51st state

"51st state" is a phrase used in the United States of America to refer to the idea of adding an additional state to the current 50-state Union. Proposals for a 51st state may include granting statehood to one of the U.S. territories or Washington, D.C., splitting an existing state, or annexing part or all of a sovereign country.

The U.S. has not admitted any new states to the union since 1959, when both Alaska (in January 1959) and Hawaii (in August 1959) were admitted. Before that, no states had been admitted since Arizona in February 1912. Before Alaska and Hawaii became states of the United States in 1959, the equivalent expression was "the 49th state"; see, for example, the National Movement for the Establishment of a 49th State, a 1930s movement that sought to create a primarily Black state in the Southern United States.

In recent years, the term has been used most often in reference to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, both of which have active statehood movements and voted for statehood in recent referendums: D.C. in 2016 and Puerto Rico in 2020.^[1][2][3] Their admission to the Union as states would require congressional approval.^[4] The two regions have different statuses within the U.S., with Puerto Rico as one of the five permanently inhabited U.S. territories, while D.C. has unique status as a federal administrative district. The path to statehood for Puerto Rico in particular would have parallels to the admission process of most U.S. states outside of the original Thirteen British Colonies, which started as territories before becoming states.

Since the 2024 U.S. Presidential election, the phrase has frequently been invoked in reference to Canada, as Donald Trump has used the phrase repeatedly while calling for the U.S. annexation of Canada.^[5] The U.S. has annexed sovereign nations as states in the past, including Texas and Vermont, though this has not happened in recent history.

Some U.S. states have experienced movements to split into two states, often due to strong political disagreements between different regions of a state. There is precedent for such state-splitting moves in U.S. history, such as the creation of Kentucky and West Virginia from Virginia, though, again, there have been no such moves in more than a century.

The phrase can also be used as a slang term in reference to regions or sovereign nations around the world that are not actually considered prospects for U.S. annexation, but are considered to be aligned with U.S. culture or political or military interests. This slang may be used in either a positive sense, or in a pejorative sense similar to the term Americanization.^[6]