNA extracted belonged to haplogroup J-M12 (J2b-L283), found in an individual dated 700-600 BC, and carried exactly the M314 derived allele also found in a Middle Bronze Age individual from Croatia (1631-1531 calBCE). While the four samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to haplogroups U5a1, H, T2b32, K1a4.[64] Therefore, Etruscans had also Steppe-related ancestry despite speaking a pre-Indo-European language.
+
+The Etruscan civilization begins with the Villanovan culture, regarded as the oldest phase.[4][5][6][7][8] The Etruscans themselves dated the origin of the Etruscan nation to a date corresponding to the 11th or 10th century BC.[5][65] The Villanovan culture emerges with the phenomenon of regionalization from the late Bronze Age culture called "Proto-Villanovan", part of the central European Urnfield culture system. In the last Villanovan phase, called the recent phase (about 770–730 BC), the Etruscans established relations of a certain consistency with the first Greek immigrants in southern Italy (in Pithecusa and then in Cuma), so much so as to initially absorb techniques and figurative models and soon more properly cultural models, with the introduction, for example, of writing, of a new way of banqueting, of a heroic funerary ideology, that is, a new aristocratic way of life, such as to profoundly change the physiognomy of Etruscan society.[65] Thus, thanks to the growing number of contacts with the Greeks, the Etruscans entered what is called the Orientalizing phase. In this phase, there was a heavy influence in Greece, most of Italy and some areas of Spain, from the most advanced areas of the eastern Mediterranean and the ancient Near East.[66] Also directly Phoenician, or otherwise Near Eastern, craftsmen, merchants and artists contributed to the spread in southern Europe of Near Eastern cultural and artistic motifs. The last three phases of Etruscan civilization are called, respectively, Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic, which roughly correspond to the homonymous phases of the ancient Greek civilization.
+
+Etruscan expansion was focused both to the north beyond the Apennine Mountains and into Campania. Some small towns in the sixth century BC disappeared during this time, ostensibly subsumed by greater, more powerful neighbours. However, it is certain that the political structure of the Etruscan culture was similar to, albeit more aristocratic than, Magna Graecia in the south. The mining and commerce of metal, especially copper and iron, led to an enrichment of the Etruscans and to the expansion of their influence in the Italian peninsula and the western Mediterranean Sea. Here, their interests collided with those of the Greeks, especially in the sixth century BC, when Phocaeans of Italy founded colonies along the coast of Sardinia, Spain and Corsica. This led the Etruscans to ally themselves with Carthage, whose interests also collided with the Greeks.[68][69]
+
+Around 540 BC, the Battle of Alalia led to a new distribution of power in the western Mediterranean. Though the battle had no clear winner, Carthage managed to expand its sphere of influence at the expense of the Greeks, and Etruria saw itself relegated to the northern Tyrrhenian Sea with full ownership of Corsica. From the first half of the 5th century BC, the new political situation meant the beginning of the Etruscan decline after losing their southern provinces. In 480 BC, Etruria's ally Carthage was defeated by a coalition of Magna Graecia cities led by Syracuse, Sicily. A few years later, in 474 BC, Syracuse's tyrant Hiero defeated the Etruscans at the Battle of Cumae. Etruria's influence over the cities of Latium and Campania weakened, and the area was taken over by Romans and Samnites.
+
+In the 4th century BC, Etruria saw a Gallic invasion end its influence over the Po Valley and the Adriatic coast. Meanwhile, Rome had started annexing Etruscan cities. This led to the loss of the northern Etruscan provinces. During the Roman–Etruscan Wars, Etruria was conquered by Rome in the 3rd century BC.[68][69]
+
+According to legend,[70] there was a period between 600 BC and 500 BC in which an alliance was formed among twelve Etruscan settlements, known today as the Etruscan League, Etruscan Federation, or Dodecapolis (in Greek Δωδεκάπολις). According to a legend the Etruscan League of twelve cities was founded by Tarchon and his brother Tyrrhenus. Tarchon lent his name to the city of Tarchna, or Tarquinnii, as it was known by the Romans. Tyrrhenus gave his name to the Tyrrhenians, the alternative name for the Etruscans. Although there is no consensus on which cities were in the league, the following list may be close to the mark: Arretium, Caisra, Clevsin, Curtun, Perusna, Pupluna, Veii, Tarchna, Vetluna, Volterra, Velzna, and Velch. Some modern authors include Rusellae.[71] The league was mostly an economic and religious league, or a loose confederation, similar to the Greek states. During the later imperial times, when Etruria was just one of many regions controlled by Rome, the number of cities in the league increased by three. This is noted on many later grave stones from the 2nd century BC onwards. According to Livy, the twelve city-states met once a year at the Fanum Voltumnae at Volsinii, where a leader was chosen to represent the league.[72]
+
+There were two other Etruscan leagues ("Lega dei popoli"): that of Campania, the main city of which was Capua, and the Po Valley city-states in northern Italy, which included Bologna, Spina and Adria.
+
+Those who subscribe to a Latin foundation of Rome followed by an Etruscan invasion typically speak of an Etruscan "influence" on Roman culture – that is, cultural objects which were adopted by Rome from neighbouring Etruria. The prevailing view is that Rome was founded by Latins who later merged with Etruscans. In this interpretation, Etruscan cultural objects are considered influences rather than part of a heritage.[73] Rome was probably a small settlement until the arrival of the Etruscans, who constructed the first elements of its urban infrastructure such as the drainage system.[74][75]
+
+The main criterion for deciding whether an object originated at Rome and traveled by influence to the Etruscans, or descended to the Romans from the Etruscans, is date. Many, if not most, of the Etruscan cities were older than Rome. If one finds that a given feature was there first, it cannot have originated at Rome. A second criterion is the opinion of the ancient sources. These would indicate that certain institutions and customs came directly from the Etruscans. Rome is located on the edge of what was Etruscan territory. When Etruscan settlements turned up south of the border, it was presumed that the Etruscans spread there after the foundation of Rome, but the settlements are now known to have preceded Rome.
+
+Etruscan settlements were frequently built on hills – the steeper the better – and surrounded by thick walls. According to Roman mythology, when Romulus and Remus founded Rome, they did so on the Palatine Hill according to Etruscan ritual; that is, they began with a pomerium or sacred ditch. Then, they proceeded to the walls. Romulus was required to kill Remus when the latter jumped over the wall, breaking its magic spell (see also under Pons Sublicius). The name of Rome is attested in Etruscan in the form Ruma-χ meaning 'Roman', a form that mirrors other attested ethnonyms in that language with the same suffix -χ: Velzna-χ '(someone) from Volsinii' and Sveama-χ '(someone) from Sovana'. This in itself, however, is not enough to prove Etruscan origin conclusively. If Tiberius is from θefarie, then Ruma would have been placed on the Thefar (Tiber) river. A heavily discussed topic among scholars is who was the founding population of Rome. In 390 BC, the city of Rome was attacked by the Gauls, and as a result may have lost many – though not all – of its earlier records. Certainly, the history of Rome before that date is not as secure as it later becomes, but enough material remains to give a good picture of the development of the city and its institutions.[citation needed]
+
+Later history relates that some Etruscans lived in the Vicus Tuscus,[76] the "Etruscan quarter", and that there was an Etruscan line of kings (albeit ones descended from a Greek, Demaratus of Corinth) that succeeded kings of Latin and Sabine origin. Etruscophile historians would argue that this, together with evidence for institutions, religious elements and other cultural elements, proves that Rome was founded by Italics. The true picture is rather more complicated, not least because the Etruscan cities were separate entities which never came together to form a single Etruscan state. Furthermore, there were strong Latin and Italic elements to Roman culture, and later Romans proudly celebrated these multiple, 'multicultural' influences on the city.
+
+Under Romulus and Numa Pompilius, the people were said to have been divided into thirty curiae and three tribes. Few Etruscan words entered Latin, but the names of at least two of the tribes – Ramnes and Luceres – seem to be Etruscan. The last kings may have borne the Etruscan title lucumo, while the regalia were traditionally considered of Etruscan origin – the golden crown, the sceptre, the toga palmata (a special robe), the sella curulis (curule chair), and above all the primary symbol of state power: The fasces. The latter was a bundle of whipping rods surrounding a double-bladed axe, carried by the king's lictors. An example of the fasces are the remains of bronze rods and the axe from a tomb in Etruscan Vetulonia. This allowed archaeologists to identify the depiction of a fasces on the grave stele of Avele Feluske, who is shown as a warrior wielding the fasces. The most telling Etruscan feature is the word populus, which appears as an Etruscan deity, Fufluns. Populus seems to mean the people assembled in a military body, rather than the general populace.[citation needed]
+
+The historical Etruscans had achieved a state system of society, with remnants of the chiefdom and tribal forms. In this, they were different from the surrounding Italics, who had chiefs and tribes.[citation needed] Rome was in a sense the first Italic state, but it began as an Etruscan one. It is believed that the Etruscan government style changed from total monarchy to oligarchic republic (as the Roman Republic) in the 6th century BC, although it is important to note this did not happen to all the city-states.[citation needed]
+
+The government was viewed as being a central authority, ruling over all tribal and clan organizations. It retained the power of life and death; in fact, the gorgon, an ancient symbol of that power, appears as a motif in Etruscan decoration. The adherents to this state power were united by a common religion. Political unity in Etruscan society was the city-state, which was probably the referent of methlum, "district". Etruscan texts name quite a number of magistrates, without much of a hint as to their function: The camthi, the parnich, the purth, the tamera, the macstrev, and so on. The people were the mech. The chief ruler of a methlum was perhaps a zilach.[citation needed]
+
+The princely tombs were not of individuals. The inscription evidence shows that families were interred there over long periods, marking the growth of the aristocratic family as a fixed institution, parallel to the gens at Rome and perhaps even its model. The Etruscans could have used any model of the eastern Mediterranean. That the growth of this class is related to the new acquisition of wealth through trade is unquestioned. The wealthiest cities were located near the coast. At the centre of the society was the married couple, tusurthir. The Etruscans were a monogamous society that emphasized pairing.
