List of Abbreviations for All 50 U.S. States

As traditional mails are still used to send physical package, mailing addresses including state abbreviation are helpful in nowadays. Below please see two letter abbreviations for each of 50 states. In the following table, you can also see the original name of these states, date when they are admitted to the nation, and region where each state is located.

List of 50 States and Their Abbreviations

Abbreviations by State

# State Abbreviation Region Date Admitted
1 Alabama AL East South Central December 14, 1819
2 Alaska AK Pacific January 3, 1959
3 Arizona AZ Mountain February 14, 1912
4 Arkansas AR West South Central June 15, 1836
5 California CA Pacific September 9, 1850
6 Colorado CO Mountain August 1, 1876
7 Connecticut CT New England January 9, 1788
8 Delaware DE South Atlantic December 7, 1787
9 Florida FL South Atlantic March 3, 1845
10 Georgia GA South Atlantic January 2, 1788
11 Hawaii HI Pacific August 21, 1959
12 Idaho ID Mountain July 3, 1890
13 Illinois IL East North Central December 3, 1818
14 Indiana IN East North Central December 11, 1816
15 Iowa IA West North Central December 28, 1846
16 Kansas KS West North Central January 29, 1861
17 Kentucky KY East South Central June 1, 1792
18 Louisiana LA West South Central April 30, 1812
19 Maine ME New England March 15, 1820
20 Maryland MD South Atlantic April 28, 1788
21 Massachusetts MA New England February 6, 1788
22 Michigan MI East North Central January 26, 1837
23 Minnesota MN West North Central May 11, 1858
24 Mississippi MS East South Central December 10, 1817
25 Missouri MO West North Central August 10, 1821
26 Montana MT Mountain November 8, 1889
27 Nebraska NE West North Central March 1, 1867
28 Nevada NV Mountain October 31, 1864
29 New Hampshire NH New England June 21, 1788
30 New Jersey NJ Mid-Atlantic December 18, 1787
31 New Mexico NM Mountain January 6, 1912
32 New York NY Mid-Atlantic July 26, 1788
33 North Carolina NC South Atlantic November 21, 1789
34 North Dakota ND West North Central November 2, 1889
35 Ohio OH East North Central March 1, 1803
36 Oklahoma OK West South Central November 16, 1907
37 Oregon OR Pacific February 14, 1859
38 Pennsylvania PA Mid-Atlantic December 12, 1787
39 Rhode Island RI New England May 29, 1790
40 South Carolina SC South Atlantic May 23, 1788
41 South Dakota SD West North Central November 2, 1889
42 Tennessee TN East South Central June 1, 1796
43 Texas TX West South Central December 29, 1845
44 Utah UT Mountain January 4, 1896
45 Vermont VT New England March 4, 1791
46 Virginia VA South Atlantic June 25, 1788
47 Washington WA Pacific November 11, 1889
48 West Virginia WV South Atlantic June 20, 1863
49 Wisconsin WI East North Central May 29, 1848
50 Wyoming WY Mountain July 10, 1890

 

Architecture

America’s history of architecture is characterized by its immigrants. In the 17th century, the first colonizers came from Europe, and then brought building techniques and building traditions from their respective countries of origin (see colonial style). The Spanish missionaries came to Texas, New Mexico and California, where they built mission stations in adobe, ie. sun- or air-dried clay stone, an old Native American technique that was mixed in style with Spanish Baroque. Well-known examples are the San Jose mission stations in San Antonio, Texas and San Xavier in Tucson, Arizona. The main building style influence came from the English, who settled around Boston in New England and on plantations in the southern states. In the north, they built wooden houses with horizontal wooden panels and with brick chimneys, so-called Gothic Style. The oldest preserved example is the Parson Capen House in Topsfield, Massachusetts (1683). During the 18th century, the Georgian style, which quickly spread from Britain to the new colonies, dominated, among other things. through pattern books.

At the time of the American Revolution, the country’s first trained architects, including Benjamin Latrobe and Charles Bulfinch. President Thomas Jefferson introduced a neoclassical design language into the country when he designed his own house as a paraphrase on the Pantheon in Rome (see Jefferson image). Neoclassicism became a style ideal for all state building in the new United States. In Boston, Bulfinch designed the Massachusetts State House (1787) and in Virginia designed the Jefferson State Capitol Building (1785) and the University of Virginia (1817).

