4647

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Blacks with 16%. So the question “Who then is the American, this new man?” cannot be answered simply or conclusively.

At best, we can say that an American is someone who meets the legal requirements of citizenship and who considers himself or herself to be an American. And any person born, on American soil automatically has the right to American citizenship. Significantly, when looking at what it means to be an American, whether legally or emotionally, the older categories used to define nationality often taken for granted in other countries – race, religion, language, parents’ ancestry –have become relatively unimportant in America.

Questions for Discussion

1. Why is the USA called “a nation of diversity”? 2. Who do you think the term “American” refers to? 3. What is the official language of the USA? 4. Is it possible to make generalizations about Americans/Russians because they are so diverse? 5. What do the “melting pot” and “pizza” views of America imply? 6. Can all ethnic groups freely participate in some areas of professional and cultural life? 7. What barriers prevent some ethnic groups from full integrating into the mainstream of American life? 8. Is it important to maintain your own language and cultural traditions in an alien world? 9. Why is it important to understand cultural values? 10. Which pattern is your country like: “melting pot,” “salad bowl,” or “pizza”? 11. What different ethnic groups are there in your country? Where do they settle? How are they different from the majority of people in your country: language? clothing? food? customs? 12. What effect do different ethnic groups have on a country and its culture?

Chapter 2 Composition of the Country

1.Do you think people all over the USA are basically the same or basically different?

2.What accounts for their being the same/different?

The US is too large and varied a country to sum up in a short explanation. To understand some of its differences, it can be divided into several regions. Each is distinctive from the others economically, geographically, and, in some ways, culturally.

Even the name “United States” incorporates the fact that the country is made up of a variety of discrete units, the first thirteen existed as separate colonies of the British Empire before the Revolutionary War. Today besides the 50 states, the country is further subdivided into counties, townships, and cities, often with crosscutting political subdivisions. Recent interest in regions of America has been primarily concerned with cultural regions, that is, with regions defined by the historical experience and qualities of the people that make up the population.

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Look at the Northeast section of the map which covers New England and the MidAtlantic Region where Boston and New York are the largest cities.

NEW ENGLAND

includes the states of Maine (Augusta), New Hampshire(Concord), Vermont (Montpelier), Massachusetts(Boston), Rhode Island (Providence), nearly all of Connecticut (Hartford), upstate New York, and a narrow strip of Northern Pennsylvania.

Centered on Boston, region’s largest city and port, New England had been established in the early 1600 by deeply religious people anxious to escape the domination and corruption they found in England. Their colonies and communities were to be an example to the world. Education, work, family, community, and church were central. Of course, later generations strayed far from such ideal, but tradition has lasted in many ways and made New England different from the rest of the country. This is the area occupied by New Englanders in 1800 and stamped with their particular culture. There are many pretty villages where white, wooden houses and a church are built around a village green. Today some villages are museums. Northern Maine is wild, unspoiled country. There is lots of wildlife here, including black bears and moose. To go with its mountains, New Hampshire is a state of myriad lakes, steepled villages, and rolling lowland edging the Atlantic. Vermont was the first state in which all men could vote. This state is famous for its maple syrup. You can find out how syrup is made at Maple Grove Museum. In Connecticut (Constitution State) Samuel Colt invented the Colt.45 revolver that was called “the gun that won the West” because settlers used it to defend the Indians. Massachusetts is a birthplace of John F. Kennedy, the 35th President, and the US first college - Harvard. The facilities of its many educational institutions have made the area a center for electronic and engineering firms.

It was in Massachusetts that James Naismith, a teacher at Springfield Training School, invented a game called basketball. It was first played in the Springfield gym in 1891. They used a soccer ball and put peach baskets on the gym wall - that is why Naismith called the game basketball.

Rhode Island’s nickname is Little Rhody). The origin of the name comes from Greek island of Rhodes). It is the smallest state in the US (3,14 square kilometers =1,21 miles), but it has three times the population of giant Alaska. It was the last colony to become a state. The name ‘Rhode Island’ is misleading – it is not an island at all. It is made of 36 islands and a mainland.

The region responds more than others to liberal and internationalist appeals. Its elite continues to have a sense of mission and represent the idealism of the country. However, the fierce democratic attitudes of the first effective settlement were swept

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away in the urban culture. Today the region’s cultures have a more European or English class system than the other parts of the country.

New Englanders are referred to as “Yankee”. The word may have been taken from the Dutch, as a corruption of Jan Kees (“John Cheese”). The suggestion is that Jan Kees was a nonce name for a Dutchman in America, rather like John Bull for an Englishman, but the historical evidence is slight. Different people use this word in different meanings. For a person from the south of the United States, “Yankee” means a Northerner. For a foreigner, “Yankee” means an American. But the exact meaning of this word is a New Englander.

The peculiar character of the New England Yankee was shaped by the history and the geography of the place. New England was settled in the 1600s by Puritans who had very strict rules about the way people lived. The Yankee has a reputation for being honest but shrewd, realistic, practical, non-talkative, thrifty and independent. There are different stories which illustrate the realistic and non-talkative character of a Yankee. One story tells us about a tourist who asked a Yankee whether he had lived in the same village all his life. “Not yet,” was the answer.

As we know, the climate on New England is cold and there’s a lot of snow and ice in winter there. Here’s another story that illustrates the business shrewdness of the Yankee.

Frederic Tudor, from Boston, remembered the joke he had used to hear when he was young: “If ice were a crop, New England would be wealthy.” Many years later, he worked out a way how to break and store up ice and send it to the south. Tudor became a very rich man. The Yankees like to speak about the special role that New England has played in United States history. The American Revolution began in New England, because the Yankees were among the strongest supporters of independence. In the 19th century, it was New England Yankees who led the fight against slavery in America.

Questions

1. What does the term “USA” imply and what units is the USA subdivided into? 2.

What states does New England include? 3.What culture is the region stamped with? 4.

What is the meaning of the word “Yankee”? 5. Where did the American Revolution begin? 6. What is the largest city of the region? 7. What state is made of 36 islands? 8. What state houses Harvard University?

THE MID-ATLANTIC REGION

is densely populated. From Boston to Washington, D.C., it is 719 km. Along this narrow coastal strip more than 20% of the population live in less than 2% of the country’s land

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area. It was originally a center of immigration, particularly of Germans. Centering on New York and Philadelphia, was populated by a much more cosmopolitan mix of peoples – the Dutch, who had ruled New York from the1620s to 1664, Germans who settled in large numbers near Philadelphia before 1800, and Swedish who had even had a colony in Delaware in the 1630s. A capitalist or business class had come to be highly developed. The original patterns of proprietorship, as well as learning and idealism, had preserved and rivaled New England, yet its early leadership faded. Now the Mid-Atlantic Region is not uniform. Geographically, historically and economically the six states – New York (Albany), New Jersey (Trenton), Pennsylvania (Harris-burg), Delaware (Dover), Maryland (Annapolis), and West Virginia (Charleston) – are quite different from one another. The New York Metropolitan Region is restricted to New York City and its environs, but at 18 million this small area is larger in population than many other regions, and almost as populous as New England. New Yorkers have the reputation of being cold and distant, with little sense of community but their expectations are high, for New Yorkers measure themselves against national and international rather than regional standards. This is a society of recent immigrants, as generations of newcomers continue to use New York City as the gateway to the USA (on December 31, 1890, Ellis Island in New York Harbor opened as immigration center; it closed in 1954). Every 13 out of 100 people here were born in another country. More than 80 languages are spoken throughout the neighborhoods and streets of the “capital of the world”. There are areas in New York where English is hardly ever heard. The religious and ethnic groups continue to follow their lifestyles with relatively little notice of the general American patterns, unless members of such groups wish to “melt” into the larger society. As a result, New York City is in many ways “more European,” more varied, and for many Americans more exciting than the other regions of the country. The “Big Apple,” as New York is nicknamed, is a city unlike any other.

Despite its fiscal problems and deteriorating services, its graffiti and crime-ridden subways, and its prices, New York City remains the focal point of America’s commerce, communications, and culture. It is everything to everyone. It offers the best, the biggest and the brightest of everything. It is the place of excitement, beauty and…contradictions. There is no canal on Canal Street, Battery Park is not a power station, and Times Square is a triangle. As they say, only in New York. It is bleak and shabby. It is bright and blooming. It is a human condition spelled in neon.

The nation’s largest city, a national leader in business, finance, manufacturing, fashion, music and literature, host of the United Nations, New York City consists of five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island (Richmond). Two international airports –La Guardia and John F. Kennedy, both in Queens, -are major air-

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cargo terminals. But it is of course its central part, the borough of Manhattan, that most people think of New York. In postal addresses, “New York” is synonymous with “Manhattan”, and to residents of the tri-state area, “New York” and “the city” usually refer to Manhattan. The name Manhattan derived from an Indian word means “island of hills”. In the 17th century, the Dutch purchased the island from the native Americans and laid claim to the land, establishing trading post. New Amsterdam became the administrative center of New Netherland. In the mid 1600s the town was taken by the English. During the 18th century, New York (called so in honor of the duke of York) became one of the fast developing commercial centers of the British colonies. From 1785 to 1790 New York was the seat of the US government. With the first stock exchange founded in 1792 New York soon became the nation’s leading financial and commercial center. New York played an important role in events leading to the American Revolution (17761783), it is here that the principle of a free press was established. After the battle of Long Island (1776), New York was occupied by British troops until the end of the Revolution, and was devastated by fires in 1776 and 1778. The American Congress met in New York in 1785 - 1790, and George Washington was inaugurated as the first United States president here in 1789. Since the 1820s, New York became a major center of commodity exchange, banking, marine insurance, and manufacturing. Immigrants, particularly Irish, German, Jewish, and Italian, began to arrive in large numbers. By the late 19th century, the population was swelled by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as well as from China. Growth was further enhanced by the great age of bridge construction initiated by beautiful wire-enlaced Brooklyn Bridge (1883) followed by other bridges which, in 1898, created the five-borough city, including 5 boroughs coextensive with five counties of New York State: Queens (Queens County), Brooklyn (Kings County), Staten Island (Richmond County), the Bronx (Bronx County), and Manhattan (New York County). In 1904, construction of the inter-borough subway systems was begun. This complex public transportation network integrated the boroughs into the pattern recognized today. Almost all of the Bronx is situated on the mainland, but the other boroughs are located on, or comprise, islands. In all, New York City comprises some 50 islands.

Now it is the center of American finance, advertising, art, theater, publishing, fashion – and everything else. In Manhattan, Wall Street – downtown financial district - has the winding, informal street pattern of the 1600s. The rest of Manhattan, however, is laid out in a checker-board pattern, as are most of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The area is crossed from north to south by avenues, and from east to west by streets. Only one avenue - Broadway – runs east to west. Fifth Avenue is the dividing line between the East and West sides. Fifth Avenue is crossed by streets. So, many streets run in

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straight lines up and down, or across. This pattern is called a grid. Each avenue has either a name or a number. The numbers of the streets (from one to over one hundred) begin in Lower Manhattan as you go north. Only a few of the streets have names. Wall and Broad Streets is the seat of the New York Stock Exchange, a United States Federal Reserve bank and the American Stock Exchange. Many prominent banking, brokerage, and financial institutions and offices of many large corporations are located here. The twin towers of the Trade Center, one of the world’s tallest structures, were here too, until destroyed in September 11th, 2001 as a result of the terrorist attacks. Thousands of civilians, blue-collar workers, police officers, and three hundred and forty-three firemen died that terrible day.

When you think of New York, you think of skyscrapers. You see them miles away across the enormous harbor the moment you sail through the “Narrows” between Long

Island and Staten Island. They seem to float between sea and sky like turrets in a fairy tale. Midtown Manhattan is a forest of notable skyscrapers. The first skyscraper in New York was built in 1902. It was twenty-storey-high. These skyscrapers were built in art deco style and were abundantly and richly decorated. Opened in the teeth of the Depression as a mighty symbol of rebirth, the slender 102-storey Empire State Building, 1931, got off to a wobbly start financially. Built by General Motors executive John Raskob, the building reigned for 43 years as the world’s tallest building (1,250 feet high). Its Art Deco crown, intended as a mooring mast for blimps, served as a handy perch in King Kong (a gigantic gorilla hung on to the top of the building, clutching a terrified woman). At night, the top 40 stories are illuminated with colors according to the season: red and green for Christmas, orange and brown for Halloween. From the top you can see all Manhattan spread out below you. A few sky-scrapers have since soared higher, but none has surpassed its limestone majesty. The Chrysler Building was built by an automobile company called Chrysler. Its shiny steel top was made to look like a car radiator. The Rockefeller Center group, built in the 1930s by John Rockefeller according to one general plan, is the largest privately owned business and entertainment center consisting of nineteen buildings, which include offices, banks, shops, and various places of entertainment. In the 1950s, there was a second building boom, which introduced a new style – buildings of steel and glass. The United Nations Secretariat building was the first steel-marble-and-glass sky-scraper (originally, the UN Headquarters were in San Francisco). Outside the UN Headquarters fly the flags of all countries that belong. They are arranged in alphabetical order. Most of the city’s theaters are clustered around Times Square and on Broadway. Broadway is the symbol of American theater, as Hollywood is of American cinema. The intersection of

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Broadway and Seventh Avenue forms world-famous Times Square which, as you remember, is actually a triangle. The square got its name from the New York Times, the most popular newspaper in America. New Year Eve’s celebrations always start here and at mid-night, a large red ball is lowered down to show that the New Year has begun.

