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Blacks with 16%. So the question “Who then is the American, this new man?” cannot be answered simply or conclusively.
At best, we can say that an American is someone who meets the legal requirements of citizenship and who considers himself or herself to be an American. And any person born, on American soil automatically has the right to American citizenship. Significantly, when looking at what it means to be an American, whether legally or emotionally, the older categories used to define nationality often taken for granted in other countries – race, religion, language, parents’ ancestry –have become relatively unimportant in America.
Questions for Discussion
1. Why is the USA called “a nation of diversity”? 2. Who do you think the term “American” refers to? 3. What is the official language of the USA? 4. Is it possible to make generalizations about Americans/Russians because they are so diverse? 5. What do the “melting pot” and “pizza” views of America imply? 6. Can all ethnic groups freely participate in some areas of professional and cultural life? 7. What barriers prevent some ethnic groups from full integrating into the mainstream of American life? 8. Is it important to maintain your own language and cultural traditions in an alien world? 9. Why is it important to understand cultural values? 10. Which pattern is your country like: “melting pot,” “salad bowl,” or “pizza”? 11. What different ethnic groups are there in your country? Where do they settle? How are they different from the majority of people in your country: language? clothing? food? customs? 12. What effect do different ethnic groups have on a country and its culture?
Chapter 2 Composition of the Country
1.Do you think people all over the USA are basically the same or basically different?
2.What accounts for their being the same/different?
The US is too large and varied a country to sum up in a short explanation. To understand some of its differences, it can be divided into several regions. Each is distinctive from the others economically, geographically, and, in some ways, culturally.
Even the name “United States” incorporates the fact that the country is made up of a variety of discrete units, the first thirteen existed as separate colonies of the British Empire before the Revolutionary War. Today besides the 50 states, the country is further subdivided into counties, townships, and cities, often with crosscutting political subdivisions. Recent interest in regions of America has been primarily concerned with cultural regions, that is, with regions defined by the historical experience and qualities of the people that make up the population.
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Look at the Northeast section of the map which covers New England and the MidAtlantic Region where Boston and New York are the largest cities.
NEW ENGLAND
includes the states of Maine (Augusta), New Hampshire(Concord), Vermont (Montpelier), Massachusetts(Boston), Rhode Island (Providence), nearly all of Connecticut (Hartford), upstate New York, and a narrow strip of Northern Pennsylvania.
Centered on Boston, region’s largest city and port, New England had been established in the early 1600 by deeply religious people anxious to escape the domination and corruption they found in England. Their colonies and communities were to be an example to the world. Education, work, family, community, and church were central. Of course, later generations strayed far from such ideal, but tradition has lasted in many ways and made New England different from the rest of the country. This is the area occupied by New Englanders in 1800 and stamped with their particular culture. There are many pretty villages where white, wooden houses and a church are built around a village green. Today some villages are museums. Northern Maine is wild, unspoiled country. There is lots of wildlife here, including black bears and moose. To go with its mountains, New Hampshire is a state of myriad lakes, steepled villages, and rolling lowland edging the Atlantic. Vermont was the first state in which all men could vote. This state is famous for its maple syrup. You can find out how syrup is made at Maple Grove Museum. In Connecticut (Constitution State) Samuel Colt invented the Colt.45 revolver that was called “the gun that won the West” because settlers used it to defend the Indians. Massachusetts is a birthplace of John F. Kennedy, the 35th President, and the US first college - Harvard. The facilities of its many educational institutions have made the area a center for electronic and engineering firms.
It was in Massachusetts that James Naismith, a teacher at Springfield Training School, invented a game called basketball. It was first played in the Springfield gym in 1891. They used a soccer ball and put peach baskets on the gym wall - that is why Naismith called the game basketball.
Rhode Island’s nickname is Little Rhody). The origin of the name comes from Greek island of Rhodes). It is the smallest state in the US (3,14 square kilometers =1,21 miles), but it has three times the population of giant Alaska. It was the last colony to become a state. The name ‘Rhode Island’ is misleading – it is not an island at all. It is made of 36 islands and a mainland.
The region responds more than others to liberal and internationalist appeals. Its elite continues to have a sense of mission and represent the idealism of the country. However, the fierce democratic attitudes of the first effective settlement were swept
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away in the urban culture. Today the region’s cultures have a more European or English class system than the other parts of the country.
New Englanders are referred to as “Yankee”. The word may have been taken from the Dutch, as a corruption of Jan Kees (“John Cheese”). The suggestion is that Jan Kees was a nonce name for a Dutchman in America, rather like John Bull for an Englishman, but the historical evidence is slight. Different people use this word in different meanings. For a person from the south of the United States, “Yankee” means a Northerner. For a foreigner, “Yankee” means an American. But the exact meaning of this word is a New Englander.
The peculiar character of the New England Yankee was shaped by the history and the geography of the place. New England was settled in the 1600s by Puritans who had very strict rules about the way people lived. The Yankee has a reputation for being honest but shrewd, realistic, practical, non-talkative, thrifty and independent. There are different stories which illustrate the realistic and non-talkative character of a Yankee. One story tells us about a tourist who asked a Yankee whether he had lived in the same village all his life. “Not yet,” was the answer.
As we know, the climate on New England is cold and there’s a lot of snow and ice in winter there. Here’s another story that illustrates the business shrewdness of the Yankee.