+
+Similarly, the behaviour of some wealthy women is not uniquely Etruscan. The apparent promiscuous revelry has a spiritual explanation. Swaddling and Bonfante (among others) explain that depictions of the nude embrace, or symplegma, "had the power to ward off evil", as did baring the breast, which was adopted by western culture as an apotropaic device, appearing finally on the figureheads of sailing ships as a nude female upper torso. It is also possible that Greek and Roman attitudes to the Etruscans were based on a misunderstanding of the place of women within their society. In both Greece and the Earliest Republican Rome, respectable women were confined to the house and mixed-sex socialising did not occur. Thus, the freedom of women within Etruscan society could have been misunderstood as implying their sexual availability.[77] It is worth noting that a number of Etruscan tombs carry funerary inscriptions in the form "X son of (father) and (mother)", indicating the importance of the mother's side of the family.[77]
+
+The Etruscans, like the contemporary cultures of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, had a significant military tradition. In addition to marking the rank and power of certain individuals, warfare was a considerable economic advantage to Etruscan civilization. Like many ancient societies, the Etruscans conducted campaigns during summer months, raiding neighboring areas, attempting to gain territory and combating piracy as a means of acquiring valuable resources, such as land, prestige, goods, and slaves. It is likely that individuals taken in battle would be ransomed back to their families and clans at high cost. Prisoners could also potentially be sacrificed on tombs as an honor to fallen leaders of Etruscan society, not unlike the sacrifices made by Achilles for Patrocles.[78][79][80]
+
+The range of Etruscan civilization is marked by its cities. They were entirely assimilated by Italic, Celtic, or Roman ethnic groups, but the names survive from inscriptions and their ruins are of aesthetic and historic interest in most of the cities of central Italy. Etruscan cities flourished over most of Italy during the Roman Iron Age, marking the farthest extent of Etruscan civilization. They were gradually assimilated first by Italics in the south, then by Celts in the north and finally in Etruria itself by the growing Roman Republic.[78]
+
+That many Roman cities were formerly Etruscan was well known to all the Roman authors. Some cities were founded by Etruscans in prehistoric times, and bore entirely Etruscan names. Others were colonized by Etruscans who Etruscanized the name, usually Italic.[79]
+
+The Etruscan system of belief was an immanent polytheism; that is, all visible phenomena were considered to be a manifestation of divine power and that power was subdivided into deities that acted continually on the world of man and could be dissuaded or persuaded in favour of human affairs. How to understand the will of deities, and how to behave, had been revealed to the Etruscans by two initiators, Tages, a childlike figure born from tilled land and immediately gifted with prescience, and Vegoia, a female figure. Their teachings were kept in a series of sacred books. Three layers of deities are evident in the extensive Etruscan art motifs. One appears to be divinities of an indigenous nature: Catha and Usil, the sun; Tivr, the moon; Selvans, a civil god; Turan, the goddess of love; Laran, the god of war; Leinth, the goddess of death; Maris; Thalna; Turms; and the ever-popular Fufluns, whose name is related in some way to the city of Populonia and the populus Romanus, possibly, the god of the people.[81][82]
+
+Ruling over this pantheon of lesser deities were higher ones that seem to reflect the Indo-European system: Tin or Tinia, the sky, Uni his wife (Juno), and Cel, the earth goddess. In addition, some Greek and Roman gods were taken into the Etruscan system: Aritimi (Artemis), Menrva (Minerva), Pacha (Dionysus). The Greek heroes taken from Homer also appear extensively in art motifs.[81][82]
+
+Relatively little is known about the architecture of the ancient Etruscans. They adapted the native Italic styles with influence from the external appearance of Greek architecture. In turn, ancient Roman architecture began with Etruscan styles, and then accepted still further Greek influence. Roman temples show many of the same differences in form to Greek ones that Etruscan temples do, but like the Greeks, use stone, in which they closely copy Greek conventions. The houses of the wealthy were evidently often large and comfortable, but the burial chambers of tombs, often filled with grave-goods, are the nearest approach to them to survive. In the southern Etruscan area, tombs have large rock-cut chambers under a tumulus in large necropoleis, and these, together with some city walls, are the only Etruscan constructions to survive. Etruscan architecture is not generally considered as part of the body of Greco-Roman classical architecture.[83]
+
+Etruscan art was produced by the Etruscan civilization between the 9th and 2nd centuries BC. Particularly strong in this tradition were figurative sculpture in terracotta (particularly lifesize on sarcophagi or temples), wall-painting and metalworking (especially engraved bronze mirrors). Etruscan sculpture in cast bronze was famous and widely exported, but few large examples have survived (the material was too valuable, and recycled later). In contrast to terracotta and bronze, there was apparently little Etruscan sculpture in stone, despite the Etruscans controlling fine sources of marble, including Carrara marble, which seems not to have been exploited until the Romans. Most surviving Etruscan art comes from tombs, including all the fresco wall-paintings, which show scenes of feasting and some narrative mythological subjects.[citation needed]
+
+Bucchero wares in black were the early and native styles of fine Etruscan pottery. There was also a tradition of elaborate Etruscan vase painting, which sprung from its Greek equivalent; the Etruscans were the main export market for Greek vases. Etruscan temples were heavily decorated with colourfully painted terracotta antefixes and other fittings, which survive in large numbers where the wooden superstructure has vanished. Etruscan art was strongly connected to religion; the afterlife was of major importance in Etruscan art.[84]
+
+The Etruscan musical instruments seen in frescoes and bas-reliefs are different types of pipes, such as the plagiaulos (the pipes of Pan or Syrinx), the alabaster pipe and the famous double pipes, accompanied on percussion instruments such as the tintinnabulum, tympanum and crotales, and later by stringed instruments like the lyre and kithara.
+
+Etruscans left around 13,000 inscriptions which have been found so far, only a small minority of which are of significant length. Attested from 700 BC to AD 50, the relation of Etruscan to other languages has been a source of long-running speculation and study. The Etruscans are believed to have spoken a pre–Indo-European language,[85][86][87] and the majority consensus is that Etruscan is related only to other members of what is called the Tyrsenian language family, which in itself is an isolate family, that is, unrelated directly to other known language groups. Since Rix (1998), it is widely accepted that the Tyrsenian family groups Raetic and Lemnian are related to Etruscan.[10]
+
+Etruscan texts, written in a space of seven centuries, use a form of the Greek alphabet due to close contact between the Etruscans and the Greek colonies at Pithecusae and Cumae in the 8th century BC (until it was no longer used, at the beginning of the 1st century AD). Etruscan inscriptions disappeared from Chiusi, Perugia and Arezzo around this time. Only a few fragments survive, religious and especially funeral texts most of which are late (from the 4th century BC). In addition to the original texts that have survived to this day, we have a large number of quotations and allusions from classical authors. In the 1st century BC, Diodorus Siculus wrote that literary culture was one of the great achievements of the Etruscans. Little is known of it and even what is known of their language is due to the repetition of the same few words in the many inscriptions found (by way of the modern epitaphs) contrasted in bilingual or trilingual texts with Latin and Punic. Out of the aforementioned genres, is just one such Volnio (Volnius) cited in classical sources mention.[88] With a few exceptions, such as the Liber Linteus, the only written records in the Etruscan language that remain are inscriptions, mainly funerary. The language is written in the Etruscan alphabet, a script related to the early Euboean Greek alphabet.[89] Many thousand inscriptions in Etruscan are known, mostly epitaphs, and a few very short texts have survived, which are mainly religious. Etruscan imaginative literature is evidenced only in references by later Roman authors, but it is evident from their visual art that the Greek myths were well-known.[90]

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+Bacteria (/bækˈtɪəriə/ (listen); common noun bacteria, singular bacterium) are a type of biological cell. They constitute a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria have a number of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods and spirals. Bacteria were among the first life forms to appear on Earth, and are present in most of its habitats. Bacteria inhabit soil, water, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste,[4] and the deep biosphere of the earth's crust. Bacteria also live in symbiotic and parasitic relationships with plants and animals. Most bacteria have not been characterised, and only about 27 percent of the bacterial phyla have species that can be grown in the laboratory.[5] The study of bacteria is known as bacteriology, a branch of microbiology.
+
+Nearly all animal life is dependent on bacteria for survival as only bacteria and some archaea possess the genes and enzymes necessary to synthesize vitamin B12, also known as cobalamin, and provide it through the food chain.  Vitamin B12 is a water-soluble vitamin that is involved in the metabolism of every cell of the human body.  It is a cofactor in DNA synthesis, and in both fatty acid and amino acid metabolism. It is particularly important in the normal functioning of the nervous system via its role in the synthesis of myelin.[6][7][8][9]
+
+There are typically 40 million bacterial cells in a gram of soil and a million bacterial cells in a millilitre of fresh water. There are approximately 5×1030 bacteria on Earth,[10] forming a biomass which exceeds that of all plants and animals.[11] Bacteria are vital in many stages of the nutrient cycle by recycling nutrients such as the fixation of nitrogen from the atmosphere. The nutrient cycle includes the decomposition of dead bodies; bacteria are responsible for the putrefaction stage in this process.[12] In the biological communities surrounding hydrothermal vents and cold seeps, extremophile bacteria provide the nutrients needed to sustain life by converting dissolved compounds, such as hydrogen sulphide and methane, to energy.
+
+In humans and most animals the largest number of bacteria exist in the gut, and a large number on the skin.[13] The vast majority of the bacteria in the body are rendered harmless by the protective effects of the immune system, though many are beneficial, particularly in the gut flora. However, several species of bacteria are pathogenic and cause infectious diseases, including cholera, syphilis, anthrax, leprosy, and bubonic plague. The most common fatal bacterial diseases are respiratory infections.  Tuberculosis alone kills about 2 million people per year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.[14] Antibiotics are used to treat bacterial infections and are also used in farming, making antibiotic resistance a growing problem. In industry, bacteria are important in sewage treatment and the breakdown of oil spills, the production of cheese and yogurt through fermentation, the recovery of gold, palladium, copper and other metals in the mining sector,[15] as well as in biotechnology, and the manufacture of antibiotics and other chemicals.[16]
+
+Once regarded as plants constituting the class Schizomycetes ("fission fungi"), bacteria are now classified as prokaryotes. Unlike cells of animals and other eukaryotes, bacterial cells do not contain a nucleus and rarely harbour membrane-bound organelles. Although the term bacteria traditionally included all prokaryotes, the scientific classification changed after the discovery in the 1990s that prokaryotes consist of two very different groups of organisms that evolved from an ancient common ancestor. These evolutionary domains are called Bacteria and Archaea.[1]
+
+The word bacteria is the plural of the New Latin bacterium, which is the latinisation of the Greek βακτήριον (bakterion),[17] the diminutive of βακτηρία (bakteria), meaning "staff, cane",[18] because the first ones to be discovered were rod-shaped.[19][20]
+
+The ancestors of modern bacteria were unicellular microorganisms that were the first forms of life to appear on Earth, about 4 billion years ago. For about 3 billion years, most organisms were microscopic, and bacteria and archaea were the dominant forms of life.[21][22] Although bacterial fossils exist, such as stromatolites, their lack of distinctive morphology prevents them from being used to examine the history of bacterial evolution, or to date the time of origin of a particular bacterial species. However, gene sequences can be used to reconstruct the bacterial phylogeny, and these studies indicate that bacteria diverged first from the archaeal/eukaryotic lineage.[23] The most recent common ancestor of bacteria and archaea was probably a hyperthermophile that lived about 2.5 billion–3.2 billion years ago.[24][25] The earliest life on land may have been bacteria some 3.22 billion years ago.[26]
+
+Bacteria were also involved in the second great evolutionary divergence, that of the archaea and eukaryotes. Here, eukaryotes resulted from the entering of ancient bacteria into endosymbiotic associations with the ancestors of eukaryotic cells, which were themselves possibly related to the Archaea.[27][28] This involved the engulfment by proto-eukaryotic cells of alphaproteobacterial symbionts to form either mitochondria or hydrogenosomes, which are still found in all known Eukarya (sometimes in highly reduced form, e.g. in ancient "amitochondrial" protozoa). Later, some eukaryotes that already contained mitochondria also engulfed cyanobacteria-like organisms, leading to the formation of chloroplasts in algae and plants. This is known as primary endosymbiosis.[29][30]
+
+Bacteria display a wide diversity of shapes and sizes, called morphologies. Bacterial cells are about one-tenth the size of eukaryotic cells and are typically 0.5–5.0 micrometres in length. However, a few species are visible to the unaided eye—for example, Thiomargarita namibiensis is up to half a millimetre long[31] and Epulopiscium fishelsoni reaches 0.7 mm.[32] Among the smallest bacteria are members of the genus Mycoplasma, which measure only 0.3 micrometres, as small as the largest viruses.[33] Some bacteria may be even smaller, but these ultramicrobacteria are not well-studied.[34]
+
+Most bacterial species are either spherical, called cocci (singular coccus, from Greek kókkos, grain, seed), or rod-shaped, called bacilli (sing. bacillus, from Latin baculus, stick).[35] Some bacteria, called vibrio, are shaped like slightly curved rods or comma-shaped; others can be spiral-shaped, called spirilla, or tightly coiled, called spirochaetes. A small number of other unusual shapes have been described, such as star-shaped bacteria.[36] This wide variety of shapes is determined by the bacterial cell wall and cytoskeleton, and is important because it can influence the ability of bacteria to acquire nutrients, attach to surfaces, swim through liquids and escape predators.[37][38]
