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
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“Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity—an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“Because of these convictions, I made a personal decision in the 1964 Presidential campaign to make education a fundamental issue and to put it high on the nation’s agenda. I proposed to act on my belief that regardless of a family’s financial condition, education should be available to every child in the United States—as much education as he could absorb.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)