Episode 855
The Bahamas
Thu, 2019-Sep-05 01:02 UTC
Length - 3:21
Direct Link
Welcome to popular Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of a popular Wikipedia page every day.
With 232,123 views on Wednesday, 4 September 2019 our article of the day is The Bahamas.
The Bahamas ( (listen)), known officially as the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, is a country within the Lucayan Archipelago, in the Caribbean. The archipelagic state consists of more than 700 islands, cays, and islets in the Atlantic Ocean, and is located north of Cuba and Hispaniola Island (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), northwest of the Turks and Caicos Islands, southeast of the U. S. state of Florida, and east of the Florida Keys. The capital is Nassau on the island of New Providence. The designation of "the Bahamas" can refer either to the country or to the larger island chain that it shares with the Turks and Caicos Islands. The Royal Bahamas Defence Force describes the Bahamas territory as encompassing 470,000 km2 (180,000 sq mi) of ocean space.
The Bahamas were inhabited by the Lucayans, a branch of the Arawakan-speaking Taíno people, for many centuries. Columbus was the first European to see the islands, making his first landfall in the 'New World' in 1492. Although the Spanish never colonised the Bahamas, they shipped the native Lucayans to slavery on Hispaniola. The islands were mostly deserted from 1513 until 1648, when English colonists from Bermuda settled on the island of Eleuthera.
The Bahamas became a British crown colony in 1718, when the British clamped down on piracy. After the American Revolutionary War, the Crown resettled thousands of American Loyalists to the Bahamas; they took their slaves with them and established plantations on land grants. African slaves and their descendants constituted the majority of the population from this period on. The slave trade was abolished by the British in 1807; slavery in the Bahamas was abolished in 1834. Subsequently, the Bahamas became a haven for freed African slaves. Africans liberated from illegal slave ships were resettled on the islands by the Royal Navy, while some North American slaves and Seminoles escaped to the Bahamas from Florida. Bahamians were even known to recognize the freedom of slaves carried by the ships of other nations which reached the Bahamas. Today Afro-Bahamians make up 90% of the population of 332,600. The Bahamas became an independent Commonwealth realm in 1973 with Elizabeth II as its queen. In terms of gross domestic product per capita, the Bahamas is one of the richest countries in the Americas (following the United States and Canada), with an economy based on tourism and offshore finance.
This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:02 UTC on Thursday, 5 September 2019.
For the full current version of the article, see The Bahamas on Wikipedia.
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This has been Joanna. Thank you for listening to popular Wiki of the Day.
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