essay about usa

United States of America Essay

The history of america.

The story of the United States is based on either the Native people’s prehistory or the 1492 voyages of Christopher Columbus to the land. USA or the United States, as it is sometimes called, is a federal republic made up of a federal district and fifty states. Native people, whose first appearance in the region was at North America, were the indigenous people in the country.

This group of people would compose of a number of distinct American ethnic communities and was called by controversial titles that were based on European language terminologies. The Voyages of Christopher Columbus, on the other hand, refers to the speculative journey of an Italian navigator and explorer by the name Christopher Columbus, across the Atlantic Ocean.

Columbus’s boat voyages were a successful exploration story, since they would lead to significant discoveries of the land. The discoveries of Columbus explorations contributed to general European awareness of the continent of America, thus necessitating its colonization by the Great Britain. This colonization begun at around 1600, and would go on for about 15 decades before the onset of the revolution war in 1775.

The first batch of Europeans to arrive in the region would languish alone for many years before a new stronger group of British settlers finally made their way into the region towards the end of the 17th century. These new settlers were indeed the first category of immigrants to bring the idea of commercial agriculture in the region, with tobacco and rice being the first agricultural products to be introduced.

The 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries would see a great number of immigrants flow into the region, with the intention of making good use of the abundant opportunities and resources that were available. Apart from the impact of these varied opportunities, many significant aspects in the American history such as industrialization and formation of the initial states would also take place in the course of this period, making America one of the most developed continents in the world those times(Wendell,2005).

However, the differences in cultural aspects arising from the diverse communities in the region would often lead to serious ethnic violence, social disruptions, and political tensions among the communities over the centuries. In fact, these pressures played a significant role in the facilitation of the American war of independence or simply the revolution war in 1775.

The American Revolution was an open confrontation that involved the Great Britain on one side, and the united colonies together with other European immigrants on the other side. The revolution would come as a result of heightening restrictions which had been placed upon the colonies by the Great Britain.

The confrontation is also said to have started as a result of disagreements over the manner in which the Natives were treated by their British colonizers, and the way they thought it was better for them to be treated. Some of these disagreements came by as a result of matters regarding taxations which the colonies believed were conducted unfairly.

While the Americans thought that their rights as the owners of the land were being trodden upon by the Europeans, particularly the British, the Great Britain would claim that it was their right to treat the colonies in every manner that suited the crown. These events would later lead to the British defeat by the Americans. This would come following the support of the latter by the French and other immigrants who had settled in the region.

The outcomes of this historic war eventually granted Americans their freedom from the colonizers. This historic achievement was realized on July 4, 1776, and the declaration of Independence would be signed officially two days later. This marked a new beginning for the Americans, since the thirteen states which had previously being under the harsh rule and domination of Great Britain for many centuries were now free to come together to establish an autonomous government.

The states could now form their own way of leadership, and be able to come up with own laws that would be suitable for them in all aspects. 37 more states were formed in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries increasing the number of states to 50 from the previous 13, thus giving rise to modern America.

1780s would see key nationalists from the 13 states come together to form a new constitution to serve as a foundation for this new nation that was too fragile to withstand any form of pressure that was likely to arise. The new constitution paved way for a stronger government with a powerful president and new laws.

George Washington, a renowned political figure who had played an active role in the revolutionary war was elected the first president of the country, under the new constitution in 1789. Ever since then, America has gone through smooth and tough, wars and treaties, and good and bad times, to emerge not only as one of the most developed countries in the world, but also as a global superpower. The United States has had 44 presidents so far, with Barack Obama being the current occupant of the Whitehouse.

Significant Events in the Country’s Life

The American life is marked by many significant events which include wars and diseases. Concerning wars, there have been all sorts of warring events in the country’s history. This would range from domestic conflicts to international conflicts where the Americans have been involved in conflicts with combatants from other countries.

Some of the well-known conflicts involving the Americans had taken place in the colonial times, while others would occur just after the independence and the years to follow. The King Philip’s War, which took place between July 1675 and August 1676, was among the first wars involving the Americans. This was followed by a conflict involving France and the English colonies, a confrontation that was known as King William’s War between 1689 and 1697.

There was also the King George’s war which took place between 1744 and 1748. This was followed closely by the French and Indian War involving the Great Britain and French colonies from 1756 to 1763. The Cherokee War between 1759 and 1761 would pave way for the Revolution War that was fought for eight consecutive years starting from the year 1775.

The Post-independence wars involving the US included Franco-American Naval War of 1798, Barbary Wars, War of 1812, Creek War, Mexican-American War, Spanish-American War, and the U.S. Civil War. Some of the major wars in the American history would include the Great War, World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam War, Invasion of Panama by the US, Persian Gulf War, the Invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the US disarmament war on Iraq.

The Iraq war which begun in 2003 and took not less than five years to end, is arguably one of the worst wars that have involved the Americans recently.

Apart from these notable wars and conflicts, America has also experienced a number of diseases. As it would be observed, Native Americans have been victims to various health concerns and diseases throughout history.

Most of these diseases, however, are said to have resulted from the interactions of the Europeans when they first invaded the American territories way back in 1600 and the years to follow. The most notable diseases and health concerns arising from these foreign invasions would include, but were not limited to, smallpox, measles, cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, chicken pox, scarlet fever, influenza, whooping cough, yellow fever, bilious disorder, and sexually transmitted diseases (Matthew & Cliff, 2004).

Most of these diseases, however, occurred as sweeping epidemics which resulted to massive deaths, thus causing serious destruction to the affected communities. Some of these epidemics are seen as significant events in the country’s life, owing to their serious implications on people’s lives.

Even though the effects of these early diseases have declined tremendously over the past several decades, probably due to the current advancements in matters of health, a new batch of more serious ailments has sprouted in the contemporary world. These contemporary diseases, which have continued to place a heavy burden on the American economy, would include HIV/AIDS, malaria, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and liver cirrhosis, among others.

Recent Worth Noting Events

Apart from the wars and diseases that have affected the American since prehistoric times, there are also other worth noting events that have rocked the country. These include devastating events such as acts of terror, natural calamities or disasters, and incidents of mass shooting that have occurred in the country‘s history. As it would be observed, America has been a common target for many Islamic terror attacks.

Some of these attacks would result to loss of many innocent lives across the country whenever they did occur. Among these attacks, the events of September 11 are said to be the most devastating acts of terrorism to have ever happened in the country’s history. This was an act of terror involving Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacking four passenger flights in the U.S. and steering them into strategic points in Washington DC, leading to the deaths of nearly 3000 Americans and injuries of more than 1000.

Apart from terrorism events, mass shooting incidents have also become a norm in the United States recently. Most of these incidents are said to have occurred in entertainment zones, restaurants, and learning institutions, among other places. According to police sources in the U.S., more than 30 mass shooting incidents have occurred in the country in the last three decades alone .

The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University incident, where an undergraduate student by the name of Cho shot and killed 32 fellow students is a worth noting event here. The April 2007 shooting, which is said to be the worst incident of mass shooting ever in the country’s history, has raised a lot of concern on the controversial issue of gun control in the country.

The McDonald’s massacre of July, 1984 is also another significant event. In this particular incident, James Huberty had invaded the Californian restaurant and opened fire on everybody who was inside. Only 19 out of the forty people who were said to have been shot in this incident had survived the ordeal, but with serious injuries.

US Government Structure

The current American government structure is divided into three major branches which include the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judiciary. Normally, the government is headed by the US president, who shares his authority and powers with the judiciary system and the Congress. Theirs being a Federal Republic, Americans do recognize the Constitution as the Supreme law which governs them.

Following is a simple diagram showing the current government structure of USA.

The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are the two major political parties in the states. Each of these parties has tried to exercise outstanding credibility and performance in governance affairs. Democratic is currently the ruling party, with president Obama being the 15th Democrat to occupy the Whitehouse as the 44th president of the United States. With a population of over 300 million people, the U.S. is arguably among the high-ranking countries in the world in terms of voter turnout every time there is an election.

However, the voter turn out in the country has never been constant, but it keeps on rising and dropping every now and then. According to the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, the recent voter turnout in the country stood at 57.5 percent of the total number of people who were eligible to vote. This rate, however, was a bit lower compared to the 2008 and 2004 general elections where percentages of 62.3 and 60.4, respectively, were observed.

Cases of Corruption in the US

The U.S., just like any other country in the world, has witnessed many cases of public corruption in its history. There has been a case of corruption in almost every administration that has governed the Federal Republic of the United States.

Some of the past administrations that have been associated with major corruption scandals in the country’s history would include the governments of Reagan, Clinton, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, George W. Bush, Kennedy, Carter, and George H.W. Bush. Of all the vast corruption scandals witnessed under the above administrations, the corruption case of William Jefferson is a worth noting scandal. This incident had taken place in the era of President George W.

Bush, and is one of the most recent corruption cases to have rocked the U.S. The fact that the case involved a Congressman was not the only reason that would make it one of the most significant corruption scandals in the country’s history, but also the fact that the 5-year investigation on the case, which had started on mid 2005 would reveal more than enough evidence to convict Jefferson (Nicholls et al., 2011).

This would see Jefferson being convicted of 11 accounts of corruption in August 2009, and getting a 13-year sentence. In this regard, Jefferson went into history as the first congressman to get the longest jail sentence on accounts of corruption and bribery.

Country Indicators and Statistics

As it would be observed, the major indicators of the United States are based on aspects of human development, climate and environmental matters, socioeconomic aspects, and information and communication technology matters, among other aspects.

The levels of Human Development in the US are assessed by bringing together the indicators of income, life expectancy and attainment of education. However, the levels of income would vary from state to state. The current Median Income of the households is said to be $45,019 per annum.

The life expectancy at birth in the US currently ranges between 77 years and 80 years for both male and women. Educational attainment for all ages, sex, race, and gender has increased significantly in the last several years. Based on the above indicators, it is patently clear that all avenues of human development in the country have improved greatly over the years, thus paving way for even better achievements as far as the country’s future economy is concerned.

