di The USA
The USA is the third largest country in the world after Russia and Canada. The USA are formed by 50 states. The lowest point is Death Valley in California, the highest mountain is Mc. Kinley in Alaska and the longest river is Mississippi river. The capital of the USA is Washington, but there are other important cites as New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. After the election of George Washington as President, the District of Columbia was chosen as the place for the capital city, so we called Washington, Washington D.C. The capital was called Washington in honor of the first President of USA. The White House is situated in Washington and it built between 1792 and 1800. The first president to move into the White House was John Adams in 1800, but the president Theodore Roosevelt officially gave the White House its current name in 1901. The American Constitution, signed in 1787 is declaration of the rights and individual liberty of all American citizens and establishes the organization on 3 levels: the executive, legislative and judicial . The Legislative branch is represented by Congress which is divided into two houses: the Senate and the House of Representatives, is made up of 435 members . The executive is represented by the President of the USA who is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and he is in charge of foreign affairs. In a state of emergency he has decisive power. He is elected directly by the people every four years. Now the president of USA is Barack Obama. He was born on 1961 in Hawaii, he studied in Los Angeles, after he transferred to Columbia University in New York with a degree in Political Science. He obtained a doctorate in law at Harvard . Obama was elected the first African-American editor of the Harvard law review. In 1992 he married Michelle and later gave birth to two daughters. He was elected US Senator from Illinois, from 2005 to 2008. Since 2009 Obama became president. Politically the USA is characterized by a two-party system: the Republican symbolically caricatured by an Elephant in the media, it are more conservative. While the Democrats, it represented in the media as a Donkey are more liberty and progressive.
Obama is a Democrat. Other city very important in the USA is New York; it’s an artistic, financial and political center which has attracted millions of people from every part of the world. The island was called New Amsterdam when the English capture the city in 1664 it was renamed New York in honor of the Duke of York. Apart from Manhattan, the heart of New York; the other boroughs are: the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. In New York‘s part there is the State of Liberty, the main symbol of the city. The most famous neighborhood are Chinatown, Little Italy, Greenwich, Village, Soho and Harlem. They are all in Manhattan. Although the cultured and ethnic groups living there are intermingled, each one still maintains its own identity. So, it is also called Salad bowl”. Or else across USA is a “Salad Bowl” because the population of USA is today about 200 million inhabitants of mixed origins, races and colors. The history of the country is in effect a story of immigrants who worked together to build a single nation. For the immigrants from all parts of the world, the USA has been a “Melting pot” which has united them into one people. The first inhabitants were the Red Indians, they, migrated to USA from Asia thousand of years ago. Nowadays the descendants of the Indian tribes from only a small part of the population. Most of the old population, the European colonizers were British, but there were a lot of explorers coming from Holland, France, Spain and Germany.
It’s easy to see this mixture of countries in the names of some American city: New Orleans was a French colony, Pittsburgh a German one, Los Angeles of Spanish origin. During the 19th century millions of immigrants coming from Europe landed in America in order to start a new life. So the Statue of Liberty in New York signaled it. The immigrants escaped from hunger, war and persecutions, but they, when arrive in USA, they had to answer questions about their origins and reasons for entry and if they answer correctly they could get into the country. The immigrants who come to America at the end of the last century traveled on ships that took them to Ellis Island, just beyond the Statue in New York Horbour. The Ellis Island, during its sixty years of service, it saw 17 million of people pass through and more than half past all Americans Descend from them.