+
+Many bacterial species exist simply as single cells, others associate in characteristic patterns: Neisseria form diploids (pairs), Streptococcus form chains, and Staphylococcus group together in "bunch of grapes" clusters. Bacteria can also group to form larger multicellular structures, such as the elongated filaments of Actinobacteria, the aggregates of Myxobacteria, and the complex hyphae of Streptomyces.[39] These multicellular structures are often only seen in certain conditions. For example, when starved of amino acids, Myxobacteria detect surrounding cells in a process known as quorum sensing, migrate towards each other, and aggregate to form fruiting bodies up to 500 micrometres long and containing approximately 100,000 bacterial cells.[40] In these fruiting bodies, the bacteria perform separate tasks; for example, about one in ten cells migrate to the top of a fruiting body and differentiate into a specialised dormant state called a myxospore, which is more resistant to drying and other adverse environmental conditions.[41]
+
+Bacteria often attach to surfaces and form dense aggregations called biofilms, and larger formations known as microbial mats. These biofilms and mats can range from a few micrometres in thickness to up to half a metre in depth, and may contain multiple species of bacteria, protists and archaea. Bacteria living in biofilms display a complex arrangement of cells and extracellular components, forming secondary structures, such as microcolonies, through which there are networks of channels to enable better diffusion of nutrients.[42][43] In natural environments, such as soil or the surfaces of plants, the majority of bacteria are bound to surfaces in biofilms.[44] Biofilms are also important in medicine, as these structures are often present during chronic bacterial infections or in infections of implanted medical devices, and bacteria protected within biofilms are much harder to kill than individual isolated bacteria.[45]
+
+The bacterial cell is surrounded by a cell membrane, which is made primarily of phospholipids. This membrane encloses the contents of the cell and acts as a barrier to hold nutrients, proteins and other essential components of the cytoplasm within the cell.[46] Unlike eukaryotic cells, bacteria usually lack large membrane-bound structures in their cytoplasm such as a nucleus, mitochondria, chloroplasts and the other organelles present in eukaryotic cells.[47] However, some bacteria have protein-bound organelles in the cytoplasm which compartmentalize aspects of bacterial metabolism,[48][49] such as the carboxysome.[50] Additionally, bacteria have a multi-component cytoskeleton to control the localisation of proteins and nucleic acids within the cell, and to manage the process of cell division.[51][52][53]
+
+Many important biochemical reactions, such as energy generation, occur due to concentration gradients across membranes, creating a potential difference analogous to a battery. The general lack of internal membranes in bacteria means these reactions, such as electron transport, occur across the cell membrane between the cytoplasm and the outside of the cell or periplasm.[54] However, in many photosynthetic bacteria the plasma membrane is highly folded and fills most of the cell with layers of light-gathering membrane.[55] These light-gathering complexes may even form lipid-enclosed structures called chlorosomes in green sulfur bacteria.[56]
+
+Bacteria do not have a membrane-bound nucleus, and their genetic material is typically a single circular bacterial chromosome of DNA located in the cytoplasm in an irregularly shaped body called the nucleoid.[57] The nucleoid contains the chromosome with its associated proteins and RNA. Like all other organisms, bacteria contain ribosomes for the production of proteins, but the structure of the bacterial ribosome is different from that of eukaryotes and Archaea.[58]
+
+Some bacteria produce intracellular nutrient storage granules, such as glycogen,[59] polyphosphate,[60] sulfur[61] or polyhydroxyalkanoates.[62] Bacteria such as the photosynthetic cyanobacteria, produce internal gas vacuoles, which they use to regulate their buoyancy, allowing them to move up or down into water layers with different light intensities and nutrient levels.[63]
+
+Around the outside of the cell membrane is the cell wall. Bacterial cell walls are made of peptidoglycan (also called murein), which is made from polysaccharide chains cross-linked by peptides containing D-amino acids.[64] Bacterial cell walls are different from the cell walls of plants and fungi, which are made of cellulose and chitin, respectively.[65] The cell wall of bacteria is also distinct from that of Archaea, which do not contain peptidoglycan. The cell wall is essential to the survival of many bacteria, and the antibiotic penicillin (produced by a fungus called Penicillium) is able to kill bacteria by inhibiting a step in the synthesis of peptidoglycan.[65]
+
+There are broadly speaking two different types of cell wall in bacteria, that classify bacteria into Gram-positive bacteria  and Gram-negative bacteria. The names originate from the reaction of cells to the Gram stain, a long-standing test for the classification of bacterial species.[66]
+
+Gram-positive bacteria possess a thick cell wall containing many layers of peptidoglycan and teichoic acids. In contrast, Gram-negative bacteria have a relatively thin cell wall consisting of a few layers of peptidoglycan surrounded by a second lipid membrane containing lipopolysaccharides and lipoproteins. Most bacteria have the Gram-negative cell wall, and only the Firmicutes and Actinobacteria (previously known as the low G+C and high G+C Gram-positive bacteria, respectively) have the alternative Gram-positive arrangement.[67] These differences in structure can produce differences in antibiotic susceptibility; for instance, vancomycin can kill only Gram-positive bacteria and is ineffective against Gram-negative pathogens, such as Haemophilus influenzae or Pseudomonas aeruginosa.[68] Some bacteria have cell wall structures that are neither classically Gram-positive or Gram-negative. This includes clinically important bacteria such as Mycobacteria which have a thick peptidoglycan cell wall like a Gram-positive bacterium, but also a second outer layer of lipids.[69]
+
+In many bacteria, an S-layer of rigidly arrayed protein molecules covers the outside of the cell.[70] This layer provides chemical and physical protection for the cell surface and can act as a macromolecular diffusion barrier. S-layers have diverse but mostly poorly understood functions, but are known to act as virulence factors in Campylobacter and contain surface enzymes in Bacillus stearothermophilus.[71]
+
+Flagella are rigid protein structures, about 20 nanometres in diameter and up to 20 micrometres in length, that are used for motility. Flagella are driven by the energy released by the transfer of ions down an electrochemical gradient across the cell membrane.[72]
+
+Fimbriae (sometimes called "attachment pili") are fine filaments of protein, usually 2–10 nanometres in diameter and up to several micrometres in length. They are distributed over the surface of the cell, and resemble fine hairs when seen under the electron microscope. Fimbriae are believed to be involved in attachment to solid surfaces or to other cells, and are essential for the virulence of some bacterial pathogens.[73] Pili (sing. pilus) are cellular appendages, slightly larger than fimbriae, that can transfer genetic material between bacterial cells in a process called conjugation where they are called conjugation pili or sex pili (see bacterial genetics, below).[74] They can also generate movement where they are called type IV pili.[75]
+
+Glycocalyx is produced by many bacteria to surround their cells, and varies in structural complexity: ranging from a disorganised slime layer of extracellular polymeric substances to a highly structured capsule. These structures can protect cells from engulfment by eukaryotic cells such as macrophages (part of the human immune system).[76] They can also act as antigens and be involved in cell recognition, as well as aiding attachment to surfaces and the formation of biofilms.[77]
+
+The assembly of these extracellular structures is dependent on bacterial secretion systems. These transfer proteins from the cytoplasm into the periplasm or into the environment around the cell. Many types of secretion systems are known and these structures are often essential for the virulence of pathogens, so are intensively studied.[78]
+
+Certain genera of Gram-positive bacteria, such as Bacillus, Clostridium, Sporohalobacter, Anaerobacter, and Heliobacterium, can form highly resistant, dormant structures called endospores.[79] Endospores develop within the cytoplasm of the cell; generally a single endospore develops in each cell.[80] Each endospore contains a core of DNA and ribosomes surrounded by a cortex layer and protected by a multilayer rigid coat composed of peptidoglycan and a variety of proteins.[80]
+
+Endospores show no detectable metabolism and can survive extreme physical and chemical stresses, such as high levels of UV light, gamma radiation, detergents, disinfectants, heat, freezing, pressure, and desiccation.[81] In this dormant state, these organisms may remain viable for millions of years,[82][83][84] and endospores even allow bacteria to survive exposure to the vacuum and radiation in space, possibly bacteria could be distributed throughout the Universe by space dust, meteoroids, asteroids, comets, planetoids or via directed panspermia.[85][86] Endospore-forming bacteria can also cause disease: for example, anthrax can be contracted by the inhalation of Bacillus anthracis endospores, and contamination of deep puncture wounds with Clostridium tetani endospores causes tetanus.[87]
+
+Bacteria exhibit an extremely wide variety of metabolic types.[88] The distribution of metabolic traits within a group of bacteria has traditionally been used to define their taxonomy, but these traits often do not correspond with modern genetic classifications.[89] Bacterial metabolism is classified into nutritional groups on the basis of three major criteria: the source of energy, the electron donors used, and the source of carbon used for growth.[90]
+
+Bacteria either derive energy from light using photosynthesis (called phototrophy), or by breaking down chemical compounds using oxidation (called chemotrophy).[91] Chemotrophs use chemical compounds as a source of energy by transferring electrons from a given electron donor to a terminal electron acceptor in a redox reaction. This reaction releases energy that can be used to drive metabolism. Chemotrophs are further divided by the types of compounds they use to transfer electrons. Bacteria that use inorganic compounds such as hydrogen, carbon monoxide, or ammonia as sources of electrons are called lithotrophs, while those that use organic compounds are called organotrophs.[91] The compounds used to receive electrons are also used to classify bacteria: aerobic organisms use oxygen as the terminal electron acceptor, while anaerobic organisms use other compounds such as nitrate, sulfate, or carbon dioxide.[91]
+
+Many bacteria get their carbon from other organic carbon, called heterotrophy. Others such as cyanobacteria and some purple bacteria are autotrophic, meaning that they obtain cellular carbon by fixing carbon dioxide.[92] In unusual circumstances, the gas methane can be used by methanotrophic bacteria as both a source of electrons and a substrate for carbon anabolism.[93]
+
+In many ways, bacterial metabolism provides traits that are useful for ecological stability and for human society. One example is that some bacteria have the ability to fix nitrogen gas using the enzyme nitrogenase. This environmentally important trait can be found in bacteria of most metabolic types listed above.[94] This leads to the ecologically important processes of denitrification, sulfate reduction, and acetogenesis, respectively.[95][96] Bacterial metabolic processes are also important in biological responses to pollution; for example, sulfate-reducing bacteria are largely responsible for the production of the highly toxic forms of mercury (methyl- and dimethylmercury) in the environment.[97] Non-respiratory anaerobes use fermentation to generate energy and reducing power, secreting metabolic by-products (such as ethanol in brewing) as waste. Facultative anaerobes can switch between fermentation and different terminal electron acceptors depending on the environmental conditions in which they find themselves.[98]
+
+Unlike in multicellular organisms, increases in cell size (cell growth) and reproduction by cell division are tightly linked in unicellular organisms. Bacteria grow to a fixed size and then reproduce through binary fission, a form of asexual reproduction.[99] Under optimal conditions, bacteria can grow and divide extremely rapidly, and bacterial populations can double as quickly as every 9.8 minutes.[100] In cell division, two identical clone daughter cells are produced. Some bacteria, while still reproducing asexually, form more complex reproductive structures that help disperse the newly formed daughter cells. Examples include fruiting body formation by Myxobacteria and aerial hyphae formation by Streptomyces, or budding. Budding involves a cell forming a protrusion that breaks away and produces a daughter cell.[101]
+
+In the laboratory, bacteria are usually grown using solid or liquid media. Solid growth media, such as agar plates, are used to isolate pure cultures of a bacterial strain. However, liquid growth media are used when the measurement of growth or large volumes of cells are required. Growth in stirred liquid media occurs as an even cell suspension, making the cultures easy to divide and transfer, although isolating single bacteria from liquid media is difficult. The use of selective media (media with specific nutrients added or deficient, or with antibiotics added) can help identify specific organisms.[103]
+
+Most laboratory techniques for growing bacteria use high levels of nutrients to produce large amounts of cells cheaply and quickly. However, in natural environments, nutrients are limited, meaning that bacteria cannot continue to reproduce indefinitely. This nutrient limitation has led the evolution of different growth strategies (see r/K selection theory). Some organisms can grow extremely rapidly when nutrients become available, such as the formation of algal (and cyanobacterial) blooms that often occur in lakes during the summer.[104] Other organisms have adaptations to harsh environments, such as the production of multiple antibiotics by Streptomyces that inhibit the growth of competing microorganisms.[105] In nature, many organisms live in communities (e.g., biofilms) that may allow for increased supply of nutrients and protection from environmental stresses.[44] These relationships can be essential for growth of a particular organism or group of organisms (syntrophy).[106]
+
+Bacterial growth follows four phases. When a population of bacteria first enter a high-nutrient environment that allows growth, the cells need to adapt to their new environment. The first phase of growth is the lag phase, a period of slow growth when the cells are adapting to the high-nutrient environment and preparing for fast growth. The lag phase has high biosynthesis rates, as proteins necessary for rapid growth are produced.[107][108] The second phase of growth is the logarithmic phase, also known as the exponential phase. The log phase is marked by rapid exponential growth. The rate at which cells grow during this phase is known as the growth rate (k), and the time it takes the cells to double is known as the generation time (g). During log phase, nutrients are metabolised at maximum speed until one of the nutrients is depleted and starts limiting growth. The third phase of growth is the stationary phase and is caused by depleted nutrients. The cells reduce their metabolic activity and consume non-essential cellular proteins. The stationary phase is a transition from rapid growth to a stress response state and there is increased expression of genes involved in DNA repair, antioxidant metabolism and nutrient transport.[109] The final phase is the death phase where the bacteria run out of nutrients and die.[110]
