The United States did not begin its break with Britain with a settled national name. As Smithsonian Magazine recounts, the shift from \u201cUnited Colonies\u201d to \u201cUnited States\u201d reflected a central question of independence: what kind of political union were the former colonies creating? September 9, 1776, is generally recognized as the date Congress formally adopted \u201cUnited States\u201d in place of \u201cUnited Colonies.\u201d During a session otherwise concerned largely with paying George Washington\u2019s troops and routine business, the Second Continental Congress directed that official documents use the new wording. The decision followed language already appearing in the independence movement. Smithsonian describes proposals for \u201cUnited Colonies,\u201d \u201cUnited Colonies of America\u201d and \u201cUnited Colonies of North America.\u201d For supporters of separation from Britain, such names were generally understood as temporary descriptions rather than a final identity. The language of states signaled a different political status. The Declaration of Independence, dated July 4, carried a heading describing the thirteen united States of America. Its lowercase \u201cu\u201d is a revealing detail: the states themselves received greater emphasis than their union. In Smithsonian\u2019s account, historian Larson explains that the founders understood the arrangement as a confederation of independent states transferring certain powers to a central government. Those powers included coordinating the war against Britain and dealing collectively with foreign nations. The central government lacked the power to tax and depended on the states for funding. That interpretation helps explain why the wording mattered. \u201cUnited\u201d expressed the need to act together, while \u201cStates\u201d preserved the political identities of the participants. The name held both ideas at once, without making them identical. The September decision should therefore be understood as an official change in usage, rather than the moment every element of the country\u2019s name was invented. The Declaration had already used the language of united states, and the movement toward independence had already generated competing formulations. What now sounds like an ordinary geographical name also records an argument about authority. The change from colonies to states announced separation from Britain; the emphasis on states reflected how the participants understood their relationship with one another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A change of name recorded a change in political identity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6265,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}