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Culture
Culture
The United States is a multicultural nation, home to a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values.
There is no "American" ethnicity; aside from the now small Native American and Native Hawaiian populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors immigrated within the past five centuries.
The culture held in common by most Americans is referred to as mainstream American culture, a Western culture largely derived from the traditions of Western European migrants, beginning with the early English and Dutch settlers.
German, Irish, and Scottish cultures have also been very influential.
Certain cultural attributes of Mandé and Wolof slaves from West Africa were adopted by the American mainstream; based more on the traditions of Central African Bantu slaves, a distinct African American culture developed that would also deeply affect the mainstream.
Westward expansion integrated the Creoles and Cajuns of Louisiana and the Hispanos of the Southwest and brought close contact with the culture of Mexico.
Large-scale immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Southern and Eastern Europe introduced many new cultural elements.
More recent immigration from Asia and especially Latin America has had broad impact.
The resulting cultural mix may be described as a homogeneous melting pot, or as a pluralistic salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics.
While the mainstream culture holds that the United States is a classless society, scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting socialization, language, and values.
The American middle and professional class has initiated many contemporary social trends such as modern feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism.
Americans' self-images, social viewpoints, and cultural expectations are associated with their occupations to an unusually close degree.
While Americans tend greatly to value socioeconomic achievement, being ordinary or average is generally seen as a positive attribute.
Though the American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants, some analysts find that the United States has less social mobility than Western Europe and Canada.
Women now mostly work outside the home and receive a majority of bachelor's degrees.
In 2005, 28% of households were married childless couples, the most common arrangement.
The extension of marital rights to homosexuals is contentious—several states permit civil unions in lieu of marriage.
Between 2003 and 2008, the supreme courts of Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut ruled those states' bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional.
The California ruling was superseded by a state constitutional amendment, approved by voters in November 2008, that defines marriage as between a man and woman.
Between 2004 and 2008, voters in 13 other states approved similar constitutional bans on same-sex marriage.
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.
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.
American screen actors like John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe have become iconic figures, while producer/entrepreneur Walt Disney was a leader in both animated film and movie merchandising.
The major film studios of Hollywood have produced the most commercially successful movies in history, such as Star Wars (1977) and Titanic (1997), and the products of Hollywood today dominate the global film industry.
Americans are the heaviest television viewers in the world, and the average viewing time continues to rise, reaching five hours a day in 2006.
The four major broadcast networks are all commercial entities.
Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercialized, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.
Aside from web portals and web search engines, the most popular websites are eBay, MySpace, Amazon.com, The New York Times, and Apple Inc.
Twelve million Americans keep a blog.
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, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll emerged between the 1920s and 1950s.
In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's greatest songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk.
More recent American creations include hip hop and house music.
American pop stars such as Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities.
Literature, philosophy, and the arts
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth 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.
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." .
Eleven U.S.
citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Toni Morrison in 1993.
Ernest Hemingway, the 1954 Nobel laureate, is often named as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.
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 Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau, established the first major American philosophical movement.
After the Civil War, Charles Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism.
In the 20th century, the work of W.
V.
Quine and Richard Rorty brought analytic philosophy to the fore of U.S.
academics.
Ayn Rand's objectivism won mainstream popularity.
In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism.
The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S.
art scene.
Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new styles, displaying a highly individualistic sensibility.
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.
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 largely overlooked at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S.
composer in the classical tradition; other experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created an American approach to classical composition.
Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a unique 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.
Superman, the quintessential comic book superhero, has become an American icon.
Food
Mainstream American culinary arts are similar to those in other Western countries.
Wheat is the primary cereal grain.
Traditional American cuisine uses ingredients such as turkey, white-tailed deer venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup, indigenous foods employed by Native Americans and early European settlers.
Slow-cooked pork and beef barbecue, crab cakes, potato chips, and chocolate chip cookies are distinctively American styles.
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.
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.
Americans generally prefer coffee to tea.
Marketing by U.S.
industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Americans' caloric intake rose 24%; frequent dining at fast food outlets is associated with what health officials call the American "obesity epidemic." Highly sweetened soft drinks are widely popular; sugared beverages account for 9% of the average American's caloric intake.
Sports
Since the late 19th century, baseball has been regarded as the national sport; American football, basketball, and ice hockey are the country's three other leading professional team sports.
College football and basketball attract large audiences.
Football is now by several measures the most popular spectator sport.
Boxing and horse racing were once the most watched individual sports, but they have been eclipsed by golf and auto racing, particularly NASCAR.
Soccer is played widely at the youth and amateur levels and is growing in popularity as a professional spectator sport.
Tennis and many outdoor sports are popular as well.
While most major U.S.
sports have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions.
Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.
Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States.
The United States has won 2,301 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 216 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most.
Source: CIA Factbook, Wikipedia
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