United States of America

The United States is a large democratic country in North America.

1861-1881
In 1861, under President Abraham Lincoln, the US became involved in a civil war when eleven Southern states attempted to secede from the Union and form the Confederate States of America. A year and a half of warfare (what became known as the War of Secession followed.

In September 1862, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee defeated and destroyed US General George McClellan's Army of the Potomac at Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, then advanced on Philadelphia. President Lincoln, feeling the cause was lost and under pressure from Britain, signed a treaty recognizing the CSA's sovereignty.

Lincoln was voted out of office in 1864, and the Democratic Party won the next four Presidential elections. The Democrats, who before the war had favored Southern interests in the Federal government, took a soft line against the CS, and for the first twenty years that nation--and its ability to threaten the US--grew. It purchased Cuba from Spain in the 1870s.

1881-1914
In 1880, American voters, tired of the Democrats' soft line, elected Republican James G. Blaine President. In Blaine's first year in office, his Confederate counterpart, James Longstreet, purchased the states of Chihuahua and Sonora from Mexico, making the CS a transcontinental power by giving it access to the Pacific port city of Guaymas.

Blaine felt he could not tolerate this expansion, and went to war with the CS. The CS was supported by Britain and France. The US Army was disorganized and woefully underprepared for the war, and was easily defeated. The CS graciously offered the US status quo antebellum in everything but recognition of the Confederate claim to the two Mexican states. Britain, however, took half the state of Maine as a territorial concession and annexed it to the Dominion of Canada.

Following the war, the German military observer to the United States, Alfred von Schleiffen, recommended sweeping reorganizations to the US military to US General-in-Chief William Rosecrans. The military took these suggestions to heart, and Schleiffen, realizing the US's wealth of resources and antagonistic relationship with France could make it a potentially valuable ally, became a voice in Berlin in favor of a US-German alliance--what ultimately became the Central Powers after German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck offered such an alliance to the US and the US accepted. (The alliance also included Austria-Hungary. For their part, the CS joined Britain, France, and Russia in forming the Entente.)

Over the next thirty years, Democrats dominated American politics, but with a much more nationalistic slant. The Republican Party, on the heels of the failures of both Lincoln and Blaine, had become largely defunct, and was soon eclipsed by the upstart Socialist Party as the Democrats' primary opposition.

The Democratic ideology was the U.S Nationalism known as "Remembrance." The US took to heart Schleiffen's suggestions for a military reorganization, replacing the position of General-in-Chief, which had limited supervision over largely autonomous field armies, with the centralized General Staff. However, the reforms did not stop there; all of US society was reorganized. Government became more bureacratic, life more regulated. Under hard-line presidents like Thomas Brackett Reed and Alfred Thayer Mahan, every facet of the country was fine-tuned to be able to support a war effort against the Entente.

That war came in 1914 when Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. Alliance systems were invoked, and war spread across Europe--and North America. The Great War had begun.

1914-1917
Unlike in its previous two wars against the CS, the US did not allow its enemy to make early gains in the Great War. The US invaded both the CS and the Dominion of Canada and held the line against both through several years of hard fighting on stationary fronts. US scientists and engineers, cooperating with their German counterparts, produced many new weapons and innovations, including poison gas and barrels, though these two were quickly aped by the US's enemies.

The US supported the Red Rebellion in the Confederacy in 1915, forcing the CS to take men off the line to suppress the rebellion--though the US was forced to do the same to contain the perenially rebellious Mormons.

In 1916, US superiority in numbers and resources began to tell, and they were able to push their enemies back. They made significant inroads into the Canadian province of Quebec, and President Theodore Roosevelt decided to take advantage of Quebecois disaffection with their Anglophone neighbors stemming from religious and linguistic differences and create the Republic of Quebec.

Finally, in 1917, the US achieved a breakthrough. The first came in Tennesse, where General George Armstrong Custer ordered the Barrel Roll Offensive, in violation of General Staff doctrine. After that, Confederate armies collapsed throughout the country, and soon British and Canadian armies did, too. At the cost of 1.5 million KIA, the US had at long last achieved its great victory.

1917-1941
With an eye toward preventing the Entente from threatening the US again in the future, Roosevelt forced the defeated British to yield all claim to Canada and allow it to be occupied by US forces. He also demanded large indemnities and severe arms restrictions from the CS and the concession of the states of Kentucky, Sequoyah, and Houston. He placed the state of Utah under martial law.

However, with the long-sought after victory attained, Americans began looking more toward domestic policies than foreign. (One unfortunate manifestation of this shift in public opinion was that the US backed down from its protest of Turkey's genocide against the Armenians when Germany supported Turkey.) The years immediately following the Great War were marked by severe labor unrest, and in 1920, when Roosevelt ran for reelection to an unprecedented third term, he lost to Socialist Upton Sinclair.

Sinclair's first term was a time of peace and prosperity for the US, and he was reelected in 1924. The good times continued through his second term. However, in 1928, Sinclair's Vice President, Hosea Blackford, was elected (having defeated the once-popular Roosevelt Sinclair was wary of violating the two-term precedent) and within a year the stock markect collapsed and the US economy plumetted. The Blackford Administration was further embattled when Japan attacked the US, beginning the Pacific War. Though the war was a draw and was not particularly costly for the US, the Japanese managed to raid Los Angeles while Blackford was appearing there at a campaign function. Blackford was defeated in 1932 by Calvin Coolidge, who died before taking office; his term was werved by Herbert Hoover. Hoover fared no better than Sinclair in sparking economic recovery (though he did manage to conclude the Pacific War), and was himself defeated by Socialist Al Smith in 1936.

Throughout this period, the US had paid less attention to the defeated CS. Sinclair had forgiven the war indemnities after the assassination of Wade Hampton V, and the US stopped sending weapons inspectors to enforce compliance with the arms restrictions shortly thereafter. When Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party was elected President of the CS in 1933, he secretly rearmed.

Featherston encouraged civil unrest among former Confederates in Kentucky, Houston, and, to a lesser extent, Sequoyah, and also supported insurgents in Utah. Smith ended martial law in Utah as an attempt to appease the latter group, and met with Featherston in Richmond to discuss a solution for the three former Confederate states. Featherston clearly got the better of Smith at this meeting, convincing the US President to agree to plebiscites in the three states and agreeing that, whichever country won, the states would remain demilitarized for twenty-five years--a promise he had no intention of keeping.

Through Freedomite intimidation tactics, the US lost the plebiscites in Kentucky and Houston, and Featherston immediately stationed troops in these states upon retaking possession of them. Featherston then issued an ultimatum claiming the US had fixed the Sequoyah plebiscite and demanding the return of that state as well as several other small territorial concessions made at the end of the Great War. The US refused and was invaded on June 22, 1941 when Featherston launched Operation Blackbeard without issuing a formal declaration of war.

1941-1943
The US was unprepared for the Confederate invasion and was driven back quickly in the first months of the war. Confederate forces took Sandusky, Ohio, on Lake Erie and neatly bisected the US, cutting every transcontinental supply line not involving Canada.

The front stabilized when the Confederates reached Sandusky, and the US launched a counterattack in Virginia; however, the Confederates very effectively ground this assault to a halt north of Fredericksburg. US commander Daniel MacArthur launced two ill-advised assaults on that city known as the Battles of Fredericksburg. After the second such assault, the Virginia front essentiallly became a stalemate.

Early in 1942, President Smith was killed in an air raid on Philadelphia. Charles LaFollette became President.

The US sent supporting columns to open secondary fronts all along the border to counteract the Confederate advantage of interior lines of communication. This was effective in severely taxing CS Army personnel, but the Confederate column in Ohio launched Operation Coalscuttle into Pennsylvania late in 1942. The army pushed the US back into Pittsburgh, where it was destroyed in an enormous months-long battle.

The US is supporting guerrilla fighters within the CS recruited from among the black population, which is the target of a genocide by the racist Featherston. The CS is supporting yet another Mormon rebellion in Utah, and Britain--still a nominal enemy despite both the Entente and the Central Powers being much looser in terms of intercontinental cooperation than was true in the Great War--is supporting a Canadian uprising. In 1942, that uprising expelled a Quebecois garrison from the city of Winnipeg. The US is also engaged in a war against Japan; it defended the Sandwich Islands, a Great War territorial gain, against that nation and is now beginning to drive them back toward their Home Islands.

In Hanford, Washington, US physicists are taking part in a top-secret project to build an atomic bomb.

1942-1945
On December 7, 1941, Japanese forces attacked a United States base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, drawing the US into World War II. Less than six months later, the Race's Conquest Fleet invaded Earth, and that war was abandoned as every human nation was thrown into a fight for its survival.

