Congratulations on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. Independence was secured through the Revolutionary War, in which thirteen British colonies rejected imperial rule over “taxation without representation”, notably that the colonists did not have any representation in the British Parliament. Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress on 4 July 1776. The struggle for independence lasted for about a decade from the mid-1760s, including protests such as the Boston Tea Party in 1773, which led to punitive measures by the British, ultimately sparking the first armed conflicts at Lexington and Concord in 1775. After that, the USA has not had any foreign wars on its territory, but it had a devastating Civil War from 1861–65 when the United States Government (the Union), which was more industrialised, fought the eleven more agricultural southern states that had seceded to form the Confederate States of America. The Union under President Abraham Lincoln won the war, abolishing chattel slavery after four years. Since that time, there has, in principle, been equality of all citizens in the vast and diverse country of the USA. But for a long time, many laws and old practices still discriminated against black people, and some discrimination even exists today.

America is a country mainly populated by immigrants since the land was ‘discovered’ by the Italian Christopher Columbus in 1492 during a seafaring exploration sponsored by Spain. Yet it has been documented that the Norwegian explorer Leif Erikson was the first European to set foot on the North American continent about 500 years earlier, and Asians had arrived some 15,000 years before that. America has been a melting pot of immigrants from all over the world, mainly Europe, with people of different backgrounds, different Christian........

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