United States
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The United States of America (USA), most often referred to simply as the United States or US, is a democratic republic in North America. Established in the 1770s as a collection of break-away English colonies, the United States has since eclipsed its mother nation and most other nations in terms of relative economic, political, military and arguably cultural importance. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union left the United States as the sole superpower. Because of this, the United States has often been accused of economic, political, military and cultural imperialism.
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Culture
The United States is home to many cultures and a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.<ref name="DD"/><ref name="Society in Focus">Thompson, William; Hickey, Joseph (2005). Society in Focus. Boston: Pearson. ISBN 0-205-41365-X.</ref> Aside from the relatively small Native American and Native Hawaiian populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors settled or immigrated within the past five centuries.<ref>Fiorina, Morris P.; Peterson, Paul E. (2000). The New American Democracy. London: Longman, p. 97. ISBN 0-321-07058-5.</ref> Mainstream American culture is a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as traditions brought by slaves from Africa.<ref name="DD"/><ref>Holloway, Joseph E. (2005). Africanisms in American Culture, 2d ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 18–38. ISBN 0-253-34479-4. Johnson, Fern L. (1999). Speaking Culturally: Language Diversity in the United States. Thousand Oaks, Calif., London, and New Delhi: Sage, p. 116. ISBN 0-8039-5912-5.</ref> More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing melting pot, and a heterogeneous salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.<ref name="DD"/>
Core American culture was established by Protestant British colonists and shaped by the frontier settlement process, with the traits derived passed down to descendants and transmitted to immigrants through assimilation. Americans have traditionally been characterized by a strong work ethic, competitiveness, and individualism, as well as a unifying belief in an "American Creed" emphasizing liberty, equality, private property, democracy, rule of law, and a preference for limited government.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Americans are extremely charitable by global standards. According to a 2006 British study, Americans gave 1.67% of GDP to charity, more than any other nation studied, more than twice the second place British figure of 0.73%, and around twelve times the French figure of 0.14%.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{
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American culture is considered the most individualistic in the world.<ref>{{
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}}</ref> The American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants.<ref name="socialmobility">{{
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}}</ref> Social mobility is actually lower than other high-income countries, with the OECD ranking the U.S. 10th behind France, Germany, Canada, Australia, and the Nordic countries,<ref name="socialmobility"/><ref>Dave Serchuk. Happy Country=Social Mobility? Forbes. 12/7/2011</ref><ref>Gould, Elise (October 10, 2012). "U.S. lags behind peer countries in mobility." Economic Policy Institute. Retrieved July 15, 2013.</ref><ref name=CAP>CAP: Understanding Mobility in America. April 26, 2006</ref> This has been partly attributed to the depth of American poverty, which leaves poor children starting especially far behind.<ref name=DeParle>DeParle, Jason (January 4, 2012). Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs. The New York Times. Retrieved September 8, 2013.</ref> Such studies are based on relative comparisons within each nation rather than absolute wealth earned throughout one's life, the U.S. having both a more stretched-out income distribution and a higher median income than those nations.<ref name=Schneider>{{
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}}</ref> While the mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.<ref>Template:Cite book {{
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Americans' self-images, social viewpoints, and cultural expectations are associated with their occupations to an unusually close degree.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> While Americans tend greatly to value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is generally seen as a positive attribute.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Popular media
The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope. The next year saw the first commercial screening of a projected film, also in New York, and the United States was in the forefront of sound film's development in the following decades. Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around Hollywood, California.Template:Citation needed
Director D. W. Griffith was central to the development of film grammar and Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time.<ref>Village Voice: 100 Best Films of the 20th century (2001). Filmsite.</ref><ref>{{
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In 1938, Superman, the quintessential comic book superhero of DC Comics, developed into an American icon.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Additional comic book publishers include; Marvel Comics, created in 1939, Image Comics, created in 1992, Dark Horse Comics, created in 1986, and numerous small press comic book companies. In celebration of the industry's success, annual comic conventions take place at The San Diego Comic-Con International, which has an attendance of over 130,000 visitors.
