A continent's worth of extremes
The two ends of the American landscape sit thousands of metres apart. North America's highest summit rises to 6,190 metres in Alaska, and its name is itself disputed: a January 2025 executive order reinstated Mount McKinley for the peak, while the park around it remains Denali National Park and Preserve. Death Valley in California, the country's lowest point, sinks to 86 metres below sea level. Furnace Creek there reached 57 °C on 10 July 1913, which the National Park Service gives as the world record for air temperature.
Water organises the interior. By the Park Service's measure the Mississippi runs for about 3,780 kilometres, and its basin covers about 40 percent of the contiguous states, touching 31 of them. The Great Lakes, shared with Canada, hold about 21 percent of the world's surface fresh water. About 1,200 tornadoes hit the country each year. Yellowstone, established in 1872, was the world's first national park.
Land taken, people enslaved
Spain founded St Augustine in Florida in 1565, and it remains the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States. England's first permanent colony followed in 1607 at Jamestown, a site Native people had used for over 10,000 years. In 1619 about twenty Africans were traded to the English there for food.
The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence for thirteen states on 4 July 1776, and peace with Britain was signed on 3 September 1783. The Constitution, signed in 1787 and in operation since 1789, has been amended 27 times. The Senate calls it the world's longest surviving written charter of government.
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled the country for $15 million. In 1848, after war, Mexico gave up 55 percent of its territory, including present-day California and Nevada. Russia sold Alaska in 1867 for $7.2 million, and Hawaii was annexed in 1898. They became the 49th and 50th states in 1959.
The Indian Removal Act became law on 28 May 1830, and from 1838 more than 16,000 Cherokee were forced out of their homes in the Southeast. The Park Service counts more than a thousand deaths on the journey west and perhaps several thousand more from its consequences. A federal notice of January 2026 lists 575 recognised Tribal entities, and 9.7 million people identified as American Indian or Alaska Native, alone or in combination, in the 2020 census. Native North American languages had 342,311 speakers in 2017 to 2021, down 6 percent from 2009 to 2013.
Of an estimated 10.7 million Africans who survived the Atlantic crossing, about 388,000 landed directly in what became the United States. The 1860 census, the last to count slaves, found 3,953,760 enslaved people. In the Civil War of 1861 to 1865, Park Service tables show about 204,000 soldiers killed in battle and about 389,000 dead of disease across both sides. Almost 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought for the Union. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified on 6 December 1865, ended slavery, though it kept an exception for punishment of crime.
Legal equality came slowly. Women gained a guaranteed right to vote in 1920. Segregation in public places and job discrimination were outlawed only by the Civil Rights Act of 2 July 1964, and the Voting Rights Act followed on 6 August 1965.
A population remade by arrivals
The 2020 census counted 331,449,281 people, and the Census Bureau estimated 341.8 million by July 2025. California, Texas and Florida are the most populous states.
Immigration rules have swung hard. Over 12 million people were processed at Ellis Island between 1892 and 1924. That year's Immigration Act imposed national quotas and shut out immigrants from Asia entirely. A new law signed on 3 October 1965 ended limits by national origin, and annual immigration soon jumped to nearly half a million, with only about a fifth coming from Europe.
In 2024 an estimated 50.2 million residents were foreign-born, about 14.8 percent of the population. The 2020 census counted 62.1 million Hispanic or Latino people and 33.8 million who identified with two or more races. Net international migration fell from about 2.7 million to about 1.3 million in the year to July 2025, a drop the Census Bureau called historic.
A March 2025 executive order designated English as the official language. Yet about 22 percent of people aged five and over spoke another language at home in 2017 to 2021, and about 61 percent of those spoke Spanish.
Dollars, alliances and jazz
World Bank figures put the economy at $30.77 trillion in 2025, about 26 percent of global output at market exchange rates. The dollar made up 58 percent of disclosed official foreign reserves in 2024 and featured in about 88 percent of foreign exchange transactions in April 2022.
NATO, created in 1949, was the first peacetime military alliance the country joined outside the Western Hemisphere. Two decades later, on 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 put the first humans on the Moon.
Jazz took shape in New Orleans around the turn of the twentieth century, nourished largely in the African American community.
