Ireland
Ireland is an island in the North Atlantic. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, St George's Channel. Ireland is the second-largest island of the British Isles, the third-largest in Europe, the twentieth-largest on Earth. Politically, Ireland is divided between the Republic of Ireland, which covers five-sixths of the island, Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom. In 2011, the population of Ireland was about 6.6 million, ranking it the second-most populous island in Europe after Great Britain. Just under 4.8 million live in the Republic of Ireland and just over 1.8 million live in Northern Ireland. The island's geography comprises low-lying mountains surrounding a central plain, with several navigable rivers extending inland, its lush vegetation is a product of its mild but changeable climate, free of extremes in temperature. Much of Ireland was woodland until the end of the Middle Ages. Today, woodland makes up about 10% of the island, compared with a European average of over 33%, most of it is non-native conifer plantations.
There are twenty-six extant mammal species native to Ireland. The Irish climate is influenced by the Atlantic Ocean and thus moderate, winters are milder than expected for such a northerly area, although summers are cooler than those in continental Europe. Rainfall and cloud cover are abundant; the earliest evidence of human presence in Ireland is dated at 10,500 BC. Gaelic Ireland had emerged by the 1st century AD; the island was Christianised from the 5th century onward. Following the 12th century Norman invasion, England claimed sovereignty. However, English rule did not extend over the whole island until the 16th–17th century Tudor conquest, which led to colonisation by settlers from Britain. In the 1690s, a system of Protestant English rule was designed to materially disadvantage the Catholic majority and Protestant dissenters, was extended during the 18th century. With the Acts of Union in 1801, Ireland became a part of the United Kingdom. A war of independence in the early 20th century was followed by the partition of the island, creating the Irish Free State, which became sovereign over the following decades, Northern Ireland, which remained a part of the United Kingdom.
Northern Ireland saw much civil unrest from the late 1960s until the 1990s. This subsided following a political agreement in 1998. In 1973 the Republic of Ireland joined the European Economic Community while the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, as part of it, did the same. Irish culture has had a significant influence on other cultures in the field of literature. Alongside mainstream Western culture, a strong indigenous culture exists, as expressed through Gaelic games, Irish music and the Irish language; the island's culture shares many features with that of Great Britain, including the English language, sports such as association football, horse racing, golf. The names Éire derive from Old Irish Eriu; this in turn comes from the Proto-Celtic *Iveriu, the source of Latin Hibernia. Iveriu derives from a root meaning'fat, prosperous'. During the last glacial period, up until about 10,000 BC, most of Ireland was periodically covered in ice. Sea levels were lower and Ireland, like Great Britain, formed part of continental Europe.
By 16,000 BC, rising sea levels due to ice melting caused Ireland to become separated from Great Britain. Around 6000 BC, Great Britain itself became separated from continental Europe; the earliest evidence of human presence in Ireland is dated at 10,500 BC, demonstrated by a butchered bear bone found in a cave in County Clare. It is not until about 8000 BC, that more sustained occupation of the island has been shown, with evidence for Mesolithic communities around the island; these Mesolithic communities lived as hunter-gatherers across the island until about 4000 BC. Some time before 4000 BC, Neolithic settlers arrived introducing cereal cultivars, domesticated animals such as cattle and sheep, large timber building, stone monuments; the earliest evidence for farming in Ireland or Great Britain is from Co.. Kerry, where a flint knife, cattle bones and a sheep's tooth were carbon-dated to c. 4350 BC. Field systems were developed in different parts of Ireland, including at the Céide Fields, preserved beneath a blanket of peat in present-day Tyrawley.
An extensive field system, arguably the oldest in the world, consisted of small divisions separated by dry-stone walls. The fields were farmed for several centuries between 3500 BC and 3000 BC. Wheat and barley were the principal crops; the Bronze Age – defined by the use of metal – began around 2500 BC, with technology changing people's everyday lives during this period through innovations such as the wheel. According to John T. Koch and others, Ireland in the Late Bronze Age was part of a maritime trading-network culture called the Atlantic Bronze Age that included Britain, western France and Iberia, that this is where Celtic languages developed; this contrasts with the traditional view that their origin lies in mainland Europe with the Hallstatt culture. During the Iron Age, a Celtic language and culture emerged in Ireland. How and when the island became Celtic has been debated for close to a century, with the migrations of the Celts being one of the more enduring themes of archaeological and linguistic studies.