Practically the most of Manhattan is a sea of concrete. Luckily for New Yorkers, there is one exception : Central Park. This huge park in the middle of the city was designed in the 1850s by the landscape architect Frederic Law Olmsted and opened in 1876. You can take a ride through Central Park in a little carriage pulled by a horse, or rent a bicycle. There are many attractions in the park: a zoo, a skating-rink, an old-fashion carousel, a lake with boats, and an outdoor theater. The city is particularly noted for its many retail outlets, including large department stores and specialty shops. Fifth and Madison Avenues are especially famous for their fine shops. On Fifth Avenue – along Central park - there are so many museums that it is called “Museum Mile”. The Metropolitan Museum of Art with huge collection of are from all over the world is one of the most important museums in the United States. Park Avenue represents luxury and fashion because of its large expensive apartment houses. Madison Avenue is also known as the center of advertising industry. The street on the western side of Central Park has large and unusual-looking buildings. The first apartments built were very large and rent was very high, and the place was so far from the center, that people called them the Dakota – it was the same as building these apartment houses in the Dakotas ( the states of South and North Dakota are situated a long way from New York). However, the place with the view on Central Park attracted people. Some very famous people have lived in the Dakota, among them the remarkable conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein and one of the fabulously famous Beatles musicians John Lennon who was killed right outside the building on December 8, 1980. As a challenge to quadrangular Manhattan, there rises the building of the Guggenheim Museum, shaped like a shell. Inside you view the pictures by walking down a curved ramp. The Guggenheim was designed by a 90-year-old architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Harlem began after 1900. At first, few people needed new apartments in Manhattan, so new buildings remained empty. Then a black man gave an idea to the building owners: why not rent the apartments to the black families who wanted to move from the old, half-ruined apartments in which they lived in downtown Manhattan and in the south of the USA. The idea worked, and in this way Harlem became an area mostly inhabited by black population. The 1920s were the time of Harlem flourishing. Famous jazz musicians regularly performed there, Duke Ellington among them. With times, bad economy and continued discrimination, the area

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became poorer, many middle-class blacks left. Yet, Harlem has kept its special atmosphere and remained the center of black culture.

Among New York’s largest institutions of higher learning are New York and Columbia universities, both privately owned.

New York is a global city. Like London and Tokyo, New York had emerged in the mud-1980s as a dominant force by serving as the link between the national and the global economies. Since then, population of New York Mega has not been growing, it has been stagnating or shrunk.

There is an inflow of highly-educated 20-to35-year-olds, along with an outflow of the very young and the old, in part, due to the spiraling downtown real-estate prices and incomes. Apartments that once held families now hold one single investment banker. And the space required by that single banker for offices, restaurants and shops can be two to four times more than that required by the family he or she replaces. This is, in part, why the urban glamour zone is expending dramatically. Fewer people means more economic activity. If anything, the elites who populate these glamour zones need more specialized services than ever. Firms, from agriculture to finance, are buying more services. Finance, insurance real estate sales to corporations has grew 30-40% for the last ten years. The general rule is that the most complex an international services (highend law, accounting, finance and management) congregate in the center, while more standardized and national segments of those same services get farmed out to midsize cities. Thus Goldman Sachs has moved a whole series of more standardizes jobs including automated mass trading to New Jersey and Connecticut, but it is building what is probably the world’s largest private trading floor in the Wall Street area. That helps explain the increasing wealth advantage of New York. The earnings of high-level professional jobs have grown the fastest.

Everyday millions of people pour in to Manhattan across the bridges, or through the huge tunnels under the water. They come from the Bronx across the Harlem River, from Queens and Brooklyn on Long Island, from Richmond on Staten Island across New York Bay (an arm of the Atlantic Ocean). Cars stream along the elevated highways, trains rattle over the 3-mile-long Hell Gate railway bridge in to the city itself. And beneath the city, the subway trains rumble. For millions, it is an impossible place to live and the only place to live. As the song says, “New York, New York…It’s a helluva town!”

Questions

1. What makes the Mid-Atlantic Region distinct from other regions? 2. What city is the gateway to America? 3. Why is New York’s nickname a “Big Pie”? 4. Which five

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boroughs does New York consist of? 5. Is Staten Island a state or a borough of New York? 6. How many islands does New York comprise and which is the largest one? 7. What role does Manhattan play in the life of USA? 8. Is Rhode Island one of the islands New York consists of? 9. Where is the Dakota and why is it so called? 10. What’s Harlem and how did it happen that it became an area of mostly black population?

