2009 Samoa State Quarter

The American Samoa quarter is the fourth in the 2009 District of Columbia and U.S. Territories Quarters Program. American Samoa—known as the heart of Polynesia—is a group of five islands and two coral atolls in the South Pacific, approximately 2,300 miles southwest of Hawaii and 2,700 miles northeast of Australia. Contacts with Europeans began in the early 1700s and intensified with the arrival of English missionaries and traders in the 1830s. Under the Treaty of Berlin in 1899, the United Kingdom and Germany gave the United States rights and claims over the area, and it officially became a United States territory in 1929 when Congress ratified deeds of cession dating back to 1900 and 1904.