Climatic indicators are also widely used in the U.S. to determine expected weather patterns. Most of these climatic indicators are aimed at assessing the key elements of weather that are likely to be observed in the country, such as weather patterns, greenhouse gases, and ecosystems.

Current economic indicators have shown USA as one of the most powerful economies globally. This great achievement, however, can be based on the behavior of the financial market as it is gauged using various economic indicators. Some of the common economic indicators that have continued to play a significant role in the United States include, but are not limited to, Gross Domestic Product, Inflation, and unemployment.

These indicators have proved to be effective in helping the Federal Reserve make the necessary decisions and plans in regard with the country’s economy. The current Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the country is estimated to be $15.7 trillion. This actually stands as the largest national economy globally.

This is slightly higher compared with previous rankings, thus indicating a significant advancement in the job and business sectors. Currently, the U.S. inflation rate is recorded at 1.1 percent, and this is a significant drop compared to previous records which had stood at a higher mark. The unemployment rate in the US has also dropped to 7.5 percent this year from last year’s rate which stood at 7.6 percent.

Population Statistics

Currently, United States stands as the third most populous country in the world, with an approximate of about 315 million people. According to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, the country’s population has been growing steadily since prehistoric times, and it was in the year 2006 when the mark of 300 million was eventually reached.

This is a massive growth, considering the fact that the country had a population of only 350 people way back in 1610, when the first census was conducted on Native Americans. United States has a total area of 3.79 sq miles, and in that case, its population density stands at around 33.9 people per sq.km. Having a growth rate of nearly 1 percent, which is considered to be higher than that of any other developed nation in the world, the country’s population is projected to increase abundantly in the near future.

The total fertility rate in the United States stands slightly below the replacement value at 2.09. This, however, is a bit more higher compared to that of other developed countries in the world. The death rate in the country is observed to have dropped significantly in the past few years. In fact, this is one of the key factors which have contributed to the high growth rate witnessed in the country today.

Based on the current demographical data, the death rate stands at 8.4 deaths per every 1,000 population. The infant mortality rate normally constitutes the largest percentage of the overall number of deaths occurring in the country. Currently, the infant mortality rate in the U.S. stands at around 6.04 deaths per 1000 live births.

Most of these infant deaths are said to occur as a result of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and serious birth defects, among other causes. Even though the infant mortality rate is observed to have started declining in recent years after leveling off for quite sometime, it still remains a bit higher than that of many other countries in the world.

Armed forces, Conventional Weapon Holdings and Military Activities

Generally, the U.S. armed forces are comprised of five key branches which include the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Marine Corps, and the US Air force. The president, who is also the Commander-in-Chief, is the military’s overall head assisted by a federal executive department and the Defense Secretary, among other key units in the government.

All these units are entrusted with the responsibility of overseeing the complex operations of the armed forces in the whole country. Members of the U.S. armed forces are entitled to a variety of duties and assignments, as stated in the Constitution. Even though personnel from different units of the U.S. armed forces can perform similar tasks in most cases, their duties would tend to vary greatly sometimes, depending on their departments or units.

The typical duties of military personnel in the U.S. armed forces would include safeguarding the country from both domestic and external attacks, responding to matters of emergency in the country, helping in undertaking development projects, and assisting in carrying out the outstanding mission of the government in other countries through the U.S. foreign policy.

The U.S. armed forces are ranked among the best trained fighting forces globally. Moreover, they have also gained outstanding reputation and recognition from allover the world, for being in possession of the most sophisticated war weapons that have ever been introduced into the world.

These achievements have brought much glory and honor to the American fighting forces. Ever since their establishment way back in 1775, the U.S. forces have taken part in many military activities inside and outside the country (Ploch, 2010). Most of these involvements have been in the many warring events involving the Americans that would take place after the declaration of independence in 1774. The prevailing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are good examples here.

Apart from the wars, the U.S. armed forces have also taken part in other special missions outside the country, some of which are noteworthy events in the country’s history. A good example of the special activities in which the U.S. military forces have continued to take part is the UN peacekeeping mission of enforcing peace in war-stricken regions in the world. The American military forces have also played a crucial role in responding to natural disasters and events of terrorism in the world.

One important aspect which the U.S. enjoys out of their economic power and stability is their status as the strongest military power in the world. This outstanding status has been confirmed by previous war events which had involved the Americans, such as the Great War and the Spanish-American War, among others.

America’s status as a strong military and economic power would come after the Second World War, when it eventually became a global superpower. Today, the U.S. stands as the country with the highest number of military personnel in the world, constituting of volunteers and conscripted service men, both of whom are entitled to salaries and allowances.

When it comes to holding of conventional weapons, the U.S. military forces would come second to none in the whole world. As a matter of fact, the deadliest conventional war machines and equipment used in the world can be found in the U.S. armed forces arsenal. These deadly weapons include laser-guided bombs, the bunker booster bomb, anti-personnel mines, the AC-130 aerial gunship, and the .50-caliber sniper rifle, among others.

Education Structure

Education is compulsory for every child in the United States, just like in any other nation that values the future of its coming generations. The system of education in the U.S. is almost similar to that of any other country in the world. Basically, the system is divided into three major levels which include elementary school, middle school, and secondary school.

The educational system constitutes of twelve study grades which are achievable over twelve full years of primary and post-primary education in high school, before one becomes eligible for admission in college or university for further studies.

Early childhood is the first level of the education system in the United States. This normally comprises of toddler, preschool, and pre-kindergarten. The elementary school, which constitutes of kindergarten as the lowest level and five years of study in the primary school, comes next.

Learners are then taken through the middle school level where they undertake grades 6, 7, and 8, before proceeding to high school. After graduating with high school diplomas, they can then enroll for post-secondary education which comprises of tertiary education, vocational education, and graduate education. Adult education, which is not very common in the country, also falls under this category.

The following figure illustrates the education structure in the U.S.

Economic and Trade Activity

Apart from being the biggest economy in the world, America is ranked among the wealthiest nations in the world today. Moreover, the country enjoys abundant natural resources, integrated communication facilities, and well-developed infrastructure, among other modern aspects that are critical in boosting a country’s productivity and economy.

All these opportunities have continued to play a crucial role in promoting the country’s development and prosperity in terms of trade and economic affairs. Over the years, America has established strong trade ties with other countries in the world, thus playing a key role in shaping the global economy. According to Hanson (1996), the U.S. has proved to be less vulnerable to anything which threatens to interfere with its incredible advancement in various sectors of the economy.

America has been a major trade partner in the world for many years now and this progress in trade affairs has made the nation a global leader in matters of trade. Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) have become the most convenient way of opening up the country’s abundant exports to foreign markets.

More importantly, these agreements have also proved to be more important in giving the country an opportunity to import equipment and resources freely from their many trade partners around the world. Currently, the country has engaged in numerous trade agreements with other countries in the world. Some of the major free trade agreements involving the U.S. include North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Australia-U.S.

Trade Agreement of 2004, Singapore-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, Chile-United States Free Trade Agreement, Morocco-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, Peru-United States Free Trade Agreement, and Oman-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, among others. Currently, the country has engaged in negotiations with other nations in a bid to open more multilateral and bilateral free trade agreements across the world.

Despite the current economic nightmares arising from the most recent economic crisis, America has maintained a stronger economic health. If anything, the country’s outstanding strength in business has played a crucial role in enabling it to survive these economic setbacks. This achievement, however, has also been enhanced by the efforts of the U.S. government and other important sectors of the economy.

For instance, both public and private sectors in the country have constantly come together to exert considerable efforts that would be necessary in key areas of the economy. The government is the engine of the country’s economic growth, and for that reason, America’s potential economic benefits out of trade affairs are likely to remain inexhaustible for long.

Some of the ways by which the government influences economic activities in the country is through exertion of leverages on some key sectors of the economy and through implementation of antitrust laws aimed at preventing firms from engaging in unethical business practices.

Membership of international organizations

Apart from the Free Trade Agreements, the United States also takes part in numerous international organizations in the world. Some of the major international organizations in which the country participates include the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations (UN), International Trade Union Confederation, International Monetary Fund (IMF), International Criminal Court (ICC), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Group of Seven (G7), International Olympic Committee (IOC), and African Development Bank Group, just to mention but a few.

Human Rights

Human rights in the U.S. are just as important as they are in any other nation in the world, and for that reason, they are legally protected by the law (Stephens, 2008). The organization of the human rights in the country dates back more than two centuries ago, when Anthony Benezet introduced the first human right standards in regard with the abolishment of slavery.

This makes America a leader in the creation of an international system which recognizes, promotes, and protects the rights of people in various sectors of life. Ever since after the independence, when the first human right requirements were introduced in the country, America has shown great consistence in recognizing and protecting the rights of all its citizens and other people in the world, regardless of their race, color, gender, and national identity, among other aspects.

To prove that they are the premier promoter of these standards in the contemporary world, Americans have expressed support to some standard international human rights through ratification of treaties. Some of the key areas of concern upon which the U.S. human rights are based would include, but are not limited to, legal aspects, equality issues, labor rights, freedoms, justice system, and health care.

Major Societal Trends

As it would be observed, modern societies in the U.S are characterized by a number of societal trends. One of the most common trends here, which has affected nearly all groups in the country, is the obsession with modern technology. For instance, Americans, just like people from other developed nations, have become big fans of the social media through interactive sites such as Facebook, you tube and twitter.

Waking up to conservative life is another significant trend which defines the current American society. It is only at this age when you will find more grown-ups in America living with their guardians, compared with the past. As a matter of fact, the percentage of parents living with their adult children has increased tremendous in the past few years.

On the same note, current generations are even more family-centric compared with their predecessors. This, however, explains the reason as to why current generations are bearing more children, compared with their predecessors.

