Still, writers have seen and recorded this quarrel as a feature of the world around them, and the evolution of American writing in the past 50 years has shown some of the same basic patterns that can be found in painting and dance and the theatre. When Francis Scott Key wrote his poem on which the song would be based, he imagined it would be sung to the tune of "The Anacreontic Song," by London-based writer John Stafford Smith, who composed it around 1775 for a gentlemen's music club, with lyrics all about an ancient Greek poet who praised love and wine. A lot of things, in fact, since this classic baked treat is not actually American. The short story, with its natural insistence on the unique moment and the infrangible glimpse of something private and fragile, had a new prominence. American culture has been shaped by the history of the United States, its geography, and various internal and external forces and migrations.A member of the core Anglosphere, it is primarily of Western, and European origin, particularly British and German, yet its influences includes the cultures of Asian American, African American, Latin American, and Native American peoples and their cultures. The U.S. film industry earned a record $100 Billion in 2019, according to Forbes (opens in new tab), before dropping in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic. Pells does pooh-pooh, as stated above, the notion that America is a cultural behemoth. And he admits that, by the first decade of the new century, American films were losing some of their market share in Europe and Asia, noting that The cinema, and culture in general, were becoming more international. But Pells leaves little doubt that the USA, thanks to what he considers its incomparable cultural recycling is, and remains, culturally no. 2023 Galvanized Media. For example, English and Hawaiian are the official languages in Hawaii, according to the Washington Post (opens in new tab). 20 "American" Traditions We Totally Stole from Other Cultures, 20 American Summer Traditions That Foreigners Will Never Understand. And for more on our favorite beers, check outThe Best Craft Beer In Every U.S. State. Borrowing From Other Cultures Can Be A Positive Exchange As the century and its obsessions closed, however, more and more scholars came to see in the most enduring inventions of American culture patterns of cyclical renewal between high and low. The dream of combining real facts and lyrical fire also achieved a masterpiece in the poet James Agees Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (l941; with photographs by Walker Evans), an account of sharecropper life in the South that is a landmark in the struggle for fact writing that would have the beauty and permanence of poetry. And for more great facts about our history, check out The 30 Craziest Things U.S. Presidents Have Done. While these would seem to some like ancient wedding traditions, they are still in use in many weddings today. Robert Baden-Powell had succeeded in bringing military discipline to British boys early in the 20thcentury and was happy to share his ideas with the world. First, Pells stressing how twentieth-century American culture was shaped by foreign influences to an unmatched extent but not comparing the cultural impact that outsiders (except Americans) had in other countries suggests that cultural borrowing is uniquely American. Words and names that come from Native Americans | ShareAmerica Heres how it works. The 1991 film "The Five Heartbeats," for example, which was based on the . Beginning at the turn of the century, the growth of the technology of mass communicationsthe movies, the phonograph, radio, and eventually televisioncreated a potential audience for stories and music and theatre larger than anyone could previously have dreamed that made it possible for music and drama and pictures to reach more people than had ever been possible. Cultural assimilation is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to resemble a dominant group or assume the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group. Culture, Values, and Beliefs | Introduction to Sociology - Lumen Learning Sure, Americans came up with a few innovative applications when setting down the Constitution for the new country in the late 18thcentury, but these were hardly new ideas. NYTimes.com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. During the 1990s autobiography became the focus for a number of accomplished novelists, including Frank McCourt, Anne Roiphe, and Dave Eggers. If American religious and ethical traditions come almost wholly from Christian and Jewish sources (combining, of course, those classical ideas which were incorporated into Christian and Western civilization), American social traditions are derived chiefly from British tradition. The contributions of veterans are honored on Veterans' Day, observed on Nov. 11. Here are 20 biblical traditions that are heavily influenced (and potentially borrowed in full) from other ancient belief systems: "Moses Smashing the Tablets of the Law", by Rembrandt (c. 1659). Cultural appropriation: when 'borrowing' becomes exploitation Chapter 2. Attitudes Toward American Culture and Ideas The Gutenberg Bible, on display at the Lenox Library (c. 1455). Patrick is the winner of the Linguistic Society of America's . High culture had come to the American living room. xhr.open('POST', 'https://www.google-analytics.com/collect', true); As a consequence, many intellectuals and artists around the end of World War II began to try to construct new kinds of elite high culture, art that would be deliberately difficultand to many people it seemed that this new work was merely difficult. The most classically American beer on earth has Germanic roots. The research also found that about 23% had no religious affiliation at all and around 6% of the population is made up non-Christian religions. The television broadcasting industry took hold in the United States in the early 1950s, and American television programs are now shown around the world, according to PBS.