United States Culture

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  • United States Culture

The United States has its own unique social and cultural characteristics such as dialect, music, arts, social habits, cuisine and folklore. With its history of mass immigration dating from the 17th century, The United States is a "melting pot" of cultures from around the world and plays a dominant role in the world's cultural landscape. It is primarily Western, but is influenced by African, Native American, Asian, Polynesian, and Latin American cultures. Many American cultural elements, especially from popular culture, have spread across the globe through modern mass media.

American literature and theater is renowned worldwide. The first internationally popular writers were James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving in the early nineteenth century. Mark Twain, Henry James, and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half. Eleven U. S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, including John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl S. Buck, T. S. Eliot and Sinclair Lewis. Ernest Hemingway, the 1954 Nobel laureate, is often named as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Eugene O'Neill considered by many to be the father of American drama. O'Neill is a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for literature. The United States is also the home and largest exporter of modern musical theater, producing such musical talents as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, George and Ira Gershwin, Kander and Ebb, and Stephen Sondheim.

Another very important aspect is that the US science and technology. Most of the new technological innovations over the 20th and 21st centuries were either first invented in the United States and/or first widely adopted by Americans. Examples include the lightbulb, the airplane, the transistor, the atomic bomb, nuclear power, the personal computer, the iPod, video games and online shopping, as well as the development of the Internet. Of course, you must have heard these names, such as Robert Fulton, Samuel Morse, Thomas Edison and a large number of Jewish scientists fled Germany and immigrated to the country, one of them is Albert Einstein.