Around the middle of the 19th century, a European style style architecture emerged. A prominent example of this is Trinity Church in New York (1839, Richard Upjohn). The entire United States was built at a rapid pace during the 19th century with residences and private houses in romantic styles, so-called Victorian Houses, erected in wood or brick. Around 1880 a special wooden house architecture came to be known as the shingle style.

Around the turn of the 1900’s, the country began to create its own building tradition. Steel building technology was developed and the elevator was invented, which meant that the height of the houses in the city centers was increased. The Chicago School came into being, led by Louis H. Sullivan. The first skyscrapers were built in New York, including the Gothic-influenced Woolworth Building (1913, Cass Gilbert), which became the world’s tallest building to date. Frank Lloyd Wright, a student of Sullivan, developed his own style, called Prairie Style. His early villas around Chicago, with low asymmetrical protective ceilings and open floor plans, attracted great international attention. In California, a similar organic architecture, based entirely on the local redwood tree, was developed by the firm Greene & Greene and by Bernard Maybeck. European functionalism was introduced in the United States in the 1920’s by Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler. It was called here international styleand became a dominant style in the construction of inner-city skyscrapers during the post-war period in particular. The skyscraper with smooth glass facades, a building type developed in the United States, was first executed by the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with Lever House (1952) and by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with Seagram Building (1956), both in New York. Around 1960, international style was abandoned and a more sculptural concrete architecture emerged, led by Louis Kahn and Eero Saarinen. A famous example is TWA’s terminal at Kennedy Airport (1956-62). The tradition of building in redwood was continued by Charles W. Moore in the Sea Ranch settlement in California.

Robert Venturi argued in 1966 for a more eclectic and historicizing architecture, called postmodernism. Among the most well-known postmodern buildings in the United States are the AT&T Building in New York (1978–84, Philip Johnson) and the Portland Public Service Building in Oregon (1980–82, Michael Graves). Around 1985, they returned to a more modern design language, such as the Richard Meier’s High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the architectural group Morphosis and Frank O. Gehry’s deconstructivist buildings in Venice, California.

Landscape and Gardening

The first European colonizers in the United States were impressed by the power and richness of the New World, and plant collectors contributed to an intensive plant exchange between the two continents of the 18th century. Early in England, the kind of common garden known as cottage garden was introduced early.

The first important book on American garden art, “A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening Adapted to North America” ​​(1841), was written by Andrew Jackson Downing. After a visit to England in 1850, Downing brought Calvert Vaux to the United States, and together they designed the gardens around the Capitolium, the White House and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC Together with FL Olmsted, Vaux won the 1858 Central Park competition in New York, which marked a change of direction. in the way of dealing with the park’s scale and road system. Olmsted’s large and influential production also included urban building projects and the planning of the first national parks.

The time after the turn of the century showed two main directions: the formal style inspired by the Italian New Renaissance, represented by Dumbarton Oaks, as well as the more informal English style. The Naumkeag Manor in Massachusetts (1925 – c. 1940, Fletcher Steele) exhibits a skillful touch with both styles in the same facility. Danish-born Jens Jensen developed Prairie Style, which was a heretical interpretation of the regional landscape with its own concepts and plants. This approach was also used in the extension of the comprehensive park road system, e.g. Blue Ridge Parkway (1935). The park roads meant a new way of looking at road environments; all the more important as living rooms for the car-borne American society. The route of the road was studied and surrounding scenic scenes were composed to create a travel experience to be enjoyed through the windscreen. In the 1930’s, the breakthrough for modernism in the art of gardening took place, where the United States was a pioneer. Among other things, Thomas Church introduced a new form of thinking and new social ambitions for parks and gardens. This work was further developed by Garrett Eckbo, Dan Kiley and James Rose, who each in their own direction gave the American landscape architecture of the 20th century a distinctive character. This detached itself from the earlier Beaux-Arts tradition and gave both private and public park and garden planning a more architectural form and uniform plant use. During the post-war period, Isamu Noguchi, as a cross-border artist, has performed some of the most important works, in the form of aesthetically long-driven landscapes with symbolic undertones, among others. the California Scenario park in Costa Mesa. Large-scale business parks with new baroque geometry were designed during the 1980’s by Peter Walker, who also introduced new ideas in the field of water art.