USA

Area: 3,618,000 sq miles (9,370,000 sq km)

Population: 265,000,000 (1% growth rate)

Capital city: Washington, DC (pop: 607,000)

People: Caucasian (74%), African American (12%), Latino (9%), Asian (3%), Native American (0.8%)

Languages: English, plus many secondary languages, chiefly Spanish

Religion: Protestant (56%), Roman Catholic (28%), Jewish (2%), Muslim (1%)

Government: Federal republic of 50 states

President: Bill Clinton

The Atlantic Coast is the most heavily populated area and retains strong traces of its European heritage.
This is where the oldest American cities like Boston, New York, Washington DC and Philadelphia are located, and where most of the major events in early American history took place.
The central north-east is marked by the humungous Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario), which occupy an area larger than most European countries.
The rivers and canals linking the lakes to the Atlantic Ocean made virtual seaports out of Midwestern cities like Chicago and Detroit The Norwegian explorer, Leif Eriksson, was probably the first European to reach North America, some 500 years before a disoriented Columbus created semantic confusion by finding 'Indians' in Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic) in 1492.
By the mid-1550s, most of the Americas had been poked and prodded by a parade of explorers from Spain, Portugal, England and France. The first colonies attracted immigrants looking to get rich quick and return home, but they were soon followed by migrants whose primary goal was to colonize.

The US claims to be the greatest success story of the modern world: a nation made from an incredibly disparate assembly of people who, with little in common apart from a desire to choose their own paths to wealth or heaven, have rallied around the ennobling ideals espoused in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to forge the richest, most inventive and most powerful country on earth.

Despite people who remind us that success story includes the destruction of Native American cultures, racism, imperialism and the shady operations of the CIA at the top of a long list of wrongdoings, half the world remains in love with the idea of America.
This is, after all, the country that gave the world the right to the pursuit of happiness, free speech, electric light, airplanes, refrigerators, the space shuttle, computers, blues, jazz, rock and roll and movies that climax at the high school prom.

This can make the country seem strangely familiar when you first encounter novelties like 24-hour shopping, bottomless cups of coffee, have-a-nice-day, drive-thru banks, TV evangelists, cheap petrol, and newspapers tossed onto lawns.
But you'd be foolish to read too much into this surface familiarity, since you only have to watch Oprah for half an hour to realize that the rituals and currents of American life are far more complex, seductive and bewildering than the most alien of cultures.

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