The most recent genetic research s
Microwave oven
A microwave oven is an electric oven that heats and cooks food by exposing it to electromagnetic radiation in the microwave frequency range. This induces polar molecules in the food to rotate and produce thermal energy in a process known as dielectric heating. Microwave ovens heat foods and efficiently because excitation is uniform in the outer 25–38 mm of a homogeneous, high water content food item; the development of the cavity magnetron in the UK made possible the production of electromagnetic waves of a small enough wavelength. American engineer Percy Spencer is credited with inventing the modern microwave oven after World War II from radar technology developed during the war. Named the "Radarange", it was first sold in 1946. Raytheon licensed its patents for a home-use microwave oven, first introduced by Tappan in 1955, but these units were still too large and expensive for general home use. Sharp Corporation introduced the first microwave oven with a turntable between 1964 and 1966; the countertop microwave oven was first introduced in 1967 by the Amana Corporation.
After Sharp introduced low-cost microwave ovens affordable for residential use in the late 1970s, their use spread into commercial and residential kitchens around the world. In addition to their use in cooking food, types of microwave ovens are used for heating in many industrial processes. Microwave ovens are a common kitchen appliance and are popular for reheating cooked foods and cooking a variety of foods, they are useful for rapid heating of otherwise prepared foodstuffs, which can burn or turn lumpy when cooked in conventional pans, such as hot butter, chocolate or porridge. Unlike conventional ovens, microwave ovens do not directly brown or caramelize food, since they attain the necessary temperatures to produce Maillard reactions. Exceptions occur in rare cases where the oven is used to heat frying-oil and other oily items, which attain far higher temperatures than that of boiling water. Microwave ovens have limited roles in professional cooking, because the boiling-range temperatures of a microwave will not produce the flavorful chemical reactions that frying, browning, or baking at a higher temperature will.
However, additional heat sources can be added to microwave ovens. The exploitation of high-frequency radio waves for heating substances was made possible by the development of vacuum tube radio transmitters around 1920. By 1930 the application of short waves to heat human tissue had developed into the medical therapy of diathermy. At the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, Westinghouse demonstrated the cooking of foods between two metal plates attached to a 10 kW, 60 MHz shortwave transmitter; the Westinghouse team, led by I. F. Mouromtseff, found that foods like steaks and potatoes could be cooked in minutes; the 1937 United States patent application by Bell Laboratories states: This invention relates to heating systems for dielectric materials and the object of the invention is to heat such materials uniformly and simultaneously throughout their mass.... It has been proposed therefore to heat such materials throughout their mass by means of the dielectric loss produced in them when they are subjected to a high voltage, high frequency field.
However, lower-frequency dielectric heating, as described in the aforementioned patent, is an electromagnetic heating effect, the result of the so-called near-field effects that exist in an electromagnetic cavity, small compared with the wavelength of the electromagnetic field. This patent proposed radio frequency heating, at 10 to 20 megahertz. Heating from microwaves that have a wavelength, small relative to the cavity is due to "far-field" effects that are due to classical electromagnetic radiation that describes propagating light and microwaves suitably far from their source; the primary heating effect of all types of electromagnetic fields at both radio and microwave frequencies occurs via the dielectric heating effect, as polarized molecules are affected by a alternating electric field. The invention of the cavity magnetron made possible the production of electromagnetic waves of a small enough wavelength; the magnetron was a crucial component in the development of short wavelength radar during World War II.
In 1937–1940, a multi-cavity magnetron was built by the British physicist Sir John Turton Randall, FRSE, together with a team of British coworkers, for the British and American military radar installations in World War II. A more high-powered microwave generator that worked at shorter wavelengths was needed, in 1940, at the University of Birmingham in England and Harry Boot produced a working prototype, they invented a valve that could spit out pulses of microwave radio energy on a wavelength of 10 cm, an unprecedented discovery. Sir Henry Tizard travelled to the U. S. in late September 1940 to offer the magnetron in exchange for their financial and industrial help. An early 6 kW version, built in England by the General Electric Company Research Laboratories, London, was given to the U. S. government in September 1940. The magnetron was described by American historian James Phinney Baxter III as "he most valuable cargo brought to our shores". Contracts were awarded to other companies for mass production of the magnetron.