America is also experiencing a big demographic shift presently than before, probably as a result of the rapid wave of globalization which is taking place in every part of the country, among other significant factors in the society. Efficient access to goods and services has also become a norm in the U.S. as a result of current advances in technology. Anxiety has also emerged as another common trend among the American societies nowadays.

Previous acts of terrorism, particularly the events of September 11, have left many citizens in the country slightly rattled. This has triggered feelings of fear and anxiety among some American citizens who have felt that the country’s security against terrorism is not fully guaranteed. Other major societal trends in the U.S. would include bulging business opportunities, innovations, and invention of sophisticated aspects of technology in all sectors.

State of Technology

Being a country associated with abundant opportunities and resources, America has over the time emerged as the most advanced nation in the world in matters of technology. These aspects have played a critical role in helping to facilitate the early industrial and technological development in the country.

For the past one century or so, America as a country has been integral in the development of many award-winning technology products in the world. The country has been associated with a series of inventions and innovations, especially in the ICT sector which has continued to serve as a platform for other major developments in the world. Based on these observations, there is no doubt that America has excelled in matters of technology.

Environmental record

The management of environmental matters has never been easy for any country in the world. However, the United States has made progressive efforts in ensuring that current and future generations are spared the implications of a wasted environment which could result from environmental pollution and air pollution.

As it would be observed, the U.S. has maintained a good environmental record, possibly through their strong environmental policy which is enforced by the federal government. 1960s and 1970s are significant years in America’s history, since they mark a time when important laws on the environment were passed by the Congress. It is worth noting here that it was also in the course of this time when the Environmental Protection Policy was first introduced in the country to help address environmental matters more efficiently.

On this note, the United States is said to be at the fore-front in the fight against pollution of air and the environment. More importantly, the country has also adopted the idea of going green in various sectors of its vast economy, thus becoming the first country in the world to show serious concerns in the fight against the devastating issue of global warming, among other serious climatic conditions affecting the global populations today.

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Matthew, R., & Cliff, D. (2004). Impact of infectious diseases on war. Infectious Disease Clinics of North America, 18 (2), 341-345.

Nicholls, C., Daniel, T., Bacarese, A., & Hatchard, J. (2011). Corruption and misuse of public office. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

Ploch, L. (2010). Africa Command: US strategic interests and the role of the US military in Africa . Berby, PA: Diane Publishing.

Stephens, B. (2008). International human rights litigation in US courts . Leiden: Brill Publishers.

Wendell, B. (2005). A literary history of America . Whitefish MT: Kessinger Publishing Company.

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United States

The United States of America is the world's third largest country in size and nearly the third largest in terms of population.

The United States of America is the world's third largest country in size and nearly the third largest in terms of population. Located in North America, the country is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. Along the northern border is Canada and the southern border is Mexico . There are 50 states and the District of Columbia .

More than twice the size of the European Union, the United States has high mountains in the West and a vast central plain. The lowest point in the country is in Death Valley which is at -282 feet (-86 meters) and the highest peak is Denali (Mt. McKinley) at 20,320 feet (6,198 meters).

Map created by National Geographic Maps

PEOPLE & CULTURE

Throughout its history, the United States has been a nation of immigrants. The population is diverse with people from all over the world seeking refuge and a better way of life.

The country is divided into six regions: New England, the mid-Atlantic, the South, the Midwest, the Southwest, and the West. European settlers came to New England in search of religious freedom. These states are Connecticut , Maine , Massachusetts , New Hampshire , Rhode Island , and Vermont .

The mid-Atlantic region includes Delaware , Maryland , New Jersey , New York , Pennsylvania , and the city of Washington, D.C. These industrial areas attracted millions of European immigrants and gave rise to some of the East Coast's largest cities: New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.

The South includes Alabama , Arkansas , Florida , Georgia , Kentucky , Louisiana , Mississippi , North Carolina , South Carolina , Tennessee , Virginia , and West Virginia , all of which struggled after the Civil War, which lasted from 1860-1865.

The Midwest is home to the country's agricultural base and is called the "nation's breadbasket." The region comprises the states of Illinois , Indiana , Iowa , Kansas , Michigan , Minnesota , Missouri , Nebraska , North Dakota , Ohio , South Dakota , and Wisconsin .

The Southwest is a beautiful stark landscape of prairie and desert. The states of Arizona , New Mexico , Oklahoma , and Texas are considered the Southwest and are home to some of the world's great natural marvels, including the Grand Canyon and Carlsbad Caverns.

The American West, home of rolling plains and the cowboy, is a symbol of the pioneering spirit of the United States. The West is diverse, ranging from endless wilderness to barren desert, coral reefs to Arctic tundra, Hollywood to Yellowstone . The states of the West include Alaska , Colorado , California , Hawaii , Idaho , Montana , Nevada , Oregon , Utah , Washington , and Wyoming .

The landscape varies across the large country from tropical beaches in Florida to peaks in the Rocky Mountains, from rolling prairie lands and barren deserts in the West to dense wilderness areas in the Northeast and Northwest. Interspersed throughout are the Great Lakes, the Grand Canyon, the majestic Yosemite Valley, and the mighty Mississippi River.

The wildlife is as diverse as the landscape. Mammals such as bison once roamed freely across the plains, but now live only in preserves. Black bears , grizzlies , and polar bears are the largest carnivores. There are over 20,000 flower species and most came from Europe. There are more than 400 areas which are protected and maintained by the National Park Service, and many other parks in each state.

The bald eagle is the national bird and symbol of the United States and is a protected species.

GOVERNMENT & ECONOMY

Citizens over the age of 18 years old vote to elect the President and Vice President of United States every four years. The president lives in the White House in the capital city of Washington, D.C.

There are two houses of Congress: the Senate and the House of Representatives. There are 100 senators, two from each of the 50 states and each serves a six-year term. There are 435 representatives who must be elected every two years.

The Supreme Court is made up of nine justices who are picked by the president and must be approved by Congress.

For the first time in the nation's history an African American, Barack Obama , was elected President of the United States in 2008. He was reelected for a second term in 2012.

Advances in the past hundred years have established America as a world leader economically, militarily, and technologically. America has the largest coal reserves in the world.

For centuries  native peoples lived across the vast expanse that would become the United States. Starting in the 16th century, settlers moved from Europe to the New World, established colonies, and displaced these native peoples.

Explorers arrived from  Spain in 1565 at St. Augustine,  Florida , and the British landed in 1587 to establish a colony in Roanoke, in present-day  Virginia . In 1606 another British colony was established in what would become Jamestown, Virginia. From there, the  French founded Quebec in 1608, then the  Dutch started a colony in 1609 in present-day  New York . Europeans continued to settle in the New World in ever-increasing numbers throughout the next couple of centuries.

Conflict with the Native Americans

While Native Americans resisted European efforts to gain land and power, they were often outnumbered and didn’t have as powerful of weapons. The settlers also brought diseases that the native peoples had not faced before, and these illnesses sometimes had horrible effects. A 1616 epidemic killed an estimated 75 percent of the Native Americans in the New England region of North America.

During this time, fights between the settlers and Native Americans erupted often, particularly as more people claimed land where the Native Americans lived. The U.S. government signed nearly 400 peace treaties between the mid-18th century and the mid-19th century to try to show they wanted peace with the Indigenous tribes. But the government did not honor most of these treaties, and even sent military units to forcibly remove Native Americans from their lands.

For example, in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which granted land west of the  Mississippi River to Native American tribes who agreed to give up their lands. But this broke with other treaties he had signed with  Native American tribes in the Southeast . The removal was supposed to be voluntary, but Jackson used legal and military action to remove several tribes from their homelands and ended nearly 70 treaties during his presidency.

By the mid-19th century, most Native American tribes had been wiped out or moved to live on much smaller portions of land in the Midwest.

Declaring Independence

In 1776, colonists living in the New England area of the New World drafted the Declaration of Independence, a document that stated that the American colonies were tired of being ruled by Great Britain (now called the  United Kingdom ).  The settlers fought for—and won—their independence and formed a union of states based on a new  constitution . But despite stating that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, the new country was home to millions of enslaved people.

Slavery in the United States

Enslaved Africans were brought to North America by boat as early as 1619. The trans-Atlantic slave trade saw more than 12.5 million people kidnapped from Africa and sold at ports throughout the Americas over the next couple of centuries.

By 1860, nearly four million enslaved people lived in the country. Most worked in the South, where their free labor allowed the sugar, cotton, and tobacco industries to flourish. Enslaved people even built the White House and the U.S. Capitol.

When  Abraham Lincoln became president in 1861, the nation had been arguing for more than a hundred years about enslaving people and each  state’s right to allow it. Lincoln wanted to end slavery. Many people in the northern states agreed with him; some people in the southern states, however, relied on enslaved people to farm their crops and did not want slavery to end. Eventually, 11 southern states formed the Confederate States of America to oppose the 23 northern states that remained in the Union. The Civil War began on April 12, 1861.

The Civil War was fought between abolitionists, or people who wanted to end slavery, and the pro-slavery Confederacy. Enslaved people weren’t freed until Lincoln delivered his famous Emancipation Proclamation speech in 1863, midway through the war. Two years later, the Civil War ended with a Union victory.

That same year, the passage of the 13th Amendment officially abolished the practice of slavery and ended nearly 250 years of slavery in the country. But it did not end racism. Former enslaved people—as well as their descendants— struggled with discrimination , and African American heroes today are still fighting for equality.

Progress (and Wars) in the 20th Century

After the Civil War, the United States  continued to expand westward until 1890, when the U.S. government declared the West fully explored. During this time of expansion, the population grew from about five million people in 1800 to nearly 80 million people in 1900.

The early 1900s were a time of progress in the United States. This in part was because of the number of immigrants coming to the country looking for opportunity. Between 1900 and 1915, 15 million immigrants arrived in the United States from countries such as Italy, Russia, and Poland. The new citizens worked in places such as gold mines and garment factories, and helped construct railroads and canals. These immigrants brought new ideas and culture to the young country.

