A2
The American dream - same key expressians
rlJ!ldividualism
J
The Puritans
I
- central concept in the way Arnericans
see
themselves and are viewed by others. The idea of
self-reliance and responsibility
for one's own fate
has shaped American
culture
since the 17th
century. Individualism
in the US is rooted in the
ideas of the Enlightenment,
+Puritanisrn
and the
+tron tier experience:
If a person is given the
freedom and opportunity
to develop he/she will
necessarily pros per.
The American tradition of scepticism about any
kind of government
(or church) restriction
or
interference
- particularly
in financial
areas guarantees a great degree of personal freedorn,
but it also furthers ruthless free enterprise and it
renders almest impossible any attempt to set up
welfare programs
01' legislature:
"If you work
hard, you prosper - if you fail, it is your own
fault."
This struggle
for freedorn.: and the tension
between the individual arid the community
are
key factors in American culture (cf the Western)
and the pursuit of the American dream ..
I Uncle Sam
I
~---il
Ellis Island
f-I
- a social and religious movement
within 16th
arid 17th century English
Protestantism. The
Puritans
wanted
to c1eanse
the Church of
England
from
the remaining
influence
of
Roman-Catholic
Papism.
In accordance
with
their wish to read the Bible literally and thus
"purify"
its rnessage,
they demanded
the
abolition
of "human
inventions," such as
traditional.
mass, ornaments,
decorations,
ceremonies as weil as the abolition of the traditional
church hierarchy.
In the 17th century, the Purirans split up into the
Presbyterians
and the Congregationalists.
Between
1620 lind 1640, approximately
20,000
of the latter, more .radical, group emigrated
to
New England
and founded
Plymouth
Colony
(1620), Massachusetts
Bay (1630), and other
settlernents
in Connecticut
and New Haven. The,
Puritans believed that America was the promised
land, their New Canaan. Later Oll, other groups,
such. as the Ouakers,
Baptists and Methodists
settled in America.
The Puritans
shaped
many
aspects of the
American
civil
religion:
virtue,
integrity,
education, werk, individual freedom and cornmunitarianism
still play an important
role in
everyday life.
Stemming from their strict moral principles, their
devout piousness, and the rejection of any kind of
amusement
or entertainment
(open sexuality,
alcohol, dancing etc.), the term "puritan"
is also
used to describe people
with an extremely
narrow-rninded
and conservative
outlook.
r--
- a very popular
nickname
for the American
government
(as well as for the American
people). When first employed
during the war
against England
in 1812, it was used in a
derogative way by the opponents of the war. The
term lost its negative connotations
and became
immensely
popular
when
the government
depicted Uncle Sam as a bearded man dressed in
stars and stripes in order to recruit volunteers
during World Wars land
Il. Since then, this
figure, as well as the term has been widely used,
-------,
Located
at Upper
New York Bay close to
Manhattan,
Ellis Island was the headquarters
of
the US immigration
authority from 1892 to 1954.
It gof its name from the New York trader James
Ellis who sold the island to the State of New York
in 1808. By 1892, the increasing
flood of immigrants made it necessary for the immigration
department
to move from Lower Manhattan
to
Ellis Island. In 1898 and 1905, two artificial
islands were added to the original one.Almost
20
million people ente red the US through
Ellis
Island before the immigration
authority
moved
back to Manhattau
in 1954. In 1990, Ellis Island
was reopened
and is now a museum featuring
documents
and artifacts from four centuries
of
immigration.
The American dream - same key expressians
;J
I
IManifest
Destiny
I
,.
I
Indeperidenc(t Day (Fourth of July)
The Stars and Stripes ("Old Glory")
The Declaration
of Independence was passed by
Congress
and was adopted
by all thirteen
colonies on July 4, 1776. The day was commemorated as early as 1777, and quickly ceremonies
came to include parades, public readings of the
Declaration, and speeches.
During the 19th century, the celebration turned
into a popular
spectacle
with fireworks
and
parades in towns and cities across the US.
Today July 4th remains an important
holiday although the true meaning of this holiday is often
lost in the hype. Still, 'the Fourth of July is of
symbolic significance for Amerieans and is often
made use of in (pop) culture. Examples include:
Independence Day (rnovie and song title) and
Born on the Fourtn of July (Ron Kovic' autobiography about the Vietnam war).
