The Southwestern United States (also known as the American Southwest or simply the Southwest) is a region defined in different ways by different sources. Broad definitions include nearly a quarter of the United States, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah. Narrowly defined, the "core" Southwest is centered around the Four Corner states, with parts of the other states making up the beginnings and endings of the Southwest. The five main southwestern states; Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada are also all considered part of the Mountain West, as well as the southwest. The total population of these states is roughly 19 million people.
Most of it was a part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, in the Spanish Empire, during the Modern Era. California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Kansas were originally all part of Mexico before the Mexican-American War. Portions of some of the areas in the "divided" states, and including western parts of Texas, were those in dispute after the Texas Revolution.
Read more about Southwestern United States: Regional Geography, History, Origins of The Term and Historical/cultural Variations, Vegetation and Terrain, Wildlife, Climate, National Monuments and Parks, Ethnicity, Cities and Urban Areas, In Sport
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united and/or states:
“Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada are the horns, the head, the neck, the shins, and the hoof of the ox, and the United States are the ribs, the sirloin, the kidneys, and the rest of the body.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“Today’s difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)