The 20th century was also a time of industrial advancement. The development of the automobile and the  airplane lead to an increase in factory jobs and marked a shift in more people moving to live and work in big cities instead of farming in small towns.

But there were tough times, too. The United States fought alongside Great Britain, France,  Russia ,  Italy , Romania, and  Japan against  Germany , Austria- Hungary , Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire (now the country of  Turkey ) in World War I, before the country suffered through what became known as the Great Depression, a time of economic crisis during the 1930s.

In the 1940s, then-president  Franklin Delano Roosevelt steered the country out of the Depression before  leading the country during the Second World War , alongside allies France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union (now Russia), against Germany, Italy, and Japan.

The United States’ reputation as a progressive country took hold after the two World Wars and the Great Depression. The ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s were a time of innovation in the nation. In 1958, NASA—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—started exploring the possibility of space flight. By 1969, the agency landed the first human on the moon .

Throughout these three decades, the fight for civil rights in the country continued with Americans of all backgrounds fighting for equal rights for their fellow citizens. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr .’s “I Have a Dream” speech is perhaps the most famous speech associated with the civil rights movement. Historic firsts for people of color during these decades include Dalip Singh Saund becoming the first Asian American elected to the Congress in 1957; Thurgood Marshall becomingthe first African American justice to serve on the Supreme Court in 1967; and Shirley Chisholm becoming the first African American female elected to Congress in 1968.

The late 1900s saw the U.S. government get involved in several wars on different fronts, including the Vietnam War, a war between what was then the two separate countries of North and South Vietnam, in which the United States sided with South Vietnam; the Cold War, a long period of non-violent tensions between the United States and the former Soviet Union, now Russia; and the Gulf War, a war waged by 30-plus nations lead by the United States against the country of Iraq .

An Attack on America

Although the country was still a relatively young nation at the beginning of the 21st century, the United States had established itself as a global power. Some people saw this power as a threat.

On September 11, 2001 , 19 terrorists who disagreed with the United States’ involvement in world affairs hijacked four planes. Two of the planes were flown into the two 110-story skyscrapers that made up New York City’s World Trade Center. Another crashed into the Pentagon outside of Washington, D.C. The fourth plane went down in a Pennsylvania field. Nearly 3,000 people died that day.

Then-president George W. Bush sent troops to  Afghanistan after the events of 9/11. He hoped to capture those responsible for the attacks, including al Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Bush also sent troops to Iraq in 2003, after rumors started that the country was hiding dangerous weapons that the president wanted to find and destroy.

While bin Laden was eventually located and killed in 2011, the United States is still fighting what’s called “the war on terrorism” today.

Historic Firsts—Plus, a Pandemic

The 21st century marked more progress for the United States, particularly at its highest levels of government. In 2008,  Barack Obama became the first African American to be elected president of the United States. In 2020, Kamala Harris became the first Black and Indian American person and the first woman elected vice president.

The early 2000s also saw the elections of  Donald Trump , the first U.S. president to be impeached twice, in 2016; and  Joe Biden , the oldest person to be elected president, in 2020. The United States—along with the rest of the world—also endured the  coronavirus pandemic that began in 2020.

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US College Essay Tips for International Students

Published on September 21, 2021 by Kirsten Courault . Revised on December 8, 2023.

Beyond your test scores and grades, the college essay is your opportunity to express your academic and personal character, writing skills, and ability to self-reflect.

You should use your unique culture and individual perspective to write a compelling essay with specific stories, a conversational tone, and correct grammar. Here are some basic guidelines on how to write a memorable college essay as an international student.

Table of contents

Research: how applying to us colleges is different, stories: show your strengths, tone: be conversational, but respectful, culture: write about what you know, language: use correct grammar, word choices, and sentence structures, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about college application essays.

The US college experience offers not only academic growth, but also campus community. While admissions officers use your grades and test scores as a baseline, they also use the college essay to further evaluate if you can add value to the academic community, student body, and campus culture.

The college essay, or personal statement, is a creative, personal piece of writing in its own genre. Rather than providing a broad overview of your life, personal essays are often centered around a specific narrative or theme.

The college essay may be the deciding factor in a student’s application, especially for competitive schools where most applicants have exceptional grades, test scores, and extracurriculars. Many students spend weeks一even months一brainstorming, workshopping, writing, and revising their essays to produce an original, compelling story.

Before starting your essay, you should take time to brainstorm topics and research your desired schools’ academic programs and campus cultures. Then, you can start outlining why you’re a good fit for a particular university.

Some colleges also require supplemental essays (e.g. diversity essays , “Why this college?” essays ), which must be submitted along with the college application. Scholarship essays are also worth writing, as many students overlook this opportunity. Research deadlines early, and create a college application timeline and checklist . Or check out our guide to writing fast if you’re running low on time.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Just being an international student isn’t enough to be competitive in a pool of both US and international applicants. To write a memorable essay, share specific stories that illustrate your strengths not only as an international student, but also as an individual within your culture. You should add details about your life that aren’t apparent in your application.

In South Korea, school is war. Similar to Battle Royale , students viciously compete, not for their life, but for their futures. From 6 a.m. to 1 a.m., I study either in school, an after-school academy, or my room. With no time to spare, I eat my meals over my textbooks while memorizing chemical compounds or geometry theorems. My bathroom breaks are like short breaths before I dive back underwater into the vast sea of knowledge that I must conquer before it drowns me. Among this chaos, I find solace twice a week with my online English tutor, Catherine. Her stories of college in Boston help me to imagine a reality where classmates can be collaborators, not competitors. Rather than memorization drills and one-sided lectures, I imagine a lively discussion between pupil and professor. As we converse in English about my future dreams, I get a taste of what it’s like to be not a prisoner to knowledge, but a friend.

American student-teacher relationships are much less formal than those in many other countries. US universities value student-professor discussion, debate, and collaboration.

Similarly, college application essays are less formal than other kinds of academic writing. You should use a conversational yet respectful tone, as if speaking with a teacher or mentor. Be honest about your feelings, thoughts, and experiences to connect with the admissions officer. To improve the tone of your essay you can use a paraphrasing tool .

• Firstly, I would like to elaborate on how my family moved from Xizhou to Beijing.
• When I was just five, my family and I left behind our tranquil village in southwest China to make a new home in the vast, bustling capital of Beijing.

As an international student, you have a wealth of culture that you can share with admissions officers. Instead of potentially using American idioms and cultural references awkwardly, write in detail about yourself within your own culture.

Make sure to explain any words, customs, or places that an American admissions officer might not be familiar with. Provide context to help your reader understand the significance of what you’re writing about.

While drowsiness still clouds my thoughts and vision, I trudge over to the bathroom to wash before Fajr , the Islamic dawn prayer. While my mouth still reeks of last night’s kabsa , a Saudi dish of rice and meat, my older sister prances out of the bathroom with sleek, long hair, flawless makeup, and a TikTok-ready outfit. While softly humming BTS’s “DNA,” she picks up a comb and begins to skillfully tackle the labyrinth that has taken over my head. Twenty minutes later, she manages to tame my wild, frizzy mane into an elegant French braid. Sara always knows how to make beauty out of chaos.

Admissions officers don’t expect your English writing skills to be perfect, but your essay should demonstrate a strong command of grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structures. Remember to use US English rather than UK English .

Choose your words carefully. You can be creative in your word choice, but don’t use elaborate vocabulary to impress admissions officers; focus on language that you know well so that your writing sounds natural and genuine. Prioritize simple sentence structures for clarity.

If English is not your first language, it’s a good idea to have a native speaker check your essay. You can also use our essay checker .

If you want 100% accuracy, you may want to consider working with a qualified editor or essay coach who can check your grammar, tone, cultural references, and content. Scribbr’s college essay editors can help.

Explore the essay editing service

If you want to know more about academic writing , effective communication , or parts of speech , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

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• Writing process
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• Paraphrasing

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• How to end an email
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Admissions officers use college admissions essays to evaluate your character, writing skills , and ability to self-reflect . The essay is your chance to show what you will add to the academic community.

The college essay may be the deciding factor in your application , especially for competitive schools where most applicants have exceptional grades, test scores, and extracurriculars.

Some colleges also require supplemental essays about specific topics, such as why you chose that specific college . Scholarship essays are often required to obtain financial aid .

College application essays are less formal than other kinds of academic writing . Use a conversational yet respectful tone , as if speaking with a teacher or mentor. Be vulnerable about your feelings, thoughts, and experiences to connect with the reader.

Aim to write in your authentic voice , with a style that sounds natural and genuine. You can be creative with your word choice, but don’t use elaborate vocabulary to impress admissions officers.

If you’re an international student applying to a US college and you’re comfortable using American idioms or cultural references , you can. But instead of potentially using them incorrectly, don’t be afraid to write in detail about yourself within your own culture.

Provide context for any words, customs, or places that an American admissions officer might be unfamiliar with.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Courault, K. (2023, December 08). US College Essay Tips for International Students. Scribbr. Retrieved April 9, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/college-essay/international-us-college-essay/

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Essay on America

Students are often asked to write an essay on America in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on America

A brief introduction.

America, also known as the United States, is a vast country located in North America. It’s famous for its diverse culture, innovative technologies, and democratic values.

America is surrounded by the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. It has a variety of landscapes, from mountains and forests to deserts and coastlines.

Culture and Diversity

America is a melting pot of cultures, with people from different backgrounds and ethnicities. This diversity is reflected in its food, music, and traditions.

America has a strong economy, being a global leader in sectors like technology, finance, and entertainment. The dollar is its official currency.

American education is highly regarded, with many prestigious universities. Education is compulsory and free in public schools.

250 Words Essay on America

Introduction.

