United States of America

The United States of America (also referred to as the United States, the U.S., the U.S.A., or America) is a country primarily located in North America, though it has territories outside the continent as well. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territories, nine Minor Outlying Islands, and 326 Indian reservations. The United States is the world's third-largest country by both land and total area. It shares land borders with Canada to its north and with Mexico to its south and has maritime borders with the Bahamas, Cuba, Russia, and other nations. 
Indigenous peoples have inhabited the Americas for thousands of years. Beginning in 1607, British colonization led to the establishment of the Thirteen Colonies in what is now the Eastern United States. They quarreled with the British Crown over taxation and political representation, leading to the American Revolution and proceeding Revolutionary War. The United States declared independence on July 4, 1776, becoming the first nation-state founded on Enlightenment principles of unalienable natural rights, consent of the governed, and liberal democracy. During the nineteenth century, the United States political philosophy was informed by the concept of manifest destiny, as the country expanded across the continent in a number of wars, land purchases, and treaties, eventually reaching the Pacific Ocean by the middle of the century. Sectional division surrounding slavery in the Southern United States led to the secession of the Confederate States of America, which fought the remaining states of the Union during the American Civil War (1861–1865). With the Union's victory and preservation, slavery was abolished nationally by the Thirteenth Amendment.
By 1900, the United States had established itself as a world power, becoming the world's largest economy. After Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. entered World War II on the Allied side. The aftermath of the war left the United States and the Soviet Union as the world's two superpowers and led to the Cold War. During the Cold War, both countries engaged in a struggle for ideological dominance but avoided direct military conflict. They also competed in the Space Race, which culminated in the 1969 landing of Apollo 11, making the U.S. the first and only nation to ever land humans on the Moon. With the Soviet Union's collapse and the subsequent end of the Cold War in 1991, the United States emerged as the world's sole superpower.
The United States government is a federal republic and a representative democracy with three separate branches of government. It has a bicameral national legislature composed of the House of Representatives, a lower house; and the Senate, an upper house based on equal representation for each state. Many policy issues are decentralized, with widely differing laws by jurisdiction. The U.S. ranks highly in international measures of quality of life, income and wealth, economic competitiveness, human rights, innovation, and education; it has low levels of perceived corruption and the highest median income per person of any polity in the world. It has high levels of incarceration and inequality and lacks universal health care. As a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities, the U.S. has been shaped by the world's largest immigrant population.
== History ==
For more information, see History of the United States, Prehistory of the United States, History of Native Americans in the United States, and Pre-Columbian era
=== Fall of an empire ===
Around 2021, the United States began to lose its military prestige following its withdrawal from Iraq. This was further compounded by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, a devastating outbreak of the Coronavirus disease 2019, which began back in 2020. What made things worse was a recession that was directly linked to the pandemic; within seven months, thanks to various lockdowns implemented in various countries, including America, every advanced economy had fallen to recession. 
As the pandemic worsened, the U.S. economy did not recover and America lost its status as a global superpower. The results were a substantial rise in gasoline prices and, eventually, deterioration in infrastructure including highways and superhighways being too costly to repair. What did not help was various conspiracy theorists spreading conspiracies about the COVID-19 pandemic and the production of the COVID-19 vaccine, the most prominent being that the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as its vaccine, was artificially engineered by billionaire Bill Gates as part of a population control agenda to usher in what many claimed was a "new world order."
Though America was able to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and gradually turn the tide, its actions did little to reverse its economic and social situation. 
By 2023, the United States was wracked with civil and political unrest with various political scandals, and by 2024, America's currency was so devastated by economic issues that the country's military and economy might have collapsed. What was once the most powerful nation on Earth was now no more than a corrupted and vulnerable shadow of her former self. 
=== Rise of the Theocratic Party ===
It was around this same time that a far-right Christian fundamentalist extremist movement began to emerge, a movement of professing Christians believing God had called them to take the government for Jesus Christ and that the pandemic was God's judgment against the church for disobeying God's holy mandate to "make disciples of all nations" through the installation of theocracies worldwide. These people also considered themselves abortion abolitionists, people who opposed mainstream pro-life organizations and even accused them of being guilty of "partiality" and "favoritism" due to their opposition to abolition bills, which would criminalize women for having abortions in addition to criminalizing abortion at conception, in favor of incremental pro-life laws, which the abolitionists condemned as "ungodly", "iniquitous", and even "demonic" due to the perception that they only protected unborn lives past a certain point in gestation and did not criminalize women for having abortions. This group of people was known by mainstream Christians, as well as the liberal Democratic party of the United States, as the "Theocratic Party". 
The Theocratic Party proceeded to exploit the pandemic for their own ends, using it to advance a narrative that God was angry with the United States for failing to obey Jesus' Great Commission and that the pro-life movement was being "punished" by God for not criminalizing women for having abortions and not outlawing abortion at conception. 
They had only one goal in mind: taking control of the United States government by any means necessary. 
America's weakened state did not stop the Theocrats from executing their goal of "conquering the nation for Jesus Christ." In mid-2024, a spiritual revival swept the United States, with millions of people nationwide converting to Christianity in droves. A large majority of the country, more specifically, began to embrace the ideology of various Christian Nationalist organizations that pledged their allegiance to the Theocratic Party, dedicating their lives to conquering the nation and bringing it under submission to Jesus Christ. 
Aided by the Christian Right (labeled the "Christian Nationalist Party" by Democratic liberals and Theocrats by mainstream Americans), the Theocratic Party, particularly the abortion abolitionists, began to take control of the various legislatures on both state and federal level throughout the nation, much to the disbelief and horror of the Democratic liberals and GOP members nationwide. 
By the 2024 Presidential election, the Theocratic Party had effectively replaced the GOP as the majority on both state and federal levels of government, with only a handful of Republicans remaining in the state and federal government. 
=== American Dark Ages ===
Despite the Theocrats' promises that they would "rescue America" from its dire state, the American currency system was so devastated by economic issues and social and political unrest, that the country's military and economy was quite literally on the verge of total collapse. What was once the most powerful nation on Earth was now no more than a corrupted and vulnerable shadow of her former self, though masquerading as a "sovereign and Godly nation on a hill." To the liberal and secular population of America, the nation had entered what they deemed the "American Dark Ages."
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