The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Have you ever filled out a form online where you had to select a country,

and you notice that one of the country options was United States

minor outlying islands. If you have you might have wondered what are those islands?

Who lives there and why are those islands considered so minor.

Learn more about the United States minor outlying islands and how they ended up on almost

every drop-down list of countries on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. I'll start off talking about the U.S. minor outlying islands by explaining what they are not. These islands are not the

populated US territories. So in other words it is not Puerto Rico, not Guam, not American Samoa, not the U.S. Virgin Islands, or not the

Northern Mariana Islands. These territories are all categorized separately.

The minor outlying islands specifically refers to nine islands which are all U.S.

territories. Eight of them are in the Pacific and one is in the Caribbean. These are sorts of the crumbs of the United States. The

Caribbean island is called Navassa. It's about two square miles in area and it's

located roughly between Haiti, Jamaica and Cuba.

There has never been a long-term human presence on the island.

There is some guano mining in the 19th century and a lighthouse in the early 20th century,

and that's about it.

The other eight islands are all in the Pacific. They are

Baker Island, Howlin Island, Jarvis Island, Johnson Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Atoll, Palmyra Atoll and Wake Island.

All of these are separate individual territories of the United States.

All eight of them are coral Atolls, with the exception of Midway Island, all of them are located approximately west to

southwest of Hawaii. Midway is actually on the Hawaiian Island archipelago, but it's not part

of the state of Hawaii.

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