Popular Library
Popular Library was a New York paperback book company established in 1942 by Leo Margulies and Ned Pines, who at the time were major pulp magazine and newspaper publishers. The company's logo of a pine tree was a tribute to Pines, another Popular Library signature visual was a reduced black-and-white copy of the front cover on the title page. A native of Malden, Pines became the president of Pines Publications in 1928 and continued to lead the company until 1961, he was the president of Popular Library from 1942 to 1966 and its chairman from 1966 to 1968. Retiring in 1971, he continued to work as a consultant. Popular Library was founded in 1942 as a detective-story reprint paperback book company. Popular expanded to publish most genres. In February 1962, the company announced it was issuing a public offering of 127,500 common shares at $8 a share, through Sutro Bros. & Company. Ned Pines was retaining 318,000 shares representing 68.3 percent of the 466,000 shares outstanding. Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation purchased Popular Library in 1968.
The company, which had the Curtis Books imprint, was sold in 1970 to Fawcett Publications. Popular won the Carey Thomas Award in 1976 for distinguished fiction in mass-market publishing under editorial director Patrick O'Connor. In 1977, CBS Publications purchased Fawcett Books. CBS renewed the copyright of in the Standard/Better/Nedor/Popular 1950s pulps library and the various Captain Marvel titles. In 1982, CBS Publications sold off Popular Library to Warner Communications. In April 1985, Warner Books relaunched Popular Library starting out with five other books plus the reprint of Question of Upbringing continuing each month with the follow volumes from A Dance to the Music of Time series by Anthony Powell. In addition, two books would be issued per month from Popular's new imprint, for science fiction. Although Popular Library embraced all genres, it was notable for publishing a wide variety of mystery authors; the line-up of Popular Library novelists included Mary Roberts Rinehart, John Dickson Carr, Anthony Powell, P. D. James, Harper Lee, Helen Van Slyke, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Drabble, Jean Rhys, Ann Beattie, Taylor Caldwell, Anne Tyler, Craig Rice, Cornell Woolrich, Sam Cherry, Octavus Roy Cohen, Mignon G. Eberhart, Ernest Haycox, Rufus King, Arthur Miller and John Steinbeck.
Popular Library’s first 100 covers were all by the same artists, H. Lawrence Hoffman and Sol Immerman; the cover art became more eye-catching and vivid with the addition of illustrators Rudolph Belarski, Earle K. Bergey and Rafael DeSoto. John Erskine's The Private Life of Helen of Troy is an early Popular Library title with conspicuous cover art and blurb which made it eagerly sought by collectors. Standard Comics - Pine's comic book company Thrilling Publications - Pine's pulp magazine company Bookscans: Popular Library Books Are Everything: Popular Library
Return of the Jedi
Return of the Jedi is a 1983 American epic space-opera film directed by Richard Marquand. The screenplay is by Lawrence Kasdan and George Lucas from a story by Lucas, the executive producer, it is the third and final installment in the original Star Wars trilogy, set one year after The Empire Strikes Back. The film stars Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Anthony Daniels, David Prowse, Kenny Baker, Peter Mayhew and Frank Oz. In the film, the Galactic Empire, under the direction of the ruthless Emperor, is constructing a second Death Star in order to crush the Rebel Alliance once and for all. Since the Emperor plans to oversee the final stages of its construction, the Rebel Fleet launches a full-scale attack on the Death Star in order to prevent its completion and kill the Emperor bringing an end to his hold over the galaxy. Meanwhile, Luke Skywalker struggles to bring his father Darth Vader back to the light side of the Force. David Lynch and David Cronenberg were considered to direct the project before Marquand signed on as director.
The production team relied on Lucas' storyboards during pre-production. While writing the shooting script, Kasdan and producer Howard Kazanjian spent two weeks in conference discussing ideas to construct it. Kazanjian's schedule pushed shooting to begin a few weeks early to allow Industrial Light & Magic more time to work on the film's effects in post-production. Filming took place in England and Arizona from January to May 1982. Strict secrecy surrounded the production; the film was released in theaters on May 25, 1983, six years to the day after the release of the first film, receiving positive reviews. The film grossed between $475 million and $572 million worldwide. Several rereleases and revisions to the film followed over the next three decades. 16 years after its original release, it was followed by a prequel trilogy, 32 years a sequel trilogy. In an attempt to rescue Han Solo from crimelord Jabba the Hutt, C-3PO and R2-D2 are sent to Jabba's palace on Tatooine in a trade bargain made by Luke Skywalker.