America, often referred to as the United States, is a land of diverse cultures, impressive landscapes, and advanced technologies. A nation built on the principles of freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness, America stands as a beacon of democracy and progress.

The Melting Pot of Cultures

America is a unique blend of cultures, a melting pot where different traditions, languages, and customs merge. This cultural diversity is one of America’s greatest strengths, fostering a society that values inclusivity and mutual respect. The fusion of various cultures has also shaped the American cuisine, arts, and social norms, contributing to its rich cultural tapestry.

Innovation and Technology

America is a global leader in innovation and technology. Home to Silicon Valley, it has been the birthplace of many groundbreaking technologies and companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. American universities and research institutions are at the forefront of scientific discoveries, making significant contributions to various fields.

The Land of Opportunities

America is often referred to as the “land of opportunities”. It provides an environment that encourages entrepreneurial spirit, innovation, and ambition. The American Dream, the belief in the freedom that allows individuals to achieve their goals through hard work, continues to attract people worldwide.

In conclusion, America is a nation of diverse cultures, leading innovations, and boundless opportunities. It is a testament to the power of democracy, freedom, and the human spirit. Despite challenges, America continues to evolve, striving towards a more equitable and inclusive society.

500 Words Essay on America

The land of opportunity: an insight into america.

America, often dubbed as the “Land of Opportunity,” is a nation that stands as a beacon of hope and prosperity for many. It is a country that prides itself on its democratic values, cultural diversity, and entrepreneurial spirit.

A Stalwart of Democracy

America’s democratic ethos is a cornerstone of its national identity. Since the inception of the United States Constitution in 1787, the country has been a global exemplar of democratic governance. The system of checks and balances, the separation of powers, and the Bill of Rights are all instrumental in maintaining the democratic fabric of the nation. These mechanisms ensure the protection of individual rights and prevent the concentration of power, embodying the democratic ideal that power should be vested in the people.

Cultural Melting Pot

America’s cultural landscape is as diverse as it is vibrant. The country is often described as a “melting pot,” where people from different ethnicities, religions, and cultures coexist and contribute to the nation’s rich cultural tapestry. This diversity is reflected in everything from its culinary scene to its arts and entertainment industry. The inclusivity and acceptance fostered by this cultural diversity are an integral part of the American identity.

The Entrepreneurial Spirit

America is renowned for its entrepreneurial spirit. The country’s economic landscape is marked by innovation and enterprise, from the Silicon Valley tech giants to the small businesses that form the backbone of its economy. The American Dream, the belief that anyone can achieve success and prosperity through hard work and determination, is deeply ingrained in the national psyche. This ethos has fostered an environment conducive to innovation and economic growth, making America a global leader in technology, finance, and various other sectors.

Challenges and the Way Forward

Despite its numerous strengths, America faces a myriad of challenges. Economic inequality, racial tensions, and political polarization are some of the most pressing issues confronting the nation. Addressing these challenges requires not only robust policy measures but also a collective commitment to uphold the principles of equality, justice, and unity that the country was founded upon.

In conclusion, America, with its democratic values, cultural diversity, and entrepreneurial spirit, stands as a symbol of opportunity for many. However, the country must confront and overcome its challenges to ensure that this promise of opportunity is accessible to all. The story of America is one of constant evolution, and it is this capacity for change and progress that will define its future.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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25 Essay Topics for American Government Classes

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If you are a teacher searching for essay topics to assign to your U.S. government or civics class or looking for ideas, do not fret. It is easy to integrate debates and discussions into the classroom environment. These topic suggestions provide a wealth of ideas for written assignments such as  position papers , compare-and-contrast essays , and  argumentative essays . Scan the following 25 question topics and ideas to find just the right one. You'll soon be reading interesting papers from your students after they grapple with these challenging and important issues.

• Compare and contrast what is a direct democracy versus representative democracy. 
• React to the following statement: Democratic decision-making should be extended to all areas of life including schools, the workplace, and the government. 
• Compare and contrast the Virginia and New Jersey plans. Explain how these led to the Great Compromise .
• Pick one thing about the U.S. Constitution including its amendments that you think should be changed. What modifications would you make? Explain your reasons for making this change.
• What did Thomas Jefferson mean when he said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants?" Do you think that this statement still applies to today's world? 
• Compare and contrast mandates and conditions of aid regarding the federal government's relationship with states. For example, how has the Federal Emergency Management Agency delivered support to states and commonwealths that have experienced natural disasters?
• Should individual states have more or less power compared to the federal government when implementing laws dealing with topics such as the legalization of marijuana  and abortion ? 
• Outline a program that would get more people to vote in presidential elections or local elections.
• What are the dangers of gerrymandering when it comes to voting and presidential elections?
• Compare and contrast the major political parties in the United States. What policies are they preparing for upcoming elections?
• Why would voters choose to vote for a third party, even though they know that their candidate has virtually no chance of winning? 
• Describe the major sources of money that are donated to political campaigns. Check out the Federal Election Regulatory Commission's website for information.
• Should corporations be treated as individuals regarding being allowed to donate to political campaigns?  Look at the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling on the issue. Defend your answer. 
• Explain the role of social media in connecting interest groups that have grown stronger as the major political parties have grown weaker. 
• Explain why the media has been called the fourth branch of government. Include your opinion on whether this is an accurate portrayal.
• Compare and contrast the campaigns of U.S. Senate and House of Representatives candidates.
• Should term limits be instituted for members of Congress? Explain your answer.
• Should members of Congress vote their conscience or follow the will of the people who elected them into office? Explain your answer.
• Explain how executive orders have been used by presidents throughout the history of the U.S. What is the number of executive orders issued by the current president?
• In your opinion, which of the three branches of the federal government has the most power? Defend your answer.
• Which of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment do you consider the most important? Explain your answer. 
• Should a school be required to get a warrant before searching a student's property? Defend your answer. 
• Why did the Equal Rights Amendment fail? What kind of campaign could be run to see it passed?
• Explain how the 14th Amendment has affected civil liberties in the United States from the time of its passage at the end of the Civil War.
• Do you think that the federal government has enough, too much or just the right amount of power? Defend your answer.
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What Makes a Great American Essay?

Talking to phillip lopate about thwarted expectations, emerson, and the 21st-century essay boom.

Phillip Lopate spoke to Literary Hub about the new anthology he has edited, The Glorious American Essay . He recounts his own development from an “unpatriotic” young man to someone, later in life, who would embrace such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who personified the simultaneous darkness and optimism underlying the history of the United States. Lopate looks back to the Puritans and forward to writers like Wesley Yang and Jia Tolentino. What is the next face of the essay form?

Literary Hub: We’re at a point, politically speaking, when disagreements about the meaning of the word “American” are particularly vehement. What does the term mean to you in 2020? How has your understanding of the word evolved?

Phillip Lopate : First of all, I am fully aware that even using the word “American” to refer only to the United States is something of an insult to Latin American countries, and if I had said “North American” to signify the US, that might have offended Canadians. Still, I went ahead and put “American” in the title as a synonym for the United States, because I wanted to invoke that powerful positive myth of America as an idea, a democratic aspiration for the world, as well as an imperialist juggernaut replete with many unresolved social inequities, in negative terms.

I will admit that when I was younger, I tended to be very unpatriotic and critical of my country, although once I started to travel abroad and witness authoritarian regimes like Spain under Franco, I could never sign on to the fear that a fascist US was just around the corner.  I came to the conclusion that we have our faults, but our virtues as well.

The more I’ve become interested in American history, the more I’ve seen how today’s problems and possible solutions are nothing new, but keep returning in cycles: economic booms and recessions, anti-immigrant sentiment, regional competition, racist Jim Crow policies followed by human rights advances, vigorous federal regulations and pendulum swings away from governmental intervention.

Part of the thrill in putting together this anthology was to see it operating simultaneously on two tracks: first, it would record the development of a literary form that I loved, the essay, as it evolved over 400 years in this country. At the same time, it would be a running account of the history of the United States, in the hands of these essayists who were contending, directly or indirectly, with the pressing problems of their day. The promise of America was always being weighed against its failure to live up to that standard.

For instance, we have the educator John Dewey arguing for a more democratic schoolhouse, the founder of the settlement house movement Jane Addams analyzing the alienation of young people in big cities, the progressive writer Randolph Bourne describing his own harsh experiences as a disabled person, the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton advocating for women’s rights, and W. E. B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson eloquently addressing racial injustice.

Issues of identity, gender and intersectionality were explored by writers such as Richard Rodriguez, Audre Lorde, Leonard Michaels and N. Scott Momaday, sometimes with touches of irony and self-scrutiny, which have always been assets of the essay form.

LH : If a publisher had asked us to compile an anthology of 100 representative American essays, we wouldn’t know where to start. How did you? What were your criteria?

PL : I thought I knew the field fairly well to begin with, having edited the best-selling Art of the Personal Essay in 1994, taught the form for decades, served on book award juries and so on. But once I started researching and collecting material, I discovered that I had lots of gaps, partly because the mandate I had set for myself was so sweeping.

This time I would not restrict myself to personal essays but would include critical essays, impersonal essays, speeches that were in essence essays (such as George Washington’s Farewell Address or Martin Luther King, Jr’s sermon on Vietnam), letters that functioned as essays (Frederick Douglass’s Letter to His Master).

I wanted to expand the notion of what is  an essay, to include, for instance, polemics such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense , or one of the Federalist Papers; newspaper columnists (Fanny Fern, Christopher Morley); humorists (James Thurber, Finley Peter Dunne, Dorothy Parker).

But it also occurred to me that fine essayists must exist in every discipline, not only literature, which sent me on a hunt that took me to cultural criticism (Clement Greenberg, Kenneth Burke), theology (Paul Tillich), food writing (M.F. K. Fisher), geography (John Brinkerhoff Jackson), nature writing (John Muir, John Burroughs, Edward Abbey), science writing (Loren Eiseley, Lewis Thomas), philosophy (George Santayana). My one consistent criterion was that the essay be lively, engaging and intelligently written. In short, I had to like it myself.

