The problem of American culture in the end is inseparable from the triumph of liberalism and of the free-market, largely libertarian social model that, at least for a while at the end of the 20th century, seemed entirely ascendant and which much of the world, despite understandable fits and starts, emulated. On the one hand, liberal societies create liberty and prosperity and abundance, and the United States, as the liberal society par excellence, has not only given freedom to its own artists but allowed artists from elsewhere, from John James Audubon to Marcel Duchamp, to exercise their freedom: artists, however marginalized, are free in the United States to create weird forms, new dance steps, strange rhythms, free verse, and inverted novels.
At the same time, however, liberal societies break down the consensus, the commonality, and the shared viewpoint that is part of what is meant by traditional culture, and what is left that is held in common is often common in the wrong way. The division between mass product and art made for small and specific audiences has perhaps never seemed so vast as it does at the dawn of the new millennium, and the odds of leaping past the divisions into common language or even merely a decent commonplace civilization have never seemed greater. Even those who are generally enthusiastic about the democratization of culture in American history are bound to find a catch in their throat of protest or self-doubt as they watch bad television reality shows become still worse or bad comic-book movies become still more dominant. The appeal of the lowest common denominator, after all, does not mean that all the people who are watching something have no other or better interests; it just means that the one thing they can all be interested in at once is this kind of thing.
Liberal societies create freedoms and end commonalities, and that is why they are both praised for their fertility and condemned for their pervasive alienation of audiences from artists, and of art from people. The history of the accompanying longing for authentic community may be a dubious and even comic one, but anyone who has spent a night in front of a screen watching the cynicism and proliferation of gratuitous violence and sexuality at the root of much of what passes for entertainment for most Americans cannot help but feel a little soul-deadened. In this way, as the 21st century began, the cultural paradoxes of American society—the constant oscillation between energy and cynicism, the capacity to make new things and the incapacity to protect the best of tradition—seemed likely not only to become still more evident but also to become the ground for the worldwide debate about the United States itself. Still, if there were not causes of triumph, there were grounds for hope.
It is in the creative life of Americans that all the disparate parts of American culture can, for the length of a story or play or ballet, at least, come together. What is wonderful, and perhaps special, in the culture of the United States is that the marginal and central, like the high and the low, are not in permanent battle but instead always changing places. The sideshow becomes the centre ring of the circus, the thing repressed the thing admired. The world of American culture, at its best, is a circle, not a ladder. High and low link hands. Adam Gopnik
History
The territory represented by the continental United States had, of course, been discovered, perhaps several times, before the voyages of Christopher Columbus. When Columbus arrived, he found the New World inhabited by peoples who in all likelihood had originally come from the continent of Asia. Probably these first inhabitants had arrived 20,000 to 35,000 years before in a series of migrations from Asia to North America by way of the Bering Strait. By the time the first Europeans appeared, the indigenous people (commonly referred to as Indians) had spread and occupied all portions of the New World.
A colour lithograph based on a painting done by American artist Frederic A. Chapman depicting the 1609 voyage of Henry Hudson's ship while Native Americans watch from the nearby shore.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
The foods and other resources available in each physiographic region largely determined the type of culture prevailing there. Fish and sea mammals, for example, contributed the bulk of the food supply of coastal peoples, although the acorn was a staple for California Indians; plant life and wild game (especially the American bison, or buffalo) were sources for the Plains Indians; and small-game hunting and fishing (depending again on local resources) provided for Midwestern and Eastern American Indian groups. These foods were supplemented by corn (maize), which was a staple food for the Indians of the Southwest. The procurement of these foods called for the employment of fishing, hunting, plant and berry gathering, and farming techniques, the application of which depended, in turn, upon the food resources utilized in given areas.
Foods and other raw materials likewise conditioned the material culture of the respective regional groups. All Indians transported goods by human carrier; the use of dogs to pull sleds or travois was widespread; and rafts, boats, and canoes were used where water facilities were available. The horse, imported by the Spanish in the early 16th century, was quickly adopted by the Indians once it had made its appearance. Notably, it came to be used widely by the buffalo-hunting Indians of the Great Plains.
American Indian culture groups were distinguished, among other ways, by house types. Dome-shaped ice houses (igloos) were developed by the Eskimos (called Inuit in Canada) in what would become Alaska; rectangular plank houses were produced by the Northwest Coast Indians; earth and skin lodges and tepees, by plains and prairie tribes; flat-roofed and often multistoried houses, by some of the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest; and barrel houses, by the Northeast Indians. Clothing, or the lack of it, likewise varied with native groups, as did crafts, weapons, and tribal economic, social, and religious customs.
An Inuit building an igloo at a hunting site on ice in Jones Sound, Nunavut, Canada.© Fred Bruemmer
At the time of Columbus’s arrival there were probably roughly 1.5 million American Indians in what is now the continental United States, although estimates vary greatly. In order to assess the role and the impact of the American Indian upon the subsequent history of the United States in any meaningful way, one must understand the differentiating factors between Native American peoples, such as those mentioned above. Generally speaking, it may be said, however, that the American Indians as a whole exercised an important influence upon the civilization transplanted from Europe to the New World. Indian foods and herbs, articles of manufacture, methods of raising some crops, war techniques, words, a rich folklore, and ethnic infusions are among the more obvious general contributions of the Indians to their European conquerors. The protracted and brutal westward-moving conflict caused by “white” expansionism and Indian resistance constitutes one of the most tragic chapters in the history of the United States. Oscar O. Winther
Colonial America to 1763
The European background
The English colonization of North America was but one chapter in the larger story of European expansion throughout the globe. The Portuguese, beginning with a voyage to Porto Santo off the coast of West Africa in 1418, were the first Europeans to promote overseas exploration and colonization. By 1487 the Portuguese had traveled all the way to the southern tip of Africa, establishing trading stations at Arguin, Sierra Leone, and El Mina. In 1497 Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed up the eastern coast of Africa, laying the groundwork for Portugal’s later commercial control of India. By 1500, when Pedro Álvares Cabral stumbled across the coast of Brazil en route to India, Portuguese influence had expanded to the New World as well.