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AMERICAN CIVILIZATION
Prof.dr.Rodica Mihaila

U.S. Geography -

Emerson: My own quarrel with America, of course, was that the geography is sublime but
the men are not. (Nye,23)
2 main features: geographical isolation ; ecological variety
-The Rockies= the backbone (Mount McKinley 20,320ft. elevation); The chief
mountains system (from central New Mexico to N.Alaska)
-The Appalachians = the eastern edge (range extending from S.Quebec province to
N.Alabama). Highest peak= MtMitchell 6684 ft.
-Between the Rockies and the Appalachians= the heartland of N.A.
-The Great Plains = the heartlands prairies
- Sierra Nevada (mountain range in E.California (Mt.Whitney=14.495 ft.)
- Between the Rockies and Sierra Nevada = the Great American Desert
-The Mississippi =the Father of Waters (Indians)
-the Great Lakes: Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie (Niagara) Ontario.

The main geographical and cultural regions (bound by landscape, climate, history,
ethnic background, and customs):
Northeast - capital; New York City. Includes also New England and Middle
Atlantic States
a) New England: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont,
New Hampshire, Maine.
-protestant (puritan) settlers; Anglo-Saxon homogeneity
-puritan tradition;emphasis on education and intellectual life
-great universities: Yale (Conn.,1701), Harvard (1636),Amherst
(Mass., 1821), Dartmouth (N.H.,1769), Brown (1764),
Wesleyan (Conn.,1831), MIT(1860), Boston University,
Tufts (1852), Wellesley (Mass., 1870)
-cultural cradle. In Mass. alone one can visit the homes of
Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson
b)The Middle Atlantic States: New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey,
Delaware, Maryland. Centered on Philadelphia and N.Y.
-a heaven of religious tolerance
-the Dutch ruled NY from the 1620s to 1664 (bought
Manhattan for glass beads worth $24. Hudson river.
Washington Irving.
-Catholics settled in Maryland, (proprietor was Lord Baltimore)
-Quakers in Pennsylvania (owned by the quaker William Penn)
-the Swidish had a colony in Delaware in the 1630s
-Germans settled nea Philadelphia before 1800
-since the late 19th century NY has become the literary capital
of the US. From W.Irving to the Harlem Renaissance,
from Henry James to Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, E.L.Doctorow, and T.Wolfe.
The South - extends from Virginia to Texas (excludes Missouri): West Virginia,
Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, N.Carolina, S.Carolina,
Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas
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-Jamestown, Virginia (1607). First area the British settled.

-English Protestants=the largest group of settlers in the 17-18th centuries
-established a vigurous agricultural system based on tobacco, sugar and cotton
-large plantations with a labor force of slaves from Africa or West Indies
The Midwest : Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin,
Iowa, Nebraska, S.Dakota, N.Dakota, Minnesota
- extends 1000 miles from the Appalachians to the Rockies. Gently
rolling countryside; one of the richest agricultural areas of the world
(corn, wheat, soybeans); heavy industry (steel mills, factories for
automobiles, chemical works).
-area of strong Scandinavian, German, Swiss and Dutch influence
-in politics: moralistic; religion: protestant sects
-in the first half of the 20th Century produced more writers than any other
region: Willa Cathers My Antonia (the first settlers); Sinclair Lewiss
Main Street (Gopher Prairie, Minn.) and Sherwood Andersons
Winesburg, Ohio (the life of the small town); Dreisers Sister Carrie
(diversity of Chicago); Hemingway (Illinois), Scott Fitzgerald (St.Paul,
Minnesota); Eliot (St.Louis, Missouri)
The South West: Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California (24 mil.)
-first explored by the Spanish at the end of the 16th c. Arid land.
-inhabited by Indian tribes with sophisticated cultures: Hopi, Navajo, Apache
- It was part of Mexico until the US conquered it in the Mexican-American war
of 1848 (also Colorado and most of Nevada)
-Has grown rapidly after WWII. Today 10 million Hispanics live here.
The Mountain States: Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Whyoming, Idaho, Montana
-Denver and Salt Lake City (Mormons)
The Pacific North West: Washington, Oregon, Northern California
-the Gold Rush 1849
-since 1865, San Francisco= literary capital of the West: Bret Harte and Mark
Twain (immortalized the mining camps), Frank Norris (McTeague: A
Story of San Francisco) and Jack London. Steinbecks work is set in
central California, as is the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, and the fiction of
William Saroyan.
-in the 1950s: the San Francisco Renaissance. Poetry: Ferlinghetti, Kenneth
Rexroth, Gary Snyder, the Beat poets. Writers: Ken Kesey (Sometimes a Great Notion
evokes Oregon), Ursula Le Guins The Lathe of Heaven science fiction in this region.
Alaska (bought from the Russians in 1867 for $7 million) and Hawaii (annexed as
US territory in 1898)
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The flag of the United States of America consists of 13 equal horizontal stripes of red (top
and bottom) alternating with white, with a blue rectangle in the canton bearing 50 small,
white, five-pointed stars arranged in nine offset horizontal rows of six stars (top and bottom)
alternating with rows of five stars. The 50 stars on the flag represent the 50 U.S. states and
the 13 stripes represent the original Thirteen Colonies that rebelled against the British Crown
and became the first states in the Union.[1] Nicknames for the flag include the Stars and
Stripes, Old Glory,[2] and the Star-Spangled Banner (also the name of the country's official
national anthem). Because of its symbolism, the starred blue canton is called the "union".
This part of the national flag can stand alone as a maritime flag called the Union Jack.[3]