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Samoa was settled as early as 1000 BCE, and it is believed that the first people on the Samoan Islands arrived by sea from southwest Asia. At 3,000 years old, the Samoan culture is Polynesia's oldest. The population today remains largely Polynesian. American Samoa's Ofu beach in Ofu-Olosega. By Acepharma (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

The territories of the United States are administrative areas under the control of the federal government in Washington, DC. As of 2018, the United States had sixteen territories. Only five of those territories—American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands—were inhabited. The total population of the US territories was about 3.7 million people. The territories are not states, but some do elect local governors and have limited representation in the US Congress. Depending on the status of the territories, their residents may be American citizens, although with less voting rights than the residents of the fifty states. In the history of the United States, many former territories eventually became states, while others became independent nations. Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States. By NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons