Local marketing agreement
In North American broadcasting, a local marketing agreement is a contract in which one company agrees to operate a radio or television station owned by another party. In essence, it is a sort of time-buy. Under Federal Communications Commission regulations, a local marketing agreement must give the company operating the station under the agreement control over the entire facilities of the station, including the finances and programming of the station, its original licensee still remains responsible for the station and its operations, such as compliance with relevant regulations regarding content. A "local marketing agreement" may refer to the sharing or contracting of only certain functions, in particular advertising sales; this may be referred to as a time brokerage agreement, local sales agreement, management services agreement, or most a joint sales agreement or shared services agreement. JSAs are counted toward ownership caps for radio stations. In Canada, local marketing agreements between domestic stations require the consent of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, although Rogers Media has used a similar arrangement to control a U.
S.-based radio station in a border market. The increased use of sharing agreements by media companies to form consolidated, "virtual" duopolies became controversial between 2009 and 2014 arrangements where a company buys a television station's facilities and assets, but sells the license to an affiliated third-party "shell" corporation, who enters into agreements with the owner of the facilities to operate the station on their behalf. Activists have argued that broadcasters were using these agreements as a loophole for the FCC's ownership regulations, that they reduce the number of local media outlets in a market through the aggregation or outright consolidation of news programming, allow station owners to have increased leverage in the negotiation of retransmission consent with local subscription television providers. Station owners have contended that these sharing agreements allow streamlined, cost-effective operations that may be beneficial to the continued operation of lower-rated and/or financially weaker stations in smaller markets.
In 2014 under chairman Tom Wheeler, the FCC began to increase its scrutiny regarding the use of such agreements—particularly joint sales—to evade its policies. On March 31, 2014, the commission voted to make joint sales agreements count as ownership if the senior partner sells 15% or more of advertising time for its partner, to ban coordinated retransmission consent negotiations between two of the top four stations in a market. Wheeler indicated that he planned to address local marketing and shared services agreements in the future; the change in stance prompted changes to then-proposed acquisitions by Gray Television and Sinclair Broadcast Group, rather than use sharing agreements to control them, moved their existing programming and network affiliations to digital subchannels of existing company-owned stations in the market, or a low-power station, relinquished control over the original stations by selling their licenses to third-parties, such as minority-owned broadcasters Due to the FCC's limits on station ownership at the time, local marketing agreements in radio, in which a smaller station would sell its entire airtime to a third-party in time-buy, were widespread between the 1970s and early 1990s.
These alliances gave larger broadcasters a way to expand their reach, smaller broadcasters a means of obtaining a stable stream of revenue. In 1992, the FCC began allowing broadcasting companies to own multiple radio stations in a single market. Following these changes, local marketing agreements fell out of favor for radio, as it was now possible for broadcasters to buy another station outright rather than lease it – consequentially triggering a wave of mass consolidation in the radio industry. However, broadcasters still used local marketing agreements to help transition acquired stations to their new owners; the first local marketing agreement in North American television was formed in 1991, when the Sinclair Broadcast Group purchased Fox affiliate WPGH-TV in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As Sinclair had owned independent station WPTT in that market, which would have violated FCC rules which at the time had prohibited television station duopolies, Sinclair decided to sell the lower-rated WPTT to the station's manager Eddie Edwards, but continued to operate the station through an LMA.
Sinclair's use of local marketing agreements would lead to legal issues in 1999, when Glencairn, Ltd. announced that it would acquire Fox affiliate KOKH-TV in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma from Sullivan Broadcasting. As the family of Sinclair Broadcast Group founder Julian Smith controlled 97% of Glencairn's stock assets and the company was to be paid with Sinclair stock in turn for the purchases, KOKH and Sinclair-owned WB affiliate KOCB would constitute a duo
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Tuscaloosa is a city in and the seat of Tuscaloosa County in west central Alabama. Located on the Black Warrior River at the Atlantic Seaboard fall line of the Piedmont, it is the fifth-largest city in Alabama, with an estimated population of 100,287 in 2017; the city was known as Tuskaloosa until the early 20th century. Incorporated as a town on December 13, 1819, it was named after Tuskaloosa, the chief of a band of Muskogean-speaking people, they battled and were defeated by forces of Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in 1540 in the Battle of Mabila, thought to have been located in what is now central Alabama. Tuscaloosa served as Alabama's capital city from 1826 to 1846. Tuscaloosa is the regional center of industry, commerce and education for the area of west-central Alabama known as West Alabama, it is the principal city of the Tuscaloosa Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Tuscaloosa and Pickens counties. In 2013 its estimated metro population was 235,628. Tuscaloosa is the home of The University of Alabama, Stillman College and Shelton State Community College.
While the city attracted international attention when Mercedes-Benz announced it would build its first automotive assembly plant in North America in Tuscaloosa County, the University of Alabama remains the dominant economic and cultural engine in the city, making it a college town. Tuscaloosa has been traditionally known as the "Druid City" because of the numerous water oaks planted in its downtown streets since the 1840s; the city has become known nationally for the sports successes of the University of Alabama in football. City leaders adopted the moniker "The City of Champions" after the Alabama Crimson Tide football team won the BCS National Championship in their 2009, 2011, again in their 2012 seasons; the Tide won the College Football Playoff in 2017 season. In 2008, the City of Tuscaloosa hosted the USA Olympic Triathlon trials for the Beijing Games. In recent years, Tuscaloosa has been named the "Most Livable City in America," one of America's "100 Best Communities for Young People," one of the "50 Best College Towns," and one of the "Best Places to Launch a Small Business."
Nearly 12,000 years ago, Native Americans or Paleo-Indians arrived in what today is referred to as the Deep South. They were hunter-gatherers who pursued the megafauna that became extinct following the end of the Pleistocene age. After thousands of years, successive indigenous cultures developed a rich and complex agricultural society. Emerging in the early first millennium of the common era were the people of the Mississippian culture. Like some of the generations before them, they built large earthwork mounds in planned sites that expressed their cosmology, their large earthworks, built for political and religious rituals from 900AD to 1500AD, expressed their cosmology. Their earthwork mounds and great plazas survive throughout the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, as well as their tributaries in the Southeast. Descendant Native American tribes include the Muskogee people. Among the historical tribes living in the area of present-day Alabama at the time of European contact were the Iroquoian-speaking Cherokee in the interior, believed to have migrated south centuries before from the Great Lakes area.
The tribes of the coastal plain and Piedmont included the Muskogean-speaking Alabama, Choctaw and Mobile. In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected president of the United States, he had gained popularity when he defeated the Creek at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814, following victories in the War of 1812. He long proposed Indian removal to an Indian Territory to be established west of the Mississippi, to make land available in the Southeast for European-American settlement. Jackson abandoned the policy of his predecessors of treating different Indian groups as separate nations. Instead, he aggressively pursued plans to move all Indian tribes living east of the Mississippi River. Following Congressional passage of the Indian Removal Act, in 1832 the Creek National Council signed the Treaty of Cusseta, ceding their remaining lands east of the Mississippi to the U. S. and accepting relocation to the Indian Territory. They had been under pressure from new settlers encroaching on their territory. Most Muscogee-speaking peoples were removed to Indian Territory during the Trail of Tears in 1834, although some remained behind.
Some Muscogee in Alabama live near Poarch Creek Reservation in Atmore. The pace of white settlement in the Southeast increased after the War of 1812 and the Treaty of Fort Jackson. A small assortment of log cabins soon arose near the large Creek village at the fall line of the river, which the new settlers named in honor of the sixteenth-century Chief Tuskaloosa of a Muskogean-speaking tribe. In 1817, Alabama became a territory. On December 13, 1819, the territorial legislature incorporated the town of Tuskaloosa, one day before Congress admitted Alabama to the Union as a state. From 1826 to 1846, Tuskaloosa was the capital of Alabama. In 1831, the University of Alabama was established and the town's population and economy grew but the relocation of the capital to Montgomery caused a severe decline; the state legislature established Alabama State Hospital for the Insane (now Bryce Hospital]] in Tuskaloosa in the 1850s, which helped restore the city's fortunes. During the Civil War following Alabama's secession from the Union, several thousand men from Tuscaloosa fought in the Confederate armies.
During the last weeks of the War, a brigade of Union troops raiding the city burned the campus of the university. The larger town was damaged in the battle and shared in the South's economic
Dothan, Alabama
Dothan is a city in Dale and Houston counties in the U. S. state of Alabama. It is the county seat of Houston County and the seventh largest city in Alabama, with a population of 65,496 at the 2010 census, it is near the state's southeastern corner 20 miles west of the Georgia state line and 16 miles north of Florida. It is named after the biblical city, the place where Joseph's brothers threw him into a cistern and sold him into slavery in Egypt. Dothan is the principal city of the Dothan, Alabama metropolitan area, which encompasses all of Geneva and Houston counties; the combined population of the entire Dothan metropolitan area in 2010 was 145,639. The city serves as the main transportation and commercial hub for a significant part of southeastern Alabama, southwest Georgia, nearby portions of the Florida Panhandle. Since one-fourth of the U. S. peanut crop is produced nearby, much of it processed in the city, Dothan is known as "The Peanut Capital of the World". It hosts the annual National Peanut Festival at the dedicated "Peanut Festival Fairgrounds".
The area, now Dothan was inhabited for thousands of years by successive cultures of indigenous peoples. In historic times it was occupied by the Alabama and Creek Native American tribes who were hunters and gatherers in the vast forests of pine that covered this region; these tribes had developed complex cultures, used to meet and camp for trading near a large spring at the crossroads of two trails. Between 1763 and 1783, the region, now Dothan was part of the colony of British West Florida. European-American settlers moving through the area during the late 18th and early 19th centuries discovered the Indian spring, naming it "Poplar Head". Most felt that the sandy soil common to this region would be unsuitable for farming, so they moved on. A crude stockade was constructed on the Barber Plantation, where settlers could take refuge whenever they felt threatened; the area received more white settlers. This fort disappeared by the 1840s, after the end of the Indian Wars in Alabama and Indian Removal in the 1830s, when most members of the Five Civilized Tribes were forcibly taken to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River.
Those members of the tribe who stayed in the southeast were considered to have given up their tribal memberships and became state and U. S. citizens. The first permanent white settlers consisted of nine families who moved into the area during the early 1830s to harvest the abundant timber, their settlement, named "Poplar Head" after the spring, failed to thrive. It was all but abandoned by the time of the Civil War. After the war, a local Pony Express route was founded. On November 11, 1885, the citizens voted to incorporate, naming their new city "Dothan" on the suggestion of a local clergyman after discovering that "Poplar Head" was registered with the U. S. post office for a town in northern Alabama. On October 12, 1889, Dothan was the scene of a deadly altercation resulting from a dispute over a tax levied on all wagons operating within city limits. Local farmers opposed this levy and united in a body called the "Farmers Alliance"; the arrest of some of the alliance's men led to a riot, although the violence lasted only a few minutes, it left two men dead and others wounded.
Chief of Police Tobe Domingus was found guilty of murder, sentenced to ten years in prison. Appeals to the Alabama Supreme Court resulted in a new trial, Domingus was acquitted. In 1893, Dothan secured a stop on the first railroad to be built in the region; this development brought new prosperity and growth, as local farmers had a means to market and transport their produce. The pine forests were harvested for turpentine and wood, transformed into ship masts and other wood products; as the pines were cut and land subsequently cleared, cotton was cultivated as a staple of the local economy. The crops were devastated by the boll weevil in the early 1900s. Farmers turned to peanut production, successful and brought financial gain to the city, it became a hub for the transport of peanuts and peanut-related products. Today, one-quarter of the U. S. peanut crop is harvested within 75 miles of Dothan. A two-week fall festival known as the National Peanut Festival celebrates this heritage. Dothan sought out industrial development, with textile and agricultural concerns being joined by manufacturing plants for the Sony and General Electric corporations in the 20th century.
