Identification: The name "America" is often used to refer to the United States, but until the political formation of the United States after the Revolutionary War, this designation referred to South America only. Contemporary use of the term to refer to the United States underlines that country's political and economic dominance in the western hemisphere. Such use of this designation is impolitic from the perspective of Canadians and Latin Americans.
The United States has an Anglo majority that is politically and economically dominant. One of the defining characteristics of the country as a nation is its legacy of slavery and the persistence of economic and social inequalities based on race.
U.S. culture has significant regional inflections. Most Americans are aware of these differences despite the fact that these regions have experienced economic transformations and that Americans are a mobile people who often leave their regions of origin.
The Northeast is densely populated. Its extensive corridors of urbanization have been called the national "megalopolis." Once a leader in technology and industry, the Northeast has been overtaken in those areas by California's Silicon Valley.
The Midwest is both rural and industrial. It is the home of the family farm and is the corn belt and breadbasket of the nation. In the Great Lakes area of the upper Midwest, the automobile and steel industries were central to community and economy. As those industries declined, the upper Midwest became known as the rust belt.
The South was shaped by its secession from the Union before the Civil War and is associated with slavery and with subsequent battles over civil rights for African-Americans. In contemporary terms, these are the sunshine states, retirement havens, and new economic frontiers.
The West, the last national frontier, is associated with national dreams and myths of unlimited opportunity and individualism. It has the nation's most open landscapes.
California, along with the southwestern states were ceded to the United States by Mexico in 1848 after the Mexican-American War. The Southwest is distinctive because of its historical ties to colonial Spain, its Native American populations, and its regional cuisine, which has been influenced by Native American and Spanish cultures.
Location and Geography: The United States is the world's fourth largest country, with an area of 3,679,192 square miles. It includes fifty states and one federal district, where the capital, D.C., is located. Its forty eight contiguous states are situated in the middle of North America. The mainland United States borders Canada to the north and Mexico, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Straits of Florida to the south. The western border meets the Pacific Ocean, and to the east lies the Atlantic Ocean.
Alaska and Hawaii are not joined to the other forty-eight states. Alaska is at the extreme north of North America, between the Pacific and Arctic oceans, and is bordered by Canada to the east. The island chain of Hawaii is situated in the east-central Pacific Ocean, about two thousand miles southwest of San Francisco.
Although Americans generally do not consider themselves an imperial or colonial power, the country has a number of commonwealths and territories, most of which were acquired through military conquest. These territories include Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean basin and Guam, American Samoa, and Wake island in the Pacific.
The physical environment is extremely diverse and often spectacular. Alaska's glaciers coexist with flowering tundras that bloom in the arctic summer. The forests of the Pacific Northwest and northern California are known for giant ancient trees such as Sitka spruce and sequoia (redwoods). Niagara Falls, Yellowstone National Park, and the Grand Canyon are a few of the better-known landscapes.
The physical regions of the country overlap both national boundaries and cultural regions. For example, the Atlantic coastal plain extends from New England to Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. It is characterized by flooded river valleys that form major estuaries, such as the Chesapeake Bay.
The Appalachian Mountains span two cultural regions. Located to the west of the Atlantic coastal plain, they extend from the Middle Atlantic state of New York to the southeastern state of Georgia. The Appalachians are an old, eroded mountain range that is now heavily forested. It is possible to traverse the entire range by walking the two thousand mile Appalachian Trail.
The interior lowlands area also crosses regions and national borders. It includes the Midwestern corn belt and the Great Plains wheat-growing region. The Great Plains section of the interior lowlands stretches into Canada.
The Western Cordillera is part of a mountain chain that stretches from Chile in South America to Alaska. The highest peak in the country, Mount McKinley (Denali), is in the Western Cordillera in Alaska. The Western Intermontane Plateau, or Great Basin, crosses from the mountain states into the west.
Major navigable inland waterways include the Mississippi River, which cuts north to south through the east-central part of the country; the Great lakes in the upper Midwest, the largest freshwater lake group in the world; and the Saint Lawrence River.
The physical environment has had significant effects on regional cultures. The rich topsoil of the Midwest made it an important agricultural area; its rivers and lakes made it central to industrial development. However, settlers significantly transformed their environments, recreating the landscapes they had left behind in Europe. The vast prairies of the Great Plains, which were characterized by numerous species of tall grasses, have been transformed by irrigation and modern agricultural methods into continuous fields of soybeans and wheat. In the West, a series of pipelines and dams transformed Los Angeles and its desert surroundings into a giant oasis.
American settlers were not the first to transform these landscapes; native American groups also altered the lands on which they depended. Fire was used in hunting, and this expanded the prairie; irrigation was used in settled communities that practiced agriculture; and maize, a crop that cannot grow without human manipulation, was a staple crop.
The idea that the environment shapes culture or character does have cultural currency. Over a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the American frontier experience had been instrumental in forming the rugged, independent, and democratic national character. Wilderness and democracy are common aspects of American symbolism.
Demography: The United States has a population of over 280 million, but it is relatively sparsely populated. The most populous state, California, with 33,871,648 inhabitants, contrasts with Wyoming, which has only 493,782 residents.
