LANGUAGE AND AREA CULTURE OF THE UNITED STATES

LANGUAGE AND AREA CULTURE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Julia Veklich

CULTURE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. PLAN Culture of the USA Literature Theater Music Dance Cinema Visual Art

1. CULTURE OF THE USA The culture of the United States of America is a Western culture, historically heavily influenced by European cultures. It has been developing since long before the United States became a country with its own unique social and cultural characteristics such as dialect, music, arts, social habits, cuisine, and folklore. Today the United States of America is an ethnically and racially diverse country as result of large-scale immigration from many different countries throughout its history.

2. LITERATURE OF THE USA Its chief early European influences came from English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish settlers of colonial America during British rule. British culture, due to colonial ties with Britain that spread the English language, legal system and other cultural inheritances, had a formative influence. Other important influences came from other parts of western Europe, especially German, France, and Italy.

LITERATURE OF THE USA It also includes elements that evolved from Indigenous Americans, and other ethnic cultures—most prominently the culture of African Americans and different cultures from Latin America. Many American cultural elements, especially from popular culture, have spread across the globe through modern mass media.

LITERATURE American literature is the written or literary works produced in the area of the United States and its proceeding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theatre. During its early history, America was a series of British colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States. Therefore, its literary tradition begins as linked to the broader tradition of English Literature. However, unique American characteristics and the breadth of its production usually now cause it to be considered a separate path and tradition.

LITERATURE The right to freedom of expression in the American constitution can be traced to German immigrant John Peter Zenger and his legal fight to make truthful publications in the Colonies a protected legal right, ultimately paving the way for the protected rights of American authors.

LITERATURE America's first internationally popular writers were James Fennimore Cooper and Washington Irving in the early nineteenth century. They painted an American literary landscape full of humor and adventure. These were followed by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Henry David Thoreau who established a distinctive American literary voice in the middle of the nineteenth century.

LITERATURE Mark Twain, Henry James, and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, would be recognized as America's other essential poet. Eleven U. S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, including John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neil, 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.

LITERATURE A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character - such as Herman Melville's Moby. Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) - may be dubbed the “ Great American Novel”. Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction were developed in the United States.

3. THEATER Theater of the United States is based in the Western tradition and did not take on a unique dramatic identity until the emergence of Eugene O’Neil in the early twentieth century, now 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.

THEATER After O'Neill, American drama came of age and flourished with the likes of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, William Inga, and Clifford Odets during the first half of the twentieth century. After this fertile period, American theater broke new ground, artistically, with the absurdist forms of Edward Albee n the 1960 s.

THEATER Social commentary has also been a preoccupation of American theater, often addressing issues not discussed in the mainstream. Writers such as Lorraine Hansbury, August Wilson, David Mamet and Tony Kushner have all won Pulitzer Prizes for their polemical plays on American society.

THEATER The United States is also the home and largest exporter of modern musical theater, producing such musical talents as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Lowe, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, George and Ira Gershwin, Kandler and Ebb, and Stephen Sondheim. Broadway is one of the largest theater communities in the world and is the epicenter of American commercial theater.

4. MUSIC OF THE UNITED STATES The music of the United States reflects the country's multiethnic population through a diverse array of styles. Among the country's most internationally-renowned genres are hip hop, blues, country, rhythm and blues, jazz, barbershop, pop, techno, and rock-and-roll. The United States has the world's largest music industry and its music is heard around the world. Since the beginning of the 20 th century, some forms of American popular music have gained a near global audience.

5. DANCE IN THE UNITED STATES hip hop dance Rock and Roll There is great variety in dance in the United States of America. It is the home of the hip hop dance and its derivative Rock and Roll, and modern square dance (associated with the United States of America due to its historic development in that country – nineteen U. S. states have designated it as their official state dance) and one of the major centers for modern dance. There is a variety of social dance and concert or performance dance forms with also a range of traditions of Native American dances.

DANCE IN THE UNITED STATES The reality shows and competitions So You Think You Can Dance, American Best Dance Crew, and Dancing with the Stars have broadened the audience for dance.

6. CINEMA OF THE UNITED STATES The cinema of the United States, also known as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20 th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period. While the Lumiere Brothers are generally credited with the birth of modern cinema, it is indisputably American cinema that soon became the most dominant force in an emerging industry. Since the 1920 s, the American film industry has grossed more money every year than that of any other country.

7. VISUAL ART OF THE UNITED STATES Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863, Hudson River School National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Visual art of The United States and/or American art encompasses the history of painting and visual art in the United States. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, artists primarily painted landscapes and portraits in a realistic style based mainly on Western painting and European arts.

1) PAINTING (18 th century) Gilbert Stuart, George Washington, also known as The Athenaeum and The Unfinished Portrait, 1796, is his most celebrated and famous work. After the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which marked the official beginning of the American national identity, the new nation needed a history, and part of that history would be expressed visually. Most of early American art (from the late 18 th century through the early 19 th century) consists of history of painting and portraits. Painters such as Gilbert Stuart made portraits of the newly elected government officials.

PAINTING (18 th century) John Singleton Copley was painting emblematic portraits for the increasingly prosperous merchant class, while Benjamin West painted scenes of American life and painters such as John Trumbull were making large battle scenes of the Revolutionary War.

PAINTING (19 th century) America's first well-known school of painting - the Hudson River School - appeared in 1820. Thomas Cole pioneered the movement which included Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Doughty and several others.

th century) PAINTING (19 The Hudson River painters' directness and simplicity of vision influenced and inspired such later artists as John Kensett and the Luminists; as well as George Inness and the tonalists (which included Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ralph Blakelock among others), and Winslow Homer (1836– 1910), who depicted rural America—the sea, the mountains, and the people who lived near them.

PAINTING (19 th century) Middle-class city life found its painter in Thomas Eakins (1844– 1916), an uncompromising realist whose unflinching honesty undercut the genteel preference for romantic sentimentalism. The Hudson River School landscape painter Robert S. Duncanson, and Henry Ossawa Tanner who studied with Thomas Eakins were two of the first important African American painters.

PAINTING (19 th century) George Catlin Paintings of the Great West, particularly the act of conveying the sheer size of the land the cultures of the native people living on it, were starting to emerge as well. Artists such as George Catlin broke from traditional styles of showing land, most often done to show much a subject owned, to show the West and its people as honestly as possible. In addition to George Catlin: Frederick Remington, Charles M. Russell, George Caleb Bingham, Edward S. Curtis, and others recorded the American Western heritage and the Old American West through their art.

PAINTING (19 th century) William B. T. Trego History painting was also a popular genre in American art during the 19 th century. William B. T. Trego a war artist was one of the last of the genre. During his lifetime, Trego painted over 200 historical and military paintings. These became widely published after his death and writer Edwin A. Peeples commented: "There is probably not an American History book which doesn't have (a) Trego picture in it”. In 1976, Trego's The March to Valley Forge was reproduced as a souvenir postage sheet issued by the United States Postal Service as part of the observance of the United States Bicentennial.

th century) PAINTING (20 Robert Henri Controversy soon became a way of life for American artists. In fact, much of American painting and sculpture since 1900 has been a series of revolts against tradition. "To hell with the artistic values, " announced Robert Henri (1865– 1929). He was the leader of what critics called the Ashcan school of painting, after the group's portrayals of the squalid aspects of city life. American realism became the new direction for American visual artists at the turn of the 20 th century.

th century) PAINTING (20 In photography the Photo. Secession movement led by Alfred Steiglitz made pathways for photography as an emerging art form. Soon the Ashcan school artists gave way to modernists arriving from Europe - the cubists and abstract painters promoted by the photographer Alfred Steiglitz (1864– 1946) at his 291 Gallery in New York City. John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Alfred Henry Maurer, Arthur Dove, Henrietta Shore, Stuart Davis, Stanton Mac. Donald-Wright, Morgan Russell, Patrick Henry Bruce, and Gerald Murphy were some important early American modernist painters.

PAINTING (20 th century) Charles Sheeler Charles Demuth After World War I many American artists also rejected the modern trends emanating from the Armory Show and European influences such as those from the School of Paris. Instead they chose to adopt academic realism in depicting American urban and rural scenes. Charles Sheeler, and Charles Demuth were referred to as Precisionists and the artists from the Ashcan school or American realism: notably George Bellows, Everett Shinn, George Benjamin Luks, Glackens socially conscious imagery in their works.

MODERN AMERICAN MOVEMENTS Robert Rauschenberg Members of the modern American artistic generation favored a different form of abstraction: works of mixed media. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg (1925– 2008) and Jasper Johns (1930 - ), who used photos, newsprint, and discarded objects in their compositions. Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol (1930– 1987), Larry Rivers (1923– 2002), and Roy Lichtenstein (1923– 1997), reproduced, with satiric care, everyday objects and images of American popular culture – Coca. Cola bottles, soup cans, comic strips.

MODERN AMERICAN MOVEMENTS Edward Hopper Realism has also been popular in the United States, despite modernist tendencies, such as the city scenes by Edward Hopper and the illustrations of Norman Rockwell. In certain places, for example Chicago, Abstract Expressionism never caught on; in Chicago, the dominant art style was grotesque, symbolic realism, as exemplified by the Chicago Imagists (1923– 1997), Jim Nutt (1938 - ), Ed Paschke (1939– 2004), and Nance Spero (1926– 2009).

2) ARCHITECTURE The architecture of the United States demonstrates a broad variety of architectural styles and built forms over the country's history of over four centuries of independence and former British rule. Architecture in the United States is as diverse as its multicultural society and has been shaped by many internal and external factors and regional distinctions. As a whole it represents a rich eclectic and innovative tradition.

PRE-COLUMBIAN ARCHITECTURE Cliff Palace, an ancient dwelling complex in Colorado. The oldest surviving structures on the territory that is now known as the United States were made by the Ancient Pueblo People of the four corners region. The Tiwa speaking people have inhabited Taos Pueblo continuously for over 1000 years. The related Chacoan civilization built extensive public architecture in northwestern New Mexico from CE 700 - 1250 until drought forced them to relocate. Another related people, now best known through the Cliff Palace and neighboring structures in Mesa Verde National Park, created distinctive cliff dwellings in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona from the 12 th through to the 14 th century.

NATIVE AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE Other Native American architecture is known from traditional structures, such as long houses, wigwams, tipis and hogans. Images by Theodor de Bry of local Algonquian villages Pomeiooc and Secoton in what later became coastal North Carolina survive from the late 16 th century. Artist and cartographer John White stayed at the short-lived Roanock Colony for 13 months and recorded over 70 watercolor images of indigenous people, plants, and animals.

HAWAIIAN ARCHITECTURE The remote location of the Yawaiian Islands from North America gave ancient Hawaii a substantial period of precolonial architecture. Early structures reflect Polynesian heritage and the refined culture of Hawaii. Post-contact late-19 th-century Hawaiian architecture shows various foreign influences such as the Victorian, and early-20 thcentury Spanish Colonial Revival style.

AMERICAN COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE When the Europeans settled in North America, they brought their architectural traditions and construction techniques for building. The oldest buildings in America show surviving examples. Construction was dependent upon the available resources: wood and brick are the common elements of English buildings in New England, the Mid. Atlantic, and coastal South. It is also brought the conquest, occupation, and displacement of the indigenous peoples in their homeland, and their dwelling and settlement construction techniques devalued. The colonizers appropriated territories and sites for new forts, dwellings, missions and churches, and agriculture.

SPANISH COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE Mission San Xavier del Bac near Tucson, Arizona. Spanish influences Spanish colonial architecture was built in Florida and the Southeastern United States from 1559 to 1821. The conch style is represented in Pensacola, Florida, adorning houses with balconies of wrought iron, as appears in the mostly Spanish-built French Quarter of New orleans, Louisiana. Fires in 1788 and 1794 destroyed the original French structures in New Orleans. Many of the city's present buildings date to late-18 th-century rebuilding efforts.

ENGLISH INFLUENCES St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Smithfield, Virginia, thought to be the oldest surviving brick church in the English Colonies of what would become the United States, dating to the mid-late 17 th century. Excavations at the first permanent English speaking settlement, Jamestown, Virginia (founded 1607) have unearthed part of the triangular James Fort and numerous artifacts from the early 17 th century. These settlers often came to the New World for economic purposes, therefore revealing why most early homes reflect the influences of modest village homes and small farms. The appearance of structures was very plain and made with little imported material. Windows, for example, were extremely small. The size did not increase until long after even the British were manufacturing glass.

