United States Culture

United States Geography and Culture

According to abbreviationfinder, United States of America is a country located almost entirely in North America, also including a state in Oceania. It is made up of 50 states and a federal district: Washington DC, the country’s capital. With some 309 million residents, it is the third most populous country in the world, although it is quite far from the first two, China and India. See population of United States.

Recognized as the empire of this age, it is the most powerful nation of all time. Emerged as an independent nation in 1776, it has achieved remarkable economic, scientific and military development. It has historically been characterized by forcibly dispossessing other nations and countries of territories and natural resources to put them at the service of their companies and monopolies. With just 4% of the world’s population, it consumes 25% of the energy produced on the planet [1] , and despite its wealth, more than a third of its population does not have health care insured.

Geography

The geography of the continental area is rugged in the western zone, where the Rocky Mountains are located. In the northeast area are the Appalachian Mountains and in the southwest region begins the Mexican Sierra Madre.

To the north, the continental states share a border with Canada, and Alaska, with the Arctic Ocean ; to the south they border Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico ; to the East is the Atlantic Ocean, and to the West, the Pacific Ocean.

Culture

In the 20th century and so far into the 21st, the United States has been a great world cultural power, but, despite great luminaries such as William Faulkner, Frank Lloyd Wright or Jackson Pollock, its great contributions to global heritage (and the that has exported the most) are not to be sought in the traditional arts, but in science, technology, and in three of the so-called popular arts, considered genuinely American: cinema, comics and Jazz.

Languages

The United States does not have an official language at the federal level. However, the predominant language, in which the Constitution and laws are written, and in which government tasks are carried out, is English. 82.1% of the population of the United States speaks this language. [33] However, hundreds of other languages and dialects are spoken, Spanish being the most common among them, a language that also has official recognition in some southwestern jurisdictions, having the same privileges as English.

A singular case within the United States is the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, which had Spanish as the only official language, and later incorporated the English language.

The Spanish language in the United States is used by 10.7% of the population. [33]

Literature

Ernest Hemingway was an American writer and journalist, and one of the leading novelists and short story writers of the 20th century. I won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea and the following year the Nobel Prize for Literature for his complete works.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of their inspiration from Europe. Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive reputation in the mid- 19th century. Mark Twain and the poet Walt Whitman were the main figures of the second half of the century; Emily Dickinson, practically unknown during her life, would be recognized as one of the most important poets in the country.

Five American citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the most recent being Toni Morrison in 1993. Ernest Hemingway, the 1954 Nobel Prize winner, has been named one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

Theater

The theater in the United States is based on the tradition of the Wild West, taken from the performances of Europe, especially England. Today it is related to American literature, movies, television and music, and it is very common for the same story to be represented in all of the above ways. Regions with a wide musical range have also developed theater and comedy academies. Musical theater is possibly its most popular form; Broadway Street in New York City is generally considered the center of American commercial theater, through its art forms imitated across the country.

Religion

The United States government does not keep an official record of the religions in the country. However, in a private survey conducted in 2001, 76.7% of adult Americans identified themselves as Christian ; about 52% of the adults recognized themselves as members of different Protestant churches ; the Roman Catholics, 24.5%, were the most numerous denominations; the Judaism (1.4%), the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1.3%), and other religions also have strong positions in American culture; about 14.2% of those surveyed described themselves as having no religion; the religious distribution of the 5.4% of respondents who decided not to respond to the survey is unknown.

The country has a relatively high rate of religiosity among developed nations. About 46% of American adults say they attend religious services at least once a week, compared with 14% of adults in Britain, 8% in France and 7% in Sweden.

United States Culture

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