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}}</ref> Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger, eBay, and Craigslist.<ref name="alexa-topsitesus">{{
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Template:Clarify The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s.<ref name="autogenerated2001">Biddle, Julian (2001). What Was Hot!: Five Decades of Pop Culture in America. New York: Citadel, p. ix. ISBN 0-8065-2311-5.</ref>
Template:Clarify Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk. More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities.<ref name="autogenerated2001"/>
Literature, philosophy, and the arts
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet.<ref>Bloom, Harold. 1999. Emily Dickinson. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House. p. 9. ISBN 0-7910-5106-4.</ref> A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel".<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> [[File:Mark Twain, Brady-Handy photo portrait, Feb 7, 1871, cropped.jpg|thumb|150px|Mark Twain, famous American author and humorist.]]
Eleven U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Toni Morrison in 1993. William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century.<ref>Quinn, Edward (2006). A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms. Infobase, p. 361. ISBN 0-8160-6243-9. Seed, David (2009). A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, p. 76. ISBN 1-4051-4691-5. Meyers, Jeffrey (1999). Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Da Capo, p. 139. ISBN 0-306-80890-0.</ref> Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.
The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty, and later Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of American philosophical academia. John Rawls and Robert Nozick led a revival of political philosophy. Cornel West and Judith Butler have led a continental tradition in American philosophical academia. Globally influential Chicago school economists like Milton Friedman, James M. Buchanan, and Thomas Sowell have transcended discipline to impact various fields in social and political philosophy.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The realist paintings of Thomas Eakins are now widely celebrated. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene.<ref>Brown, Milton W. (1988 1963). The Story of the Armory Show. New York: Abbeville. ISBN 0-89659-795-4.</ref> Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new, individualistic styles. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.
[[File:Times Square 1-2.JPG|thumb|Times Square in New York City, the hub of the Broadway Theater District.]] One of the first major promoters of American theater was impresario P. T. Barnum, who began operating a lower Manhattan entertainment complex in 1841. The team of Harrigan and Hart produced a series of popular musical comedies in New York starting in the late 1870s. In the 20th century, the modern musical form emerged on Broadway; the songs of musical theater composers such as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim have become pop standards. Playwright Eugene O'Neill won the Nobel literature prize in 1936; other acclaimed U.S. dramatists include multiple Pulitzer Prize winners Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and August Wilson.
Though little known at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition, while experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music. Choreographers Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham helped create modern dance, while George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins were leaders in 20th-century ballet. Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Ansel Adams. The newspaper comic strip and the comic book are both U.S. innovations.
Food
Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain. Traditional American cuisine uses indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup, which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers.Template:Citation needed
Slow-cooked pork and beef barbecue, crab cakes, potato chips, and chocolate chip cookies are distinctively American foods. Soul food, developed by African slaves, is popular around the South and among many African Americans elsewhere. Syncretic cuisines such as Louisiana Creole, Cajun, and Tex-Mex are regionally important. The confectionery industry in the United States includes The Hershey Company, the largest chocolate manufacturer in North America. In addition, Frito-Lay, a subsidiary of PepsiCo, is the largest globally distributed snack food company in the world. The United States has a vast Breakfast cereal industry that includes brands such as Kellog's and General Mills.Template:Citation needed
Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed.<ref name="IFT">{{
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The American fast food industry, the world's largest, pioneered the drive-through format in the 1930s. Fast food consumption has sparked health concerns. During the 1980s and 1990s, Americans' caloric intake rose 24%;<ref name="IFT" /> frequent dining at fast food outlets is associated with what public health officials call the American "obesity epidemic".<ref>Boslaugh, Sarah (2010). "Obesity Epidemic", in Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices, ed. Roger Chapman. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, pp. 413–14. ISBN 978-0-7656-1761-3.</ref> Highly sweetened soft drinks are widely popular, and sugared beverages account for nine percent of American caloric intake.<ref>{{
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See also
- American culture
- Disneyfication
- Cultural imperialism
- Visual arts of the United States
- African American culture
- American cinema
- American literature
- American popular culture
- American music and "black music"
- American cinema and Hollywood
