United States (USA)
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The major characteristic of the United States, USA is probably its great variety. Its physical environment ranges from the Arctic to the subtropical, from the moist rain forest to the arid desert, from the rugged mountain peak to the flat prairie. Although the total population of the United States is large by world standards, its overall population density is relatively low. The country embraces some of the world’s largest urban concentrations as well as some of the most extensive areas that are almost devoid of habitation
The United States contains a highly diverse population. Unlike a country such as China which largely incorporated indigenous peoples, the United States has a diversity that to a great degree has come from an immense and sustained global immigration. Probably no other country has a wider range of racial, ethnic, and cultural types than does the United States. In addition to the presence of surviving Native Americans including American Indians, Aleuts, and Eskimos and the descendants of Africans taken as enslaved persons to the New World, the national character has been enriched, tested, and constantly redefined by the tens of millions of immigrants who by and large have come to America hoping for greater social, political, and economic opportunities than they had in the places they left. It should be noted that although the terms America and Americans are often used as synonyms for the United States and its citizens, respectively, they are also used in a broader sense for North, South, and Central America collectively and their citizens.
The United States is the world’s greatest economic power, measured in terms of gross domestic product GDP. The nation’s wealth is partly a reflection of its rich natural resources and its enormous agricultural output, but it owes more to the country’s highly developed industry. Despite its relative economic self-sufficiency in many areas, the United States is the most important single factor in world trade by virtue of the sheer size of its economy. Its exports and imports represent major proportions of the world total. The United States also impinges on the global economy as a source of and as a destination for investment capital. The country continues to sustain an economic life that is more diversified than any other on Earth, providing the majority of its people with one of the world’s highest standards of living.
The United States is relatively young by world standards, being less than 250 years old; it achieved its current size only in the mid-20th century. America was the first of the European colonies to separate successfully from its motherland, and it was the first nation to be established on the premise that sovereignty rests with its citizens and not with the government. In its first century and a half, the country was mainly preoccupied with its own territorial expansion and economic growth and with social debates that ultimately led to civil war and a healing period that is still not complete. In the 20th century, the United States emerged as a world power, and since World War II it has been one of the preeminent powers. It has not accepted this mantle easily nor always carried it willingly; the principles and ideals of its founders have been tested by the pressures and exigencies of its dominant status. The United States still offers its residents opportunities for unparalleled personal advancement and wealth. However, the depletion of its resources, the contamination of its environment, and the continuing social and economic inequality that perpetuates areas of poverty and blight all threaten the fabric of the country.
The District of Columbia has been discussed in the article Washington. For discussion of other major U.S. cities, see the articles Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Political units in association with the United States include Puerto Rico, discussed in the article Puerto Rico, and several Pacific islands, discussed in Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa.
Land
The two great sets of elements that mold the physical environment of the United States are, first, the geologic, which determines the main patterns of landforms, drainage, and mineral resources and influences soils to a lesser degree, and, second, the atmospheric, which dictates not only climate and weather but also in large part the distribution of soils, plants, and animals. Although these elements are not entirely independent of one another, each produces on map patterns that are so profoundly different that essentially they remain two separate geographies. Since this article covers only the conterminous United States, see also the articles Alaska and Hawaii.
Relief
The center of the conterminous United States is a great sprawling interior lowland, reaching from the ancient shield of central Canada on the north to the Gulf of Mexico on the south. To east and west this lowland rises, first gradually and then abruptly, to mountain ranges that divide it from the sea on both sides. The two mountain systems differ drastically. The Appalachian Mountains on the east are low, almost unbroken, and in the main set well back from the Atlantic. From New York to the Mexican border stretches the low Coastal Plain, which faces the ocean along a swampy, convoluted coast. The gently sloping surface of the plain extends out beneath the sea, where it forms the continental shelf, which, although submerged beneath shallow ocean water, is geologically identical to the Coastal Plain. Southward the plain grows wider, swinging westward in Georgia and Alabama to truncate the Appalachians along their southern extremity and separate the interior lowland from the Gulf.
