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The following are the links to websites which has the useful information such as history, geography, politcal, economy etc... about USA and its states.
cia.gov.
50states.com.
Interesting facts about America
- The Mississippi-Missouri is the longest river in the
USA.
- Lake Michigan, one of the Great Lakes, is the USA's
largest lake.
- The Grand Canyon, in the State of Arizona, is one of the
USA's World Heritage Sites.
- Six hundred and forty thousand years ago, a massive
volcanic eruption took place in present-day Yellowstone Park
(Wyoming). The caldera is seventy kilometres long and thirty
kilometres wide. Yellowstone became the world's first
National Park in 1872.
- Skeletons of prehistoric animals buried by volcanic ash
in the State of Nebraska can be seen at the Ashfall State
Historical Park.
- Sixteen thousand years ago North America was covered
with trees, such as pines, poplar and spruce. Wolves,
coyotes, sabre-toothed cats and mammoths inhabited the
country.
- Fossilized remains of mammoths and other creatures have
been found in Tennessee.
- Twenty thousand years ago nomadic people, thought to
have traveled from Asia, hunted mammoths and antelope in New
Mexico.
- Recent studies point to a very early migration of people
to America across the Atlantic. One theory is that the
Solutrean Neolithic (Stone Age) people from southwest France
may have made the journey.
- People lived on the Blue Ridge Mountains ten thousand
years ago. Some are thought to have built permanent villages
near the Shenandoah Valley.
- In the sixth century AD the Anasazi built villages in
Colorado (Mesa Verde National Park).
- The pre-Columbian settlement of Cahokia, (700-1400 AD)
near St Louis, had a population of twenty thousand
people.
- About a thousand years ago Leif Ericson (born in
Iceland) made voyages along the North American coast.
- Colombus' voyages of discovery to the New World took
place between 1492 and 1504.
- The explorer Amerigo Vespucci gave his name to
"America".
- When the first settlers arrived in America millions of
buffalo roamed the plains.
- The stories of Raven, Mink and Coyote are Native
American legends about spirit beings of Northwest
mythology.
- The Indian princess Pocahontas (1595-1617) was a friend
to the colonists of Jamestown in Virginia at a time when
they were finding life difficult. During a period when she
was held captive, to exchange for English prisoners,
Pocahontas met and married the colonist John Rolfe.
- Well remembered Native American Indian leaders include
Cochise (Apache) Geronimo (Apache) and Sitting Bull
(Sioux).
- Famous American outlaws include Jesse James, Billy the
Kid and Butch Cassidy.
- Oklahoma was a centre of the early cattle industry.
- Over the years immigrants arrived in the USA from all
over the world: China, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary,
Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Lithuania, Mexico, Poland,
Portugal, Puerto Rico, Sweden, Spainand Vietnam.
- Richmond, the capital of the state of Virginia in the
USA, was named after Richmond upon Thames in the UK.
- The State of Nevada's name comes from the Spanish
meaning "snow-capped".
- The State of Louisiana was named after the French King
Louis XIV.
- Henry Wadsworth' Longfellow
wrote the poem "Paul Revere's Ride". It tells the story of the ride through the
country to alert people to the beginning of the American War of
Independence:
"The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the
spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame
with its heat."
- George Washington was the first President of the United
States.
- President Abraham Lincoln was shot while attending the
theatre with his wife. He died the following morning on 15
April 1865.
- Between 1927 and 1941, Gutzon Borglum sculpted busts of
Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore
Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln on Mount Rushmore.
- Russia sold the State of Alaska (to the west of Canada)
to the United States in 1867.
- Spain ceded Guam to the US in 1898. It is one of the
most important bases in the Pacific.
- Frederic Auguste Bartholdi was the sculptor of the
Statue of Liberty and Gustave Eiffel its structural
engineer. The statue was presented to the American people by
the people of France on 4th July 1884 and shipped to the US
in early 1885.
- Al Capone, one of America's most famous gangsters, made
his money selling alcohol during Prohibition (anti-alcohol
laws).
- Helen Keller was born in Alabama in 1880 and lost her
sight and hearing at a very early age. Helen grew up to
become a famous speaker who also helped to set up the
American Foundation for the Blind.
- In 1903 the Wright brothers made the first successful
flight in a plane.
- In 1927 Lindburgh made the first non-stop transatlantic
flight from New York to Paris.
- Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly the Atlantic
(1931).
- New York's Empire State Building, a National Historic
Landmark, is one of the world's tallest buildings.
- Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park on Lake Michigan is
among the world's largest fountains and one of Chicago's
most familiar landmarks.
- William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) was an American
newspaper owner who is said to have inspired Orson Welles'
film "Citizen Kane".
- Jean Paul Getty (1892-1976), the American oil baron, set
up a foundation dedicated to the visual arts and the
humanities.
- During the Second World War in August 1945 the USA
dropped the Atom bomb on Japan in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
- The Polaris atomic-powered submarines were launched in
1958. They were armed with nuclear warheads with a range of
fifteen hundred miles.
- In 1960 a US reconnaissance ("spy") plane was shot down
over the USSR. Its pilot, Gary Powers, was captured but
later released.
- Malcolm X, the black militant leader, was shot and
killed in 1965.
- 1968 saw the death of Martin Luther King, the Civil
Rights leader, aged 38. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1964.
- The Anti-Vietnam War Movement in the US gained momentum
in the late 1960s and early 1970s; the Americans withdrew
from Vietnam in 1973.
- Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward were Washington Post
reporters who investigated the Watergate break-ins.
President Nixon ordered a cover-up of the affair and
eventually had to resign.
- On 18 May 1980 the Mount St Helens volcano (Washington
State) erupted. Fifty-seven people and thousands of animals
perished.
- In 1986 seven members of the crew of the Challenger
Space Shuttle were killed when the Challenger exploded just
over a minute after take-off.
- The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990 to study
stars and galaxies.
- The famous American comedian, Bob Hope, was born in
Eltham in South East London. He migrated to the USA with his
family at the age of four. Bob returned to Eltham in 1982 to
open the Bob Hope Theatre.
- On 11 September 2001 four US planes were hijacked by
terrorists; two crashed into the twin towers of the World
Trade Center, one crashed into the Pentagon and the fourth
crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Over three thousand
people were killed.
- In August 2005 Hurricane Katrina swept through the Gulf Coast of
the USA killing thousands of people, destroying homes, property and
infrastructure.
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