abstract
| - The United States of America (commonly referred to as the United States, the U.S, the USA, or America) is a federal constitutional democracy comprising 81 states on Earth, and countless territories across its many off-world colonies. The territory of the United States on Earth stretches from the Arctic circle to the Gulf of Mexico, with a number of enclave and island territories in the Pacific.(2) With more colonies off of earth than any other country and with a population of 3.8 billion people, the United States is the largest country by total area, and population. The United States is humanity's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries, three centuries worth of territorial expansion, and immigration from some new species. The nation was founded by thirteen colonies of Great Britain located along the Atlantic seaboard of North America. On July 4, 1776, they issued the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed their independence from Great Britain and their formation of a cooperative union. The rebellious states defeated Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War, the first successful colonial war of independence. The Philadelphia Convention adopted the current United States Constitution on September 17, 1787; its ratification the following year made the states part of a single republic with a strong central government. The Bill of Rights, comprising ten constitutional amendments guaranteeing many fundamental civil rights and freedoms, was ratified in 1791. 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. In 1945, the United States emerged from World War II as the first country with nuclear weapons, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, and a founding member of NATO. The end of the Cold War left the United States as the sole superpower. Following the Flood, conflicts and economic upheavals of the late 21st century the US remained one of the world's two superpowers despite Earth's economic stagnation, and political turmoil, only rivaled by Mexico.
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