"From many, one". When Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams proposed this motto to the Continental Congress in 1776, they meant that one indivisible nation, the United States of America, was being formed from 13 separate colonies. Today we can see other meanings as well in the words, meanings perhaps undreamed of by those first congressional delegates.

From many countries in the world, millions upon millions of immigrants have come to the shores of this country to make one people. They all left their past behind to try their fortune and make their dream come true in the “greatest country in the world” or the “land of the free”.

Just as the face of the American people is one of great diversity. so is the face of the land.  Each region of the country offers wonders and surprises and its own particular kind of beauty. Alaska is a place where you can sense the wilderness and spaciousness of much of the land before Europeans arrived. In the Western United States, the Cascade Range, the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Ranges give this part of the country a high profile characterized by rolling seas of evergreen forest, mountain glaciers and snowfields, rocky cliffs plunging headlong into the ocean, and deep bays and sounds.

When Christoph Columbus sailed into the New World, at the end of the 15th century, there were some two million people - Indians and other Native groups - living on the continent north of Central America. Today, five centuries later, the population of the United States alone, at almost 250,000,000, is more than a hundred times greater. One reason for this growth is that Americans have traditionally been a people on the move.

More than half of the people in the United States live in metropolitan areas of one million or more. In 1950 it was less than one-third of the population. Today more and more people move to the outermost fringes of suburbian areas.

The United States has been called a melting pot, a nation of nations, a world nation. One of the strengths of the country has always been its diversity.