In 1945, the specific heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine. Employed by Raytheon at the time, he noticed that micr
Steaming
Steaming is a method of cooking using steam. This is done with a food steamer, a kitchen appliance made to cook food with steam, but food can be steamed in a wok. In the American southwest, steam pits used for cooking have been found dating back about 5,000 years. Steaming is considered a healthy cooking technique; some of the world's earliest examples of steam cooking were found in Gunma Prefecture, created during the Stone Age. Some of the second earliest examples of steam cooking have been found in Italy and Sardinia, created during the Bronze Age, in Cochise County, where steam pits were used for cooking about 10,000 years ago. In China's Yellow River Valley, early steam cookers made of stoneware have been found dating back as far as 5,000 BCE. From the eighth century CE, thin cypress strips were used to make steamers; the classic steamer has a chimney in the center. Steaming works by boiling water continuously; the food is kept separate from the boiling water but has direct contact with the steam, resulting in a moist texture to the food.
This differs from double boiling, in which food is not directly exposed to steam, or pressure cooking, which uses a sealed vessel. Such cooking is most done by placing the food into a food steamer a circular container made of metal or wood and bamboo; the steamer has a lid, placed on the top of the container during cooking to allow the steam to cook through the food. When a steamer is unavailable, food can be steamed inside a wok, supported over boiling water in the bottom of the wok by a metal frame; some modern home microwave ovens include a structure to cook food by steam vapor produced in a separate water container, providing a similar result to being cooked on stove. There are specialized steam ovens available. In Japan, glutinous rice is steamed to prepare mochi rice cakes. Traditional Japanese sweets or wagashi making involves steaming rice or wheat dough for making mochigashi and manju. In Western cooking, steaming is most used to cook vegetables—it is used to cook meats. However, steamed clams are prepared by steaming.
With Chinese cuisine, vegetables are stir fried or blanched and steamed. Seafood and meat dishes are steamed. For example: steamed whole fish, steamed crab, steamed pork spare ribs, steamed ground pork or beef, steamed chicken and steamed goose. Rice can be steamed too, although in Chinese cooking this is referred to as "cooking" rather than "steaming". In Thailand steaming is the definition of minimalist cooking. Wheat foods are steamed as well. Examples include Chinese steamed cakes. Steamed meat dishes are less common in Chinese restaurants than in traditional home cooking, because meats require longer cooking times to steam than to stir fry. Commercially sold frozen foods had instructions to reheat by steaming, until the rise in popularity of home microwave ovens, which have shorter cooking times. Staple foods Mantou, steamed bread Wotou, Chinese cornbreadChinese steamed eggs similar to custard with local variety of ingredients and vessels. Dim sum Rice Steamed rice with crab, Fujian cuisine called 蠘飯.
Steamed Pork with rice: pork steamed with crushed rice called 粉蒸肉. Seafood Fish: Chinese perch, Japanese black porgy. Crab: Chinese mitten crab, Shanghai cuisine for the autumn. Soup Steamed Pork Rib Soup: a Jiangxi cuisine called zh:煨汤. Buddha Jumps Over the Wall: a Fujian cuisine. Winter Melon Soup: use a hollowed out and sculpted gourd as a vessel. Qi Guoji Steamed Chicken Soup: soup of chicken cooked with double steamer, a Yunnan cuisine called zh:汽锅鸡. Sweets Milk Pudding: called Daliang Milk Pudding as said to be made in the 1850s in Daliang in Foshan, Guangdong. Guilinggao: known as Turtle Jelly, a jelly-like Chinese medicine sold as a dessert. Bread Chawanmushi: beaten egg, dashi soup and ingredients into a bowl with a lid. Odamaki-mushi: udon in a cup of chawan-mushi. Osaka specialty. Glutinous rice. Instead of boiling, glutinous rice is steamed to eat. *Okowa おこわ as it is called, receipts with ingredients and vessel chestnuts or wild herbs are popular. 赤飯: served at festive occasions with azuki bean and color agent added to enhance red color.
