United States

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