GEORGIAN ARCHITECTURE Carpenter’s Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Georgian style appeared during the 18 th century and Paladian architecture took hold of colonial Williamsburg in the Colony of Virginia. The Governor's Palace there, built in 1706 -1720, has a vast gabled entrance at the front. It respects the principle of symmetry and uses the materials that were found in the Tide water region of the Mid-Atlantic colonies: red brick, white painted wood, and blue slate used for the roof with a double slant. This style is used to build the houses for prosperous plantation owners in the country and wealthy merchants in town.

FEDERAL ARCHITECTURE Massachusetts State House, Boston, Massachusetts (1795 -1798) In 1776, the members of the Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies. After the long and distressing American Revolutionary War, the 1783 Treaty of Paris recognized the existence of the new republic, the United States of America. The buildings of these new federal and business institutions used the classic vocabulary of columns, domes and pediments, in some referencing to ancient Rome and Greece. Architectural publications multiplied. Americans looked to affirm their independence in the domains of politics, economics, and culture with new civic architecture for government, religion, and education.

JEFFERSONIAL ARCHITECTURE Plan (ca. 1819) for the Rotunda of the University of Virginia, based on the Pantheon in Rome. Thomas Jefferson, who was the third president of the United States between 1801 and 1809, was a scholar in many domains, including architecture. Having journeyed several times in Europe, he hoped to apply the formal rules of palladianism and of antiquity in public and private architecture and master planning. He contributed to the plans for the University of Virginia, which began construction in 1817. The project was completed by Benjamin Latrobe applying Jefferson's architectural concepts.

NEOCLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE Study of the south facade of the White House, ca. 1817. (note the presence of central stairs and the absence of the Truman Balcony). United States Capitol, Washington, D. C. , rebuilt 1815 -1830, as it appeared during the early 19 th century (prior to expansions and reconstruction of the dome). The United States Capitol in Washington, D. C. is an example of uniform urbanism: the design of the capitol building was imagined by the French Pierre Charles L’Enfant. This ideal of the monumental city and neoclassicism. Several cities wanted to apply this concept, which is part of the [, but Washington, D. C. seems the most dedicated of all of them.

NEOCLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE The White House was constructed after the creation of Washington, D. C. by congressional law in December 1790. James Hoban, an Irish American, was chosen and the construction began in October 1792. The building that he had conceived was modeled upon the first and second floors of the Leinster House, a ducal palace in Dublin which is now the seat of the Irish Parliament. During United States Capitol, the War of 1812, the White House was Washington, D. C. , rebuilt ravaged. Only the exterior walls 1815 -1830, as it appeared remained standing, but it was reconstructed. The walls were painted during the early 19 th white to hide the damage caused by the century (prior to fire. At the beginning of the 20 th century, expansions and two new wings were added to support reconstruction of the development of the government. dome).

GREEK REVIVAL STYLE New York Customs House, 1842, New York City, designed by James Renwick (the first Federal customs house) Greek revival style attracted American architects working in the first half of the 19 th century. The young nation, free from Britannic protection, was persuaded to be the new Athens, that is to say, a foyer for democracy. Benjamin Latrobe (1764– 1820) and his students William Strickland (1788– 1854) and Robert Mills (1781– 1855) obtained commissions to build some banks and churches in the big cities (Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, DC).

ITALIAN ARCHITECTURE. GOTHIC REVIVAL Residential: “Lynhurst, " by Alexander Jackson Davis in Tarrytown, New York, 1838– 1865. From the 1840 s on, the Gothic Revival style became popular in the United States, under the influence of Andrew Jackson Downing (1815– 1852). He defined himself in a reactionary context to classicism and development of romantisicism. His work is characterized by a return to Medieval decor: chimneys, garbels, embrasure towers, warhead windows, gargoyles, stained glass and severely sloped roofs.

