E. The Question of a Distinctive American Culture
What is a national culture, and do Americans have one? Consider this tentative definition:
A nation's culture is its shared body of discrete ideas, patterns and habits of thought, customs, and modes of expression, all of which make up not only the nation's identity but its way of life, broadly defined. A national culture forms the set of conceptual lenses through which that nation's people views the world and their place in it, as well as their dealings with one another beyond the narrowly political and economic realms.
The eminent sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote an influential book describing the United States as "the first new nation"{4} -- that is, the first nation deliberately invented as a nation, lacking most traditional determinants of national identity. Because the American people chose to be a nation, one of the most important components of a distinctive American culture is American political culture, which includes institutional arrangements, political ideas and beliefs, and habits and patterns of political behavior.{5}
But there is a distinctive American culture beyond its political component. It has developed in a three-stage process:
I. Americans prove that they have a culture.
Beginning in the colonial period and persisting into the years before the Civil War, Americans set out to prove to Europeans that they were not unlettered, provincial colonials existing on the edge of civilization -- that they, too, could achieve greatly in such fields as literature, art, science, and technology.
ii. Americans prove that they have their own culture.
Ironically, this stage (which dominated the period from the 1820s through the end of the nineteenth century and, to a lesser extent, well into the twentieth century) was the mirror-image of the first stage. Now Americans believed that they had to demonstrate, not that they had a culture at all, but that the culture they had was their own, independent creation rather than a derivative offshoot of Europe.
iii. Americans invent cultural forms, examples, and forces that influence world culture.
This stage, which began in the mid-nineteenth century{6} and persists to this day, goes beyond the traditional forms of "high" culture such as written literature (novels, plays, short stories, essays, and so forth) and the fine arts (painting, sculpture, music). For example, the linked fields of science and technology are among the foremost examples of American culture reshaping the world. The list of American technological inventions and advances with world impact include achievements in energy and power generation and transmission (steam, electricity, nuclear power); communications (telegraph, telephone, motion pictures, radio, television); transportation (steam-powered ships capable of crossing oceans, automobiles, aircraft, spacecraft); information science (computers and electronic data storage); and military technology (nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, space satellites). Another cultural sphere in which the United States has transformed the world is popular culture -- the development and spread of mass media (motion pictures, radio, and television programming);{7} music (ragtime, jazz, musical comedy, big bands, country & western, and the myriad forms of rock and roll); genre entertainment (mysteries, science fiction); fast food; clothing (for example, blue-jeans and T-shirts); and so forth.