North America

Map of North America

About North America

About 13,000 years ago through Bering Land Bridge – Beringia, the original “first peoples” Paleoindians (by archaeologists) after a long travelling into the Alaskan interior and the Yukon and ultimately south from the Arctic region, Siberian mainland comes the direct ancestors of nearby all of the Native Americans tribes in Americas. A diverse ethnical North America has three main groups as Caucasians, Mestizos and Blacks with minority of Indigenous Americans and Asians among other less numerous groups.

Northern and almost all the Western Hemispherical continent, North America, called a northern subcontinent of the Americas, surrounded by the Arctic Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean to the north, the east and the south; and to the southeast by South America and the Caribbean Sea, only land connection to South America at the Isthmus of Panama, covers about 24,709,000 square kilometers of an area, the fourth by population about 565,265,000 people after Asia, Africa and Europe where the density is 22.9/sq. kilometer. It has 23 UN member countries and other dependent territories.

Sovereign states: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, United States.

Dependent territories: Anguilla, Bajo Nuevo Bank, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Navassa Island, Puerto Rico, Serranilla Bank, Turks and Caicos Islands, United States Virgin Islands.

Other areas: Aruba, Bonaire, Clipperton Island, Curaçao, Greenland, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saba, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, San Andrés and Providencia, Sint Eustatius, Sint Maarten.

The North America lies on the North American Plate, the Pacific Plate and the Caribbean Plate where we find a volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occurring from time to time. The Great Plains stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian Arctic; mountainous west including the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, California and Alaska; raise and flat plateau of the Canadian Shields in the northeast; and the Appalachian Mountains, the coastal plain along the Atlantic seaboard and Florida peninsula are the main geographical divisions in the North America. Mexico, with its long plateaus and cordilleras, falls largely in the western region is the Gulf with the eastern coastal plain.

The indigenous Native American people have their own civilizations to the isolated communities, developed their own unique ways of life and cultures, and their interaction with another with a limited as the Mayan classical civilization in around 2600 BC – 250 AD of the North America. The Norse explored the North America almost 500 years ago and later on Christopher Columbus of Spain and the other countries of the Europe as Britain, and France and migrated people from Africa, Asia and Europe.

The American Revolution, Mexican War of Independence, the Canadian Confederation (in 1867), creating the modern political landscape of English, Spanish and French language speaking North America reflects the western cultural tradition. Since nineteen centuries to twenty first centuries, the continent developed increasingly deeper connections with each other and most parts enjoyed peace and general cooperation among the states as well as open commerce and trade among them though some conflicts have occurred with drug trafficking concerns.

The U.S. might be the world’s largest economy, and leading importer, with America’s two largest ports in California and New York, of the continent dominate business worldwide. The North America Free Trade Agreement- NAFTA creates a duty free trade zone, in 1994 allowed for a strong economic cooperation with hopes of trades and foreign investment.