The USA: capital, system of the states
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, the District, or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States, founded on July 16, 1790. The City of Washington was originally a separate municipality within the Territory of Columbia until an act of Congress in 1871 effectively merged the City and the Territory into a single entity called the District of Columbia. It is for this reason that the city, while legally named the District of Columbia, is known as Washington, D.C. The city is located on the north bank of the Potomac River and is bordered by the states of Virginia to the southwest and Maryland to the other sides. The District has a resident population of 599,657; The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. Indigenous peoples, probably of Asian descent, have inhabited what is now the mainland United States for many thousands of years. This Native American population was greatly reduced after European contact by disease and warfare. The United States was founded by thirteen British colonies located along the Atlantic seaboard. On July 4, 1776, they issued the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed their right to self-determination and their establishment of a cooperative union. In the 19th century, the United States acquired land from France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Russia, and annexed the Republic of Texas and the Republic of Hawaii. Disputes between the agrarian South and industrial North over states' rights and the expansion of the institution of slavery provoked the American Civil War of the 1860s. The North's victory prevented a permanent split of the country and led to the end of legal slavery in the United States. By the 1870s, the national economy was the world's largest. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a military power. It emerged from World War II as the first country with nuclear weapons and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union left the United States as the sole superpower. The country accounts for two-fifths of global military spending and is a leading economic, political, and cultural force in the world. Hawaii is the newest of the 50 U.S. states (August 21, 1959), and is the only state made up entirely of islands. It occupies most of an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of Australia. Due to its mid-Pacific location, Hawaii has many North American and Asian influences along with a vibrant native culture. Hawaii has over a million permanent residents along with many visitors and U.S. military personnel. Its capital is Honolulu on the island of O’ahu.
American South: agricultural regions and centres
Agriculture constitutes a large sector of South America’s economy in both its tropical and its temperate regions. Livestock production also occupies large parts of rural South America, especially cattle ranching. Most of the commercial livestock production, especially for the export sector, occurs on huge estancias (estates) that have been the source of economic and social dominance for their owners for many generations. Only about one-eighth of South America’s land is suitable for permanent cropping or grazing. It is broadly agreed that agricultural land use throughout the continent is less efficient than it might be. Farm and ranch productivity could be enhanced by measures such as providing adequate agricultural credit, improving marketing, storage, and transportation systems, and expanding the educational system in rural areas. Unemployment is a problem in such areas, even though less than one-third of South America’s working population is employed in the agricultural sector, as compared with nearly one-half of the population for the world as a whole. Black Belt is still used in the physiographic sense, describing a crescent-shaped region about 480 km long and up to 40 km wide, extending from southwest Tennessee to east-central Mississippi and then east through Alabama to the border with Georgia. Before the 19th century, this region was a mosaic of prairies and oak-hickory woods. In the 1820s and 1830s, this region was identified as prime land for cotton plantations, resulting in a rush of immigrant planters and their slaves called Alabama Fever. The region became one of the cores of an expanding cotton plantation system that spread through much of the American South. Eventually, Black Belt came to describe the larger area of the South with historic ties to slave plantation agriculture and the cash crops cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco.
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