United States Department of State

The United States Department of State (DOS), often referred to as the State Department, is the United States federal executive department responsible for the international relations of the United States, equivalent to the foreign ministry of other countries. The Department was created in 1789 and was the first executive department established.

The Department is headquartered in the Harry S Truman Building located at 2201 C Street, NW, a few blocks away from the White House in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The Department operates the diplomatic missions of the United States abroad and is responsible for implementing the foreign policy of the United States and U.S. diplomacy efforts. The Department is also the depositary for more than 200 multilateral treaties.

The Department is led by the Secretary of State, who is nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate and is a member of the Cabinet. The current Secretary of State is John Kerry. The Secretary of State is the first Cabinet official in the order of precedence and in the presidential line of succession.

U.S. state

A state of the United States of America is one of the 50 constituent political entities that shares its sovereignty with the United States federal government. Due to the shared sovereignty between each state and the federal government, Americans are citizens of both the federal republic and of the state in which they reside.State citizenship and residency are flexible and no government approval is required to move between states, except for persons covered by certain types of court orders (e.g., paroled convicts and children of divorced spouses who are sharing custody). States range in population from just under 600,000 (Wyoming) to over 38 million (California). Four—Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—use the term commonwealth rather than state in their full official names.

States are divided into counties or county-equivalents, which may be assigned some local governmental authority but are not sovereign. County or county-equivalent structure varies widely by state. State governments are allocated power by the people (of each respective state) through their individual constitutions. All are grounded in republican principles, and each provides for a government, consisting of three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial.