About the United States

The United States of America is a federal republic of 50 states and a capital district, mostly in central North America. The U.S. has three land borders, two with Canada and one with Mexico, and is otherwise bounded by the Pacific Ocean, the Bering Sea, the Arctic Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. Of the 50 states, only Alaska and Hawaii are not contiguous with any other state. The U.S. also has a collection of districts, territories, and possessions around the world.

Bureau of Consular Affairs

The mission of the Bureau of Consular Affairs is to protect the lives and interests of American citizens overseas and to strengthen U.S. border security. Consular work is about touching people’s lives in a thousand different ways every day. We deal with events and issues that have a personal impact: birth, death, marriage, adoption, child custody, citizenship, and relocation to another country. CA provides the passports that enable Americans to travel internationally and stands ready to lend a helping hand when citizens fall victim to crime, accident or illness in other countries, or just want to vote absentee. We make decisions and take actions every day that form key turning points in people’s lives.

California Tourism

VisitCalifornia.com is the official consumer web site of the state of California, featuring maps, events, photos, hotels, and other planning information.

Colorado.com

Official site from the state Tourism Office. Includes maps, information on accommodations, attractions, recreation, transportation throughout the state, and order form for the state vacation planning guide.

Council for Educational Travel

Council for Educational Travel, U.S.A. (CETUSA) is a non-profit, global exchange organization dedicated to helping people from different cultures develop more compassion and understanding for one another.

Discover America

The official travel and tourism website of the United States. Online resource for planning a vacation with lists of hotels, restaurants, and things to do.

Education in the United States

Education in the United States is mainly provided by the public sector, with control and funding coming from three levels: federal, state, and local. Child education is compulsory. A sub-type of compulsory education is public education. Public education is universal at the primary and secondary levels (known inside the United States as the elementary and high school levels). At these levels, school curricula, funding, teaching, and other policies are set through locally elected school boards with jurisdiction over school districts. School districts are usually separate from other local jurisdictions, with independent officials and budgets. Educational standards and standardized testing decisions are usually made by state governments. The ages for compulsory education vary by state, beginning at ages five to eight and ending at the ages of fourteen to eighteen. A growing number of states are now requiring compulsory education until the age of 18.

Jobs in the United States

Find jobs in the United States of America. Directory of job listings and career search engines. Place ads on these online job finder sites and hear from the best candidates who seek employment in your industry.

Travel USA

Travel USA provides discount prices on many of the most common travel products such as hotels, rental cars, airline tickets, cruises, vacation packages, and more. Our prices rival the lowest you'll find anywhere on the Internet and we even offer a price match guarantee that our hotel reservations (which are up to 70% off standard rac rates) are the lowest you'll find anywhere.

USATourist - USA Travel Guide

An Insiders Travelers Guide to the United States of America for visitors from around the world.

USA Student Travel

USA Student Travel provides a variety of educational, leadership, theatre arts, celebration & adventure, and science programs with customized and learning-standards based itineraries, trips, tours, classes, workshops and more.

US-Parks.com

Guide featuring park descriptions and fees, a lodging directory, road trip and activities planning information, photos and maps.

Disneyland Park (Anaheim)

Disneyland is an American theme park in Anaheim, California, owned and operated by the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts division of The Walt Disney Company. It was dedicated with a press preview on July 17, 1955, and opened to the general public on July 18, 1955. Disneyland holds the distinction of being the only theme park to be designed and built under the direct supervision of Walt Disney himself. As of 2005, the park has been visited by more than 515 million guests since it opened, including presidents, royalty and other heads of state. In 1998, the theme park was re-branded "Disneyland Park" to distinguish it from the larger Disneyland Resort complex. In 2007, more than 14,800,000 people visited the park making it the second most visited park in the world, behind the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World.

Faneuil Hall

Faneuil Hall, located near the waterfront and today's Government Center, in Boston, Massachusetts, has been a marketplace and a meeting hall since 1742. It was the site of several speeches by Samuel Adams, James Otis, and others encouraging independence from Great Britain, and is now part of Boston National Historical Park and a well known stop on the Freedom Trail. It is sometimes referred to as "the Cradle of Liberty".

Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco

Fisherman's Wharf is a neighborhood and popular tourist attraction in San Francisco, California.

One of the busiest and well known tourist attractions in North America, it is best known for being the location of Pier 39, San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, the Cannery Shopping Center, Ghirardelli Square, a Ripley's Believe it or Not museum, the Musée Mécanique, the Wax Museum at Fisherman's Wharf, Forbes Island and restaurants and stands that serve fresh seafood, most notably dungeness crab and clam chowder served in a sourdough bread bowl. Some of the restaurants, like Pompeii's and Alioto's #8, go back for three generations of the same family ownership. Nearby Pier 45 has a chapel in memory of the "Lost Fishermen" of San Francisco and Northern California.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a United States National Park that straddles the ridgeline of the Great Smoky Mountains, part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are a division of the larger Appalachian Mountain chain. The border between Tennessee and North Carolina runs northeast to southwest through the centerline of the park. It is the most visited national park in the United States. On its route from Maine to Georgia, the Appalachian Trail also passes through the center of the park. The park was chartered by the United States Congress in 1934 and officially dedicated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940. It encompasses 814 square miles (2,108 km²), making it one of the largest protected areas in the eastern United States. The main park entrances are located along U.S. Highway 441 (Newfound Gap Road) at the towns of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and Cherokee, North Carolina. It was the first national park whose land and other costs were paid for in part with federal funds; previous parks were funded wholly with state money or private funds.

