A Brief History
On May 10, 1922, the US annexed an atoll in the North Pacific, an unoccupied, mostly underwater formation called Kingman Reef. Between Hawaii and Samoa, the 7.4 acre reef is known as the Kingman Reef National Wildlife Refuge administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Digging Deeper
Other than the 50 states and Puerto Rico, the US owns many territories, mostly islands in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. Some of these include the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia in the Pacific. Other islands such as Midway and Wake evoke memories of World War II, and other small islands are owned by the US.
Washington, D.C., is another US territory that is not a state. Americans that live in these territories are American citizens, but are not represented by voting in Congress.
Question for students (and subscribers): Should Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. become states? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Davies, Monka. The U.S. Territories. Shell Educational Publishing, 2022.
Mack, Doug. The Not-Quite States of America: Dispatches from the Territories and Other Far-Flung Outposts of the USA. W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.
The featured image in this article, map insets of Pacific Outlying Areas, is from the Library of Congress. According to the library, there are no known copyright restrictions on the use of this work.
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