LATE VICTORIAN ARCHITECTURE The Carson Mansion, an 1886 Queen Anne Victorian in Eureka, California, is widely considered to have achieved the height of expression of that style. Following the American Civil War and through the turn of the 20 th century, a number of related styles, trends, and movements emerged, are loosely and broadly categorized as "Victorian", due to their correspondence with similar movements of the time in the British Empire during the later reign of Queen Victoria. Many architects working during this period would cross various modes, depending on the commission. Key influential American architects of the period include Richard Morris Hunt, Frank Furness, and Henry Hobson Richardson.

RISE OF THE SKYSCRAPER 40 Wall street, briefly holding the title of the world's tallest building until the completion of the Chrysler building. The most notable United States architectural innovation has been the skyscraper. Several technical advances made this possible. In 1853 Elisha Otis invented the first safety elevator Elevators allowed buildings to rise above the four or five stories that people were willing to climb by stairs for normal occupancy. In 1868 the New York City's six story Equitable Life Building became the first commercial building to use an elevator. Construction commenced in 1873. Other structures: the Auditorium Building, Chicago in 1885 by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan.

3) USA SCULPTURE FOLK ART William Rush – portrait of General Andrew Jackson, 1815, Art Institute of Chicago There is frequently art in well-made tombstones, iron products, furniture, toys, and tools—perhaps better reflecting the character of a people than sculptures made in classical styles for social elites. One of these specific applications, the carving of wooden figureheads for ships, started in the Americas as early as 1750 and a century later helped launch the careers of Samuel Mc. Intyre and the country's first famous sculptor, William Rush (1756– 1833) of Philadelphia. The tradition begun then continues today in the folk sculpture style known as Chaisaw carving.

THE ITALIAN YEARS Thomas Crawford, David Triumphant, 1848 Randolph Rogers, Nydia, the Blind Flower Girl of Pompeii, 1856 In the 1830 s, the first generation of American sculptors studied and lived in Italy, creating in the Neoclassic style. They also gave the artists access to the carvers of Italy who translated their clay works into marble. During this period themes from which the subjects of sculptural works were chosen tended to be drawn from antiquity, the exceptions being portraits (whose subjects were frequently shown wearing Roman or Greek garb) or works that included Native Americans. These artists included Horatio Greenough, Thomas Crawford, Randolph Rogers and others.

AMERICAN WOMEN SCUPTORS (19 th c. ) Harriet Hosmer, Zenobia in chains, 1857, Saint Louis Art Museum Charles Sumner by Anne Whitney American women also became active sculptors during the Italian Period despite the sexism of the age. Among the women who acquired both commissions and fame were Edmonia Lewis, Harriet Hosmer, Anne Whitney, Vinnie Ream and Emma Stebbins).

THE PARIS YEARS Adams Memorial, Augustus Saint-Gaudens The Daniel Chester French sculpture at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D. C. . In the decades following the Civil War American sculptors began more and more to go to Paris to study — falling in with the more naturalistic and dramatic style exemplified by the works of Jean. Baptiste Carpeaux (1827– 1875) and Antoine-Louis Barye (1796– 1875) and other French sculptors. Among these Americans were Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Frederick Mac. Monnies and Daniel Chester French.

PUBLIC MONUMENTS The Robert Gould Show Memorial, Boston, commemorates Shaw and the Afro-American 54 th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, St, Gaudens The years following the close of the War Between the States saw a huge increase in the number of public monuments erected in the United States. "By far the most prevalent monument features a fully equipped Confederate soldier (the same prototype held true for Union monuments) in a realistic pose. ” This style of monument was popularized by sculptor Martin Milmore who created one of the first ones in 1868. Milmore's own monument, authored by Daniel Chester French, Death and the Sculptor remains one of America's "noble tributes. ”

CARVING MOUNTAINS Mount Rushmore National Monument. Sculptures of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodor Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln represent the first 150 years of American history. There at least three major mountain sculptures in the United States. These are Mount Rushmore, Stone Mountain, and Crazy Horse Memorial. Gutzon Borgium, an accomplished sculptor with such pieces as Seated Lincoln and a variety of other public monuments, oversaw the sculpture of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills in South Dakota. The monument was finished after his death by his son Lincoln Borglum.