Disguised as a bounty hunter, Princess Leia infiltrates the palace under the pretense of collecting the bounty on Chewbacca and unfreezes Han, but is caught and enslaved. Luke arrives soon afterward, but after a tense standoff, is sent through a trapdoor to do battle with Jabba's rancor. Jabba sentences Han to death by being fed to the Sarlacc. Having hidden his lightsaber inside R2-D2, Luke frees himself and battles Jabba's guards while Leia uses her chains to strangle Jabba; as the others rendezvous with the Rebel Alliance, Luke returns to Dagobah, where he finds that Yoda is dying. Yoda confirms; the spirit of Obi-Wan Kenobi reveals. The Jedi Masters tell Luke that he must face Vader again to defeat the Empire and become a Jedi Knight; the Rebel Alliance learns that the Empire has been constructing a new Death Star under the supervision of the Emperor himself. As the station is protected by an energy shield, Han leads a strike team to destroy the shield generator on the forest moon of Endor.
Luke and Leia accompany the strike team to Endor in a stolen Imperial shuttle. Luke and his companions encounter a tribe of Ewoks and, after an initial conflict, gain their trust. Luke tells Leia that she is his sister, Vader is their father, that he must confront him. Surrendering to Imperial troops, Luke is brought before Vader, he tries to convince his father to return from the dark side of the Force. Vader takes Luke to the Death Star to meet the Emperor, intent on turning him to the dark side; the Emperor reveals that the Death Star is operational and that the Rebel Fleet will fall into a trap. On Endor, Han's team is captured by Imperial forces, but a counterattack by the Ewoks allows the Rebels to infiltrate the shield generator. Meanwhile, Lando Calrissian leads the Rebel Fleet in the Millennium Falcon, only to find that the Death Star's shield is still active, the Imperial fleet waiting for them; the Emperor tempts Luke to give in to his anger, Luke engages Vader in a lightsaber duel.
Vader senses that Luke has a sister, threatens to turn her to the dark side. Enraged, Luke severs Vader's prosthetic hand; the Emperor entreats Luke to kill Vader and take his place, but Luke refuses, declaring himself a Jedi as his father had been. Furious, the Emperor tortures Luke with Force lightning. Unwilling to let his son die, Vader throws the Emperor down a pit, but is mortally electrocuted in the process. At his last request, Luke removes the redeemed Anakin's mask. After the strike team destroys the shield generator, Lando leads a group of Rebel fighters into the Death Star core and destroys its main reactor; as the Falcon flies out of the Death Star's superstructure and Luke escapes on a shuttle with his father's body, the station explodes. On Endor, Leia reveals to Han that Luke is her brother, they kiss. Luke cremates Anakin's body on a pyre; as the defeat of the Empire is celebrated, Luke sees the spirits of Yoda, Obi-Wan, Anakin watching over him. Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker: One of the last living Jedi, trained by Obi-Wan and Yoda, a skilled X-wing fighter pilot allied with the Rebellion Harrison Ford as Han Solo: A rogue smuggler, who aids the Rebellion against the Empire.
Han is Luke and Leia's friend, as well as Leia's love interest Carrie Fisher as Leia Organa: The former princess of the destroyed planet Alderaan, part of the Rebellion.
The Saturday Evening Post
The Saturday Evening Post is an American magazine published six times a year. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1963 every two weeks until 1969. From the 1920s to the 1960s, it was one of the most circulated and influential magazines for the American middle class, with fiction, non-fiction and features that reached millions of homes every week; the magazine declined in readership through the 1960s, in 1969 The Saturday Evening Post folded for two years before being revived as a quarterly publication with an emphasis on medical articles in 1971. The magazine was redesigned in 2013; the Saturday Evening Post was founded in 1821 and grew to become the most circulated weekly magazine in America. The magazine gained prominent status under the leadership of its longtime editor George Horace Lorimer; the editors claimed it had historical roots in the Pennsylvania Gazette, first published in 1728 by Samuel Keimer and sold to Benjamin Franklin in 1729. It discontinued publication in 1800.