The city had an exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Part of Henry County, Dothan became the county seat of the newly formed Houston County on May 9, 1903; the city continued to flourish and grow throughout the twentieth century, with an airport being constructed in 1965 and Wallace Community College in 1969. Troy University Dothan Campus was established in 1961 and is located in the northwestern part of the city; the Southern Company constructed the Joseph M. Farley Nuclear Generating Station near the city between 1970 and 1981. In the late 1970s, factories were constructed in the city by Michelin corporations. In 2010 Sony announced its closure of its Dothan plant. Pemco Aviation declared bankruptcy in March 2012 and in May that year announced the closing of its Dothan facility. Culturally, an art museum, several theaters, symphony orchestra, dance troupe and other artistic amenities have been established. Dothan is in northwestern Houston County in southeastern Alabama; the city limits extend north int
Spamming
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send an unsolicited message advertising, as well as sending messages on the same site. While the most recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam, it is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in every dish and where patrons annoyingly chant "Spam!" over and over again. Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, infrastructures, IP ranges, domain names, it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings; the costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the volume.
Spamming has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions. A person who creates spam is called a spammer; the term spam is derived from the 1970 Spam sketch of the BBC television comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus. The sketch, set in a cafe, has a waitress reading out a menu where every item includes Spam canned luncheon meat; as the waitress recites the Spam-filled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drowns out all conversations with a song, repeating "Spam, Spam, Spam… Spammity Spam! Wonderful Spam!". The excessive amount of Spam mentioned, references the preponderance of it and other imported canned meat products in the United Kingdom after World War II, as the country struggled to rebuild its agricultural base. In the 1980s the term was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented BBSs and MUDs, who would repeat "Spam" a huge number of times to scroll other users' text off the screen. In early chat rooms services like PeopleLink and the early days of Online America, they flooded the screen with quotes from the Monty Python Spam sketch.
This was used as a tactic by insiders of a group that wanted to drive newcomers out of the room so the usual conversation could continue. It was used to prevent members of rival groups from chatting—for instance, Star Wars fans invaded Star Trek chat rooms, filling the space with blocks of text until the Star Trek fans left, it came to be used on Usenet to mean excessive multiple posting—the repeated posting of the same message. The unwanted message would appear in many, if not all newsgroups, just as Spam appeared in all the menu items in the Monty Python sketch; the first usage of this sense was by Joel Furr This use had become established—to spam Usenet was flooding newsgroups with junk messages. The word was attributed to the flood of "Make Money Fast" messages that clogged many newsgroups during the 1990s. In 1998, the New Oxford Dictionary of English, which had only defined "spam" in relation to the trademarked food product, added a second definition to its entry for "spam": "Irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of newsgroups or users."
There was an effort to differentiate between types of newsgroup spam. Messages that were crossposted to too many newsgroups at once – as opposed to those that were posted too – were called velveeta, but this term didn't persist. In the late 19th Century Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations; the first recorded instance of a mass unsolicited commercial telegram is from May 1864, when some British politicians received an unsolicited telegram advertising a dentist. The earliest documented spam was a message advertising the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers sent by Gary Thuerk to 393 recipients on ARPANET in 1978. Rather than send a separate message to each person, the standard practice at the time, he had an assistant, Carl Gartley, write a single mass email. Reaction from the net community was fiercely negative. Spamming had been practiced as a prank by participants in multi-user dungeon games, to fill their rivals' accounts with unwanted electronic junk.
The first major commercial spam incident started on March 5, 1994, when a husband and wife team of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, began using bulk Usenet posting to advertise immigration law services. The incident was termed the "Green Card spam", after the subject line of the postings. Defiant in the face of widespread condemnation, the attorneys claimed their detractors were hypocrites or "zealouts", claimed they had a free speech right to send unwanted commercial messages, labeled their opponents "anti-commerce radicals"; the couple wrote a controversial book entitled How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway. An early example of nonprofit fundraising bulk posting via Usenet occurred in 1994 on behalf of CitiHope, an NGO attempting to raise funds to rescue children at risk during the Bosnian War. However, as it was a violation of their terms of service, the ISP Panix deleted all of the bulk posts from Usenet, only missing three copies. Within a few years, the focus of spamming moved chiefly to email.