+
+Most bacteria have a single circular chromosome that can range in size from only 160,000 base pairs in the endosymbiotic bacteria Carsonella ruddii,[111] to 12,200,000 base pairs (12.2 Mbp) in the soil-dwelling bacteria Sorangium cellulosum.[112] There are many exceptions to this, for example some Streptomyces and  Borrelia species contain a single linear chromosome,[113][114] while some Vibrio species contain more than one chromosome.[115] Bacteria can also contain plasmids, small extra-chromosomal molecules of DNA that may contain genes for various useful functions such as antibiotic resistance, metabolic capabilities, or various virulence factors.[116]
+
+Bacteria genomes usually encode a few hundred to a few thousand genes. The genes in bacterial genomes are usually a single continuous stretch of DNA and although several different types of introns do exist in bacteria, these are much rarer than in eukaryotes.[117]
+
+Bacteria, as asexual organisms, inherit an identical copy of the parent's genomes and are clonal. However, all bacteria can evolve by selection on changes to their genetic material DNA caused by genetic recombination or mutations. Mutations come from errors made during the replication of DNA or from exposure to mutagens. Mutation rates vary widely among different species of bacteria and even among different clones of a single species of bacteria.[118] Genetic changes in bacterial genomes come from either random mutation during replication or "stress-directed mutation", where genes involved in a particular growth-limiting process have an increased mutation rate.[119]
+
+Some bacteria also transfer genetic material between cells. This can occur in three main ways. First, bacteria can take up exogenous DNA from their environment, in a process called transformation.[120] Many bacteria can naturally take up DNA from the environment, while others must be chemically altered in order to induce them to take up DNA.[121] The development of competence in nature is usually associated with stressful environmental conditions, and seems to be an adaptation for facilitating repair of DNA damage in recipient cells.[122] The second way bacteria transfer genetic material is by transduction, when the integration of a bacteriophage introduces foreign DNA into the chromosome. Many types of bacteriophage exist, some simply infect and lyse their host bacteria, while others insert into the bacterial chromosome.[123] Bacteria resist phage infection through restriction modification systems that degrade foreign DNA,[124] and a system that uses CRISPR sequences to retain fragments of the genomes of phage that the bacteria have come into contact with in the past, which allows them to block virus replication through a form of RNA interference.[125][126] The third method of gene transfer is conjugation, whereby DNA is transferred through direct cell contact. In ordinary circumstances, transduction, conjugation, and transformation involve transfer of DNA between individual bacteria of the same species, but occasionally transfer may occur between individuals of different bacterial species and this may have significant consequences, such as the transfer of antibiotic resistance.[127][128] In such cases, gene acquisition from other bacteria or the environment is called horizontal gene transfer and may be common under natural conditions.[129]
+
+Many bacteria are motile (able to move themselves) and do so using a variety of mechanisms. The best studied of these are flagella, long filaments that are turned by a motor at the base to generate propeller-like movement.[130] The bacterial flagellum is made of about 20 proteins, with approximately another 30 proteins required for its regulation and assembly.[130] The flagellum is a rotating structure driven by a reversible motor at the base that uses the electrochemical gradient across the membrane for power.[131]
+
+Bacteria can use flagella in different ways to generate different kinds of movement. Many bacteria (such as E. coli) have two distinct modes of movement: forward movement (swimming) and tumbling. The tumbling allows them to reorient and makes their movement a three-dimensional random walk.[132] Bacterial species differ in the number and arrangement of flagella on their surface; some have a single flagellum (monotrichous), a flagellum at each end (amphitrichous), clusters of flagella at the poles of the cell (lophotrichous), while others have flagella distributed over the entire surface of the cell (peritrichous). The flagella of a unique group of bacteria, the spirochaetes, are found between two membranes in the periplasmic space. They have a distinctive helical body that twists about as it moves.[130]
+
+Two other types of bacterial motion are called twitching motility that relies on a structure called the type IV pilus,[133] and gliding motility, that uses other mechanisms. In twitching motility, the rod-like pilus extends out from the cell, binds some substrate, and then retracts, pulling the cell forward.[134]
+
+Motile bacteria are attracted or repelled by certain stimuli in behaviours called taxes: these include chemotaxis, phototaxis, energy taxis, and magnetotaxis.[135][136][137] In one peculiar group, the myxobacteria, individual bacteria move together to form waves of cells that then differentiate to form fruiting bodies containing spores.[41] The myxobacteria move only when on solid surfaces, unlike E. coli, which is motile in liquid or solid media.[138]
+
+Several Listeria and Shigella species move inside host cells by usurping the cytoskeleton, which is normally used to move organelles inside the cell. By promoting actin polymerisation at one pole of their cells, they can form a kind of tail that pushes them through the host cell's cytoplasm.[139]
+
+A few bacteria have chemical systems that generate light. This bioluminescence often occurs in bacteria that live in association with fish, and the light probably serves to attract fish or other large animals.[140]
+
+Bacteria often function as multicellular aggregates known as biofilms, exchanging a variety of molecular signals for inter-cell communication, and engaging in coordinated multicellular behaviour.[141][142]
+
+The communal benefits of multicellular cooperation include a cellular division of labour, accessing resources that cannot effectively be used by single cells, collectively defending against antagonists, and optimising population survival by differentiating into distinct cell types.[141] For example, bacteria in biofilms can have more than 500 times increased resistance to antibacterial agents than individual "planktonic" bacteria of the same species.[142]
+
+One type of inter-cellular communication by a molecular signal is called quorum sensing, which serves the purpose of determining whether there is a local population density that is sufficiently high that it is productive to invest in processes that are only successful if large numbers of similar organisms behave similarly, as in excreting digestive enzymes or emitting light.[143][144]
+
+Quorum sensing allows bacteria to coordinate gene expression, and enables them to produce, release and detect autoinducers or pheromones which accumulate with the growth in cell population.[145]
+
+Classification seeks to describe the diversity of bacterial species by naming and grouping organisms based on similarities. Bacteria can be classified on the basis of cell structure, cellular metabolism or on differences in cell components, such as DNA, fatty acids, pigments, antigens and quinones.[103] While these schemes allowed the identification and classification of bacterial strains, it was unclear whether these differences represented variation between distinct species or between strains of the same species. This uncertainty was due to the lack of distinctive structures in most bacteria, as well as lateral gene transfer between unrelated species.[147] Due to lateral gene transfer, some closely related bacteria can have very different morphologies and metabolisms. To overcome this uncertainty, modern bacterial classification emphasises molecular systematics, using genetic techniques such as guanine cytosine ratio determination, genome-genome hybridisation, as well as sequencing genes that have not undergone extensive lateral gene transfer, such as the rRNA gene.[148] Classification of bacteria is determined by publication in the International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology,[149] and Bergey's Manual of Systematic Bacteriology.[150] The International Committee on Systematic Bacteriology (ICSB) maintains international rules for the naming of bacteria and taxonomic categories and for the ranking of them in the International Code of Nomenclature of Bacteria.[151]
+
+The term "bacteria" was traditionally applied to all microscopic, single-cell prokaryotes. However, molecular systematics showed prokaryotic life to consist of two separate domains, originally called Eubacteria and Archaebacteria, but now called Bacteria and Archaea that evolved independently from an ancient common ancestor.[1] The archaea and eukaryotes are more closely related to each other than either is to the bacteria. These two domains, along with Eukarya, are the basis of the three-domain system, which is currently the most widely used classification system in microbiology.[152] However, due to the relatively recent introduction of molecular systematics and a rapid increase in the number of genome sequences that are available, bacterial classification remains a changing and expanding field.[153][154] For example, Cavalier-Smith argued that the Archaea and Eukaryotes evolved from Gram-positive bacteria.[155]
+
+The identification of bacteria in the laboratory is particularly relevant in medicine, where the correct treatment is determined by the bacterial species causing an infection. Consequently, the need to identify human pathogens was a major impetus for the development of techniques to identify bacteria.[156]
+
+The Gram stain, developed in 1884 by Hans Christian Gram, characterises bacteria based on the structural characteristics of their cell walls.[66] The thick layers of peptidoglycan in the "Gram-positive" cell wall stain purple, while the thin "Gram-negative" cell wall appears pink. By combining morphology and Gram-staining, most bacteria can be classified as belonging to one of four groups (Gram-positive cocci, Gram-positive bacilli, Gram-negative cocci and Gram-negative bacilli). Some organisms are best identified by stains other than the Gram stain, particularly mycobacteria or Nocardia, which show acid-fastness on Ziehl–Neelsen or similar stains.[157] Other organisms may need to be identified by their growth in special media, or by other techniques, such as serology.[158]
+
+Culture techniques are designed to promote the growth and identify particular bacteria, while restricting the growth of the other bacteria in the sample. Often these techniques are designed for specific specimens; for example, a sputum sample will be treated to identify organisms that cause pneumonia, while stool specimens are cultured on selective media to identify organisms that cause diarrhoea, while preventing growth of non-pathogenic bacteria. Specimens that are normally sterile, such as blood, urine or spinal fluid, are cultured under conditions designed to grow all possible organisms.[103][159] Once a pathogenic organism has been isolated, it can be further characterised by its morphology, growth patterns (such as aerobic or anaerobic growth), patterns of hemolysis, and staining.[160]
+
+As with bacterial classification, identification of bacteria is increasingly using molecular methods. Diagnostics using DNA-based tools, such as polymerase chain reaction, are increasingly popular due to their specificity and speed, compared to culture-based methods.[161] These methods also allow the detection and identification of "viable but nonculturable" cells that are metabolically active but non-dividing.[162] However, even using these improved methods, the total number of bacterial species is not known and cannot even be estimated with any certainty. Following present classification, there are a little less than 9,300 known species of prokaryotes, which includes bacteria and archaea;[163] but attempts to estimate the true number of bacterial diversity have ranged from 107 to 109 total species—and even these diverse estimates may be off by many orders of magnitude.[164][165]
+
+Despite their apparent simplicity, bacteria can form complex associations with other organisms. These symbiotic associations can be divided into parasitism, mutualism and commensalism. Due to their small size, commensal bacteria are ubiquitous and grow on animals and plants exactly as they will grow on any other surface. However, their growth can be increased by warmth and sweat, and large populations of these organisms in humans are the cause of body odour.[167]
+
+Some species of bacteria kill and then consume other microorganisms, these species are called predatory bacteria.[168] These include organisms such as Myxococcus xanthus, which forms swarms of cells that kill and digest any bacteria they encounter.[169] Other bacterial predators either attach to their prey in order to digest them and absorb nutrients, such as Vampirovibrio chlorellavorus,[170] or invade another cell and multiply inside the cytosol, such as Daptobacter.[171] These predatory bacteria are thought to have evolved from saprophages that consumed dead microorganisms, through adaptations that allowed them to entrap and kill other organisms.[172]
+
+Certain bacteria form close spatial associations that are essential for their survival. One such mutualistic association, called interspecies hydrogen transfer, occurs between clusters of anaerobic bacteria that consume organic acids, such as butyric acid or propionic acid, and produce hydrogen, and methanogenic Archaea that consume hydrogen.[173] The bacteria in this association are unable to consume the organic acids as this reaction produces hydrogen that accumulates in their surroundings. Only the intimate association with the hydrogen-consuming Archaea keeps the hydrogen concentration low enough to allow the bacteria to grow.[174]
+
+In soil, microorganisms that reside in the rhizosphere (a zone that includes the root surface and the soil that adheres to the root after gentle shaking) carry out nitrogen fixation, converting nitrogen gas to nitrogenous compounds.[175] This serves to provide an easily absorbable form of nitrogen for many plants, which cannot fix nitrogen themselves. Many other bacteria are found as symbionts in humans and other organisms. For example, the presence of over 1,000 bacterial species in the normal human gut flora of the intestines can contribute to gut immunity, synthesise vitamins, such as folic acid, vitamin K and biotin, convert sugars to lactic acid (see Lactobacillus), as well as fermenting complex undigestible carbohydrates.[176][177][178] The presence of this gut flora also inhibits the growth of potentially pathogenic bacteria (usually through competitive exclusion) and these beneficial bacteria are consequently sold as probiotic dietary supplements.[179]
+