West of the Central Lowland is the mighty Cordillera, part of a global mountain system that rings the Pacific basin. The Cordillera encompasses fully one-third of the United States, with an internal variety commensurate with its size. At its eastern margin lie the Rocky Mountains, a high, diverse, and discontinuous chain that stretches all the way from New Mexico to the Canadian border. The Cordillera’s western edge is a Pacific coastal chain of rugged mountains and inland valleys, the whole rising spectacularly from the sea without the benefit of a coastal plain. Pent between the Rockies and the Pacific chain is a vast intermontane complex of basins, plateaus, and isolated ranges so large and remarkable that they merit recognition as a region separate from the Cordillera itself.
These regions the Interior Lowlands and their upland fringes, the Appalachian Mountain system, the Atlantic Plain, the Western Cordillera, and the Western Intermontane Region are so various that they require further division into 24 major subregions or provinces.
The Interior Lowlands and their upland fringes
Andrew Jackson is supposed to have remarked that the United States begins at the Alleghenies, implying that only west of the mountains, in the isolation and freedom of the great Interior Lowlands, could people finally escape Old World influences. Whether or not the lowlands constitute the country’s cultural core is debatable, but there can be no doubt that they comprise its geologic core and in many ways its geographic core as well.
This enormous region rests upon an ancient, much-eroded platform of complex crystalline rocks that have for the most part lain undisturbed by major orogenic mountain-building activity for more than 600,000,000 years. Over much of central Canada, these Precambrian rocks are exposed at the surface and form the continent’s single largest topographical region, the formidable and ice-scoured Canadian Shield.
In the United States, most of the crystalline platform is concealed under a deep blanket of sedimentary rocks. In the far north, however, the naked Canadian Shield extends into the United States far enough to form two small but distinctive landform regions: the rugged and occasionally spectacular Adirondack Mountains of northern New York and the more-subdued and austere Superior Upland of northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. As in the rest of the shield, glaciers have stripped soils away, strewn the surface with boulders and other debris, and obliterated preglacial drainage systems. Most attempts at farming in these areas have been abandoned, but the combination of a comparative wilderness in a northern climate, clear lakes, and white-water streams has fostered the development of both regions as year-round outdoor recreation areas.
Mineral wealth in the Superior Upland is legendary. Iron lies near the surface and close to the deepwater ports of the upper Great Lakes. Iron is mined both north and south of Lake Superior, but best known are the colossal deposits of Minnesota’s Mesabi Range, for more than a century one of the world’s richest and a vital element in America’s rise to industrial power. In spite of depletion, the Minnesota and Michigan mines still, yield a major proportion of the country’s iron and a significant percentage of the world’s supply.
South of the Adirondack Mountains and the Superior Upland lies the boundary between crystalline and sedimentary rocks; abruptly, everything is different. The core of this sedimentary region the heartland of the United States is the great Central Lowland, which stretches for 1,500 miles 2,400 kilometers from New York to central Texas and north another 1,000 miles to the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. To some, the landscape may seem dull, for heights of more than 2,000 feet 600 meters are unusual, and truly rough terrain is almost lacking. Landscapes are varied, however, largely as the result of glaciation that directly or indirectly affected most of the subregion. North of the Missouri–Ohio river line, the advance and readvance of continental ice left an intricate mosaic of boulders, sand, gravel, silt, and clay and a complex pattern of lakes and drainage channels, some abandoned, some still in use. The southern part of the Central Lowland is quite different, covered mostly with loess wind-deposited silt that further subdued the already low relief surface. Elsewhere, especially near major rivers, postglacial streams carved the loess into rounded hills, and visitors have aptly compared their billowing shapes to the waves of the sea. Above all, the loess produces soil of extraordinary fertility. As the Mesabi iron was a major source of America’s industrial wealth, its agricultural prosperity has been rooted in Midwestern loess.