These population figures reflect the fact that the United states is an urban nation. Over 75 percent of the inhabitants live in cities, among whom more than 50 percent are estimated to be suburban. Population growth is at below-replacement levels unless immigration is taken into account.
One of the most significant facts about the population is that its average age is on the rise. The baby boomers born in the period from the end of World War II until the early 1960s are beginning to get old.
Life expectancy is seventythree years for white men and seventy nine years for white women. African-American men have a life expectancy of sixty-seven years; in inner-city areas, the average life expectancy of African-American males is much lower. Infant mortality rates are higher among African-Americans than among whites.
U.S. Census categories identify populations according to whether they are of European descent. Whites constitute a large majority at about 70 percent of the population. According to current census figures, in the year 2000 the largest minority was blacks, who number about 35 million, or 13 percent of the population.
The Hispanic population, which includes primarily people of Mexican and Cuban descent, is estimated to number 31 million, or 12 percent of the population. Latinos are expected to become the largest minority group early in the twenty-first century.
The Asian population (including Pacific Islanders) is defined as people of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Indian, Korean, and Vietnamese origin. It is estimated that there are eleven million Asians, making up about 4 percent of the population.
The Native American population, which includes natives of Alaska such as the Inuit and Aleuts, is estimated to consist of over two million people, slightly over 1 percent of the population. Roughly a third of Native Americans live on reservations, trust lands, territories, and mother lands under Native American jurisdiction.
Linguistic Affiliation: There is no official national language. If English is its unofficial first language, Spanish is its unofficial second language. The United States ranks fifth in the world in the number of Spanish speakers.
Standard English is the language Americans are expected to speak. Within the social hierarchy of American English dialects, Standard English can be described as the exemplar of acceptable for correct usage based on the model of cultural, economic, and political leaders. There is no clear-cut definition of what Standard English is, and it is often defined by what it is not. For example, it often is contrasted with the type of English spoken by black Americans.
Standard English grammar and pronunciation are taught by English teachers in public schools. Like whiteness, this implies a neutral, normative and nonethnic position. However, most Americans do not speak Standard English; instead, they speak a range of class, ethnic, and regional variants.
Spoken English includes many dialects that have been influenced by Native Americans, immigrants, and slaves. These languages include not only Dutch, German, and Scandinavian, Asian, and African languages, but less widely spoken languages such as Basque, Yiddish, and Greek. Thus, spoken English reflects the nation's immigration and history.
As linguistic diversity has increased, and particularly as Spanish has become more widely spoken, language has become an important aspect of the debate over the meaning or nature of American culture. Linguistic and cultural diversity is accepted in states such as New York and Illinois, where Spanish bilingual education is mandated in the public schools. In California, however, where tensions between Anglos and Mexican immigrants run high, bilingual education has been abolished in the public school systems. State laws prohibit even bilingual personnel from using Spanish with Spanish-speaking patients in hospitals or with students in schools.
Bilingual education is not new. In the nineteenth century, Germans outnumbered all other immigrant groups except for all the people from the British Isles combined. With the exception of Spanish speakers in the Southwest, at no other time has foreign language been so widely spoken. German-only newspapers and German and bilingual public schools were found throughout the Midwest and Oregon and Colorado and elsewhere from the mid-nineteenth century until World War I, when anti-German sentiment resulted in the elimination of German instruction in public schools.
Other languages used in the press and in public schools included Yiddish, Swedish, and Norwegian. Thus, proponents of English only, who claim that bilingual education should not be provided to Spanish-speaking immigrants because earlier immigrants did not have this advantage, overlook the fact that those immigrants often were schooled in their native languages.
Education was important in spreading English as a standard language. Public schools played a major role; by 1870, every state in the country had committed itself to compulsory education. The percentage of foreign-born persons who were unable to speak English peaked 31 percent in 1910, by 1920 had decreased to 15 percent, and by 1930 had fallen less than 9 percent. Among Native Americans, English was enforced by the establishment by the Bureau of Indian Affairs of compulsory boarding schools for school-age children. Contemporary Native American speech patterns can be traced to that experience.
Symbolism: The flag is perhaps the most potent and contested national symbol. Made up of stripes symbolizing the original thirteen colonies and fifty stars representing the fifty states, it is displayed on national holidays such as Veterans Day, Memorial Day and Independence Day. Public places and businesses raise the flag as a matter of course. Individuals who display the flag in their homes or yards make an explicit statement about their patriotic connection to the nation.
The flag is also employed frequently as a symbol of protest. In the nineteenth century, northern abolitionists hoisted the flag upside down to protest the return of an escaped slave to his southern owner, and upside-down flags continue to be used as a sign of protest. The use of the stars and stripes design of the flag in clothing, whether for fashion, or protest, is controversial and is considered by some people to be akin to treason and by others to be an individual right in a state that upholds individual rights.
Nationalism and community solidarity frequently are expressed through sports. In the Olympic games and victors are heralded for their American qualities of determination, individualism, and competitiveness. In the same way, football games connect fans to one another and to their communities through a home team. The game expresses the important value of competition: unlike soccer, American football games can never end in a tie. Football also reflects cultural ideals about sex and gender.
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