+If bacteria form a parasitic association with other organisms, they are classed as pathogens. Pathogenic bacteria are a major cause of human death and disease and cause infections such as tetanus (Caused by Clostridium tetani), typhoid fever, diphtheria, syphilis, cholera, foodborne illness, leprosy (caused by Micobacterium leprae) and tuberculosis (Caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis). A pathogenic cause for a known medical disease may only be discovered many years after, as was the case with Helicobacter pylori and peptic ulcer disease. Bacterial diseases are also important in agriculture, with bacteria causing leaf spot, fire blight and wilts in plants, as well as Johne's disease, mastitis, salmonella and anthrax in farm animals.[180]
+
+Each species of pathogen has a characteristic spectrum of interactions with its human hosts. Some organisms, such as Staphylococcus or Streptococcus, can cause skin infections, pneumonia, meningitis and even overwhelming sepsis, a systemic inflammatory response producing shock, massive vasodilation and death.[181] Yet these organisms are also part of the normal human flora and usually exist on the skin or in the nose without causing any disease at all. Other organisms invariably cause disease in humans, such as the Rickettsia, which are obligate intracellular parasites able to grow and reproduce only within the cells of other organisms. One species of Rickettsia causes typhus, while another causes Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Chlamydia, another phylum of obligate intracellular parasites, contains species that can cause pneumonia, or urinary tract infection and may be involved in coronary heart disease.[182] Finally, some species, such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Burkholderia cenocepacia, and Mycobacterium avium, are opportunistic pathogens and cause disease mainly in people suffering from immunosuppression or cystic fibrosis.[183][184]
+
+Bacterial infections may be treated with antibiotics, which are classified as bacteriocidal if they kill bacteria, or bacteriostatic if they just prevent bacterial growth. There are many types of antibiotics and each class inhibits a process that is different in the pathogen from that found in the host. An example of how antibiotics produce selective toxicity are chloramphenicol and puromycin, which inhibit the bacterial ribosome, but not the structurally different eukaryotic ribosome.[185] Antibiotics are used both in treating human disease and in intensive farming to promote animal growth, where they may be contributing to the rapid development of antibiotic resistance in bacterial populations.[186] Infections can be prevented by antiseptic measures such as sterilising the skin prior to piercing it with the needle of a syringe, and by proper care of indwelling catheters. Surgical and dental instruments are also sterilised to prevent contamination by bacteria. Disinfectants such as bleach are used to kill bacteria or other pathogens on surfaces to prevent contamination and further reduce the risk of infection.[187]
+
+Bacteria, often lactic acid bacteria, such as Lactobacillus and Lactococcus, in combination with yeasts and moulds, have been used for thousands of years in the preparation of fermented foods, such as cheese, pickles, soy sauce, sauerkraut, vinegar, wine and yogurt.[188][189]
+
+The ability of bacteria to degrade a variety of organic compounds is remarkable and has been used in waste processing and bioremediation. Bacteria capable of digesting the hydrocarbons in petroleum are often used to clean up oil spills.[190] Fertiliser was added to some of the beaches in Prince William Sound in an attempt to promote the growth of these naturally occurring bacteria after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. These efforts were effective on beaches that were not too thickly covered in oil. Bacteria are also used for the bioremediation of industrial toxic wastes.[191] In the chemical industry, bacteria are most important in the production of enantiomerically pure chemicals for use as pharmaceuticals or agrichemicals.[192]
+
+Bacteria can also be used in the place of pesticides in the biological pest control. This commonly involves Bacillus thuringiensis (also called BT), a Gram-positive, soil dwelling bacterium. Subspecies of this bacteria are used as a Lepidopteran-specific insecticides under trade names such as Dipel and Thuricide.[193] Because of their specificity, these pesticides are regarded as environmentally friendly, with little or no effect on humans, wildlife, pollinators and most other beneficial insects.[194][195]
+
+Because of their ability to quickly grow and the relative ease with which they can be manipulated, bacteria are the workhorses for the fields of molecular biology, genetics and biochemistry. By making mutations in bacterial DNA and examining the resulting phenotypes, scientists can determine the function of genes, enzymes and metabolic pathways in bacteria, then apply this knowledge to more complex organisms.[196] This aim of understanding the biochemistry of a cell reaches its most complex expression in the synthesis of huge amounts of enzyme kinetic and gene expression data into mathematical models of entire organisms. This is achievable in some well-studied bacteria, with models of Escherichia coli metabolism now being produced and tested.[197][198] This understanding of bacterial metabolism and genetics allows the use of biotechnology to bioengineer bacteria for the production of therapeutic proteins, such as insulin, growth factors, or antibodies.[199][200]
+
+Because of their importance for research in general, samples of bacterial strains are isolated and preserved in Biological Resource Centers. This ensures the availability of the strain to scientists worldwide.[201]
+
+Bacteria were first observed by the Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in 1676, using a single-lens microscope of his own design.[202] He then published his observations in a series of letters to the Royal Society of London.[203][204][205] Bacteria were Leeuwenhoek's most remarkable microscopic discovery. They were just at the limit of what his simple lenses could make out and, in one of the most striking hiatuses in the history of science, no one else would see them again for over a century.[206] His observations had also included protozoans which he called animalcules, and his findings were looked at again in the light of the more recent findings of  cell theory.[207]
+
+Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg introduced the word "bacterium" in 1828.[208] In fact, his Bacterium was a genus that contained non-spore-forming rod-shaped bacteria,[209] as opposed to Bacillus, a genus of spore-forming rod-shaped bacteria defined by Ehrenberg in 1835.[210]
+
+Louis Pasteur demonstrated in 1859 that the growth of microorganisms causes the fermentation process, and that this growth is not due to spontaneous generation (yeasts and molds, commonly associated with fermentation, are not bacteria, but rather fungi). Along with his contemporary Robert Koch, Pasteur was an early advocate of the germ theory of disease.[211]
+
+Robert Koch, a pioneer in medical microbiology, worked on cholera, anthrax and tuberculosis. In his research into tuberculosis Koch finally proved the germ theory, for which he received a Nobel Prize in 1905.[212] In Koch's postulates, he set out criteria to test if an organism is the cause of a disease, and these postulates are still used today.[213]
+
+Ferdinand Cohn is said to be a founder of bacteriology, studying bacteria from 1870. Cohn was the first to classify bacteria based on their morphology.[214][215]
+
+Though it was known in the nineteenth century that bacteria are the cause of many diseases, no effective antibacterial treatments were available.[216] In 1910, Paul Ehrlich developed the first antibiotic, by changing dyes that selectively stained Treponema pallidum—the spirochaete that causes syphilis—into compounds that selectively killed the pathogen.[217] Ehrlich had been awarded a 1908 Nobel Prize for his work on immunology, and pioneered the use of stains to detect and identify bacteria, with his work being the basis of the Gram stain and the Ziehl–Neelsen stain.[218]
+
+A major step forward in the study of bacteria came in 1977 when Carl Woese recognised that archaea have a separate line of evolutionary descent from bacteria.[3] This new phylogenetic taxonomy depended on the sequencing of 16S ribosomal RNA, and divided prokaryotes into two evolutionary domains, as part of the three-domain system.[1]

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+Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (/ˈdɛləkrwɑː, ˌdɛləˈkrwɑː/ DEL-ə-krwah, DEL-ə-KRWAH,[1] French: [øʒɛn dəlakʁwa]; 26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.[2]
+
+In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic.[3] Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime", of nature in often violent action.[4]
+
+However, Delacroix was given to neither sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible."[5] Together with Ingres, Delacroix is considered one of the last old Masters of painting, and one of the few who was ever photographed.
+
+As a painter and muralist, Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish author Walter Scott and the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
+
+Eugène Delacroix was born on 26 April 1798 at Charenton-Saint-Maurice in Île-de-France, near Paris. His mother was named Victoire Oeben, the daughter of the cabinet-maker Jean-François Oeben.
+He had three much older siblings.
+Charles-Henri Delacroix (1779–1845) rose to the rank of General in the Napoleonic army.
+Henriette (1780–1827) married the diplomat Raymond de Verninac Saint-Maur (1762–1822).
+Henri was born six years later. He was killed at the Battle of Friedland on 14 June 1807.[6]
+
+There are medical reasons to believe that Eugène's legitimate father, Charles-François Delacroix, was not able to procreate at the time of Eugène's conception.
+Talleyrand, who was a friend of the family and successor of Charles Delacroix as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and whom the adult Eugène resembled in appearance and character, considered himself as his real father.[7] After assuming his office as foreign minister Talleyrand, dispatched Delacroix to The Hague in the capacity of French ambassador to Batavia. Delacroix who at the time suffered from erectile dysfunction returned to Paris in early September 1797, only to find his wife pregnant. Talleyrand went on to assist Eugène in the form of numerous anonymous commissions.[8] Throughout his career as a painter, he was protected by Talleyrand, who served successively the Restoration and king Louis-Philippe, and ultimately as ambassador of France in Great Britain, and later by Talleyrand's grandson, Charles Auguste Louis Joseph, duc de Morny, half-brother of Napoleon III and speaker of the French House of Commons. His legitimate father, Charles Delacroix, died in 1805, and his mother in 1814, leaving 16-year-old Eugène an orphan.
+
+His early education was at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen[9] where he steeped himself in the classics and won awards for drawing. In 1815 he began his training with Pierre-Narcisse Guérin in the neoclassical style of Jacques-Louis David. An early church commission, The Virgin of the Harvest (1819), displays a Raphael-esque influence, but another such commission, The Virgin of the Sacred Heart (1821), evidences a freer interpretation.[10] It precedes the influence of the more colourful and rich style of the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, and fellow French artist Théodore Géricault, whose works marked an introduction to Romanticism in art.
+
+The impact of Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa was profound, and stimulated Delacroix to produce his first major painting, The Barque of Dante, which was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1822. The work caused a sensation, and was largely derided by the public and officialdom, yet was purchased by the State for the Luxembourg Galleries; the pattern of widespread opposition to his work, countered by a vigorous, enlightened support, would continue throughout his life.[11] Two years later he again achieved popular success for his The Massacre at Chios.
+
+Delacroix's painting of the massacre at Chios shows sick, dying Greek civilians about to be slaughtered by the Turks. One of several paintings he made of this contemporary event, expressed the official policy for the Greek cause in their war of independence against the Turks, war sustained by English, Russian and French governments. Delacroix was quickly recognized by the authorities as a leading painter in the new Romantic style, and the picture was bought by the state. His depiction of suffering was controversial, however, as there was no glorious event taking place, no patriots raising their swords in valour as in David's Oath of the Horatii, only a disaster. Many critics deplored the painting's despairing tone; the artist Antoine-Jean Gros called it "a massacre of art".[11] The pathos in the depiction of an infant clutching its dead mother's breast had an especially powerful effect, although this detail was condemned as unfit for art by Delacroix's critics. A viewing of the paintings of John Constable and the watercolour sketches and art of Richard Parkes Bonnington prompted Delacroix to make extensive, freely painted changes to the sky and distant landscape.[12]
+
+Delacroix produced a second painting in support of the Greeks in their war for independence, this time referring to the capture of Missolonghi by Turkish forces in 1825.[13] With a restraint of palette appropriate to the allegory, Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi displays a woman in Greek costume with her breast bared, arms half-raised in an imploring gesture before the horrible scene: the suicide of the Greeks, who chose to kill themselves and destroy their city rather than surrender to the Turks. A hand is seen at the bottom, the body having been crushed by rubble. The painting serves as a monument to the people of Missolonghi and to the idea of freedom against tyrannical rule. This event interested Delacroix not only for his sympathies with the Greeks, but also because the poet Byron, whom Delacroix greatly admired, had died there.[2]
+
+A trip to England in 1825 included visits to Thomas Lawrence and Richard Parkes Bonington, and the colour and handling of English painting provided impetus for his only full-length portrait, the elegant Portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter (1826–30). At roughly the same time, Delacroix was creating romantic works of numerous themes, many of which would continue to interest him for over thirty years. By 1825, he was producing lithographs illustrating Shakespeare, and soon thereafter lithographs and paintings from Goethe's Faust. Paintings such as The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan (1826), and Woman with Parrot (1827), introduced subjects of violence and sensuality which would prove to be recurrent.[14]
+
+These various romantic strands came together in The Death of Sardanapalus (1827–28). Delacroix's painting of the death of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus shows an emotionally stirring scene alive with beautiful colours, exotic costumes and tragic events. The Death of Sardanapalus depicts the besieged king watching impassively as guards carry out his orders to kill his servants, concubines and animals. The literary source is a play by Byron, although the play does not specifically mention any massacre of concubines.[15]
+
+Sardanapalus' attitude of calm detachment is a familiar pose in Romantic imagery in this period in Europe. The painting, which was not exhibited again for many years afterward, has been regarded by some critics[who?] as a gruesome fantasy involving death and lust. Especially shocking is the struggle of a nude woman whose throat is about to be cut, a scene placed prominently in the foreground for maximum impact. However, the sensuous beauty and exotic colours of the composition make the picture appear pleasing and shocking at the same time.[original research?]
