United States
There are 42 independent cities in the United States, with 39 of these in Virginia (in Virginia, cities are separate from counties even if they function as county seats). The three others are Baltimore, Maryland; St. Louis, Missouri; and Carson City, Nevada.
While resembling an independent city, New York City is a unique case, with the city divided into five boroughs, each of which is territorially conterminous with a county of New York State.
Another type of locality is known as a consolidated city–county. In a consolidated city-county, as in an independent city, there is one single local government. But in a consolidated city-county, the city and the county nominally both exist, although they are the same entity (the City of Denver, Colorado and Denver County; the City of San Francisco, California and San Francisco County; the City of Butte, Montana and Silver Bow County), whereas in an independent city, the county does not even nominally exist (Falls Church, Virginia, Carson City, Nevada).
Washington, D.C. is coterminous with the District of Columbia, which is not a part of any state. It cannot be considered "independent" because it is under Congressional oversight as the U.S. national capital.
Read more about this topic: Independent City, North America
Famous quotes related to united states:
“The United States is the only great nation whose government is operated without a budget. The fact is to be the more striking when it is considered that budgets and budget procedures are the outgrowth of democratic doctrines and have an important part in developing the modern constitutional rights.... The constitutional purpose of a budget is to make government responsive to public opinion and responsible for its acts.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“United States! the ages plead,—
Present and Past in under-song,—
Go put your creed into your deed,—
Nor speak with double tongue.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“On the whole, yes, I would rather be the Chief Justice of the United States, and a quieter life than that which becomes at the White House is more in keeping with the temperament, but when taken into consideration that I go into history as President, and my children and my children’s children are the better placed on account of that fact, I am inclined to think that to be President well compensates one for all the trials and criticisms he has to bear and undergo.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.... The United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kow-tow before any United States pro-consul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.”
—Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909–1989)