United States

The United States, as this atlas uses the name for a region, is the federal republic of fifty states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C., lying mainly in North America. The forty eight contiguous states border Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, while Alaska lies in the northwest and Hawaii is an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. People the article calls Paleo-Indians migrated from North Asia to North America at least fifteen thousand years ago and formed the first civilizations here, and British colonization beginning in 1607 established the Thirteen Colonies, whose republican and liberal ideas from the eighteenth century American Enlightenment led to the declaration of independence in 1776. Movements, texts, sacred sites and organizations in this atlas are placed here when they arose in or belong to that country.