United States Geography and Early History Facts

The United States of America

The 48 contiguous states lie between Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. Alaska is the northern tip of North America, north and west of Canada. Hawaii is a group of islands about 2,400 miles (3,862 km) west of California in the Pacific Ocean. The country is formed by six main regions:

US Regions

• New England: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.
• The Middle Atlantic: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland.
• The South: Runs from Virginia south to Florida and west as far as central Texas. This region also includes West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and parts of Missouri and Oklahoma.
• The Midwest: A broad collection of states sweeping westward from Ohio to Nebraska and including Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, parts of Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, and eastern Colorado.
• The Southwest: Made up of western Texas, portions of Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and the southern interior part of California.
• The West: Comprising Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, California, Nevada, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii.

Native Americans

• The first American immigrants, beginning more than 20,000 years ago, wandered from Asia to America.
• When Christopher Columbus “discovered” the New World in 1492, about 1.5 million Native Americans lived in what is now the continental United States.
• Native Americans suffered greatly from the influx of Europeans.
• In the 19th century, the government’s preferred solution to the Indian “problem” was to force tribes to inhabit specific plots of land called reservations.
• In many cases, the reservation land was of poor quality, and Indians came to depend on government assistance.
• Territorial wars, along with Old World diseases, sent their population plummeting to a low of 350,000 in 1920.
• Native Americans have proved to be resilient. Today they number almost 3 million (0.9 percent of the total U.S. population), and only about one third of Native Americans still live on reservations.
• Countless American place-names derive from Indian words, including the states of Massachusetts, Ohio, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, and Idaho.
• Indians taught Europeans how to cultivate crops that are now staples throughout the world: corn, potatoes, tomatoes.

European Contact

• The first Europeans to reach North America were Icelandic Vikings, led by Lief Ericson, about the year 1000.
• The Vikings failed to establish a permanent settlement and soon lost contact with the new continent.
• Five centuries later, the demand for Asian spices, textiles, and dyes spurred the European navigators to dream of shorter routes between East and West.