The Saturday Evening Post published current event articles, human interest pieces, illustrations, a letter column, single-panel gag cartoons and stories by the leading writers of the time. It was known for original works of fiction. Illustrations were embedded in stories and advertising; some Post illustrations became popular and continue to be reproduced as posters or prints those by Norman Rockwell. Curtis Publishing Co. stopped publishing the Post in 1969 after the company lost a landmark defamation suit and was ordered to pay over $3 million in damages. The Post was revived in 1971 as a limited circulation quarterly publication; as of the late 2000s, The Saturday Evening Post is published six times a year by the Saturday Evening Post Society, which purchased the magazine in 1982. In 1916, Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Lorimer discovered Norman Rockwell an unknown 22-year-old New York artist. Lorimer promptly purchased two illustrations from Rockwell, using them as covers, commissioned three more drawings.
Rockwell's illustrations of the American family and rural life of a bygone era became icons. During his 50-year career with the Post, Rockwell painted more than 300 covers; the Post employed Nebraska artist John Philip Falter, who became known "as a painter of Americana with an accent of the Middle West," who "brought out some of the homeliness and humor of Middle Western town life and home life." He produced 120 covers for the Post between 1943 and 1968, ceasing only when the magazine began displaying photographs on its covers. Another prominent artist was Charles R. Chickering, a freelance illustrator who went on to design numerous postage stamps for the U. S. Post Office. Other popular cover illustrators include the artists Constantin Alajalov. John Clymer, W. H. D. Koerner, J. C. Leyendecker, Charles Archibald MacLellan, John E. Sheridan, Douglass Crockwell, Amos Sewell, N. C. Wyeth; the magazine's line-up of cartoonists included Bob Barnes, Irwin Caplan, Tom Henderson, Al Johns, Clyde Lamb, Jerry Marcus, Frank O'Neal, B.
Tobey, Pete Wyma and Bill Yates. The magazine ran Ted Key's cartoon panel series Hazel from 1943 to 1969; each issue featured several original short stories and included an installment of a serial appearing in successive issues. Most of the fiction was written for mainstream tastes by popular writers, but some literary writers were featured; the opening pages of stories featured paintings by the leading magazine illustrators. The Post published stories and essays by H. E. Bates, Ray Bradbury, Kay Boyle, Agatha Christie, Brian Cleeve, Eleanor Franklin Egan, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, C. S. Forester, Ernest Haycox, Robert A. Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Gallico, Normand Poirier, Hammond Innes, Louis L'Amour, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph C. Lincoln, John P. Marquand, Edgar Allan Poe, Sax Rohmer, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck and Rex Stout and Rob Wagner, it published poetry by such noted poets as Carl Sandburg, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker and Hannah Kahn. Jack London's best-known novel The Call of the Wild was first published, in serialized form, in the Saturday Evening Post in 1903.
Emblematic of the Post's fiction was author Clarence Budington Kelland, who first appeared in 1916–17 with stories of homespun heroes, Efficiency Edgar and Scattergood Baines. Kelland was a steady presence from 1922 until 1961. For many years William Hazlett Upson contributed a popular series of short stories about the escapades of Earthworm Tractors salesman Alexander Botts. Publication in the Post helped established artists and writers stay afloat. P. G. Wodehouse said "the wolf was always at the door" until the Post gave him his "first break" in 1915 by serializing Something New. After the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Post columnist Garet Garrett became a vocal critic of the New Deal. Garrett accused the Roosevelt Administration of initiating socialist strategies. After Lorimer died, Garrett became editorial writer-in-chief and criticized the Roosevelt Administration's support of the United Kingdom and efforts to prepare to enter what became the Second World War. Garrett's positions may have cost the Post readers and advertisers.
The Post readership began to decline in the late 1960s. In general, the decline of general interest magazines was blamed on television, which competed for advertisers and readers' attention; the Post had problems retaining readers: the public's taste in fiction was changing, the Post's conservative politics and values appealed to a declining number of people. Content by popular writer
Paperback
A paperback known as a softcover or سعيد, is a type of book characterized by a thick paper or paperboard cover, held together with glue rather than stitches or staples. In contrast, hardcover or hardback books are bound with cardboard covered with cloth; the pages on the inside are made of paper. Inexpensive books bound in paper have existed since at least the 19th century in such forms as pamphlets, dime novels, airport novels. Modern paperbacks can be differentiated by size. In the U. S. there are "mass-market paperbacks" and larger, more durable "trade paperbacks." In the U. K. there are A-format, B-format, the largest C-format sizes. Paperback editions of books are issued when a publisher decides to release a book in a low-cost format. Cheaper, lower quality paper. Paperbacks can be the preferred medium when a book is not expected to be a major seller or where the publisher wishes to release a book without putting forth a large investment. Examples include many novels, newer editions or reprintings of older books.