New York City is the largest city of New York - a state in the Mid-Atlantic Region. This state has been called the Empire State since before 1800. George Washington predicted that New York would become the seat of the new empire – a reference to its wealth and variety of resources. The state was named in the1660s for the Duke of York, later James II of England. Once a Dutch colony, New York entered the Union in 1788 as the 11th of the original 13 states. The colossal Statue of Liberty set on Liberty Island in the Upper Bay of New York Harbor was the first view of America seen by millions of immigrants arriving at New York City. Standing 302 ft high including its pedestal, the statue itself 151feet tall, one of the world’s greatest and best-loved monuments, it represents a woman with a crown on her head. High, in her right hand she holds a huge torch which sends a light far out into the Atlantic. In her left hand is a tablet bearing the date - July 4, 1776, proclaiming liberty. The full name of the monument is “The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World.” An elevator lifts to the balcony level, and a spiral staircase leads to an observation platform so that anyone could climb to the top and look through the windows which form the jewels in Liberty’s crown. The American Museum of Immigration is contained in the statue’s base.

At the end of the 19th century, America had become very settled and prosperous once the terrible Civil War had ended in 1865. To the oppressed people of Europe it seemed to offer new hope and new opportunity. The people of France, which is also a republic, had always felt friendly towards the people of America. Many felt that they would like to pay tribute to America for taking in starving and persecuted people and allowing them to live and worship as they wished. A French historian made a proposal for the lasting memorial to Liberty and Franco-American friendship. A young sculptor, Auguste Bartholdi, started his part of work. He decided to mould the figure in copper, because that was a metal which could not be spoiled by sea air. The framework inside the figure was to be in iron and steel. A great engineer, Eiffel, designed that part. (do you know of another large building he is famous for?) The French people raised the money through fetes, concerts, shows collections and a lottery. The work began in France in 1875. By 1884, there was the great statue, towering over the rooftops of Paris. It was the pride and joy of all France. In 1885, the completed statue weighing 225 tons,

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was dissembled and shipped to New York City. By 1886, it had been fitted together again in New York and anchored firmly to the pedestal was designed by American

Architect Richard Morris Hunt and built on Bedloe’s Island. On October 28, 1886, the

Statue of Liberty was presented by Bartholdi to the American nation, her lamp lit for the first time. In the mid-1980s the statue was repaired and restored by both American and French workers for a centennial celebration held in July 1986. It was declared a national monument in 1924. In the 1930s the whole of the island was incorporated into the monument. In 1956 Bedloe’s Island was renamed Liberty Island, and in 1965 nearby Ellis Island, once the country’s major immigration station, was added, bringing the monument’s total area to about 58 acres.

The rest of the MidAtlantic Region was originally a center of immigration, particularly of Germans and Scotch-Irish. The original patterns of large proprietorships were preserved here. In 1638, a group of Swedish settlers set up a colony along the Delaware River and lived there peacefully until 1655 when the Dutch, who disliked the Swedes, settled there. Later it was taken over by the English, and finally became independent in 1776. Delaware is called the First State because it was the first to accept the Constitution, in December, 1787. It is a very small state, second only to Rhode Island. Another important fact about Delaware is that in 1939, nylon, the light-weight, yet strong fiber of the twenty’s century, was invented there, in the largest city Willington which houses the giant chemical company called DuPont. In1938 DuPont invented Teflon as coating. In 1940, DuPont found the killer app. The city of Willington is sometimes called “the chemical capital of the world”. In colonial days, Delaware was part of the “bread basket” area, raising wheat, corn, and other grains for national consumption.

New Jersey (Garden State) is most densely populated and the fifth smallest of states. It ranks seventh biggest in manufactures and even higher in income per acre of farmland. The first professional baseball game in the world was played in New Jersey–the nation’s mostly populated and fifth smallest of states. Baseball is America’s most popular sport. No matter where you travel, baseball is a part of American consciousness

–from tin signs hanging in old bars and restaurants, to TV commercials, to the video games American kids play. It’s more than just a part of Americans’ life, it’s a religion, an American religion. Americans attend more baseball games every season than attend the religious services of all religions combined in the US. No wonder, baseball parks have been referred to as cathedrals by many writers in the past. The past is what hooks Americans – the past of their parents. It’s the equivalent of the storytelling – a tradition, handed down one generation to the next. Where did it come from? No one knows for sure. Many believe that a man named Abner Doubleday invented the game in