Liberia is a country on the west coast of Africa, by the Atlantic Ocean. It sits next to Sierra Leone, and also next to Guinea and Ivory Coast. The capital is Monrovia. English is the official language, which is unusual in that part of Africa — though actually people at home speak many other languages too, and the English you hear there is its own kind, not schoolbook American or British. The name is not an old local name. It was built from a Latin word for “free” plus an ending that means “place,” so it was meant to say “land of the free.” In 1822, people from the United States began a new community there for Black people who had been enslaved in the American South and then set free. The modern country grew from that. That story is mixed and painful: the families who came from America ran the country for a long time, while the many groups who already lived there had far less power. Later came terrible civil war, from 1989 to 1997, and fighting again until 2003, when President Charles Taylor was forced to leave. In 2014 the population was given as about four million. The flag even looks a little like the United States flag, because of that American start. Liberia is a proper name, so it takes a capital L. You meet it in news, maps, and history.