Mochi: prepared with steamed rice and kneaded. There are receipts where sauce is added to the main ingredients, aiming to control smell or aroma, or keep moisture to the ingredients. Awayukimushi: egg meringue over fish or seafood and keep moisture as well as retain aroma. Kaburamushi: grated or shredded turnip covers crabs and fish to keep moisture. Sakamushi: add sake to steam sea bream and clams which will reduce fishy smell. Receipts named after the container. Dobin-mushi: matsutake and fish in a pot together with dashi soup. Yugama: yuzu citrus is hollowed out into a cup to hold and add zest to the food. Sea bream milt steamed in yugamaSweets: steaming is an important process in Japanese sweets making such as manjū, yōkan, uirō, karukan or suama. Gyeran-jjim, a custardy dish Overcooking or burning food is avoided when steaming it. Individuals preferring to avoid additional fat intake may prefer steaming to methods which require cooking oil. A 2007 USDA comparison between steaming and boiling vegetables shows the most affected nutrients are folic acid and vitamin C.
When compared to raw consumption, steaming reduces folic acid by 15%, and
Australia
Australia the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area; the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea and East Timor to the north. The population of 25 million is urbanised and concentrated on the eastern seaboard. Australia's capital is Canberra, its largest city is Sydney; the country's other major metropolitan areas are Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians for about 60,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, it is documented. After the European exploration of the continent by Dutch explorers in 1606, who named it New Holland, Australia's eastern half was claimed by Great Britain in 1770 and settled through penal transportation to the colony of New South Wales from 26 January 1788, a date which became Australia's national day; the population grew in subsequent decades, by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored and an additional five self-governing crown colonies established.
On 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated. Australia has since maintained a stable liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy, comprising six states and ten territories. Being the oldest and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils, Australia has a landmass of 7,617,930 square kilometres. A megadiverse country, its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes, with deserts in the centre, tropical rainforests in the north-east and mountain ranges in the south-east. A gold rush began in Australia in the early 1850s, its population density, 2.8 inhabitants per square kilometre, remains among the lowest in the world. Australia generates its income from various sources including mining-related exports, telecommunications and manufacturing. Indigenous Australian rock art is the oldest and richest in the world, dating as far back as 60,000 years and spread across hundreds of thousands of sites. Australia is a developed country, with the world's 14th-largest economy.
It has a high-income economy, with the world's tenth-highest per capita income. It is a regional power, has the world's 13th-highest military expenditure. Australia has the world's ninth-largest immigrant population, with immigrants accounting for 26% of the population. Having the third-highest human development index and the eighth-highest ranked democracy globally, the country ranks in quality of life, education, economic freedom, civil liberties and political rights, with all its major cities faring well in global comparative livability surveys. Australia is a member of the United Nations, G20, Commonwealth of Nations, ANZUS, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Trade Organization, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, Pacific Islands Forum and the ASEAN Plus Six mechanism; the name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis, a name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times. When Europeans first began visiting and mapping Australia in the 17th century, the name Terra Australis was applied to the new territories.
Until the early 19th century, Australia was best known as "New Holland", a name first applied by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1644 and subsequently anglicised. Terra Australis still saw occasional usage, such as in scientific texts; the name Australia was popularised by the explorer Matthew Flinders, who said it was "more agreeable to the ear, an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth". The first time that Australia appears to have been used was in April 1817, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie acknowledged the receipt of Flinders' charts of Australia from Lord Bathurst. In December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office. In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known by that name; the first official published use of the new name came with the publication in 1830 of The Australia Directory by the Hydrographic Office. Colloquial names for Australia include "Oz" and "the Land Down Under". Other epithets include "the Great Southern Land", "the Lucky Country", "the Sunburnt Country", "the Wide Brown Land".
The latter two both derive from Dorothea Mackellar's 1908 poem "My Country". Human habitation of the Australian continent is estimated to have begun around 65,000 to 70,000 years ago, with the migration of people by land bridges and short sea-crossings from what is now Southeast Asia; these first inhabitants were the ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. Aboriginal Australian culture is one of the oldest continual civilisations on earth. At the time of first European contact, most Indigenous Australians were hunter-gatherers with complex economies and societies. Recent archaeological finds suggest. Indigenous Australians have an oral culture with spiritual values based on reverence for the land and a belief in the Dreamtime; the Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas. The northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited s
Flour
Flour is a powder made by grinding raw grains, beans, |nuts or seeds. It is used to make many different foods. Cereal flour is the main ingredient of bread, a staple food for most cultures. Wheat flour is one of the most important ingredients in Oceanic, South American, North American, Middle Eastern, North Indian and North African cultures, is the defining ingredient in their styles of breads and pastries. Wheat is the most common base for flour. Corn flour has been important in Mesoamerican cuisine since ancient times and remains a staple in the Americas. Rye flour is a constituent of bread in central Europe. Cereal flour consists either of the endosperm and bran together or of the endosperm alone. Meal is either differentiable from flour as having coarser particle size or is synonymous with flour. For example, the word cornmeal connotes a grittier texture whereas corn flour connotes fine powder, although there is no codified dividing line; the English word "flour" is a variant of the word "flower" and both words derive from the Old French fleur or flour, which had the literal meaning "blossom", a figurative meaning "the finest".