The Central Lowland resembles a vast saucer, rising gradually to higher lands on all sides. Southward and eastward, the land rises gradually to three major plateaus. Beyond the reach of glaciation to the south, the sedimentary rocks have been raised into two broad upwarps, separated from one another by the great valley of the Mississippi River. The Ozark Plateau lies west of the river and occupies most of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas; on the east, the Interior Low Plateaus dominate central Kentucky and Tennessee. Except for two nearly circular patches of rich limestone country the Nashville Basin of Tennessee and the Kentucky Bluegrass region most of both plateau regions consist of sandstone uplands, intricately dissected by streams. Local relief runs to several hundreds of feet in most places, and visitors to the region must travel winding roads along narrow stream valleys. The soils there are poor, and mineral resources are scanty.
Eastward from the Central Lowland the Appalachian Plateau a narrow band of dissected uplands that strongly resembles the Ozark Plateau and Interior Low Plateaus in steep slopes, wretched soils, and endemic poverty forms a transition between the interior plains and the Appalachian Mountains. Usually, however, the Appalachian Plateau is considered a subregion of the Appalachian Mountains, partly on grounds of location, and partly because of geologic structure. Unlike the other plateaus, where rocks are warped upward, the rocks there form an elongated basin, wherein bituminous coal has been preserved from erosion. This Appalachian coal, like the Mesabi iron that it complements in U.S. industry, is extraordinary. Extensive, thick, and close to the surface, it has stoked the furnaces of northeastern steel mills for decades and helps explain the huge concentration of heavy industry along the lower Great Lakes.
The western flanks of the Interior Lowlands are the Great Plains, a territory of awesome bulk that spans the full distance between Canada and Mexico in a swath nearly 500 miles 800 km wide. The Great Plains were built by successive layers of poorly cemented sand, silt, and gravel debris laid down by parallel east-flowing streams from the Rocky Mountains. Seen from the east, the surface of the Great Plains rises inexorably from about 2,000 feet 600 meters near Omaha, Nebraska, to more than 6,000 feet 1,825 meters at Cheyenne, Wyoming, but the climb is so gradual that popular legend holds the Great Plains to be flat. True flatness is rare, although the High Plains of western Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and eastern Colorado come close. More commonly, the land is broadly rolling, and parts of the northern plains are sharply dissected into badlands.
The main mineral wealth of the Interior Lowlands derives from fossil fuels. Coal occurs in structural basins protected from erosion high-quality bituminous in the Appalachian, Illinois, and western Kentucky basins; and subbituminous and lignite in the eastern and northwestern Great Plains. Petroleum and natural gas have been found in nearly every state between the Appalachians and the Rockies, but the Midcontinent Fields of western Texas and the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma, and Kansas surpass all others. Aside from small deposits of lead and zinc, metallic minerals are of little importance.
The Appalachian Mountain system
The Appalachians dominate the eastern United States and separate the Eastern Seaboard from the interior with a belt of subdued uplands that extends nearly 1,500 miles 2,400 km from northeastern Alabama to the Canadian border. They are old, complex mountains, the eroded stumps of much greater ranges. Present topography results from erosion that has carved weak rocks away, leaving a skeleton of resistant rocks behind as highlands. Geologic differences are thus faithfully reflected in topography. In the Appalachians, these differences are sharply demarcated and neatly arranged so that all the major subdivisions except New England lie in strips parallel to the Atlantic and to one another.
The core of the Appalachians is a belt of complex metamorphic and igneous rocks that stretches all the way from Alabama to New Hampshire. The western side of this belt forms the long slender rampart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, containing the highest elevations in the Appalachians Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, 6,684 feet 2,037 meters, and some of its most handsome mountain scenery. On its eastern, or seaward, side the Blue Ridge descends in an abrupt and sometimes spectacular escarpment to Piedmont, a well-drained, rolling land—never quite hills, but never quite a plain. Before the settlement of the Midwest Piedmont was the most productive agricultural region in the United States, and several Pennsylvania counties still consistently report some of the highest farm yields per acre in the entire country.