+
+A variety of Romantic interests were again synthesized in The Murder of the Bishop of Liège (1829). It also borrowed from a literary source, this time Scott, and depicts a scene from the Middle Ages, that of the murder of Louis de Bourbon, Bishop of Liège amidst an orgy sponsored by his captor, William de la Marck. Set in an immense vaulted interior which Delacroix based on sketches of the Palais de Justice in Rouen and Westminster Hall, the drama plays out in chiaroscuro, organized around a brilliantly lit stretch of tablecloth. In 1855, a critic described the painting's vibrant handling as "Less finished than a painting, more finished than a sketch, The Murder of the Bishop of Liège was left by the painter at that supreme moment when one more stroke of the brush would have ruined everything".[16]
+
+Delacroix's most influential work came in 1830 with the painting Liberty Leading the People, which for choice of subject and technique highlights the differences between the romantic approach and the neoclassical style. Less obviously, it also differs from the Romanticism of Géricault, as exemplified by The Raft of the Medusa.
+
+Delacroix felt his composition more vividly as a whole, thought of his figures and crowds as types, and dominated them by the symbolic figure of Republican Liberty which is one of his finest plastic inventions...[17]
+
+Probably Delacroix's best-known painting, Liberty Leading the People is an unforgettable image of Parisians, having taken up arms, marching forward under the banner of the tricolour representing liberty, equality, and fraternity. Although Delacroix was inspired by contemporary events to invoke this romantic image of the spirit of liberty, he seems to be trying to convey the will and character of the people,[17] rather than glorifying the actual event, the 1830 revolution against Charles X, which did little other than bring a different king, Louis-Philippe, to power. The warriors lying dead in the foreground offer poignant counterpoint to the symbolic female figure, who is illuminated triumphantly against a background of smoke.[18]
+
+Although the French government bought the painting, by 1832 officials deemed its glorification of liberty too inflammatory and removed it from public view.[19] Nonetheless, Delacroix still received many government commissions for murals and ceiling paintings.[20]
+
+Following the Revolution of 1848 that saw the end of the reign of King Louis Philippe, Delacroix' painting, Liberty Leading the People, was finally put on display by the newly elected President, Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III). It is exhibited in the Louvre museum in Paris; although from December 2012 until 2014 it was on exhibit at Louvre-Lens in Lens, Pas-de-Calais.[21]
+
+The boy holding a pistol aloft on the right is sometimes thought to be an inspiration for the Gavroche character in Victor Hugo's 1862 novel, Les Misérables.[22]
+
+In 1832, Delacroix traveled to Spain and North Africa in company with the diplomat Charles-Edgar de Mornay, as part of a diplomatic mission to Morocco shortly after the French conquered Algeria. He went not primarily to study art, but to escape from the civilization of Paris, in hopes of seeing a more primitive culture.[17] He eventually produced over 100 paintings and drawings of scenes from or based on the life of the people of North Africa, and added a new and personal chapter to the interest in Orientalism.[23] Delacroix was entranced by the people and the costumes, and the trip would inform the subject matter of a great many of his future paintings. He believed that the North Africans, in their attire and their attitudes, provided a visual equivalent to the people of Classical Rome and Greece:
+
+The Greeks and Romans are here at my door, in the Arabs who wrap themselves in a white blanket and look like Cato or Brutus...[17]
+
+He managed to sketch some women secretly in Algiers, as in the painting Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1834), but generally he encountered difficulty in finding Muslim women to pose for him because of Muslim rules requiring that women be covered.[citation needed] Less problematic was the painting of Jewish women in North Africa, as subjects for the Jewish Wedding in Morocco (1837–1841).
+
+While in Tangier, Delacroix made many sketches of the people and the city, subjects to which he would return until the end of his life.[25] Animals—the embodiment of romantic passion—were incorporated into paintings such as Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable (1860), The Lion Hunt (of which there exist many versions, painted between 1856 and 1861), and Arab Saddling his Horse (1855).
+
+Delacroix drew inspiration from many sources over his career, such as the literary works of William Shakespeare and Lord Byron, or the artistry of Michelangelo. But from beginning to end of his life, he was in part characterized by a constant need for music, saying in 1855, "nothing can be compared with the emotion caused by music; that it expresses incomparable shades of feeling." He had said, while working at Saint Sulpice, that the music put him in a state of "exaltation" which inspired his painting. It was often in music, in the most melancholy renditions of Chopin, or the "pastoral" works of Beethoven that Delacroix was often able to draw the most emotion and inspiration. At one point during his life, Delacroix befriended and made portraits of the composer Chopin; in his journal, Delacroix praised him frequently.[26]
+
+In 1838 Delacroix exhibited Medea about to Kill Her Children, which created a sensation at the Salon. His first large-scale treatment of a scene from Greek mythology, the painting depicts Medea clutching her children, dagger drawn to slay them in vengeance for her abandonment by Jason. The three nude figures form an animated pyramid, bathed in a raking light which penetrates the grotto in which Medea has hidden. Though the painting was quickly purchased by the State, Delacroix was disappointed when it was sent to the Lille Musée des Beaux-Arts; he had intended for it to hang at the Luxembourg, where it would have joined The Barque of Dante and Scenes from the Massacres of Chios.[27]
+
+From 1833 Delacroix received numerous commissions to decorate public buildings in Paris. In that year he began work for the Salon du Roi in the Chambre des Députés, Palais Bourbon, which was not completed until 1837, and began a lifelong friendship with the female artist Marie-Élisabeth Blavot-Boulanger. For the next ten years he painted in both the Library at the Palais Bourbon and the Library at the Palais du Luxembourg. In 1843 he decorated the Church of St. Denis du Saint Sacrement with a large Pietà, and from 1848 to 1850 he painted the ceiling in the Galerie d'Apollon of the Louvre. From 1857 to 1861 he worked on frescoes for the Chapelle des Anges at the Church of St. Sulpice in Paris. They included "The Battle of Jacob with the Angel", "Saint Michael Slaying the Dragon", and "The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple".[28] These commissions offered him the opportunity to compose on a large scale in an architectural setting, much as had those masters he admired, Paolo Veronese, Tintoretto, and Rubens.
+
+The work was fatiguing, and during these years he suffered from an increasingly fragile constitution. In addition to his home in Paris, from 1844 he also lived at a small cottage in Champrosay, where he found respite in the countryside. From 1834 until his death, he was faithfully cared for by his housekeeper, Jeanne-Marie le Guillou, who zealously guarded his privacy, and whose devotion prolonged his life and his ability to continue working in his later years.[29]
+
+In 1862 Delacroix participated in the creation of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. His friend, the writer Théophile Gautier, became chairman, with the painter Aimé Millet acting as deputy chairman. In addition to Delacroix, the committee was composed of the painters Carrier-Belleuse and Puvis de Chavannes. Among the exhibitors were Léon Bonnat, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Charles-François Daubigny, Gustave Doré, and Édouard Manet.[citation needed] Just after his death in 1863, the society organized a retrospective exhibition of 248 paintings and lithographs by Delacroix—and ceased to mount any further exhibitions.[citation needed]
+
+The winter of 1862–63 was extremely rough for Delacroix; he was suffering from a bad throat infection which seemed to get worse over the course of the season. On a trip to Champrosay, he met a friend on the train and became exhausted after having a conversation. On 1 June he returned to Paris to see his doctor. Two weeks later, on 16 June, he was getting better and returned to his house in the country. But by 15 July he was sick enough to see his doctor who said he could do nothing more for him. By then, the only food he could eat was fruit. Delacroix realized the seriousness of his condition and wrote his will, leaving a gift for each of his friends. For his trusted housekeeper, Jenny Le Guillou, he left enough money for her to live on while ordering everything in his studio to be sold. He also inserted a clause forbidding any representation of his features, "whether by a death-mask or by drawing or by photography. I forbid it, expressly."[30] On 13 August, Delacroix died, with Jenny by his side.[31] He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery.
+
+His house, formerly situated along the canal of the Marne, is now near the exit of the motorway leading from Paris to central Germany.
+
+Mademoiselle Rose, 1817–1824, Louvre
+
+Orphan Girl at the Cemetery, 1823, Louvre
+
+Louis of Orléans Unveiling his Mistress, c.1825–26, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
+
+Charles Étienne Raymond Victor de Verninac, the painter's nephew, c.1825–26. private collection
+
+The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, 1826, Art Institute of Chicago
+
+Woman with a Parrot, 1827, Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon
+
+Woman With White Socks, 1825–1830, Louvre
+
+A Young Tiger Playing with its Mother, 1830, Louvre
+
+The Duke of Morny's Apartment, 1831–1833, Louvre
+
+Portrait of Dr. François-Marie Desmaisons, 1832–33, Detroit Institute of Arts
+
+Fantasia Arabe, 1833. Frankfurt Städel Museum
+
+The Women of Algiers, 1834, Louvre
+
+The Battle of Taillebourg (draft), 1834–35, Louvre
+
+The Natchez, 1835, Metropolitan Museum of Art
+
+Frédéric Chopin, 1838, Louvre
+
+George Sand, 1838, Ordrupgaard-Museum
+
+Modern hypothetical reconstruction of the painting showing George Sand sews while Chopin plays piano.
+
+Columbus and His Son at La Rábida, 1838, National Gallery of Art
+
+Jewish Wedding in Morocco, c.1839, Louvre
+
+Hamlet with Horatio, (the gravedigger scene), 1839, Louvre
+
+Christ on the Sea of Galilee, 1841, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
+
+Collision of Moorish Horsemen, 1844, Walters Art Museum
+
+Last Words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, 1844, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon
+
+Saint George Fighting the Dragon, 1847, Louvre Museum
+
+Desdemona Cursed by her Father (Desdemona maudite par son père), c.1850–1854, Brooklyn Museum
+
+]], 1852, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
+
+Perseus and Andromeda, circa 1853, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
+
+1855, Moroccan Saddles His Horse, Hermitage Museum
+
+Rider Attacked by a Jaguar, 1855. National Gallery in Prague
+
+The Bride of Abydos, 1857, Louvre
+
+The Death of Desdemona, 1858
+
+Horses Leaving the Sea, 1860, The Phillips Collection
+
+Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable, 1860
+
+Shipwreck on the Coast, 1862, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
+
+Ovid among the Scythians, oil on cavas, 1862, version in Metropolitan Museum of Art
+
+Winter: Juno and Aeolus, 1856, private collection (sketch for the painting in the São Paulo Museum of Art)
+
+Murals for Salon du Roi, Palais Bourbon, Paris, 1833–1837
+
+Charioteers, National Gallery of Art
+
+At the sale of his work in 1864, 9140 works were attributed to Delacroix, including 853 paintings, 1525 pastels and water colours, 6629 drawings, 109 lithographs, and over 60 sketch books.[32] The number and quality of the drawings, whether done for constructive purposes or to capture a spontaneous movement, underscored his explanation, "Colour always occupies me, but drawing preoccupies me."
+Delacroix produced several fine self-portraits, and a number of memorable portraits which seem to have been done purely for pleasure, among which were the portrait of fellow artist Baron Schwiter, an inspired small oil of the violinist Niccolò Paganini, and Portrait of Frédéric Chopin and George Sand, a double portrait of his friends, the composer Frédéric Chopin and writer George Sand; the painting was cut after his death, but the individual portraits survive.
+
+On occasion Delacroix painted pure landscapes (The Sea at Dieppe, 1852) and still lifes (Still Life with Lobsters, 1826–27), both of which feature the virtuoso execution of his figure-based works.[33] He is also well known for his Journal, in which he gave eloquent expression to his thoughts on art and contemporary life.[34]
+
+A generation of impressionists was inspired by Delacroix's work. Renoir and Manet made copies of his paintings, and Degas purchased the portrait of Baron Schwiter for his private collection. His painting at the church of St. Sulpice has been called the "finest mural painting of his time".[35]
+
+Contemporary Chinese artist Yue Minjun has created his own interpretation of Delacroix's painting Massacre of Chios, which retains the same name. Yue Minjun's painting was itself sold at Sotheby's for nearly $4.1 million in 2007.[36]
+
+His pencil drawing Moorish Conversation on a Terrace was discovered as part of the Munich Art Hoard.[37]
+

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+Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (/ˈdɛləkrwɑː, ˌdɛləˈkrwɑː/ DEL-ə-krwah, DEL-ə-KRWAH,[1] French: [øʒɛn dəlakʁwa]; 26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.[2]
+
+In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic.[3] Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the "forces of the sublime", of nature in often violent action.[4]
+
+However, Delacroix was given to neither sentimentality nor bombast, and his Romanticism was that of an individualist. In the words of Baudelaire, "Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible."[5] Together with Ingres, Delacroix is considered one of the last old Masters of painting, and one of the few who was ever photographed.