The phrase "fleur de farine" meant "the finest part of the meal", since flour resulted from the elimination of coarse and unwanted matter from the grain during milling. The earliest archaeological evidence for wheat seeds crushed between simple millstones to make flour dates to 6000 BC; the Romans were the first to grind seeds on cone mills. In 1879, at the beginning of the Industrial Era, the first steam mill was erected in London. In the 1930s, some flour began to be enriched with iron, niacin and riboflavin. In the 1940s, mills started to enrich flour and folic acid was added to the list in the 1990s. An important problem of the industrial revolution was the preservation of flour. Transportation distances and a slow distribution system collided with natural shelf life; the reason for the limited shelf life is the fatty acids of the germ, which react from the moment they are exposed to oxygen. This occurs. Depending on climate and grain quality, this process takes six to nine months. In the late 19th century, this process was too short for an industrial production and distribution cycle.
As vitamins and amino acids were or unknown in the late 19th century, removing the germ was an effective solution. Without the germ, flour cannot become rancid. Degermed flour became standard. Degermation started in densely populated areas and took one generation to reach the countryside. Heat-processed flour is flour where the germ is first separated from the endosperm and bran processed with steam, dry heat or microwave and blended into flour again; the FDA has been advised by several cookie dough manufacturers that they have implemented the use of heat-treated flour for their "ready-to-bake cookie dough" products to reduce the risk of E. coli bacterial contamination. Milling of flour is accomplished by grinding grain between stones or steel wheels. Today, "stone-ground" means that the grain has been ground in a mill in which a revolving stone wheel turns over a stationary stone wheel, vertically or horizontally with the grain in between. Roller mills soon replaced stone grist mills as the production of flour has driven technological development, as attempts to make gristmills more productive and less labor-intensive led to the watermill and windmill.
These terms are now applied more broadly to uses of water and wind power for purposes other than milling. More the Unifine mill, an impact-type mill, was developed in the mid-20th century. Home users have begun grinding their own flour from organic wheat berries on a variety of electric flour mills; the grinding process is not much different from grinding coffee but the mills are larger. This provides fresh flour with the benefits of wheat fiber without spoilage. Modern farm equipment allows livestock farmers to do some or all of their own milling when it comes time to convert their own grain crops to coarse meal for livestock feed; this capability is economically important because the profit margins are thin enough in commercial farming that saving expenses is vital to staying in business. Flour contains a high proportion of starches, which are a subset of complex carbohydrates known as polysaccharides; the kinds of flour used in cooking include all-purpose flour, self-rising flour, cake flour including bleached flour.
The higher the protein content the harder and stronger the flour, the more it will produce crusty or chewy breads. The lower the protein the softer the flour, better for cakes and pie crusts. "Bleached flour" is any refined flour with a whitening agent added. "Refined flour" has had the germ and bran removed and is referred to as "white flour". Bleached flour is artificially aged using a maturing agent, or both. A bleaching agent would affect only the carotenoids in the flour. A maturing agent may either weaken gluten development; the four most common additives used as bleaching/maturing agents in the US are: Potassium bromate, listed as an ingredient, is a maturing agent that strengthens gluten development. It does not bleach. Benzoyl peroxide does not act as a maturing agent, it has no effect on gluten. Ascorbic acid is listed as an ingredient, either as an indication that the flour was matured using ascorbic acid or that a small amount is
United States
The United States of America known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U. S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D. C. and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico; the State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean; the U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The diverse geography and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century; the United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776; the war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties; the United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848. During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.
By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power; the United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U. S. Moon landing; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower. The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation, it is a representative democracy.
The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, other international organizations. The United States is a developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for a quarter of global GDP; the U. S. economy is post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U. S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, worker productivity.
The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, is a leading political and scientific force internationally. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci; the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan, Esq. to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort; the first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776. The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the'United States of America'".
