United States nationality law in the context of "Americans"

Americans are the citizens and nationals of the United States. U.S. federal law does not equate nationality with race or ethnicity but rather with citizenship. The U.S. has 37 ancestry groups with more than one million individuals. White Americans form the largest racial and ethnic group at 61.6% of the U.S. population, with non-Hispanic Whites making up 57.8% of the population. Hispanic and Latino Americans form the second-largest group and are 18.7% of the American population. Black Americans constitute the country's third-largest ancestry group and are 12.4% of the total U.S. population. Asian Americans are the country's fourth-largest group, composing 6% of the American population. The country's 3.7 million Native Americans account for about 1.1%, and some 574 native tribes are recognized by the federal government. People of American descent can be found internationally. As many as seven million Americans are estimated to be living abroad, and make up the American diaspora.

The majority of Americans trace their roots to immigrants who arrived in what is now the United States, starting with European colonization in the 16th century. This includes diverse groups such as the English, Irish, Germans, Italians, and others, as well as Africans forcibly brought as slaves during the Atlantic slave trade. However, the Native American population, whose ancestors inhabited the continent for thousands of years before European contact, are a key exception.

Citizenship of the United States is a legal status that entails citizens with specific rights, duties, protections, and benefits in the United States. It serves as a foundation of fundamental rights derived from and protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States, such as freedom of expression, due process, the rights to vote, live and work in the United States, and to receive federal assistance.

There are two primary sources of citizenship: birthright citizenship, in which persons born within the territorial limits of the United States (except American Samoa) are presumed to be a citizen, or—providing certain other requirements are met—born abroad to a United States citizen parent, and naturalization, a process in which an eligible legal immigrant applies for citizenship and is accepted. The first of these two pathways to citizenship is specified in the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution which reads:

French Americans or Franco-Americans (French: Franco-américains) are citizens or nationals of the United States who identify themselves with having full or partial French or French-Canadian heritage, ethnicity and/or ancestral ties. They include French-Canadian Americans, whose experience and identity differ from the broader community.

The state with the largest proportion of people identifying as having French ancestry is Maine, while the state with the largest number of people with French ancestry is California. Many U.S. cities have large French American populations. The city with the largest concentration of people of French extraction is Madawaska, Maine, while the largest French-speaking population by percentage of speakers in the U.S. is found in St. Martin Parish, Louisiana.

Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA) is a postnominal title or membership, designating an individual who has been named a fellow of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

Fellowship is bestowed by the institute on AIA-member architects who have made outstanding contributions to the profession through design excellence, contributions in the field of architectural education, or to the advancement of the profession. In 2014, fewer than 3,200 of the more than 80,000 AIA members were fellows. Honorary Fellowship (Hon. FAIA) is awarded to foreign (non-U.S. citizen) architects, and to non-architects who have made substantial contributions to the field of architecture or to the institute.

Benoit B. Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010) was a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of physical phenomena and "the uncontrolled element in life". He referred to himself as a "fractalist" and is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word "fractal", as well as developing a theory of "roughness and self-similarity" in nature.

In 1936, at the age of 11, Mandelbrot and his family emigrated from Warsaw, Poland, to France. After World War II ended, Mandelbrot studied mathematics, graduating from universities in Paris and in the United States and receiving a master's degree in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. He spent most of his career in both the United States and France, having dual French and American citizenship. In 1958, he began a 35-year career at IBM, where he became an IBM Fellow, and periodically took leaves of absence to teach at Harvard University. At Harvard, following the publication of his study of U.S. commodity markets in relation to cotton futures, he taught economics and applied sciences.