The US military fared badly in the first year of the war, with Race forces taking pockets of territory throughout the Midwest and the destruction of its capital, Washington, DC by one of the Race's nuclear missiles. In the winter of 1942-43, however, the US, taking advantage of the Race's low tolerance for cold temperatures, retook the city of Chicago during a snowstorm.

The US became a participant in the Big Five cobelligerency along with Germany, Japan, Britain and the Soviet Union. It benefited from technology exchanges among the group, and received a sample of radioactive uranium from the Polish Jew Mordechai Anielewicz.

The US completed an atomic bomb in 1944 and destroyed the city of Chicago, which the race was on the verge of taking. It also destroyed the Race-held city of Miami. The Race retaliated by destroying Seattle and Pearl Harbor; Vice President Henry Wallace was killed in the former.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1944 and was succeeded Cordell Hull. It was Hull who accepted the Race's invitation to be part of a peace conference in Cairo and sent his Secretary of State, General George Marshall, to represent US interests at the conference. Along with its Big Five cobelligerents, the US was among the first political entity to force an authority of the Ssumaz dynasty to treat with it on equal terms in more than fifty thousand years.

1945-1962
Peace prevailed on Earth, however unsteadily, and the US, like Germany and the Soviet Union (and Japan and Britain to a much lesser extent) took advantage of this peace to build up its technological arsenal. The US built nuclear missiles, computers, created its own Internet, and became a space-faring government: It maintained a space station in Earth orbit, flew regular orbital flights, and visited the Moon and Mars.

1962-1966
In 1962 the Race's Colonization Fleet arrived in Earth orbit. It was attacked by the nuclear missiles of an unknown party, and twelve of its starships were destroyed. The attack had been ordered by none other than US President Earl Warren, but this would not come to light for several years.

In 1963 the US completed the Lewis and Clark, a space vessel which it sent to the asteroid belt. This was the first spaceship of human build to use an atomic engine and was considered a forerunner of a starship with interstellar capability.

The US allowed the Race to set up shrines to the spirits of emperors past within its territory, making it unique among the human powers. The US believed it could not bar the shrines under the Free Exercise clause of its Constitution. The Race's cult of emperor-worship was adopted by some Americans, mainly Californians.

The US remained neutral in the war between Germany and the Race, but Warren took note of the destruction to which Germany was subjected.

When Straha, an exiled Conquest Fleet shiplord who had defected to the US in 1944, brought incriminating evidence of US involvement in the Colonization Fleet episode provided to him by his friend, Sam Yeager, to the attention of Atvar, the US was presented with a choice: allow the Race to destroy an American city; discontinue its space program; or go to war. Warren knew that, even with Soviet help, the US could not win a war, and also knew that the dismantling of the space program would be an unacceptable setback. Warren therefore allowed the Race to destroy Indianapolis, then committed suicide and was succeeded by his Vice President, Harold Stassen.

1966-2034
As ginger use became widespread among the Colonization Fleet's females, causing them to become sexually receptive all the time, many who frequently mated with male friends became interested in entering into exclusive mating arrangements, or marriages. As the Race considered monogamy the height of perversion, these couples were not welcome in their own government's territory. The United States accepted many monogamous Lizards as defectors, thus deepening their own talent pool and simultaneously depleting the Race's.

In the late 1970s the US began experimenting with cold sleep technology. A number of people it considered useful (and, not coincidentally) troublesome) such as Sam Yeager and Glenn Johnson were put into suspended animation in preparation for an interstellar journey to Home at sublight speeds. The US launched its starship, the Admiral Peary, in 1997.  It arrived in Home orbit in 2034, the first starship not of Race manufacture to visit Home in that planet's history.

The Admiral Peary was sent with the primary mission of establishing an embassy on Home. It had originally intended for Dr Henry Kissinger to be diplomatic chief of mission, but he failed to awaken from cold sleep and Sam Yeager became ambassador.

Yeager and his team dealt primarily with Atvar, Race psychologist Ttomalss, and Tosevite citizen of the Empire Kassquit. Yeager was also granted an audience with Emperor Risson, making him the first ambassador to be received by a Ssumaz emperor since the unification of Home.

Despite a willingness to negotiate in good faith by both parties, the Race could not accept the threat presented to it merely by the US's presence in the Tau Ceti system. The tone of the negotiations steadily deteriorated over a period of several months, and war seemed increasingly likely. However, then the FTL ship Commodore Perry arrived in Home orbit, a clear sign that the United States had surpassed the slow-moving Race technologically--and giving the US the very real option of destroying the Race's entire empire if the Race attempted to destroy the United States and Earth.