Of course I would need to include the best-known practitioners of the American essay—Emerson, Thoreau, Mencken, Baldwin, Sontag, etc.—and was happy to do so.  As it turned out, most of the masters of American fiction and poetry also tried their hand successfully at essay-writing, which meant including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison. . .

But I was also eager to uncover powerful if almost forgotten voices such as John Jay Chapman, Agnes Repplier, Randolph Bourne, Mary Austin, or buried treasures such as William Dean Howells’ memoir essay of his days working in his father’s printing shop.

Finally, I wanted to show a wide variety of formal approaches, since the essay is by its very nature and nomenclature an experiment, which brought me to Gertrude Stein and Wayne Koestenbaum. Equally important, I was aided in all these searches by colleagues and friends who kept suggesting other names. For every fertile lead, probably four resulted in dead ends.  Meanwhile, I was having a real learning adventure.

LH: Do you have a personal favorite among American essayists? If so, what appeals to you the most about them?

PL : I do. It’s Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was the one who cleared the ground for US essayists, in his famous piece, “The American Scholar,” which called on us to free ourselves from slavish imitation of European models and to think for ourselves.  So much American thought grows out of Emerson, or is in contention with Emerson, even if that debt is sometimes unacknowledged or unconscious.

What I love about Emerson is his density of thought, and the surprising twists and turns that result from it. I can read an essay of his like “Experience” (the one I included in this anthology) a hundred times and never know where it’s going next.  If it was said of Emily Dickenson that her poems made you feel like the top of your head was spinning, that’s what I feel in reading Emerson. He has a playful skepticism, a knack for thinking against himself.  Each sentence starts a new rabbit of thought scampering off. He’s difficult but worth the trouble.

I once asked Susan Sontag who her favorite American essayist was, and she replied “Emerson, of course.” It’s no surprise that Nietzsche revered Emerson, as did Carlyle, and in our own time, Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, Richard Poirier. But here’s a confession: it took me awhile to come around to him.

I found his preacher’s manner and abstractions initially off-putting, I wasn’t sure about the character of the man who was speaking to me. Then I read his Notebooks and the mystery was cracked: suddenly I was able to follow essays such as “Circles” with pure pleasure, seeing as I could the darkness and complexity underneath the optimism.

LH: You make the interesting decision to open the anthology with an essay written in 1726, 50 years before the founding of the republic. Why?

PL : I wanted to start the anthology with the first fully-formed essayistic voices in this land, which turned out to belong to the Puritans. Regardless of the negative associations of zealous prudishness that have come to attach to the adjective “puritanical,” those American colonies founded as religious settlements were spearheaded by some remarkably learned and articulate spokespersons, whose robust prose enriched the American literary canon.

Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards were highly cultivated readers, familiar with the traditions of essay-writing, Montaigne and the English, and with the latest science, even as they inveighed against witchcraft. I will admit that it also amused me to open the book with Cotton Mather, a prescriptive, strait-is-the-gate character, and end it with Zadie Smith, who is not only bi-racial but bi-national, dividing her year between London and New York, and whose openness to self-doubt is signaled by her essay collection title, Changing My Mind .

The next group of writers I focused on were the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and a foundational feminist, Judith Sargent Murray, who wrote the 1790 essay “On the Equality of the Sexes.” These authors, whose essays preceded, occurred during or immediately followed the founding of the republic, were in some ways the opposite of the Puritans, being for the most part Deists or secular followers of the Enlightenment.

Their attraction to reasoned argument and willingness to entertain possible objections to their points of view inspired a vigorous strand of American essay-writing. So, while we may fix the founding of the United States to a specific year, the actual culture and literature of the country book-ended that date.

LH: You end with Zadie Smith’s “Speaking in Tongues,” published in 2008. Which essay in the last 12 years would be your 101st selection?

PL : Funny you should ask. As it happens, I am currently putting the finishing touches on another anthology, this one entirely devoted to the Contemporary (i.e., 21st century) American Essay. I have been immersed in reading younger, up-and-coming writers, established mid-career writers, and some oldsters who are still going strong (Janet Malcolm, Vivian Gornick, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, for example).

It would be impossible for me to single out any one contemporary essayist, as they are all in different ways contributing to the stew, but just to name some I’ve been tracking recently: Meghan Daum, Maggie Nelson, Sloane Crosley, Eula Biss, Charles D’Ambrosio, Teju Cole, Lia Purpura, John D’Agata, Samantha Irby, Anne Carson, Alexander Chee, Aleksander Hemon, Hilton Als, Mary Cappello, Bernard Cooper, Leslie Jamison, Laura Kipnis, Rivka Galchen, Emily Fox Gordon, Darryl Pinckney, Yiyun Li, David Lazar, Lynn Freed, Ander Monson, David Shields, Rebecca Solnit, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Eileen Myles, Amy Tan, Jonathan Lethem, Chelsea Hodson, Ross Gay, Jia Tolentino, Jenny Boully, Durga Chew-Bose, Brian Blanchfield, Thomas Beller, Terry Castle, Wesley Yang, Floyd Skloot, David Sedaris. . .

Such a banquet of names speaks to the intergenerational appeal of the form. We’re going through a particularly rich time for American essays: especially compared to, 20 years ago, when editors wouldn’t even dare put the word “essays” on the cover, but kept trying to package these variegated assortments as single-theme discourses, we’ve seen many collections that have been commercially successful and attracted considerable critical attention.

It has something to do with the current moment, which has everyone more than a little confused and therefore trusting more than ever those strong individual voices that are willing to cop to their subjective fears, anxieties, doubts and ecstasies.

__________________________________

The Glorious American Essay , edited by Phillip Lopate, is available now.

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10 great articles and essays about american culture, the american idea, pell-mell by tom wolfe, america, my new-found-land by tony judt, just asking by david foster wallace, fixed opinions, or the hinge of history by joan didion, fear and loathing in las vegas by hunter s. thompson, the me decade by tom wolfe, how to slowly kill yourself and others in america by kiese laymon, america the marvelous by a. a. gill, chuck klosterman, the great american stasis by chuck klosterman, culture got you down by chuck klosterman, see also…, 10 great articles about america, 10 great reads about ‘hidden america’ by jeanne marie laskas.

Rich and Poor

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% by joseph e. stiglitz, the rich have feelings, too by tom wolfe, nickel and dimed by barbara ehrenreich, sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs by chuck klostermann.

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Essay on USA | Paragraph on USA

Essay on USA | Paragraph on USA | Article on USA | Speech on USA | United States Of America | America Essay | Essay on US

‘America is hope. It is compassion. It is valor. It is a tune which must be sung together’. The United States of America, aka America or U.S.A, with a motto announcing ‘ In God We Trust’, justifies every sense of the word used. This connoisseur country of North America exercises huge trickle down effect when it comes to the economy of the entire globe, thus making it one of the most carefully scrutinized country of the world.

The country whose capital reads Washington D.C., where English is the National language and whose citizens are called ‘Americans’, was declared independent from the Kingdom of Great Britain in the year 1776, while it was recognized as one on September 3rd, 1783.”America is great because it has as much diversity in geographies as it does in people”, quotes Aurora Raigne, highlighting the heterogeneous composition of the place. The United States, which ranks first in terms of total GDP, a commendable 3rd in Human Development Index, and yet another 3rd in its population base, consists of 500 states, a federal district and 5 Union Territories. Patriotism sprinkles upon its people with the anthem ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ as the country exercises uncountable effect over finance, trade, culture, military, politics and technology.

“What the American people hope, what they deserve is for all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to work through our differences; to overcome the numbing weight of our politics. For while the people who sent us here have different backgrounds, different stories, different beliefs, the anxieties they face are the same. The aspirations they hold are shared: a job that pays the bills, a chance to get ahead, most of all, the ability to give their children a better future”. The quoted line by the current President Mr. Barack Obama, gives the sum and substance of the inescapable influence integrated by this world’s superpower, America, where ‘luxuries’ are camouflaged behind ‘basics’, ‘security’ is exercised as ‘necessity’.

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NPR reportedly in turmoil after editor accuses outlet of liberal bias in bombshell essay

N PR has reportedly been thrown into turmoil after a bombshell essay penned by a veteran editor claimed the broadcaster allowed liberal bias to affect its coverage — with the editor-in-chief telling furious staffers she did not want him to become a “martyr.”

Uri Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist who has worked at NPR for 25 years, called out journalistic blind spots around major news events, including the origins of COVID-19, the war in Gaza and the Hunter Biden laptop, in an essay published Tuesday on Bari Weiss’ online news site the Free Press.

The senior business editor also said the internal culture at NPR had placed race and identity as ”paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace.”

Berliner’s essay sparked a firestorm of criticism from prominent conservatives — with former President Donald Trump demanding NPR’s federal funding be yanked — and has led to internal tumult, the New York Times reported Friday.

The essay was brought up at what was described as a “long-scheduled meet-and-greet” with the hosts of NPR’s biggest shows on Wednesday, where NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin reportedly said she did not want Berliner to become a “martyr,” according to the Times.

Others took to the internal messaging system to rail against Berliner’s assertions.

“Mr. Berliner’s essay also sent critical Slack messages whizzing through some of the same employee affinity groups focused on racial and sexual identity that he cited in his essay. In one group, several staff members disputed Mr. Berliner’s points about a lack of ideological diversity and said efforts to recruit more people of color would make NPR’s journalism better,” the Times reported. 

NPR managing editor of standards and practices Tony Cavin disputed Berliner’s assumptions and claimed the essay will likely make it “harder for NPR journalists to do their jobs.”

”The next time one of our people calls up a Republican congressman or something and tries to get an answer from them, they may well say, ‘Oh, I read these stories, you guys aren’t fair, so I’m not going to talk to you,”’ Cavin said.

