United States  (Overview)

The United States is many things. It's where jazz originated, and it's where the federal government virtually abandoned where-jazz-originated in the face of a city-destroying natural disaster. It's the country of the Marshall Plan, and of the Iraq debacle. It's the country of the Ku Klux Klan, and it's the country where the next president may be a black man also a country where the half-white part of half-black and half-white doesn't count!).

In the eyes of much of the world the United States is a monolithic giant, but this is overlooking the reality that it is a complex nation of a myriad peoples.