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:
“We now in the United States have more security guards for the rich than we have police services for the poor districts. If you’re looking for personal security, far better to move to the suburbs than to pay taxes in New York.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never well-informed.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)