|
|
|
|---|
Since the late nineteenth 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 also attract large audiences. Football is now by several measures the most popular spectator sport in the
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
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from
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 twentieth century, the work of W. V. Quine and Richard Rorty helped bring analytic philosophy to the fore in
In the visual arts, the
One of the first notable promoters of the nascent American theater was impresario P. T. Barnum, who began operating a lower
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the power of photography to capture motion. In 1894, the world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in
Americans are the heaviest television viewers in the world, and the average time spent in front of the screen continues to rise, hitting 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. 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 twentieth 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
The
While American culture maintains that the
Women, many of whom were formerly more limited to domestic roles, now mostly work outside the home and receive a majority of bachelor's degrees. The changing role of women has also changed the American family. In 2005, no household arrangement defined more than 30% of households; married childless couples were most common, at 28%. The extension of marital rights to homosexual persons is an issue of debate; several more liberal states permit civil unions in lieu of marriage. In 2003, the
Law enforcement in the
Among developed nations, the
The American life expectancy of 77.8 years at birth is a year shorter than the overall figure in Western Europe, and three to four years lower than that of
The
American public education is operated by state and local governments, regulated by the United States Department of Education through restrictions on federal grants. Children are required in most states to attend school from the age of six or seven (generally, kindergarten or first grade) until they turn eighteen (generally bringing them through 12th grade, the end of high school); some states allow students to leave school at sixteen or seventeen. About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled. The
The
English is the de facto national language. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as
As of 2008, the
The
The population growth of Hispanic and Latino Americans has been a major demographic trend. Approximately 44 million Americans are of Hispanic descent, with about 64% possessing Mexican ancestry. Between 2000 and 2006, the country's Hispanic population increased 25.5% while the non-Hispanic population rose just 3.5%. Much of this growth is from immigration; as of 2004, 12% of the
About 83% of the population lives in one of the country's 363 metropolitan areas. In 2006, 254 incorporated places in the United States had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than 1 million residents, and four global cities had over 2 million (New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston). The
The
|
|
||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
