United States Culture
The Culture of the United States is a Western culture, and has been developing since long before the United States became a country. Today the United States is a diverse and multi-cultural nation.
Its chief early influence was British culture, due to colonial ties with the British that spread the English language, legal system and other cultural inheritances. Other important influences came from other parts of Europe, especially countries from which large numbers immigrated such as Ireland, Germany, Poland, and Italy; the Native American peoples; Africa, especially the western part, from which came the ancestors of most African Americans; and young groups of immigrants. American culture also has shared influence on the cultures of its neighbors in the New World.
The United States has traditionally been known as a melting pot, but recent left leaning academics tend towards cultural diversity, pluralism and the image of a salad bowl rather than a melting pot. Due to the extent of American culture there are many integrated but unique subcultures within the United States. The cultural affiliations an individual in the United States may have commonly depend on social class, political orientation and a multitude of demographic characteristics such as ancestral traditions, sex and sexual orientation. The strongest influences on American culture came from northern European cultures, most prominently from Germany, Ireland and England. There are great regional and subcultural differences, making American culture mostly heterogeneous.
Cultural Differences Among the States
Variation in the majority traditions occur due to class, ancestral, religious, regional and other groups of people. Cultural differences exist in the various regions of the United States like New England, Mid-Atlantic States, Southern United States, Midwestern United States, Southwest United States, Western United States and Pacific Northwestern United States pages. The West Coast of the continental U.S. consisting of California, Oregon, and the state of Washington is also sometimes referred to as the Left Coast, indicating its political orientation and tendency towards liberal norms, folkways and values. Strong cultural differences have a long history in the U.S. with the southern slave society in the antebellum period serving as a prime example. Not only social, but also economic tensions between the Northern and Southern states were so severe that they eventually caused the South to declare itself an independent nation, the Confederate States of America; thus provoking the American civil war.
Examples of the great variations in norms, values and beliefs found across the United States can be found in the legal policies of some states. The state of California for example has passed environmental reforms and regulations rivaling those of Western Europe. With recent legislation California has become the only part of the United States with mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emission. Policy regarding human sexuality further indicated tremendous differences across the nation. In early 2003, 14 U.S. states had sodomy laws, before the Supreme court declared them unconstitutional. Roughly one year later Massachusetts allowed couples to obtain same-sex matrimony licenses. As laws represent a society's most profound and strictly held social norms and mores, great variations in laws reflect cultural variations as well.
Language
The United States currently does not have an official language, but English is spoken by about 82% of the population as a native language. The variety of English spoken in the United States is known as American English; together with Canadian English it makes up the group of dialects known as North American English. 96% of the population of the U.S. speaks English "well" or "very well". On May 18, 2006, the Senate voted on an amendment to an immigration reform bill that would declare English the national language of the United States. The immigration reform bill itself, S. 2611, was passed in the Senate on May 25, 2006, and now has to go back to the House of Representatives in conference to make sure amendments are agreed upon.
The Spanish language is the second-most common language in the country, spoken by almost 30 million people (or 12% of the population) in 2005. In Puerto Rico, both Spanish and English have the status of official language, and in New Mexico both languages have widespread usage. The United States holds the world's fifth largest Spanish-speaking population, outnumbered only by Mexico, Spain, Argentina, and Colombia. The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is predominantly Spanish-speaking. New Spain was steadily eroded in territory by Mestizo and American forces, from the Mexican-American War to the Spanish-American War. Although many new Latin American immigrants are less than fluent in English, second-generation Hispanic Americans nearly all speak English fluently, while only about half still speak Spanish.
People of German ancestry make up the largest single ethnic group in the United States and the German language ranks fifth. Italian, Polish, and Greek are still widely spoken among populations descending from immigrants from those countries in the early 20th century, but the use of these languages is dwindling as older generations die out. Starting in the 1970s and continuing until the mid 1990s, many people from the Soviet Union and later its constituent republics such as Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Uzbekistan have immigrated to the United States, causing Russian to become one of the minority languages in the United States.
Tagalog and Vietnamese have over one million speakers in the United States, almost entirely within recent immigrant populations.
There are also a small population of Native Americans who still speak their native languages, but these populations are dropping and the languages are almost never widely used outside of reservations. Hawaiian, although having few native speakers, is still used at the state level in Hawaii along with English. All other languages besides the English language are usually learned from immigrant ancestors or learned through some form of education.
Ethnicity
Race in the United States is based on physical characteristics and skin color and has played an essential part in shaping American society even before the nation's conception. Until the civil rights movement of the 1960s racial minorities in the United States faced discrimination and social as well as economic marginalization. Today the US Department of Commerce's Bureau of the Census recognized four races, Native American or American Indian, African American, Asian and White. Hispanic Americans do not technically according to the US Governement, constitute a race but rather an ethnic group. During the 2000 US Census Whites made up 75.1% of the population with those being Hispanic or Latino constituting the nation's prevalent minority with 12.5% of the population. African Americans made up 12.3% of the total population, 3.6% were Asian American and 0.7% were Native American.
Until the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on December 6th 1865 the United States was a slave society. While the northern states had outlawed slavery in their territory in the late 18th and early 19th century their industrial economies relied on the raw materials produced by slave labor. Following the Reconstruction period in the 1870s, Southern states initialized an apartheid regulated by Jim Crow laws that provided for legal segregation. Lynching occurred throughout the US until the 1930s, continuing well into the civil rights movement in the South. Asian Americans were also marginalized during much of US history. Between 1882 and 1943 the United States government instituted the Chinese Exclusion Act which prohibited Chinese immigrants from entering the nation. During the second world war roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans, 62% of whom were US citizens, were imprisoned in Japanese internment camps. Hispanic American also faced segregation and other types of discrimination. Despite being considered White in many states such as California, Hispanics were regularly subject to second class citizen status.
Largely as a result of being de jure or de facto excluded and marginalized from so-called mainstream society, racial minorities in the United States developed their own unique sub-cultures. During the 1920s for example, Harlem, New York became home to the Harlem Renaissance. Music styles such as Jazz, Blues and Rap as well as numerous folk-songs originated within the realms of African American culture. Chinatowns can be found in many cities across the nation and Asian cuisine has become a common staple in America. The Hispanic community has also had a dramatic impact on American culture. Today, Catholics are the largest religious denomination in the United States and out-number Protestants in the Southwest and California. Mariachi music and Mexican cuisine are commonly found throughout the Southwest with some Latino dishes are found anywhere in the nation. Economic discrepancies and de-facto segregation, however, continue and is a prominent feature of mundane life in the United States. While Asian Americans have prospered and have a median household income and educational attainment far exceeding that of Whites, the same cannot be said for the other racial minorities. African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans have considerably lower income and education than do White Americans. In 2005 the median household income of Whites was 62.5% higher than that of African American, nearly one-quarter of whom live below the poverty line. Furthermore 46.9% of homicide victims in the United States are African American indicating the many severe socio-economic problems African Americans and minorities in general continue to face in the twenty-first century.
