Awesome theme of doom

On 1 January 1901, the six colonies became a federation, and the Commonwealth of Australia was formed. Since Federation, Australia has maintained a stable liberal democratic political system and remains a Commonwealth realm. The population is 22.0 million, with approximately 60% concentrated in and around the mainland state capitals of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. The nation’s capital city is Canberra, located in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).

Australia is a developed country, with a prosperous multicultural society and has excellent results in many international comparisons of national performance such as health care, life expectancy, quality of life, human development, public education, economic freedom, and the protection of civil liberties and political rights.[13] Australian cities routinely rank among the world’s highest in terms of cultural offerings and quality of life. It is a member of the United Nations, G-20 major economies, Commonwealth of Nations, ANZUS, OECD, and the WTO.

Artist’s rendition of Port Jackson, the site where Sydney was established, viewed from the South Head. (From A Voyage to Terra Australis.)

The name Australia is derived from the Latin australis, meaning “southern”. Legends of an “unknown land of the south” (terra australis incognita) date back to Roman times and were commonplace in medieval geography but were not based on any documented knowledge of the continent.

The first recorded use of the word Australia in English was in 1625, in “A note of Australia del Espíritu Santo, written by Master Hakluyt”, published by Samuel Purchas in Hakluytus Posthumus.[14] The Dutch adjectival form Australische was used by Dutch East India Company officials in Batavia to refer to the newly discovered land to the south in 1638. Australia was used in a 1693 translation of Les Aventures de Jacques Sadeur dans la Découverte et le Voyage de la Terre Australe, a 1676 French novel by Gabriel de Foigny under the pen-name Jacques Sadeur.[15] Alexander Dalrymple then used it in An Historical Collection of Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean (1771), to refer to the entire South Pacific region. In 1793, George Shaw and Sir James Smith published Zoology and Botany of New Holland, in which they wrote of “the vast island, or rather continent, of Australia, Australasia or New Holland”.[16] It also appeared on a 1799 chart by James Wilson.[17]

The nation was founded by thirteen colonies of Great Britainlocated along the Atlantic seaboard. On July 4, 1776, they issued the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed their independence from Great Britain and their formation of a cooperative union.

The rebellious states defeated Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War, the first successful colonial war of independence.^[9] The Philadelphia Convention adopted the current United States Constitutionon September 17, 1787; its ratification the following year made the states part of a single republic with a strong central government.

The Bill of Rights, comprising ten constitutional amendments guaranteeing many fundamental civil rights and freedoms, was ratified in 1791.

In the 19th century, the United States acquired land and led to the end of legal slavery in the United States. By the 1870s, the national economy was the world’s largest.^[10]The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country’s status as a military power. In 1945, the United States emerged from World War II as the first country with nuclear weapons, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, and a founding member of NATO. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union left the United States as the sole superpower.

The country accounts for half of global military spending and is a leading economic, political and cultural force in the world.^[11]fromFrance, Spain, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Russia, andannexed the Republic of Texas and the Republic of Hawaii.

Disputes between the agrarian South and industrial Northover states’ rights and the expansion of the institution of slavery provoked the American Civil War of the 1860s. The North’s victory prevented a permanent split of the country