A Polynesian U.S. territory that refused full incorporation
American Samoa is a self-governing, unincorporated U.S. territory in Polynesia, forty miles southeast of independent Samoa. Volcanic Tutuila and its neighbours, plus Rose Atoll and Swains Island, cover about seventy-seven square miles, and the territory posts the highest military enlistment rate of any U.S. state or territory.
Polynesians settled prehistoric Samoa; Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century, drawn to Pago Pago’s protected harbour. The United States took possession in the late nineteenth century via Deeds of Cession in 1900 and 1904. When Interior moved toward an Organic Act in 1949, Samoan leaders resisted, fearing incorporation would undermine culture and communal land.
Strategic location keeps a heavy military footprint; as of 2021 the Pago Pago Army recruiting station ranked first nationally among states and territories.
European contact began in 1722, when the Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen sighted the islands, and Bougainville dubbed them the Navigators' Islands in 1768. In 1789 a party from Lapérouse's expedition fetching water on Tutuila was attacked and his second-in-command de Langle killed; a bay near Aasu is still called Massacre Bay. John Williams of the London Missionary Society began mission work in 1830, and by the late 1800s coal-burning ships and whalers relied on Pago Pago as a refuelling stop.
Rival powers nearly fought over the islands in March 1889, when American and German warships faced off at Apia until a typhoon wrecked both squadrons. The 1899 Tripartite Convention then split the archipelago: the eastern islands went to the United States and the much larger western group became German Samoa. The naval station was renamed American Samoa on 17 July 1911, after Manuʻa's people objected to being left out of the old name. People born there today are non-citizen U.S. nationals, a status many Samoans prefer; the Fono unanimously opposed birthright citizenship in 2021.
Source: American Samoa