NPR did not immediately return calls for comment.

Berliner told the Times on Thursday that he didn’t regret publishing the essay, saying he loved NPR and hoped to make it better by “airing criticisms that have gone unheeded by leaders for years.”

Calling the broadcaster a “national trust” that people rely on for fair reporting and top-notch storytelling, he said: ”I decided to go out and publish it in hopes that something would change, and that we get a broader conversation going about how the news is covered.”

Berliner said he hasn’t been disciplined for writing the essay, but he did get a note from his supervisor reminding him that NPR requires employees to clear speaking appearances and media requests with standards and media relations teams.

Some former NPR staffers defended Berliner’s essay.

Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, NPR’s former ombudsman, said Berliner was ”not wrong.” Chuck Holmes, a former managing editor at NPR, called Berliner’s essay ”brave.”

After the essay was published, Berliner said, he received “a lot of support from colleagues, and many of them unexpected, who say they agree with me.”

“Some of them say this confidentially,”  Berliner told NewsNation anchor Chris Cuomo on Tuesday.

Chapin had pushed back on Berliner’s claims of a liberal bias, saying: ”We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories.” 

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Panama Papers: trial begins of 27 Mossack Fonseca employees

Law firm’s founders among those to face money laundering charges after leak of 11.5m files in 2016

A criminal trial of 27 employees working for the law firm at the heart of the Panama Papers on money laundering charges has commenced in a Panamanian court.

Eight years ago, leaked financial records from the law firm Mossack Fonseca sparked international outrage at the use of offshore companies by wealthy individuals to commit tax fraud and hide assets.

In 2016, files from Mossack Fonseca were leaked to reporters at the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with the US-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Reporters from more than 100 media organisations, including the Guardian, collaborated to investigate the 11.5m files.

The firm’s founders, Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca Mora, are among those facing charges. They have previously denied any allegations against them, arguing that they had no control over the offshore companies that the firm set up for its clients. If convicted, they reportedly face up to 12 years in prison.

According to the Associated Press , Mossack attended the hearing to declare his innocence, telling reporters outside the courtroom that he was “very optimistic”. A representative for Fonseca told the court that his client was in hospital.

Battered by international criticism, Panama adopted new legislation modernising the country’s legal definition of money laundering in 2019. Aspects of the charges against the Mossack Fonseca employees concern activities predating the change in the law, which could complicate prosecutors’ attempts to convict them, according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists .

Panama’s supreme court previously ruled that creating shell companies used for tax fraud could not be considered a crime if the companies in question were created prior to 2019.

Mossack and Fonseca were both acquitted of separate charges two years ago after a judge directed that the firm did not handle or attempt to hide money stolen from Brazil as part of a major corruption scandal involving the state oil company codenamed Lava Jato or the Car Wash.

Offshore companies linked more than 100 politicians from around the world, including 12 national leaders, were discovered by journalists analysing the Panama Papers. They included $2bn in an offshore company belonging to the Russian cellist Sergei Roldugin, the friend of the President Vladimir Putin.

Nawaz Sharif , then prime minister of Pakistan, and Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson , prime minister of Iceland, were both forced from office amid public fury at hidden offshore wealth connected to their families.

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Sharif was disqualified from office and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment by the Pakistani supreme court after reporters discovered undeclared real estate secretly owned by his family through offshore companies. Gunnlaugsson was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had never declared his family’s ownership of an offshore company with a $1m claim against one of Iceland’s failed banks.

After publication of the Panama Papers investigation, countries around the world initiated proceedings to recover unpaid taxes that had been hidden using offshore companies. By 2021 more than $1.36bn in fines and penalties for unpaid taxes were said to have been recovered by exchequers around the world, including $253m recovered by HMRC in the UK.

• Panama Papers

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Panama Papers whistleblower speaks out: ‘Politicians must act – now’

We were leaked the Panama Papers. Here’s how to bring down Putin’s cronies

EU states 'dragging their feet' over financial transparency, report finds

Panama Papers law firm Mossack Fonseca sues Netflix over The Laundromat

Meryl Streep on the Panama Papers: ‘People died to get the word out’

Fears UK law change could prevent scrutiny of money launderers

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Nevis: how the world’s most secretive offshore haven refuses to clean up

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Imprinted by Belief

Does It Seem Like the End Times Are Here? These Novels Know Better.

What can fiction tell us about the apocalypse? Ayana Mathis finds unexpected hope in novels of crisis by Ling Ma, Jenny Offill and Jesmyn Ward.

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By Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis’s most recent novel, “The Unsettled,” was published in September.

• April 11, 2024

On the day my mother died, I sat by her bedside and read the Psalms. The room was quiet — the need for machines had passed — save for the sound of my voice and my mother’s labored breathing. Outside her room, the hospital went about its business: Lunch trays were delivered, nurses conferred, a television played too loudly down the corridor. Out there, time passed in its usual, unremarkable way. In her room, my mother and I had stepped off time’s familiar track.

Everything inessential vanished in her final hours. I read the Psalms because they comforted her. I told her I loved her. She squeezed my hand, which, in that afternoon when she was no longer able to speak, was as profound an expression of love as any words had ever been. When she died hours later, I knew that on the other side of her hospital room door there awaited, at least for me, an altered world.

The subject of this essay is apocalypse, and so I have begun with an ending. If you have lost a deeply beloved, then you have experienced the obliterating finality of death, that catastrophe in the small universe of an individual life. The loss also brings a realization: The “worst thing” that could happen is no longer a future projection; it has exploded into the present.

Apocalypse is generally understood as a future event: widespread suffering, extinctions, various iterations of end-time destruction gunning for us from some tomorrow. Out there, in the vast, unknowable not-yet, apocalypse roars. It paralyzes us with fear, deadens us into numbness or provokes us to hysteria. We are powerless in its face.

But what if we could change our relationship with the end by shifting our perspective on it? The first step might be dwelling more profoundly in the here and now where our crises amass, rather than focusing on the boogeyman future. We already know something about how to do this: We are creatures of loss; we have confronted, or will confront, the “worst things” in the real time of our lives. There is a precedent, then, for how, in this moment, we might collectively approach the apocalyptic worst things. While our beloved still lives, there is possibility: We can give her our attention; we can hold her hand.

I won’t downplay the current horrors — tens of thousands dead in Gaza, conflict in Ukraine, the high-stakes presidential election on the horizon — or imply that all will turn out right. The novels in this essay don’t do that either. Instead, they suggest new ways of seeing: a shift to deeper present-time awareness, even wonder, as the times grow ever more dire. The theologian Catherine Keller calls this “apocalyptic mindfulness.” “A cloud of roiling possibility seems to reveal itself,” she writes in “Facing Apocalypse” (2021). “It guarantees no happy ending. It may, however, enhance the uncertain chance of better outcomes.”

Many of our end-time notions are inflected by the biblical Book of Revelation. Its phantasmagoric visions and lurid scenes of destruction have thoroughly infiltrated Western talk of the end: the Four Horsemen, the beast we call the Antichrist (though Revelation doesn’t use the term), fires, plagues and raging pestilence. It may come as a surprise, then, that apokalypsis, the Greek word for “revelation,” means not “ending” but “unveiling.” As Keller writes, “It means not closure but dis-closure — that is, opening. A chance to open our eyes?” But, to what?

In Ling Ma’s novel “ Severance ” (2018), newly pregnant Candace Chen wanders a near-deserted New York City in the midst of a pandemic caused by a disease called Shen Fever. The majority of the city’s residents have fled or become “fevered,” a zombielike state that leaves victims stuck on repeat: a family endlessly setting the table and saying grace; a saleswoman, her jaw half eaten by decay, folding and refolding polo shirts at an abandoned Juicy Couture store on Fifth Avenue. The fevered are the least threatening zombies imaginable: so busy with their mindless performance of mundane tasks that they don’t notice the living. Ma has a knack for nuanced satire.

Candace sticks around because she’s got nowhere else to go; she’s the orphaned child of Chinese immigrants who died years before. Inexplicably, and perhaps somewhat to her dismay, she remains virus-free. As the pandemic shuts down the city, she doggedly persists with her job in the Bibles department at Spectra, a book production company: “I clicked Send, knowing it was fruitless,” she says. When public transportation stops entirely, she moves into her office on the 32nd floor, overlooking an empty Times Square.

It doesn’t take long to understand that a vast grief underlies Candace’s workaholic paralysis. So intense is her mourning for her parents that for a while the pandemic hardly registers. She needs to hold on to something, even pointless work at Spectra. The office setting is no coincidence: In some sense, Candace, too, is fevered, and her job’s rote repetition is a kind of anesthetic.

The dull but familiar grind of late-capitalist working life acts as a numbing agent, or perhaps a blindfold. When work dries up because the rest of the world is no longer at its desk, Candace rambles around the city utterly alone, taking pictures of derelict buildings that she posts on a blog she calls “NY Ghost.” One afternoon she enters a flooded subway station. “You couldn’t even see the water beneath all the garbage,” Ma writes. “The deeper you tunneled down, the bigger the sound, echoed and magnified by the enclosed space, until this primordial slurp was all that existed.” Grieving Candace is adrift, her internal landscape aligned with the desolation of the external world.

Published two years before the Covid pandemic, “Severance” offers an eerily prescient description of a nation shocked and exhausted. For so many, 2020 was a kind of apocalyptic unveiling. The pandemic revealed the fault lines in our health care and our schools, as well as the fact that so many of us were living in perpetual economic precarity. Then there were the deaths, which as a country we have hardly begun to mourn. Painfully and all at once, we understood the fragility of the systems we relied on, and the instability of our own lives.

Yet alongside the devastation there was transient beauty: In many places, air and water quality improved during lockdown and wildlife resurged. Health-care and essential workers were acknowledged and more respected; we realized the extent of our dependence on one another. If only for a little while, we were thrown into Keller’s “apocalyptic mindfulness.” But the eye snapped shut. We “recovered,” and, like Candace, we find ourselves once again in a collective disquiet, punctuated by bouts of terror as we contemplate the future.

