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The full name "United States of America" was first used during the American Revolutionary War, though its precise origin is a matter of contention. [1] The newly formed union was first known as the "United Colonies", and the earliest known usage of the modern full name dates from a January 2, 1776 letter written between two military officers.
However, without a clarifying context, singular America in English commonly refers to the United States of America. [2] Historically, in the English-speaking world, the term America could refer to a single continent until the 1950s (as in Van Loon's Geography of 1937): According to historians Kären Wigen and Martin W. Lewis, [3]
The first documented use of the phrase "United States of America" is a letter from January 2, 1776. Stephen Moylan, a Continental Army aide to General George Washington, wrote to Joseph Reed, Washington's aide-de-camp, seeking to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the Revolutionary War effort.
The meaning of the word American in the English language varies according to the historical, geographical, and political context in which it is used.American is derived from America, a term originally denoting all of the Americas (also called the Western Hemisphere), ultimately derived from the name of the Florentine explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512).
The Federalist Papers of 1787–1788, written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison to advocate the ratification of the United States Constitution, use the word American in both its original Pan-American sense, but also in its United States sense: Federalist Paper 24 refers to the "American possessions" of Britain and Spain [6] (i ...
About 60,000 Loyalists migrated to other British territories in Canada and elsewhere, but the great majority remained in the United States. With its victory in the American Revolution, the United States became the first constitutional republic in world history founded on the consent of the governed and the rule of law.
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The Conquest of Canaan by Timothy Dwight is credited as the first epic poem of the United States. The Anarchiad was a prominent satire of the early United States. [100] The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy, was published by William Hill Brown in 1789. [99] Drama and theater were controversial in the early United States.