Theme: a travel brochure

General characteristics

The United States shares land borders with Canada (to the north) and Mexico (to the south), and a territorial water border with Russia in the northwest, and two territorial water borders in the southeast between Florida and Cuba, and Florida and the Bahamas. The contiguous forty-eight states are otherwise bounded by the Pacific Ocean on the west, the Atlantic Ocean on the east, and the Gulf of Mexico to the southeast. Alaska borders the Pacific Ocean to the south and southwest, the Bering Strait to the west, and the Arctic Ocean to the north, while Hawaii lies far to the southwest of the mainland in the Pacific Ocean.
Forty-eight of the states are in the single region between Canada and Mexico; this group is referred to, with varying precision and formality, as the contiguous United States, and as the Lower 48. Alaska, which is included in the term continental United States, is located at the northwestern end of North America.
The capital city, Washington, District of Columbia, is a federal district located on land donated by the state of Maryland. (Virginia had also donated land, but it was returned in 1849.) The United States also has overseas territories (Insular areas) with varying levels of autonomy and organization: in the Caribbean the territories of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (formerly the Danish Virgin Islands, purchased by the US at the beginning of WW2), and in the Pacific the inhabited territories of American Samoa, Guam and theNorthern Mariana Islands, along with a number of uninhabited island territories. Some of the territories acquired were a part of United States imperialism, or to gain access to the east.
Nearly all of the United States is in the northern hemisphere — the exceptions are American Samoa and Jarvis Island, which are in thesouthern hemisphere.