On the final afternoon of her wandering, Candace ventures into the same Juicy Couture store she’d photographed weeks before. Ominously, the fevered saleswoman has been bludgeoned to death. Candace’s unborn child seems frightened too: “The baby moved inside of me, fluttering frantically.” Candace leaves Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel in a yellow taxi she’s commandeered from a fevered driver. She joins a band of survivors led by a creepy zealot named Bob, a former I.T. guy who wears a brace for carpal tunnel syndrome, that most banal of white-collar work maladies. They journey to the Chicago suburbs to homestead in a deserted mall. (I told you Ma has a knack for satire.)

In this semi-cult, Candace’s grief intensifies. She begins to have visions of her mother, who warns her that she and her unborn baby aren’t safe with Bob. Candace’s mother is right. Bob has a penchant for shooting the fevered in the head if he encounters them when he and the others go “stalking” for food and supplies. We squirm at these killings, even if the victims are not quite alive, at least not in the usual sense. Bob’s violent demagoguery opens Candace’s eyes to her metaphorically fevered state, and as we look into the mirror the novel holds up to us, we begin to wonder about our relationship to our own beleaguered world.

At last, Candace’s fever breaks and, fully alive, she escapes Bob and the others in a Nissan stolen from the group’s mini-fleet. She drives into once grand Chicago, swerving to avoid abandoned cars clogging Milwaukee Avenue. Finally, she runs out of gas. “Up ahead there’s a massive littered river, planked by an elaborate, wrought-iron red bridge,” she recounts. “Beyond the bridge is more skyline, more city. I get out and start walking.”

The “end” for Candace and her baby is not, in fact, an ending, but rather, an awakening that follows revelation.

If “Severance” chronicles its protagonist’s end-time stirrings from the stupor of grief, Jenny Offill’s novel “ Weather ” (2020) is its manic cousin, a diaristic account of climate anxiety. Narrated in the first person, aggressively present tense and composed of short chapters that leap from association to observation, the book is like a panicked brain in overdrive.

“Weather”’s protagonist, Lizzie, works as a university librarian in New York City. Her former professor, Sylvia, a climate change expert, finagled the gig for her though Lizzie isn’t really qualified. “Years ago, I was her grad student,” Lizzie explains, “but then I gave up on it. She used to check in on me sometimes to see if I was still squandering my promise. The answer was always yes.”

Lizzie is all wry self-deprecation. As the book progresses, we understand that she is less an underachiever than an empath, so often overwhelmed that her focus scrambles. Or perhaps it’s that she is deeply attentive to things we try to ignore. Her experience of the world is the opposite of Candace’s near-impenetrable grief. Lizzie is porous. Too much gets in: grave news about the environment, the plights of relative strangers — like kindly Mr. Jimmy, a car-service owner being run out of business by Uber. Lizzie “helps” by taking Mr. Jimmy’s car to various appointments, though she can’t afford it and the traffic makes her late.

The novel doesn’t so much unfold as tumble out over the course of a turbulent year that encompasses Donald Trump’s election in 2016. After Trump’s win, tensions rise in Lizzie’s Brooklyn neighborhood. Even Mr. Jimmy is spewing casual vitriol about Middle Eastern people and car bombs. Lizzie’s husband, Ben, retreats to the couch, to read a “giant history of war.” And I haven’t even mentioned Henry, Lizzie’s depressive, recovering-addict brother, who meets a woman, marries and has a baby, all at whiplash speed. When the marriage implodes, Henry winds up on Lizzie and Ben’s couch, using again and barely able to parent his daughter.

For Lizzie, as for most of us, personal and collective catastrophes run parallel. Her vision of the future grows ever darker. She talks to Sylvia about buying land somewhere cooler, where Eli, her young son, and Iris, her newborn niece, might fare better in 30 years or so. “Do you really think you can protect them? In 2047?” Sylvia asks.

“I look at her,” Lizzie thinks. “Because until this moment, I did, I did somehow think this.” The realization of her helplessness is unbearable, but Lizzie knows she must bear it: This bleak state of affairs is her son’s inheritance.

Lizzie is gripped by grief and despair — she spends far too much time on doomsday prepper websites — both complicated responses to a planet in the midst of radical, damaging change. “In a world of mortal beings,” Keller writes in “Facing Apocalypse,” “it would seem that without some work of mourning, responsibility for that world cannot develop.” Lizzie’s sense of loss and futility is wrenching, but her response attaches her that much more deeply to this world. Her anxiety is acute because the time in which to act is limited and shot through with urgency.

Lizzie experiences her moment as unprecedented; her end-time sensibility suggests an analogy, albeit to a starkly different context. The Apostle Paul also understood himself to be living through an extraordinary rupture in time. Paul's zeal to spread the Gospel through the ancient world was fueled by his conviction that ordinary time, and life, had been profoundly derailed by Christ’s crucifixion, and was soon to end with his imminent Second Coming. Paul believed he was living in an in-between time that the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has aptly called “ the time that remains ,” a phrase borrowed from Paul’s letter to the fledgling church at Corinth. “The time is short,” Paul wrote. “From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not.”

The old world and its rules had not yet passed away but the prospect of Christ’s return cast an altering light on the present, highlighting the impermanence of all things. Everything was revealed to be in flux and therefore subject to reversals and change.

In “Weather,” Lizzie’s frazzled report from the event horizon of impending disaster, the time that remains means that moments are more precious, less bound by previous rules of engagement and more open to radically new ones. Near the end of the novel, Henry reclaims his sobriety, and Lizzie finds renewed, if melancholic, love for this imperiled world. She wants to find a new way to engage, even as she is uncertain what that might be. “There’s the idea in the different traditions. Of the veil,” Lizzie says. “What if we were to tear through it?” The image recalls Keller’s apokalypsis — a revelatory “ dis-closure .”

Jesmyn Ward’s “ Salvage the Bones ” (2011) takes a very different approach to apocalypse. The novel is set over 12 days, before and just after Hurricane Katrina strikes the Gulf Coast. The 15-year-old narrator, Esch, her father and three brothers live in the Mississippi Delta, outside a coastal town Ward calls Bois Sauvage. Unlike other characters we have encountered, Ward’s need no awakening; and time is far too short for existential anxiety or long-term planning.

The novel opens as China, a pit bull belonging to Esch’s brother Skeetah, is giving birth. Moody, commanding China is the love of Skeetah’s young life and as vivid as any human character in the book. “What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do,” Ward writes. “Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet.” Skeetah hopes to sell China’s puppies for big money. Enough to send his older brother, Randall, to basketball camp, where, the family hopes, he’ll be noticed by college scouts. Enough, perhaps, to help Esch take care of her baby. Esch is pregnant, though not far enough along to show, and she is in love with the baby’s father, her brother Randall’s friend Manny, who keeps her a secret and won’t kiss her on the mouth.

The novel is full of mothers: mothers to be, absent mothers (Esch’s mother died in childbirth years before), animal mothers, even mythical mothers (Esch is fixated on the avenging Medea, whom she’s read about in school). And, of course, Mother Nature is flying across the gulf, heading straight for Bois Sauvage. Mothers in this novel are makers and destroyers. In some cases, they are also unprepared to occupy the role; they are in jeopardy or else the circumstances of their motherhood run afoul of certain proprieties.

Esch’s pregnancy isn’t easy. It may also be hard for readers to accept: Esch is in dire financial straits and young enough to scandalize some of us. Does the prospect of her motherhood elicit the same empathy as Lizzie’s or Candace’s? Whose children do we think of as the hope for the future when the end is nigh? Which mothers are most valued in the collective perception? Not, generally speaking, an impoverished Black girl barely into her teens.

Ward’s concerns are with those who will bear the brunt of the coming storms, both natural and metaphoric, on the page and in the world. Esch and her family face Katrina with nothing besides a few canned goods they’ve scared up, and some plywood nailed over the doors and windows. Esch herself is the sort of vulnerable person Scripture might refer to as “the least of these.” Each time I read the novel, my mind leaps to the biblical Mary, mother of Jesus, a poor, brown, teenage girl who gave birth in a barn because no safer provision was made for her. In that story, the life least protected turns out to be the most essential.

So it is in “Salvage the Bones”: Esch and her unborn child, along with fighting China and her puppies, are the beating heart of this universe. Here, Esch considers which animals flee before a coming storm: “Maybe the bigger animals do,” she reflects. “Maybe the small don’t run. Maybe the small pause on their branches, the pine-lined earth, nose up, catch that coming storm air that would smell like salt to them, like salt and clean burning fire, and they prepare like us.”

With “the small,” or those treated as such, as focal points, Ward’s novel is also an indictment. It’s true that Katrina was a natural disaster, but its effects were preventable, or might have been mitigated. Most of us remember the levees breaking. The disaster’s aftermath — thousands, mostly poor, stranded without food or water; critically ill patients dying in storm-ravaged hospitals ; desperate, unarmed civilians shot by police officers — was entirely the fault of humans.

We might extend Ward’s insight to end-time crises in general, in which other Esches are similarly left with the greater share of suffering. We may not be able to reverse the crises themselves, but we can intervene in the devastation they cause, and to whom.

We have been down a harrowing road; there isn’t much comfort here. But perhaps at this critical juncture in our human story, it is not comfort that will aid us most. Perhaps what will aid us most is to enter more fully into dis comfort. To awaken to our grief, like Candace. To try to tear through the veil, like Lizzie. In this way we might begin to believe that the future is not foreclosed upon, whatever it might look like.

I leave us with Esch’s declaration of hope at the end of Ward’s novel. Esch’s family has survived, but Skeetah is searching for China, who disappeared in the storm: “He will look into the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire, beaten dirty by the hurricane so she doesn’t gleam anymore … dull but alive, alive, alive.”

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