"United States of the Earth."
Someone said that out loud, in a room full of serious men, on September 9, 1776, and apparently expected it to land.
It didn't. But the fact that it was floated at all tells you everything about how chaotic the naming process for a brand-new republic actually was. The Continental Congress had just spent months arguing about whether to break from Britain, and now they had a follow-up problem nobody had fully thought through: what do you call the thing you just built?
For most of 1775 and into 1776, the working answer was "the United Colonies", functional, accurate, and about as exciting as a tax ledger. Thomas Paine had already started pushing "the United States of America" in print, and it had traction, but it wasn't official. Columbia was in the mix too, named after Christopher Columbus, which would have given the country a very different flavour, and probably a much more confusing relationship with the District of Columbia later on.
Then there was "the United States of Alleghania," a proposal rooted in the Allegheny Mountains, a nod to Indigenous place names that had genuine geographical logic behind it. Alleghania never made it past the suggestion stage, but it had its advocates.
The congressional vote on September 9, 1776, in Philadelphia settled it, officially, permanently, without much ceremony. "The United States of America" became the name of a nation that didn't yet control most of its own territory, had no stable currency, and was actively losing a war at the time.
The man who proposed "United States of the Earth" remains, frustratingly, not definitively identified in the record, which is either an act of historical mercy or a missed opportunity for a very good Wikipedia page.
Would you have voted for Alleghania? Drop your take below.