+
+As a painter and muralist, Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish author Walter Scott and the German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
+
+Eugène Delacroix was born on 26 April 1798 at Charenton-Saint-Maurice in Île-de-France, near Paris. His mother was named Victoire Oeben, the daughter of the cabinet-maker Jean-François Oeben.
+He had three much older siblings.
+Charles-Henri Delacroix (1779–1845) rose to the rank of General in the Napoleonic army.
+Henriette (1780–1827) married the diplomat Raymond de Verninac Saint-Maur (1762–1822).
+Henri was born six years later. He was killed at the Battle of Friedland on 14 June 1807.[6]
+
+There are medical reasons to believe that Eugène's legitimate father, Charles-François Delacroix, was not able to procreate at the time of Eugène's conception.
+Talleyrand, who was a friend of the family and successor of Charles Delacroix as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and whom the adult Eugène resembled in appearance and character, considered himself as his real father.[7] After assuming his office as foreign minister Talleyrand, dispatched Delacroix to The Hague in the capacity of French ambassador to Batavia. Delacroix who at the time suffered from erectile dysfunction returned to Paris in early September 1797, only to find his wife pregnant. Talleyrand went on to assist Eugène in the form of numerous anonymous commissions.[8] Throughout his career as a painter, he was protected by Talleyrand, who served successively the Restoration and king Louis-Philippe, and ultimately as ambassador of France in Great Britain, and later by Talleyrand's grandson, Charles Auguste Louis Joseph, duc de Morny, half-brother of Napoleon III and speaker of the French House of Commons. His legitimate father, Charles Delacroix, died in 1805, and his mother in 1814, leaving 16-year-old Eugène an orphan.
+
+His early education was at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen[9] where he steeped himself in the classics and won awards for drawing. In 1815 he began his training with Pierre-Narcisse Guérin in the neoclassical style of Jacques-Louis David. An early church commission, The Virgin of the Harvest (1819), displays a Raphael-esque influence, but another such commission, The Virgin of the Sacred Heart (1821), evidences a freer interpretation.[10] It precedes the influence of the more colourful and rich style of the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, and fellow French artist Théodore Géricault, whose works marked an introduction to Romanticism in art.
+
+The impact of Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa was profound, and stimulated Delacroix to produce his first major painting, The Barque of Dante, which was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1822. The work caused a sensation, and was largely derided by the public and officialdom, yet was purchased by the State for the Luxembourg Galleries; the pattern of widespread opposition to his work, countered by a vigorous, enlightened support, would continue throughout his life.[11] Two years later he again achieved popular success for his The Massacre at Chios.
+
+Delacroix's painting of the massacre at Chios shows sick, dying Greek civilians about to be slaughtered by the Turks. One of several paintings he made of this contemporary event, expressed the official policy for the Greek cause in their war of independence against the Turks, war sustained by English, Russian and French governments. Delacroix was quickly recognized by the authorities as a leading painter in the new Romantic style, and the picture was bought by the state. His depiction of suffering was controversial, however, as there was no glorious event taking place, no patriots raising their swords in valour as in David's Oath of the Horatii, only a disaster. Many critics deplored the painting's despairing tone; the artist Antoine-Jean Gros called it "a massacre of art".[11] The pathos in the depiction of an infant clutching its dead mother's breast had an especially powerful effect, although this detail was condemned as unfit for art by Delacroix's critics. A viewing of the paintings of John Constable and the watercolour sketches and art of Richard Parkes Bonnington prompted Delacroix to make extensive, freely painted changes to the sky and distant landscape.[12]
+
+Delacroix produced a second painting in support of the Greeks in their war for independence, this time referring to the capture of Missolonghi by Turkish forces in 1825.[13] With a restraint of palette appropriate to the allegory, Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi displays a woman in Greek costume with her breast bared, arms half-raised in an imploring gesture before the horrible scene: the suicide of the Greeks, who chose to kill themselves and destroy their city rather than surrender to the Turks. A hand is seen at the bottom, the body having been crushed by rubble. The painting serves as a monument to the people of Missolonghi and to the idea of freedom against tyrannical rule. This event interested Delacroix not only for his sympathies with the Greeks, but also because the poet Byron, whom Delacroix greatly admired, had died there.[2]
+
+A trip to England in 1825 included visits to Thomas Lawrence and Richard Parkes Bonington, and the colour and handling of English painting provided impetus for his only full-length portrait, the elegant Portrait of Louis-Auguste Schwiter (1826–30). At roughly the same time, Delacroix was creating romantic works of numerous themes, many of which would continue to interest him for over thirty years. By 1825, he was producing lithographs illustrating Shakespeare, and soon thereafter lithographs and paintings from Goethe's Faust. Paintings such as The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan (1826), and Woman with Parrot (1827), introduced subjects of violence and sensuality which would prove to be recurrent.[14]
+
+These various romantic strands came together in The Death of Sardanapalus (1827–28). Delacroix's painting of the death of the Assyrian king Sardanapalus shows an emotionally stirring scene alive with beautiful colours, exotic costumes and tragic events. The Death of Sardanapalus depicts the besieged king watching impassively as guards carry out his orders to kill his servants, concubines and animals. The literary source is a play by Byron, although the play does not specifically mention any massacre of concubines.[15]
+
+Sardanapalus' attitude of calm detachment is a familiar pose in Romantic imagery in this period in Europe. The painting, which was not exhibited again for many years afterward, has been regarded by some critics[who?] as a gruesome fantasy involving death and lust. Especially shocking is the struggle of a nude woman whose throat is about to be cut, a scene placed prominently in the foreground for maximum impact. However, the sensuous beauty and exotic colours of the composition make the picture appear pleasing and shocking at the same time.[original research?]
+
+A variety of Romantic interests were again synthesized in The Murder of the Bishop of Liège (1829). It also borrowed from a literary source, this time Scott, and depicts a scene from the Middle Ages, that of the murder of Louis de Bourbon, Bishop of Liège amidst an orgy sponsored by his captor, William de la Marck. Set in an immense vaulted interior which Delacroix based on sketches of the Palais de Justice in Rouen and Westminster Hall, the drama plays out in chiaroscuro, organized around a brilliantly lit stretch of tablecloth. In 1855, a critic described the painting's vibrant handling as "Less finished than a painting, more finished than a sketch, The Murder of the Bishop of Liège was left by the painter at that supreme moment when one more stroke of the brush would have ruined everything".[16]
+
+Delacroix's most influential work came in 1830 with the painting Liberty Leading the People, which for choice of subject and technique highlights the differences between the romantic approach and the neoclassical style. Less obviously, it also differs from the Romanticism of Géricault, as exemplified by The Raft of the Medusa.
+
+Delacroix felt his composition more vividly as a whole, thought of his figures and crowds as types, and dominated them by the symbolic figure of Republican Liberty which is one of his finest plastic inventions...[17]
+
+Probably Delacroix's best-known painting, Liberty Leading the People is an unforgettable image of Parisians, having taken up arms, marching forward under the banner of the tricolour representing liberty, equality, and fraternity. Although Delacroix was inspired by contemporary events to invoke this romantic image of the spirit of liberty, he seems to be trying to convey the will and character of the people,[17] rather than glorifying the actual event, the 1830 revolution against Charles X, which did little other than bring a different king, Louis-Philippe, to power. The warriors lying dead in the foreground offer poignant counterpoint to the symbolic female figure, who is illuminated triumphantly against a background of smoke.[18]
+
+Although the French government bought the painting, by 1832 officials deemed its glorification of liberty too inflammatory and removed it from public view.[19] Nonetheless, Delacroix still received many government commissions for murals and ceiling paintings.[20]
+
+Following the Revolution of 1848 that saw the end of the reign of King Louis Philippe, Delacroix' painting, Liberty Leading the People, was finally put on display by the newly elected President, Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III). It is exhibited in the Louvre museum in Paris; although from December 2012 until 2014 it was on exhibit at Louvre-Lens in Lens, Pas-de-Calais.[21]
+
+The boy holding a pistol aloft on the right is sometimes thought to be an inspiration for the Gavroche character in Victor Hugo's 1862 novel, Les Misérables.[22]
+
+In 1832, Delacroix traveled to Spain and North Africa in company with the diplomat Charles-Edgar de Mornay, as part of a diplomatic mission to Morocco shortly after the French conquered Algeria. He went not primarily to study art, but to escape from the civilization of Paris, in hopes of seeing a more primitive culture.[17] He eventually produced over 100 paintings and drawings of scenes from or based on the life of the people of North Africa, and added a new and personal chapter to the interest in Orientalism.[23] Delacroix was entranced by the people and the costumes, and the trip would inform the subject matter of a great many of his future paintings. He believed that the North Africans, in their attire and their attitudes, provided a visual equivalent to the people of Classical Rome and Greece:
+
+The Greeks and Romans are here at my door, in the Arabs who wrap themselves in a white blanket and look like Cato or Brutus...[17]
+
+He managed to sketch some women secretly in Algiers, as in the painting Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1834), but generally he encountered difficulty in finding Muslim women to pose for him because of Muslim rules requiring that women be covered.[citation needed] Less problematic was the painting of Jewish women in North Africa, as subjects for the Jewish Wedding in Morocco (1837–1841).
+
+While in Tangier, Delacroix made many sketches of the people and the city, subjects to which he would return until the end of his life.[25] Animals—the embodiment of romantic passion—were incorporated into paintings such as Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable (1860), The Lion Hunt (of which there exist many versions, painted between 1856 and 1861), and Arab Saddling his Horse (1855).
+
+Delacroix drew inspiration from many sources over his career, such as the literary works of William Shakespeare and Lord Byron, or the artistry of Michelangelo. But from beginning to end of his life, he was in part characterized by a constant need for music, saying in 1855, "nothing can be compared with the emotion caused by music; that it expresses incomparable shades of feeling." He had said, while working at Saint Sulpice, that the music put him in a state of "exaltation" which inspired his painting. It was often in music, in the most melancholy renditions of Chopin, or the "pastoral" works of Beethoven that Delacroix was often able to draw the most emotion and inspiration. At one point during his life, Delacroix befriended and made portraits of the composer Chopin; in his journal, Delacroix praised him frequently.[26]
+
+In 1838 Delacroix exhibited Medea about to Kill Her Children, which created a sensation at the Salon. His first large-scale treatment of a scene from Greek mythology, the painting depicts Medea clutching her children, dagger drawn to slay them in vengeance for her abandonment by Jason. The three nude figures form an animated pyramid, bathed in a raking light which penetrates the grotto in which Medea has hidden. Though the painting was quickly purchased by the State, Delacroix was disappointed when it was sent to the Lille Musée des Beaux-Arts; he had intended for it to hang at the Luxembourg, where it would have joined The Barque of Dante and Scenes from the Massacres of Chios.[27]
+
+From 1833 Delacroix received numerous commissions to decorate public buildings in Paris. In that year he began work for the Salon du Roi in the Chambre des Députés, Palais Bourbon, which was not completed until 1837, and began a lifelong friendship with the female artist Marie-Élisabeth Blavot-Boulanger. For the next ten years he painted in both the Library at the Palais Bourbon and the Library at the Palais du Luxembourg. In 1843 he decorated the Church of St. Denis du Saint Sacrement with a large Pietà, and from 1848 to 1850 he painted the ceiling in the Galerie d'Apollon of the Louvre. From 1857 to 1861 he worked on frescoes for the Chapelle des Anges at the Church of St. Sulpice in Paris. They included "The Battle of Jacob with the Angel", "Saint Michael Slaying the Dragon", and "The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple".[28] These commissions offered him the opportunity to compose on a large scale in an architectural setting, much as had those masters he admired, Paolo Veronese, Tintoretto, and Rubens.
