The U.S. Virgin Islands is an archipelago of approximately 50 islands and cays in the northeastern Caribbean, about 40 miles east of Puerto Rico. Three main islands, St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix, hold virtually the entire population of approximately 100,000 people. A fourth island, Water Island in Charlotte Amalie Harbor, is much smaller with only a few hundred residents. The islands are the easternmost point of the United States, and their position at the meeting of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea gives them some of the clearest, most turquoise water in the world.

The USVI has a layered history unlike any other U.S. territory. It is the only territory purchased from a European power in the 20th century, bought from Denmark in 1917 for $25 million in gold. Before American ownership, it spent 245 years as a Danish colony, a period that left an architectural legacy, a cultural character, and a civic holiday, Emancipation Day, commemorating an 1848 act of freedom that preceded Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation by 15 years. Before Danish rule, the islands passed through Spanish, Dutch, French, and English hands in the free-for-all of early Caribbean colonialism.

Today the USVI is best known to most Americans as a beach destination, and its beaches, particularly Magens Bay on St. Thomas and Trunk Bay on St. John, are among the finest in the Caribbean. But beneath the postcard surface is a territory grappling with the same fundamental questions as the other four inhabited territories: the democratic deficit of citizens without a presidential vote, an economy vulnerable to external shocks, and the long-unresolved question of what political relationship with the United States best serves its people.