By 1999, Khan C. Smith, a well known hacker at the time, had begun to commercialize the bulk email industry and rallied thousands into the business by building more friendly bulk email software and providing internet access illegally hacked from major ISPs suc
Sinclair Broadcast Group
Sinclair Broadcast Group is a publicly traded American telecommunications conglomerate, controlled by the family of company founder Julian Sinclair Smith. Headquartered in the Baltimore suburb of Hunt Valley, the company is the largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations, largest by total coverage. Sinclair owns four digital multicast networks and one cable network and streaming service, owns or operates four radio stations in the Pacific Northwest. Among other non-broadcast properties, Sinclair owns the professional wrestling promotion Ring of Honor and its streaming service Honor Club. Sinclair has faced scrutiny from some media critics, as well as some of its station employees, for the conservative slant of their stations' news reporting and other programming decisions, how the company's rapid growth has aided the airing of content that supports these views. Sinclair has faced criticism over business practices that circumvent concentration of media ownership regulations the use of local marketing agreements, accusations that the company had been currying favor with the Trump administration in order to loosen these rules and about its management lacking diversity and being controlled by a single family.
Critics including former news anchor Dan Rather have described Sinclair's practices as being "an assault on our democracy" by disseminating what they perceive to be Orwellian-like propaganda to its local stations. The company's roots date back to 1958, when Julian Sinclair Smith, an electrical engineer, along with a group of shareholders, formed the Commercial Radio Institute, a broadcasting trade school in Baltimore, Maryland. Commercial Radio Institute applied to build an FM radio station and construction permit was granted the following year, WFMM-FM signed on the air in February 1960. By 1967, Smith had applied for, was granted, a construction permit for UHF channel 45 in Baltimore. Chesapeake Engineering Placement Service changed its name to Chesapeake Television Corporation, launched its founding television station property, WBFF in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 11, 1971; the Commercial Radio Institute, by a division of Chesapeake Television Corporation founded WPTT in Pittsburgh, in 1978.
All three stations were independents, though WBFF and WTTE became charter affiliates of the Fox Broadcasting Company at its launch in 1986, while the Fox affiliation in Pittsburgh went to higher-rated WPGH-TV, which would be purchased by Sinclair in 1990. Smith's son David D. Smith began taking a more active role in the company in the 1980s. In 1985, the Chesapeake Television Corporation changed its name to the Sinclair Broadcast Group. In 1990, David Smith and his three brothers bought their parents' remaining stock and went on a buying spree that made it one of the largest station owners in the country, through the purchases of groups such as Act III Broadcasting and River City Broadcasting. Sinclair pioneered the concept of the local marketing agreement in American television in 1991, when it sold WPTT to its general manager Eddie Edwards in order to purchase fellow Pittsburgh station WPGH-TV to comply with FCC ownership rules of the time that prohibited duopolies, while agreeing to allow Sinclair to retain operational responsibilities for the station.
However, while LMAs would become an integral part of the company's business model in subsequent years, Sinclair's plans to acquire KOKH-TV in Oklahoma City through Glencairn, which would subsequently attempt to sell five of its 11 existing LMA-operated stations to Sinclair outright in turn was challenged by the Rainbow/PUSH coalition to the Federal Communications Commission in 1998, citing concerns over a single company controlling two broadcast licenses in the same market in violation of FCC rules. The coalition argued that Glencairn passed itself off as a minority-owned company which, since the Smith family controlled most of the company's stock, was technically a Sinclair arm that planned to use the LMA with KOKH to gain control of the station and create an illegal duopoly with KOCB. In 2001, the FCC levied a $40,000 fine against Sinclair for illegally controlling Glencairn. Sinclair became a publicly listed company in 1995, while the Smith family retained a controlling interest. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 14, 2009, Sinclair stated that if the company could not refinance its $1.33 billion debt or if Cunningham Broadcasting became insolvent due to nonpayment on a loan worth $33.5 million, Sinclair may be forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
However, the company recovered its financial fortunes enough, as it would begin a major string of acquisitions involving television stations and other properties two years later. On September 8, 2011, Sinclair entered into an agreement to purchase all of the assets of Four Points Media Group from Cerberus Capital Management for $200 million; the Federal Trade Commission gave its antitrust approval of the deal in late September.
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
Pensacola, Florida
Pensacola is the westernmost city in the Florida Panhandle 13 miles from the border with Alabama, the county seat of Escambia County, in the U. S. state of Florida. As of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 51,923, down from 56,255 at the 2000 census. Pensacola is the principal city of the Pensacola metropolitan area, which had an estimated 461,227 residents in 2012. Pensacola is a sea port on Pensacola Bay, protected by the barrier island of Santa Rosa and connects to the Gulf of Mexico. A large United States Naval Air Station, the first in the United States, is located southwest of Pensacola near Warrington; the main campus of the University of West Florida is situated north of the city center. The area was inhabited by Muskogean language peoples; the Pensacola people lived there at the time of European contact, Creek people visited and traded from present-day southern Alabama. Spanish explorer Tristán de Luna founded a short-lived settlement in 1559. In 1698 the Spanish established a presidio in the area, from which the modern city developed.
The area changed hands several times. During Florida's British rule, fortifications were strengthened, it is nicknamed "The City of Five Flags", due to the five governments that have ruled it during its history: the flags of Spain, Great Britain, the United States of America, the Confederate States of America. Other nicknames include "World's Whitest Beaches", "Cradle of Naval Aviation", "Western Gate to the Sunshine State", "America's First Settlement", "Emerald Coast", "Red Snapper Capital of the World", "P-Cola"; the original inhabitants of the Pensacola Bay area were Native American peoples. At the time of European contact, a Muskogean-speaking tribe known to the Spanish as the Pensacola lived in the region; this name was not recorded until 1677, but the tribe appears to be the source of the name "Pensacola" for the bay and thence the city. Creek people Muskogean-speaking, came from present-day southern Alabama to trade, so the peoples were part of a broader regional and continental network of relations.
The best-known Pensacola culture site in terms of archeology is the Bottle Creek site, a large site located 59 miles west of Pensacola north of Mobile, Alabama. This site has at least 18 large earthwork mounds, its main occupation was from 1250 AD to 1550. It was a gateway to their society; this site would have had easy access by a dugout canoe, the main mode of transportation used by the Pensacola. The area's written recorded history begins in the 16th century, with documentation by Spanish explorers who were the first Europeans to reach the area; the expeditions of Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528 and Hernando de Soto in 1539 both visited Pensacola Bay, the latter of which documented the name "Bay of Ochuse". In the age of sailing ships Pensacola was the busiest port on the Gulf of Mexico, having the deepest harbor on the Gulf. In 1559, Tristán de Luna y Arellano landed with some 1,500 people on 11 ships from Mexico; the expedition was to establish an outpost called Santa María de Ochuse by Luna, as a base for Spanish efforts to colonize Santa Elena But the colony was decimated by a hurricane on September 19, 1559, which killed an unknown number of sailors and colonists, sank six ships, grounded a seventh, ruined supplies.
The survivors struggled to survive, most moving inland to what is now central Alabama for several months in 1560 before returning to the coast. Some of the survivors sailed to Santa Elena, but another storm struck there. Survivors made their way to Cuba and returned to Pensacola, where the remaining fifty at Pensacola were taken back to Veracruz; the Viceroy's advisers concluded that northwest Florida was too dangerous to settle. They ignored it for 137 years. In the late 17th century, the French began exploring the lower Mississippi River with the intention of colonizing the region as part of La Louisiane or New France in North America. Fearful that Spanish territory would be threatened, the Spanish founded a new settlement in western Florida. In 1698 they established a fortified town near what is now Fort Barrancas, laying the foundation for permanent European-dominated settlement of the modern city of Pensacola; the Spanish built three presidios in Pensacola: Presidio Santa Maria de Galve: the presidio included fort San Carlos de Austria and a village with church.
The garrison was moved to the mainland. During the early years of settlement, a tri-racial creole society developed; as a fortified trading post, the Spanish had men stationed here. Some married or had unions with Pensacola, Creek or African women, both slave and free, their descendants created a mixed-race population of mestizos and mulattos; the Spanish encouraged slaves from the southern British colonies to come to Florida as a refuge, promising freedom in exchange for conversion to Catholicism. King Charles II of Spain issu