+
+The work was fatiguing, and during these years he suffered from an increasingly fragile constitution. In addition to his home in Paris, from 1844 he also lived at a small cottage in Champrosay, where he found respite in the countryside. From 1834 until his death, he was faithfully cared for by his housekeeper, Jeanne-Marie le Guillou, who zealously guarded his privacy, and whose devotion prolonged his life and his ability to continue working in his later years.[29]
+
+In 1862 Delacroix participated in the creation of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. His friend, the writer Théophile Gautier, became chairman, with the painter Aimé Millet acting as deputy chairman. In addition to Delacroix, the committee was composed of the painters Carrier-Belleuse and Puvis de Chavannes. Among the exhibitors were Léon Bonnat, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Charles-François Daubigny, Gustave Doré, and Édouard Manet.[citation needed] Just after his death in 1863, the society organized a retrospective exhibition of 248 paintings and lithographs by Delacroix—and ceased to mount any further exhibitions.[citation needed]
+
+The winter of 1862–63 was extremely rough for Delacroix; he was suffering from a bad throat infection which seemed to get worse over the course of the season. On a trip to Champrosay, he met a friend on the train and became exhausted after having a conversation. On 1 June he returned to Paris to see his doctor. Two weeks later, on 16 June, he was getting better and returned to his house in the country. But by 15 July he was sick enough to see his doctor who said he could do nothing more for him. By then, the only food he could eat was fruit. Delacroix realized the seriousness of his condition and wrote his will, leaving a gift for each of his friends. For his trusted housekeeper, Jenny Le Guillou, he left enough money for her to live on while ordering everything in his studio to be sold. He also inserted a clause forbidding any representation of his features, "whether by a death-mask or by drawing or by photography. I forbid it, expressly."[30] On 13 August, Delacroix died, with Jenny by his side.[31] He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery.
+
+His house, formerly situated along the canal of the Marne, is now near the exit of the motorway leading from Paris to central Germany.
+
+Mademoiselle Rose, 1817–1824, Louvre
+
+Orphan Girl at the Cemetery, 1823, Louvre
+
+Louis of Orléans Unveiling his Mistress, c.1825–26, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
+
+Charles Étienne Raymond Victor de Verninac, the painter's nephew, c.1825–26. private collection
+
+The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan, 1826, Art Institute of Chicago
+
+Woman with a Parrot, 1827, Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon
+
+Woman With White Socks, 1825–1830, Louvre
+
+A Young Tiger Playing with its Mother, 1830, Louvre
+
+The Duke of Morny's Apartment, 1831–1833, Louvre
+
+Portrait of Dr. François-Marie Desmaisons, 1832–33, Detroit Institute of Arts
+
+Fantasia Arabe, 1833. Frankfurt Städel Museum
+
+The Women of Algiers, 1834, Louvre
+
+The Battle of Taillebourg (draft), 1834–35, Louvre
+
+The Natchez, 1835, Metropolitan Museum of Art
+
+Frédéric Chopin, 1838, Louvre
+
+George Sand, 1838, Ordrupgaard-Museum
+
+Modern hypothetical reconstruction of the painting showing George Sand sews while Chopin plays piano.
+
+Columbus and His Son at La Rábida, 1838, National Gallery of Art
+
+Jewish Wedding in Morocco, c.1839, Louvre
+
+Hamlet with Horatio, (the gravedigger scene), 1839, Louvre
+
+Christ on the Sea of Galilee, 1841, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
+
+Collision of Moorish Horsemen, 1844, Walters Art Museum
+
+Last Words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, 1844, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon
+
+Saint George Fighting the Dragon, 1847, Louvre Museum
+
+Desdemona Cursed by her Father (Desdemona maudite par son père), c.1850–1854, Brooklyn Museum
+
+]], 1852, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
+
+Perseus and Andromeda, circa 1853, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
+
+1855, Moroccan Saddles His Horse, Hermitage Museum
+
+Rider Attacked by a Jaguar, 1855. National Gallery in Prague
+
+The Bride of Abydos, 1857, Louvre
+
+The Death of Desdemona, 1858
+
+Horses Leaving the Sea, 1860, The Phillips Collection
+
+Arab Horses Fighting in a Stable, 1860
+
+Shipwreck on the Coast, 1862, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
+
+Ovid among the Scythians, oil on cavas, 1862, version in Metropolitan Museum of Art
+
+Winter: Juno and Aeolus, 1856, private collection (sketch for the painting in the São Paulo Museum of Art)
+
+Murals for Salon du Roi, Palais Bourbon, Paris, 1833–1837
+
+Charioteers, National Gallery of Art
+
+At the sale of his work in 1864, 9140 works were attributed to Delacroix, including 853 paintings, 1525 pastels and water colours, 6629 drawings, 109 lithographs, and over 60 sketch books.[32] The number and quality of the drawings, whether done for constructive purposes or to capture a spontaneous movement, underscored his explanation, "Colour always occupies me, but drawing preoccupies me."
+Delacroix produced several fine self-portraits, and a number of memorable portraits which seem to have been done purely for pleasure, among which were the portrait of fellow artist Baron Schwiter, an inspired small oil of the violinist Niccolò Paganini, and Portrait of Frédéric Chopin and George Sand, a double portrait of his friends, the composer Frédéric Chopin and writer George Sand; the painting was cut after his death, but the individual portraits survive.
+
+On occasion Delacroix painted pure landscapes (The Sea at Dieppe, 1852) and still lifes (Still Life with Lobsters, 1826–27), both of which feature the virtuoso execution of his figure-based works.[33] He is also well known for his Journal, in which he gave eloquent expression to his thoughts on art and contemporary life.[34]
+
+A generation of impressionists was inspired by Delacroix's work. Renoir and Manet made copies of his paintings, and Degas purchased the portrait of Baron Schwiter for his private collection. His painting at the church of St. Sulpice has been called the "finest mural painting of his time".[35]
+
+Contemporary Chinese artist Yue Minjun has created his own interpretation of Delacroix's painting Massacre of Chios, which retains the same name. Yue Minjun's painting was itself sold at Sotheby's for nearly $4.1 million in 2007.[36]
+
+His pencil drawing Moorish Conversation on a Terrace was discovered as part of the Munich Art Hoard.[37]
+

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+Eurasia /jʊəˈreɪʒə/ is the largest continental area on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia.[3][4] Located primarily in the Northern and Eastern Hemispheres, it is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Pacific Ocean to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and by Africa, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian Ocean to the south.[5] The division between Europe and Asia as two different continents is a historical social construct, with no clear physical separation between them; thus, in some parts of the world, Eurasia is recognized as the largest of the six, five, or even four continents on Earth.[4] In geology, Eurasia is often considered as a single rigid megablock. However, the rigidity of Eurasia is debated based on paleomagnetic data.[6][7]
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+Eurasia covers around 55,000,000 square kilometres (21,000,000 sq mi), or around 36.2% of the Earth's total land area. The landmass contains well over 5 billion people, equating to approximately 70% of the human population. Humans first settled in Eurasia between 60,000 and 125,000 years ago. Some major islands, including Great Britain, Iceland,  Ireland and Sri Lanka, as well as those of Japan, the Philippines and most of Indonesia, are often included under the popular definition of Eurasia, in spite of being separate from the contiguous landmass.
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+Physiographically, Eurasia is a single continent.[4] The concepts of Europe and Asia as distinct continents date back to antiquity and their borders are geologically arbitrary. In ancient times the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, along with their associated straits, were seen as separating the continents, but today the Ural and Caucasus ranges are more seen as the main delimiters between the two. Eurasia is connected to Africa at the Suez Canal, and Eurasia is sometimes combined with Africa to make the largest contiguous landmass on Earth called Afro-Eurasia.[8] Due to the vast landmass and differences in latitude, Eurasia exhibits all types of climate under the Köppen classification, including the harshest types of hot and cold temperatures, high and low precipitation and various types of ecosystems.
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+Eurasia formed between 375 and 325 million years ago with the merging of Siberia, Kazakhstania, and Baltica, which was joined to Laurentia, now North America, to form Euramerica. Chinese cratons collided with Siberia's southern coast.
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+Eurasia has been the host of many ancient civilizations, including those based in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and China. In the Axial Age (mid-first millennium BC), a continuous belt of civilizations stretched through the Eurasian subtropical zone from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This belt became the mainstream of world history for two millennia.
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+Originally, “Eurasia” is a geographical notion: in this sense, it is simply the biggest continent; the combined landmass of Europe and Asia. However, geopolitically, the word has several meanings, reflecting specific geopolitical interests.[9] “Eurasia” is one of the most important geopolitical concepts and it figures prominently in the commentaries on the ideas of Halford Mackinder. As Zbigniew Brzezinski observed on Eurasia:
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+“... how America "manages" Eurasia is critical. A power that dominates “Eurasia” would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over “Eurasia” would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in “Eurasia”, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. “Eurasia” accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”[10]
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+The Russian "Eurasianism" corresponded initially more or less to the land area of Imperial Russia in 1914, including parts of Eastern Europe.[11] One of Russia's main geopolitical interests lies in ever closer integration with those countries that it considers part of “Eurasia.”[12] This concept is further integrated with communist eschatology by author Alexander Dugin as the guiding principle of "self-sufficiency of a large space" during expansion.[13]
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+The term Eurasia gained geopolitical reputation as one of the three superstates in 1984,[14] George Orwell's[15] novel where constant surveillance and propaganda are strategic elements (introduced as reflexive antagonists) of the heterogeneous dispositif such metapolitical constructs use in order to control and exercise power.[16]
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+Across Eurasia, several single markets have emerged including the Eurasian Economic Space, European Single Market, ASEAN Economic Community and the Gulf Cooperation Council. There are also several international organizations and initiatives which seek to promote integration throughout Eurasia, including:
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+In ancient times, the Greeks classified Europe (derived from the mythological Phoenician princess Europa) and Asia (derived from Asia, a woman in Greek mythology) as separate "lands". Where to draw the dividing line between the two regions is still a matter of discussion. Especially whether the Kuma-Manych Depression or the Caucasus Mountains form the southeast boundary is disputed, since Mount Elbrus would be part of Europe in the latter case, making it (and not Mont Blanc) Europe's highest mountain. Most accepted is probably the boundary as defined by Philip Johan von Strahlenberg in the 18th century. He defined the dividing line along the Aegean Sea, Dardanelles, Sea of Marmara, Bosporus, Black Sea, Kuma–Manych Depression, Caspian Sea, Ural River, and Ural Mountains.
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+In modern usage, the term "Eurasian" is a demonym usually meaning "of or relating to Eurasia" or "a native or inhabitant of Eurasia".[17] It is also used to describe people of combined "Asian" and "European" descent.
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+Located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres, Eurasia is considered a supercontinent, part of the supercontinent of Afro-Eurasia or simply a continent in its own right.[18] In plate tectonics, the Eurasian Plate includes Europe and most of Asia but not the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian Peninsula or the area of the Russian Far East east of the Chersky Range.
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+From the point of view of history and culture, Eurasia can be loosely subdivided into Western and Eastern Eurasia.[19]
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+Nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Danilevsky defined Eurasia as an entity separate from Europe and Asia, bounded by the Himalayas, the Caucasus, the Alps, the Arctic, the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, a definition that has been influential in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union.[20] Nowadays, partly inspired by this usage, the term Eurasia is sometimes used to refer to the post-Soviet space – in particular Russia, the Central Asian republics, and the Transcaucasian republics – and sometimes also adjacent regions such as Turkey, Mongolia, Afghanistan and Xinjiang.
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+The word "Eurasia" is often used in Kazakhstan to describe its location. Numerous Kazakh institutions have the term in their names, like the L. N. Gumilev Eurasian National University (Kazakh: Л. Н. Гумилёв атындағы Еуразия Ұлттық университеті; Russian: Евразийский Национальный университет имени Л. Н. Гумилёва)[21] (Lev Gumilev's Eurasianism ideas having been popularized in Kazakhstan by Olzhas Suleimenov), the Eurasian Media Forum,[22] the Eurasian Cultural Foundation (Russian: Евразийский фонд культуры), the Eurasian Development Bank (Russian: Евразийский банк развития),[23] and the Eurasian Bank.[24] In 2007 Kazakhstan's President, Nursultan Nazarbayev, proposed building a "Eurasia Canal" to connect the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea via Russia's Kuma-Manych Depression in order to provide Kazakhstan and other Caspian-basin countries with a more efficient path to the ocean than the existing Volga-Don Canal.[25]
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+This usage can also be seen in the names of Eurasianet,[26] The Journal of Eurasian Studies,[27] and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies,[28] as well as the titles of numerous academic programmes at US universities.[29][30][31][32][33]
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+This usage is comparable to how Americans use "Western Hemisphere" to describe concepts and organizations dealing with the Americas (e.g., Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).
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+Africa
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+Antarctica
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+Asia
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+Australia
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+Europe
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+North America
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+South America
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+Afro-Eurasia
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+America
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+Eurasia
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+Oceania
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+Coordinates: 50°N 80°E / 50°N 80°E / 50; 80