Frederic Tudor, from Boston, remembered the joke he had used to hear when he was young: “If ice were a crop, New England would be wealthy.” Many years later, he worked out a way how to break and store up ice and send it to the south. Tudor became a very rich man. The Yankees like to speak about the special role that New England has played in United States history. The American Revolution began in New England, because the Yankees were among the strongest supporters of independence. In the 19th century, it was New England Yankees who led the fight against slavery in America.
Questions
1. What does the term “USA” imply and what units is the USA subdivided into? 2.
What states does New England include? 3.What culture is the region stamped with? 4.
What is the meaning of the word “Yankee”? 5. Where did the American Revolution begin? 6. What is the largest city of the region? 7. What state is made of 36 islands? 8. What state houses Harvard University?
THE MID-ATLANTIC REGION
is densely populated. From Boston to Washington, D.C., it is 719 km. Along this narrow coastal strip more than 20% of the population live in less than 2% of the country’s land
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area. It was originally a center of immigration, particularly of Germans. Centering on New York and Philadelphia, was populated by a much more cosmopolitan mix of peoples – the Dutch, who had ruled New York from the1620s to 1664, Germans who settled in large numbers near Philadelphia before 1800, and Swedish who had even had a colony in Delaware in the 1630s. A capitalist or business class had come to be highly developed. The original patterns of proprietorship, as well as learning and idealism, had preserved and rivaled New England, yet its early leadership faded. Now the Mid-Atlantic Region is not uniform. Geographically, historically and economically the six states – New York (Albany), New Jersey (Trenton), Pennsylvania (Harris-burg), Delaware (Dover), Maryland (Annapolis), and West Virginia (Charleston) – are quite different from one another. The New York Metropolitan Region is restricted to New York City and its environs, but at 18 million this small area is larger in population than many other regions, and almost as populous as New England. New Yorkers have the reputation of being cold and distant, with little sense of community but their expectations are high, for New Yorkers measure themselves against national and international rather than regional standards. This is a society of recent immigrants, as generations of newcomers continue to use New York City as the gateway to the USA (on December 31, 1890, Ellis Island in New York Harbor opened as immigration center; it closed in 1954). Every 13 out of 100 people here were born in another country. More than 80 languages are spoken throughout the neighborhoods and streets of the “capital of the world”. There are areas in New York where English is hardly ever heard. The religious and ethnic groups continue to follow their lifestyles with relatively little notice of the general American patterns, unless members of such groups wish to “melt” into the larger society. As a result, New York City is in many ways “more European,” more varied, and for many Americans more exciting than the other regions of the country. The “Big Apple,” as New York is nicknamed, is a city unlike any other.
Despite its fiscal problems and deteriorating services, its graffiti and crime-ridden subways, and its prices, New York City remains the focal point of America’s commerce, communications, and culture. It is everything to everyone. It offers the best, the biggest and the brightest of everything. It is the place of excitement, beauty and…contradictions. There is no canal on Canal Street, Battery Park is not a power station, and Times Square is a triangle. As they say, only in New York. It is bleak and shabby. It is bright and blooming. It is a human condition spelled in neon.
The nation’s largest city, a national leader in business, finance, manufacturing, fashion, music and literature, host of the United Nations, New York City consists of five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island (Richmond). Two international airports –La Guardia and John F. Kennedy, both in Queens, -are major air-
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cargo terminals. But it is of course its central part, the borough of Manhattan, that most people think of New York. In postal addresses, “New York” is synonymous with “Manhattan”, and to residents of the tri-state area, “New York” and “the city” usually refer to Manhattan. The name Manhattan derived from an Indian word means “island of hills”. In the 17th century, the Dutch purchased the island from the native Americans and laid claim to the land, establishing trading post. New Amsterdam became the administrative center of New Netherland. In the mid 1600s the town was taken by the English. During the 18th century, New York (called so in honor of the duke of York) became one of the fast developing commercial centers of the British colonies. From 1785 to 1790 New York was the seat of the US government. With the first stock exchange founded in 1792 New York soon became the nation’s leading financial and commercial center. New York played an important role in events leading to the American Revolution (17761783), it is here that the principle of a free press was established. After the battle of Long Island (1776), New York was occupied by British troops until the end of the Revolution, and was devastated by fires in 1776 and 1778. The American Congress met in New York in 1785 - 1790, and George Washington was inaugurated as the first United States president here in 1789. Since the 1820s, New York became a major center of commodity exchange, banking, marine insurance, and manufacturing. Immigrants, particularly Irish, German, Jewish, and Italian, began to arrive in large numbers. By the late 19th century, the population was swelled by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as well as from China. Growth was further enhanced by the great age of bridge construction initiated by beautiful wire-enlaced Brooklyn Bridge (1883) followed by other bridges which, in 1898, created the five-borough city, including 5 boroughs coextensive with five counties of New York State: Queens (Queens County), Brooklyn (Kings County), Staten Island (Richmond County), the Bronx (Bronx County), and Manhattan (New York County). In 1904, construction of the inter-borough subway systems was begun. This complex public transportation network integrated the boroughs into the pattern recognized today. Almost all of the Bronx is situated on the mainland, but the other boroughs are located on, or comprise, islands. In all, New York City comprises some 50 islands.
Now it is the center of American finance, advertising, art, theater, publishing, fashion – and everything else. In Manhattan, Wall Street – downtown financial district - has the winding, informal street pattern of the 1600s. The rest of Manhattan, however, is laid out in a checker-board pattern, as are most of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The area is crossed from north to south by avenues, and from east to west by streets. Only one avenue - Broadway – runs east to west. Fifth Avenue is the dividing line between the East and West sides. Fifth Avenue is crossed by streets. So, many streets run in