The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20111004024129/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:North_America

Portal:North America

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Main page   Geography   Projects
edit  

The North America Portal

Location North America.svg

North America is a continent in the Earth's northern hemisphere and western hemisphere. It is bordered on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the east by the North Atlantic Ocean, on the southeast by the Caribbean Sea, and on the south and west by the North Pacific Ocean; South America lies to the southeast. It covers an area of about 24,709,000 square kilometers (9,540,000 square miles), about 4.8% of the planet's surface or about 16.5% of its land area. As of July 2008, its population was estimated at nearly 529 million people. It is the third-largest continent in area, following Asia and Africa, and the fourth in population after Asia, Africa, and Europe. North America and South America are collectively known as the Americas or simply America.

Satellite imagery of North America

North and South America are generally accepted as having been named after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who explored South America between 1497 and 1502, and was the first European to suggest that the Americas were not the East Indies. Scientists have several theories as to the origins of the early human population of North America. The indigenous peoples of North America themselves have many creation myths, by which they assert that they have been present on the land since its creation. Before contact with Europeans, the natives of North America were divided into many different polities, from small bands of a few families to large empires. They lived in several "culture areas", which roughly correspond to geographic and biological zones and give a good indication of the main lifeway or occupation of the people who lived there.

edit  

Countries and territories

edit  

Featured article

Location of Canada
Canada (pronounced /ˈkænədə/) is a country occupying most of northern North America, extending from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west and northward into the Arctic Ocean. It is the world's second largest country by total area (after Russia), and shares land borders with the United States to the south and northwest. The land occupied by Canada was inhabited for millennia by various aboriginal people. Beginning in the late 15th century, British and French expeditions explored and later settled the Atlantic coast. France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America in 1763 after the Seven Years War. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces. This began an accretion of additional provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy from the United Kingdom, highlighted by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, and culminating in the Canada Act in 1982 which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British parliament. A federation now comprising ten provinces and three territories, Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy, with Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state.It is a bilingual and multicultural country, with both English and French as official languages at the federal level. Technologically advanced and industrialized, Canada maintains a diversified economy that is heavily reliant upon its abundant natural resources and upon trade—particularly with the United States, with which Canada has had a long and complex relationship.
edit  

Featured picture

edit  

Did you know...

edit  

Categories

North America categories

North America
Central America
Electric power in North America
Military of North America
Caribbean
Northern America
North America-related lists
North American portals
Buildings and structures in North America
North American comics
Communications in North America
North American countries
Crime in North America
North American culture
Demographics of North America
Economy of North America
Education in North America
Ethnic groups in North America
North America in fiction
Geography of North America
Health in North America
History of North America
Infrastructure in North America
Languages of North America
Law in North America
LGBT in North America
Natural history of North America
[×] North American Spanish
North American people
Politics of North America
Religion in North America
Science and technology in North America
North American society
Sport in North America
Transportation in North America
Wikipedia books on North America
Images of North America
North America stubs
edit  

Selected biography

Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam (born July 31, 1926) is an American philosopher who has been a central figure in Western philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. He is known for his willingness to apply an equal degree of scrutiny to his own philosophical positions as to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposes its flaws. As a result, he has acquired a reputation for frequently changing his own position.

In philosophy of mind, Putnam is known for his argument against the type-identity of mental and physical states based on his hypothesis of the multiple realizability of the mental, and for the concept of functionalism, an influential theory regarding the mind-body problem. In philosophy of language, along with Saul Kripke and others, he developed the causal theory of reference, and formulated an original theory of meaning, inventing the notion of semantic externalism based on a famous thought experiment called Twin Earth.

edit  

News

edit  

Sub portals

edit  

WikiProjects

edit  

Selected quote

“ I hardly sustain myself beneath the weight of white men's blood that I have shed. ”
— Sitting Bull June 19, 1868
edit  

Topics

edit  

Related portals

edit  

Associated Wikimedia
What are portals? · List of portals · Featured portals
Purge server cache
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:North_America"
Personal tools
Namespaces
Variants
Actions
Navigation
Interaction
Toolbox
Print/export
Languages
Morty Proxy This is a proxified and sanitized view of the page, visit original site.