- the name given to the American flag. The first
flag was designed in 1777 and featured thirteen
red and white stripes and thirteen stars on a blue
background.
The stars and stripes represented
the founding states. The colors had. a symbolic
meaning:
white
stood
for purity,
red for
endurance
and bravery, and blue for justice. In
1818, Congress
reduced-. the total amount of
stripes to thirteen (stripes had been added for
every new state) and decided simply to add a star
for every new state. TIJe design of the flag wasn't
standardized
untiI1920; it presently displays fifty
stars (the last one for Hawaii was added in 1960).
IHe\v Cantfah'l
I
The name Canaan in the Old Testament referred
to the land west of the river Jordan that later
became Palestine. It was the country to which
Moses led his people when God told him to free
them from Egyptian slavery. Before Moses died,
God allowed hirn to glimpse the promised land
(Canaan),
which his people would ultimatively
reach after 40 years of being on the move.
It is this biblical account to which 17th century
writers
and those fleeing
to America
frorn
religious
.persecution
referred
when
they
envisioned
the American
colonies as the "New
Canaan"
(see, for example, Thomas
Morton's
The New Englisb Canaan, 1637). It was the hope
that America
would become
their "Promised
Land."
I
John L. O'Sullivan
(1813-1859),
the editor of
the influential
United Sttues 'Magazine and
Democratic Review, was a ferventsupporter
'of
the Democrarie
Party. In his editorials
he
popularized
the belief that it was America's
mission to demccratize
the world. In 1839 he
declared
the United
States the "nation of the
future," whose fate was "to manifest to mankind
the excellence of divine principles, to establish on
eartb the noblest temple to the worship of the
Most High - The Sacred and the True."
America used this belief in its manifest destiny to
justify
its territorial
expansion
(into Texas,
California, New. Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona)
as weil as imperialism
(in Latin America). The
role of the Uni ted States as global media tor in
political conflicts also grew out of this idea.
,-----11 Frontier
..
f-I
---------,
- a term which originally referred to the line of
settlement
- of civilization - moving westward.
The his tori an Frederick
Jackson TUrner argued
that this notion
of expansion
distinguished
Americans
from Europe.ans, When the fron tier
reached
the Pacific in 1890, he declared
the
(geographical)
fron tier c1osed. The coneept of
the fron tier is closely related to the American
idea of +rnanifest
destiny
and explains
the
Arnericans'
need for new "frontiers"
(i.e. dass,
seience).
Today, lhe myth of the fron tier is kept alive in
Arnerican
culture (literature,
the western, and
seience fiction genre) as weil as in political
rhetoric (i.e. 1. F. Kennedy's
speech on "the new
fron tier" in space).
Mailing Pot
I
r-I
------,-----,
Hector SI. John de Creveceeur was the first to use
this rnetaphor
to describe the United States. In
his 1782 essay "Letters frorn an American
Farmer" Creveceeur wrote: "Here individuals of
all nations are melted into a new race of men ... "
African and Native Arnericans
were, however,
excluded
from the beginning.
Ralph
Waldo
Emerson
appropriated
the term in 1845 to
protest against the rnilitan t xenophobia
of that
time.
In 1908 the play The Meltlng Pot by Israel
Zangwill was first performed. As a result of the
nationwide suceess of the play, the terrn beeame
a common expression.
,------11
Multiculturalism
rl
------,
This term originally referred
to Canadian and
Australian minority policy in the 1970s, it did not
emerge in the US until the 1980s wben acadernics
started to discuss problems in education
related
to the changing society.
The term became rather popular as feminists,
gays and lesbians,
and members
of ethnie
rninorities
challenged
the traditional
North
American
and
Western
Europe
cultural
preeminence
and asked for equal rights and
opporturlities.
.
The two competing
concepts
in the rnulticulturalism debate are assimilation
and pluralism on a cultural
level they are mainstream
vs,
minority culture and subcultures.
On the one hand the concept of multieulturalism
has achieved more rights for minority groups, 011
the other hand it has furthered
cultural fragmentation.
9
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