Since paperbacks tend to have a smaller profit margin, many publishers try to balance the profit to be made by selling fewer hardcovers against the potential profit to be made by selling more paperbacks with a smaller profit per unit. First editions of many modern books genre fiction, are issued in paperback. Best-selling books, on the other hand, may maintain sales in hardcover for an extended period to reap the greater profits that the hardcovers provide; the early 19th century saw numerous improvements in the printing and book-distribution processes, with the introduction of steam-powered printing presses, pulp mills, automatic type setting, a network of railways. These innovations enabled the likes of Simms and McIntyre of Belfast, Routledge & Sons and Ward & Lock to mass-produce cheap uniform yellowback or paperback editions of existing works, distribute and sell them across the British Isles, principally via the ubiquitous W H Smith & Sons newsagent found at most urban British railway stations.
These paper bound volumes were offered for sale at a fraction of the historic cost of a book, were of a smaller format, 110 mm × 178 mm, aimed at the railway traveller. The Routledge's Railway Library series of paperbacks remained in print until 1898, offered the traveling public 1,277 unique titles; the German-language market supported examples of cheap paper-bound books: Bernhard Tauchnitz started the Collection of British and American Authors in 1841. These inexpensive, paperbound editions, a direct precursor to mass-market paperbacks ran to over 5,000 volumes. Reclam published Shakespeare in this format from October 1857 and went on to pioneer the mass-market paper-bound Universal-Bibliothek series from 10 November 1867; the German publisher Albatross Books revised the 20th-century mass-market paperback format in 1931, but the approach of World War II cut the experiment short. It proved an immediate financial success in the United Kingdom in 1935 when Penguin Books adopted many of Albatross' innovations, including a conspicuous logo and color-coded covers for different genres.
British publisher Allen Lane invested his own financial capital to launch the Penguin Books imprint in 1935, initiating the paperback revolution in the English-language book-market by releasing ten reprint titles. The first released book on Penguin's 1935 list was André Maurois' Ariel. Lane intended to produce inexpensive books, he purchased paperback rights from publishers, ordered large print runs to keep unit prices low, looked to non-traditional book-selling retail locations. Booksellers were reluctant to buy his books, but when Woolworths placed a large order, the books sold well. After that initial success, booksellers showed more willingness to stock paperbacks, the name "Penguin" became associated with the word "paperback". In 1939, Robert de Graaf issued a similar line in the United States, partnering with Simon & Schuster to create the Pocket Books label; the term "pocket book" became synonymous with paperback in English-speaking North America. In French, the term livre de poche is still in use today.
De Graaf, like Lane, negotiated paperback rights from other publishers, produced many runs. His practices contrasted with those of Lane by his adoption of illustrated covers aimed at the North American market. To reach an broader market than Lane, he used distribution networks of newspapers and magazines, which had a lengthy history of being aimed at mass audiences; because of its number-one position in what became a long list of pocket editions, James Hilton's Lost Horizon is cited as the first American paperback book. However, the first mass-market, pocket-sized, paperback book printed in the US was an edition of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, produced by Pocket Books as a proof-of-concept in late 1938, sold in New York City. In World War II, the U. S. military distributed some 122 million "Armed Services Editions" paperback novels to the troops, which helped popularize the format after the war. Through the circulation of the paperback in kiosks and bookstores and intellectual knowledge was able to reach the masses.
This occurred at the same time that the masses were starting to attend university, leading to the student revolts of 1968 prompting open access to knowledge. The paperback book meant that more people were able to and access knowledge and this led to people wanting more and more of it; this accessibility posed a threat to the wealthy by imposing that
Anita Loos
Corinne Anita Loos was an American screenwriter and author known for her successful novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She became arguably the first-ever staff scriptwriter in 1912 when D. W. Griffith put her on the payroll at Triangle Film Corporation, she went on to write many of the Douglas Fairbanks films, as well as the stage adaptation of Colette’s Gigi. Anita Loos was born Corinne Anita Loos in Sisson, California, to Richard Beers Loos and Minerva "Minnie" Ellen Smith. Loos had two siblings: Gladys and Harry Clifford, a physician/co-founder of the Ross-Loos Medical Group. On pronouncing her name, Loos said, "The family has always used the correct French pronunciation, lohse. However, I myself pronounce my name as if it were spelled luce, since most people pronounce it that way and it was too much trouble to correct them." Loos' father, R. Beers Loos, founded a tabloid newspaper for which her mother, did most of the work of a publisher. In 1892, when Loos was four years old, the family moved to San Francisco, where Beers Loos bought the newspaper The Dramatic Event, a veiled version of the UK's Police Gazette, with money Minerva borrowed from her father.
