Spotlight on the USA

Manhattan is and island just 13 miles long and 2 miles wide. It is the center of American finance, advertising, art, theater, publishing, fashion - and much more. The borough of Manhattan is what most people think of when they think of New York, one of the most exciting cities in the world. New York attracts people from all over. Get on a subway in New York and look at the newspapers that people around you are reading. One persone is reading a newspaper in Spanish, another in Chinese, yet others in Arabic, Russian, Italian, Yiddish, and French. New York was always a city of immigrants. It still is. New York's other boroughs are brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Brooklyn alone has so many people that if it were a separate city, it would be the fourth largest in the United States!

The Nation's Capital

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Building a New City With its grand neoclassical buildings and its tree-lined avenues, Washington, D.C. strikes the visitor as a lovely and formal city. Washington wasn't always this way. When it was decided that new county needed a new city for its capital, President George Washington himself helped pick the spot - a marshy area where the Potomac and Anacostia rivers come together. French engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant created a design based on Versailles, a palace built fo King Louls XIV in the 17th century. The capital city would be crisscrossed by broad avenues, which would meet is spacious squares and circles. Creating Versailles from a marsh was no easy task. Building went slowly, and people were reluctant to move to tje mew capital. For years, pigs roamed through unpaved streets. There was said to be good hunting right near the White House! Matters were not hellped when, during the War of 1812, the British burned parts of Washington. This episode did, however, give the White House its name. The president's house was one of the buildings burned, and after the war it was painted white to cover up the marks. The American People

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The United States has the third-largest population in the world (after china and India).In 1990, population in the United States passed the 250,000,000 mark.Who are the American People? The most distinctive characteristic of the United States is its people.As nineteenth-centurypoet Walt Whitman said, the United States "is not merely a nation but a nation of nations." People from around the world have come to the United States and influenced its history and culture. The Native Americans The first people on the American continent came from Asia.They came across the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska at various times when the sea level dropped.The first migrantion might have been as early as 40,000 years ago.Once in America, these people migrated east across North America and south through Central and South America.When Columbus arrived in the fifteenth century, three were perhaps 10 million people in North America alone.They had developed many different kinds of societies.These were the people that columbus called "Indians," in the mistaken belief that he had reached the East Indies. The story of the westward growth of the United States was also the story of the destruction of the Native Americans, or Indians. Today there are about 1.5 million Indians in the United States.Western states - especially California, Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico - have the largest Indian populations. About one-third of the Native Americans live on reservations, land that was set aside for them. Most of the others live in cities. Poverty and unemployment are major problems, especially on the reservations.