United States

The United States is a continent-sized country stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, plus Arctic Alaska and the tropical islands of Hawaii. The third most populous country in the world, with some 340 million people, it is a country built by immigration, held together by a shared Constitution. Its political capital is Washington; its largest city is New York.

The country has almost every landscape on Earth. In the east are the old, worn Appalachian mountains and the great cities of the Atlantic coast. In the centre lie the vast flat Great Plains, the country's wheat and corn belt, and the Great Lakes. In the west rise the Rockies, then the great deserts and canyons open up before the Pacific coast and California. There are the frozen forests of Alaska, the bayous of Louisiana and the volcanoes of Hawaii.

The land first belonged to the Native American nations, hundreds of peoples with their own languages and worlds. Then came settlers, Spanish in the south and west, and above all English on the Atlantic coast, where thirteen colonies declared independence in 1776 in the name of liberty. The country expanded westward by dispossessing Native peoples, and tore itself apart over slavery in the Civil War. Then tens of millions of immigrants (Irish, Italians, Germans, Eastern European Jews, Mexicans, Chinese and many more) arrived, while the descendants of enslaved Africans built their own culture and led the struggle for civil rights. The 20th-century superpower grew out of this mixing.

Americans speak English, which through America became the language of film, science and the Internet; long without official status at the federal level, it was designated the official language by an executive order in 2025. Spanish is the second language, spoken by tens of millions. The country is very religious and highly diverse: a Protestantism split into countless churches, a large Catholic minority that came with the immigrants, and nearly every faith in the world. The freedom to believe, or not, is written into the First Amendment of its Constitution.

Few cultures have spread so far in the 20th century. There is Hollywood, with films watched everywhere; jazz, blues, rock and hip-hop, born of African American culture; and jeans, hamburgers and Coke, now found everywhere. It is also an optimistic nation that thinks big: the land of baseball and American football, wide open spaces and road trips, skyscrapers and Silicon Valley, driven by the stubborn belief that anyone can start their life over there.