Magic Kingdom

The Magic Kingdom is a theme park at the Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando, Florida. The first park built at the resort, it opened on October 1, 1971. The park saw an estimated 17 million visitors in 2008, making it the most visited theme park in the world.

Designed and built by WED Enterprises (now known as Walt Disney Imagineering), the park's layout and attractions are similar to Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, known colloquially as The Met, is an art museum located on the eastern edge of Central Park, along what is known as Museum Mile in New York City, United States, North America. It has a permanent collection containing more than two million works of art, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, often referred to simply as "the Met", is one of the world's largest art galleries; there is also a much smaller second location in Upper Manhattan, at "The Cloisters", which features medieval art.

Navy Pier

Navy Pier is a 3,300-foot (1,010 m) long pier on the Chicago shoreline of Lake Michigan. It is located in the Streeterville neighborhood of the Near North Side community area. The pier was built in 1916 at a cost of $4.5 million, equivalent to $87.8 million today. It was a part of the Plan of Chicago developed by architect and city planner Daniel Burnham and his associates. As Municipal Pier #2 (Municipal Pier #1 was never built), Navy Pier was planned and built to serve as a mixed-purpose piece of public infrastructure. Its primary purpose was as a cargo facility for lake freighters, and warehouses were built up and down the pier. However, the pier was also designed to provide docking space for passenger excursion steamers, and in the pre-air conditioning era parts of the pier, especially its outermost tip, were designed to serve as cool places for public gathering and entertainment. The pier even had its own streetcar. Today, Navy Pier is Chicago's number one tourist attraction.

San Antonio River Walk

The San Antonio River Walk (also known as Paseo del Río) is a network of walkways along the banks of the San Antonio River, one story beneath downtown San Antonio, Texas. Lined by bars, shops and restaurants, the River Walk is an important part of the city's urban fabric and a tourist attraction in its own right.

Today, the River Walk is an enormously successful special-case pedestrian street, one level down from the automobile street. The River Walk winds and loops under bridges as two parallel sidewalks lined with restaurants and shops, connecting the major tourist draws from the Alamo to Rivercenter mall, to the Arneson River Theatre close to La Villita, to HemisFair Park, to the Tower Life Building, to the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the Pearl Brewery. During the annual springtime Fiesta San Antonio, the River Parade features flowery floats that literally float.

Times Square

Times Square is a major intersection in Manhattan, a borough of New York City, at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue and stretching from West 42nd to West 47th Streets. The Times Square area consists of the blocks between Sixth and Eighth Avenues from east to west, and West 40th and West 53rd Streets from south to north, making up the western part of the commercial area of Midtown Manhattan.

Universal Orlando Resort

Universal Orlando Resort is a theme park resort in Orlando, Florida. It is a joint partnership between NBC Universal and the Blackstone Group. The resort consists of two theme parks (Universal Studios Florida and Universal's Islands of Adventure), Universal CityWalk (a night-time entertainment destination), and three Loews Hotels. Universal Orlando Resort is the largest property owned by Universal Studios Theme Parks; it is also the second-largest resort in Greater Orlando, after the Walt Disney World Resort.

Universal Studios Hollywood

Universal Studios Hollywood is a movie studio and theme park in the unincorporated Universal City community of Los Angeles County, California, United States, and is the original Universal Studios theme park. Woody Woodpecker is the mascot for Universal Studios Hollywood and the rest of the Universal Studios Theme Parks. It is one of the oldest and most famous Hollywood movie studios still in use. Its official marketing headline is "The Entertainment Capital of LA", though during the summer it is often advertised as "The Coolest Place in LA." It was initially created to offer tours of the real Universal Studios soundstages and sets. It is the first of many fully-fledged Universal Studios Theme Parks, along with Universal Studios Florida, Universal Studios Japan, and the upcoming Universal Studios Singapore, Universal Studios Dubailand, Universal Studios South Korea theme parks.

Waikiki

Waikīkī or Waikiki (pronounced /waɪkiːˈkiː/ in English and [vɐiˈkiːˈkiː] or [wɐiˈkiːˈkiː] in Hawaiian) is a neighborhood of Honolulu, in the City & County of Honolulu, on the south shore of the island of Oʻahu, Hawaii. Waikiki Beach is the shoreline fronting Waikīkī.