By age six Loos knew she wanted to be a writer and while living in San Francisco she followed her alcoholic father on exciting fishing trips to the pier. Exploring the city's underbelly and making friends with the locals; this fed into Loos' lifelong fascination with loose women. In 1897, at their father's urging and her sister performed in the San Francisco stock company production of Quo Vadis. Gladys died at eight of appendicitis. Anita continued appearing on stage, being the family's breadwinner, but Beers Loos' spendthrift ways caught up with them, in 1903, he took an offer to manage a theater company in San Diego. Anita performed in her father's company and under another name with a more legitimate stock company. After graduating from San Diego High, Loos devised a method of cobbling together published reports of Manhattan social life, mailing them to a friend in New York who would submit them under their own name for publication in San Diego, her father had turned out some one-act plays for the stock company, encouraged Anita to work in the field herself.
She wrote a successful piece for which she received periodic royalties. In 1911, the theater was running one-reel films after each night's performances, she sent her first attempt at a screenplay, He Was A College Boy, to the Biograph Company, for which she received $25. The New York Hat, starring Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore and directed by D. W. Griffith, was her third screenplay and the first to be produced. Loos dredged real life and real situations for her scenarios: she dished up her father's cronies, her brother's friends and the rich vacationers from the San Diego resorts. By 1912, Loos had sold scripts to both the Lubin studios. Between 1912 and 1915, she turned out 105 scripts, only four of which went unproduced, she would write 200 scenarios before she saw the inside of a studio. In 1915, trying to escape her mother's influence and objections to a career in Hollywood, Loos married Frank Pallma, Jr. the son of the band conductor. But Frank proved to be penniless and dull – after six months, Anita sent him out for hair pins, while he was gone she packed her bags and went home to her mother.
After that, Minnie rethought her position on a Hollywood career. Accompanied by her mother, Anita joined the film colony in Hollywood where Griffith put Loos on the payroll for Triangle Film Corporation at $75 a week with a bonus for every produced script. Many of the scripts she turned out for Griffith went unproduced; some he considered unfilmable because the "laughs were all in the lines, there was no way to get them onto the screen", but he encouraged her to continue, because reading them amused him. Her first screen credit was for an adaptation of Macbeth in which her billing came right after Shakespeare's; when Griffith asked her to write the subtitling for his epic Intolerance, she traveled to New York City for the first time to attend its premiere. Instead of returning to Hollywood, Loos spent the fall of 1916 in New York and met with Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair, they had an instant rapport and Loos remained a Vanity Fair contributor for several decades. Loos returned to California as Griffith was leaving Triangle to make longer films, she joined director and future husband John Emerson for a string of successful Douglas Fairbanks movies.
Loos and company realized that Douglas Fairbanks' acrobatics were an extension of his effervescent personality and parlayed his natural athletic ability into swashbuckling adventure roles. His Picture in the Papers was noted for its wry style of discursive and witty subtitles: "My most popular subtitle introduced the name of a new character; the name was something like this:'Count Xxerkzsxxv.' There was a note,'To those of you who read titles aloud, you can't pronounce the Count's name. You can only think it.' "The five films Loos wrote. When Fairbanks was offered a sweetheart deal with Famous Players-Lasky, he took the team of Emerson-Loos with him at the high income of $500 a week. During this time Loos and Emerson collaborated well together, Loos was getting as much publicity as either Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford. Photoplay magazine labeled her "The Soubrette of Satire". In 1918, Famous Players-Lasky offered the couple a four-picture deal in New York for more money than they had been making with t
Philadelphia
Philadelphia, sometimes known colloquially as Philly, is the largest city in the U. S. state and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-most populous U. S. city, with a 2017 census-estimated population of 1,580,863. Since 1854, the city has been coterminous with Philadelphia County, the most populous county in Pennsylvania and the urban core of the eighth-largest U. S. metropolitan statistical area, with over 6 million residents as of 2017. Philadelphia is the economic and cultural anchor of the greater Delaware Valley, located along the lower Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, within the Northeast megalopolis; the Delaware Valley's population of 7.2 million ranks it as the eighth-largest combined statistical area in the United States. William Penn, an English Quaker, founded the city in 1682 to serve as capital of the Pennsylvania Colony. Philadelphia played an instrumental role in the American Revolution as a meeting place for the Founding Fathers of the United States, who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 at the Second Continental Congress, the Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.
