- The land
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- Colonial America to 1763
- The American Revolution and the early federal republic
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- Imperialism, the Progressive era, and the rise to world power, 1896–1920
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The bioclimatic regions
Three first-order bioclimatic zones encompass most of the coterminous United States—regions in which climatic conditions are similar enough to dictate similar conditions of mature (zonal) soil and potential climax vegetation (i.e., the assemblage of plants that would grow and reproduce indefinitely given stable climate and average conditions of soil and drainage). These are the Humid East, the Humid Pacific Coast, and the Dry West. In addition, the boundary zone between the Humid East and the Dry West is so large and important that it constitutes a separate region, the Humid–Arid Transition. Finally, because the Western Cordillera contains an intricate mosaic of climatic types, largely determined by local elevation and exposure, it is useful to distinguish the Western Mountain Climate. The first three zones, however, are very diverse and require further breakdown, producing a total of 10 main bioclimatic regions. For two reasons, the boundaries of these bioclimatic regions are much less distinct than boundaries of landform regions. First, climate varies from year to year, especially in boundary zones, whereas landforms obviously do not. Second, regions of climate, vegetation, and soils coincide generally but sometimes not precisely. Boundaries, therefore, should be interpreted as zonal and transitional, and rarely should be considered as sharp lines in the landscape.
For all of their indistinct boundaries, however, these bioclimatic regions have strong and easily recognized identities. Such regional identity is strongly reinforced when a particular area falls entirely within a single bioclimatic region and at the same time a single landform region. The result—as in the Piedmont South, the central Midwest, or the western Great Plains—is a landscape with an unmistakable regional personality.
The largest and in some ways the most important of the bioclimatic zones, the Humid East was where the Europeans first settled, tamed the land, and adapted to American conditions. In early times almost all of this territory was forested, a fact of central importance in American history that profoundly influenced both soils and wildlife. As in most of the world’s humid lands, soluble minerals have been leached from the earth, leaving a great family of soils called pedalfers, rich in relatively insoluble iron and aluminum compounds.
Both forests and soils, however, differ considerably within this vast region. Since rainfall is ample and summers are warm everywhere, the main differences result from the length and severity of winters, which determine the length of the growing season. Winter, obviously, differs according to latitude, so that the Humid East is sliced into four great east–west bands of soils and vegetation, with progressively more amenable winters as one travels southward. These changes occur very gradually, however, and the boundaries therefore are extremely subtle.
The Sub-Boreal Forest Region is the northernmost of these bands. It is only a small and discontinuous part of the United States, representing the tattered southern fringe of the vast Canadian taiga—a scrubby forest dominated by evergreen needle-leaf species that can endure the ferocious winters and reproduce during the short, erratic summers. Average growing seasons are less than 120 days, though localities in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula have recorded frost-free periods lasting as long as 161 days and as short as 76 days. Soils of this region that survived the scour of glaciation are miserably thin podzols—heavily leached, highly acid, and often interrupted by extensive stretches of bog. Most attempts at farming in the region long since have been abandoned.
Farther south lies the Humid Microthermal Zone of milder winters and longer summers. Large broadleaf trees begin to predominate over the evergreens, producing a mixed forest of greater floristic variety and economic value that is famous for its brilliant autumn colours. As the forest grows richer in species, sterile podzols give way to more productive gray-brown podzolic soils, stained and fertilized with humus. Although winters are warmer than in the Sub-Boreal zone, and although the Great Lakes help temper the bitterest cold, January temperatures ordinarily average below freezing, and a winter without a few days of subzero temperatures is uncommon. Everywhere, the ground is solidly frozen and snow covered for several months of the year.
Still farther south are the Humid Subtropics. The region’s northern boundary is one of the country’s most significant climatic lines: the approximate northern limit of a growing season of 180–200 days, the outer margin of cotton growing, and, hence, of the Old South. Most of the South lies in the Piedmont and Coastal Plain, for higher elevations in the Appalachians cause a peninsula of Northern mixed forest to extend as far south as northern Georgia. The red-brown podzolic soil, once moderately fertile, has been severely damaged by overcropping and burning. Thus much of the region that once sustained a rich, broadleaf-forest flora now supports poor piney woods. Throughout the South, summers are hot, muggy, long, and disagreeable; Dixie’s “frosty mornings” bring a welcome respite in winter.
The southern margins of Florida contain the only real tropics in the coterminous United States; it is an area in which frost is almost unknown. Hot, rainy summers alternate with warm and somewhat drier winters, with a secondary rainfall peak during the autumn hurricane season—altogether a typical monsoonal regime. Soils and vegetation are mostly immature, however, since southern Florida rises so slightly above sea level that substantial areas, such as the Everglades, are swampy and often brackish. Peat and sand frequently masquerade as soil, and much of the vegetation is either salt-loving mangrove or sawgrass prairie.
1Excludes 5 nonvoting delegates from the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam and a nonvoting resident commissioner from Puerto Rico.
2Includes inland water area of 78,797 sq mi (204,083 sq km) and Great Lakes water area of 60,251 sq mi (156,049 sq km); excludes coastal water area of 42,225 sq mi (109,362 sq km) and territorial water area of 75,372 sq mi (195,213 sq km).
|Official name||United States of America|
|Form of government||federal republic with two legislative houses (Senate ; House of Representatives )|
|Head of state and government||President: Barack Obama|
|Monetary unit||dollar (U.S.$)|
|Population||(2010) 308,745,538; (2013 est.) 316,498,000|
|Total area (sq mi)||3,678,1902|
|Total area (sq km)||9,526,4682|
|Urban-rural population||Urban: (2011) 82.4%|
Rural: (2011) 17.6%
|Life expectancy at birth||Male: (2011) 76.3 years|
Female: (2011) 81.1 years
|Literacy: percentage of population age 15 and over literate||Male: (2000–2004) 95.7%|
Female: (2000–2004) 95.3%
|GNI per capita (U.S.$)||(2012) 50,120|