The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence; this draft of the document did not surface unti
Poland
Poland the Republic of Poland, is a country located in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative subdivisions, covering an area of 312,696 square kilometres, has a temperate seasonal climate. With a population of 38.5 million people, Poland is the sixth most populous member state of the European Union. Poland's capital and largest metropolis is Warsaw. Other major cities include Kraków, Łódź, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk, Szczecin. Poland is bordered by the Baltic Sea, Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast and Lithuania to the north and Ukraine to the east and Czech Republic, to the south, Germany to the west; the establishment of the Polish state can be traced back to AD 966, when Mieszko I, ruler of the realm coextensive with the territory of present-day Poland, converted to Christianity. The Kingdom of Poland was founded in 1025, in 1569 it cemented its longstanding political association with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by signing the Union of Lublin; this union formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest and most populous countries of 16th and 17th century Europe, with a uniquely liberal political system which adopted Europe's first written national constitution, the Constitution of 3 May 1791.
More than a century after the Partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century, Poland regained its independence in 1918 with the Treaty of Versailles. In September 1939, World War II started with the invasion of Poland by Germany, followed by the Soviet Union invading Poland in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. More than six million Polish citizens, including 90% of the country's Jews, perished in the war. In 1947, the Polish People's Republic was established as a satellite state under Soviet influence. In the aftermath of the Revolutions of 1989, most notably through the emergence of the Solidarity movement, Poland reestablished itself as a presidential democratic republic. Poland is regional power, it has the fifth largest economy by GDP in the European Union and one of the most dynamic economies in the world achieving a high rank on the Human Development Index. Additionally, the Polish Stock Exchange in Warsaw is the largest and most important in Central Europe. Poland is a developed country, which maintains a high-income economy along with high standards of living, life quality, safety and economic freedom.
Having a developed school educational system, the country provides free university education, state-funded social security, a universal health care system for all citizens. Poland has 15 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Poland is a member state of the European Union, the Schengen Area, the United Nations, NATO, the OECD, the Three Seas Initiative, the Visegrád Group; the origin of the name "Poland" derives from the West Slavic tribe of Polans that inhabited the Warta river basin of the historic Greater Poland region starting in the 6th century. The origin of the name "Polanie" itself derives from the early Slavic word "pole". In some languages, such as Hungarian, Lithuanian and Turkish, the exonym for Poland is Lechites, which derives from the name of a semi-legendary ruler of Polans, Lech I. Early Bronze Age in Poland begun around 2400 BC, while the Iron Age commenced in 750 BC. During this time, the Lusatian culture, spanning both the Bronze and Iron Ages, became prominent; the most famous archaeological find from the prehistory and protohistory of Poland is the Biskupin fortified settlement, dating from the Lusatian culture of the early Iron Age, around 700 BC.
Throughout the Antiquity period, many distinct ancient ethnic groups populated the regions of what is now Poland in an era that dates from about 400 BC to 500 AD. These groups are identified as Celtic, Slavic and Germanic tribes. Recent archeological findings in the Kujawy region, confirmed the presence of the Roman Legions on the territory of Poland; these were most expeditionary missions sent out to protect the amber trade. The exact time and routes of the original migration and settlement of Slavic peoples lacks written records and can only be defined as fragmented; the Slavic tribes who would form Poland migrated to these areas in the second half of the 5th century AD. Up until the creation of Mieszko's state and his subsequent conversion to Christianity in 966 AD, the main religion of Slavic tribes that inhabited the geographical area of present-day Poland was Slavic paganism. With the Baptism of Poland the Polish rulers accepted Christianity and the religious authority of the Roman Church.
However, the transition from paganism was not a smooth and instantaneous process for the rest of the population as evident from the pagan reaction of the 1030s. Poland began to form into a recognizable unitary and territorial entity around the middle of the 10th century under the Piast dynasty. Poland's first documented ruler, Mieszko I, accepted Christianity with the Baptism of Poland in 966, as the new official religion of his subjects; the bulk of the population converted in the course of the next few centuries. In 1000, Boleslaw the Brave, continuing the policy of his father Mieszko, held a Congress of Gniezno and created the metropolis of Gniezno and the dioceses of Kraków, Kołobrzeg, Wrocław. However, the pagan unrest led to the transfer of the capital to Kraków in 1038 by Casimir I the Restorer. In 1109, Prince Bolesław III Wrymouth defeated the King of Germany Henry V at the Battle of Hundsfeld, stopping the Ge