Several other key events occurred in Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War including the First Continental Congress, the preservation of the Liberty Bell, the Battle of Germantown, the Siege of Fort Mifflin. Philadelphia was one of the nation's capitals during the revolution, served as temporary U. S. capital while Washington, D. C. was under construction. In the 19th century, Philadelphia became a railroad hub; the city grew from an influx of European immigrants, most of whom came from Ireland and Germany—the three largest reported ancestry groups in the city as of 2015. In the early 20th century, Philadelphia became a prime destination for African Americans during the Great Migration after the Civil War, as well as Puerto Ricans; the city's population doubled from one million to two million people between 1890 and 1950. The Philadelphia area's many universities and colleges make it a top study destination, as the city has evolved into an educational and economic hub. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Philadelphia area had a gross domestic product of US$445 billion in 2017, the eighth-largest metropolitan economy in the United States.
Philadelphia is the center of economic activity in Pennsylvania and is home to five Fortune 1000 companies. The Philadelphia skyline is expanding, with a market of 81,900 commercial properties in 2016, including several nationally prominent skyscrapers. Philadelphia has more outdoor murals than any other American city. Fairmount Park, when combined with the adjacent Wissahickon Valley Park in the same watershed, is one of the largest contiguous urban park areas in the United States; the city is known for its arts, culture and colonial history, attracting 42 million domestic tourists in 2016 who spent US$6.8 billion, generating an estimated $11 billion in total economic impact in the city and surrounding four counties of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia has emerged as a biotechnology hub. Philadelphia is the birthplace of the United States Marine Corps, is the home of many U. S. firsts, including the first library, medical school, national capital, stock exchange and business school. Philadelphia contains 67 National Historic Landmarks and the World Heritage Site of Independence Hall.
The city became a member of the Organization of World Heritage Cities in 2015, as the first World Heritage City in the United States. Although Philadelphia is undergoing gentrification, the city maintains mitigation strategies to minimize displacement of homeowners in gentrifying neighborhoods. Before Europeans arrived, the Philadelphia area was home to the Lenape Indians in the village of Shackamaxon; the Lenape are a Native American tribe and First Nations band government. They are called Delaware Indians, their historical territory was along the Delaware River watershed, western Long Island, the Lower Hudson Valley. Most Lenape were pushed out of their Delaware homeland during the 18th century by expanding European colonies, exacerbated by losses from intertribal conflicts. Lenape communities were weakened by newly introduced diseases smallpox, violent conflict with Europeans. Iroquois people fought the Lenape. Surviving Lenape moved west into the upper Ohio River basin; the American Revolutionary War and United States' independence pushed them further west.
In the 1860s, the United States government sent most Lenape remaining in the eastern United States to the Indian Territory under the Indian removal policy. In the 21st century, most Lenape reside in Oklahoma, with some communities living in Wisconsin, in their traditional homelands. Europeans came to the Delaware Valley in the early 17th century, with the first settlements founded by the Dutch, who in 1623 built Fort Nassau on the Delaware River opposite the Schuylkill River in what is now Brooklawn, New Jersey; the Dutch considered the entire Delaware River valley to be part of their New Netherland colony. In 1638, Swedish settlers led by renegade Dutch established the colony of New Sweden at Fort Christina and spread out in the valley. In 1644, New Sweden supported the Susquehannocks in their military defeat of the English colony of Maryland. In 1648, the Dutch built Fort Beversreede on the west bank of the Delaware, south of the Schuylkill near the present-day Eastwick neighborhood, to reassert their dominion over the area.
The Swedes responded by building Fort Nya Korsholm, or New Korsholm, named after a town in Finland with a Swedish majority. In 1655, a
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