West of the crystalline zone, away from the axis of primary geologic deformation, sedimentary rocks have escaped metamorphism but are compressed into tight folds. Erosion has carved the upturned edges of these folded rocks into the remarkable Ridge and Valley country of the western Appalachians. Long linear ridges characteristically stand about 1,000 feet 300 meters from base to crest and run for tens of miles, paralleled by broad open valleys of comparable length. In Pennsylvania, ridges run unbroken for great distances, occasionally turning abruptly in a zigzag pattern; by contrast, the southern ridges are broken by faults and form short, parallel segments that are lined up like magnetized iron filings. By far the largest valley—and one of the most important routes in North America—is the Great Valley, an extraordinary trench of shale and limestone that runs nearly the entire length of the Appalachians. It provides a lowland passage from the middle Hudson valley to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and on southward, where it forms the Shenandoah and Cumberland valleys, and has been one of the main paths through the Appalachians since pioneer times. In New England, it is floored with slates and marbles and forms the Valley of Vermont, one of the few fertile areas in an otherwise mountainous region.
Topography much like that of the Ridge and Valley is found in the Ouachita Mountains of western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma, an area generally thought to be a detached continuation of Appalachian geologic structure, the intervening section buried beneath the sediments of the lower Mississippi valley.
The once-glaciated New England section of the Appalachians is divided from the rest of the chain by an indentation of the Atlantic. Although almost completely underlain by crystalline rocks, New England is laid out in north-south bands, reminiscent of the southern Appalachians. The rolling, rocky hills of southeastern New England are not dissimilar to Piedmont, while, farther northwest, the rugged and lofty White Mountains are a New England analog to the Blue Ridge. (Mount Washington, New Hampshire, at 6,288 feet 1,917 meters, is the highest peak in the northeastern United States. The westernmost ranges the Taconics, Berkshires, and the Green Mountains show a strong north-south lineation like the Ridge and Valley. Unlike the rest of the Appalachians, however, glaciation has scoured the crystalline rocks much like those of the Canadian Shield, so New England is best known for its picturesque landscape, not for its fertile soil.
Typical of diverse geologic regions, the Appalachians contain a great variety of minerals. Only a few occur in quantities large enough for sustained exploitation, notably iron in Pennsylvania’s Blue Ridge and Piedmont and the famous granites, marbles, and slates of northern New England. In Pennsylvania, the Ridge and Valley region contain one of the world’s largest deposits of anthracite coal, once the basis of a thriving mining economy; many of the mines are now shut, oil and gas having replaced coal as the major fuel used to heat homes.
The Atlantic Plain
The eastern and southeastern fringes of the United States are part of the outermost margins of the continental platform, repeatedly invaded by the sea and veneered with layer after layer of young, poorly consolidated sediments. Part of this platform now lies slightly above sea level and forms a nearly flat and often swampy coastal plain, which stretches from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to beyond the Mexican border. Most of the platform, however, is still submerged, so that a band of shallow water, the continental shelf, parallels the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, in some places reaching 250 miles 400 km out to sea.
The Atlantic Plain slopes so gently that even slight crustal up warping can shift the coastline far out to sea at the expense of the continental shelf. The peninsula of Florida is just such an upwarp: nowhere in its 400-mile 640-km length does the land rise more than 350 feet 100 meters above sea level; much of the southern and coastal areas rise less than 10 feet 3 meters and are poorly drained and dangerously exposed to Atlantic storms. Downwards can result in extensive flooding. North of New York City, for example, the weight of glacial ice depressed most of the Coastal Plain beneath the sea, and the Atlantic now beats directly against New England’s rock-ribbed coasts. Cape Cod, Long Island New York, and a few offshore islands are all that remain of New England’s drowned Coastal Plain. Another downwarp lies perpendicular to the Gulf coast and guides the course of the lower Mississippi. The river, however, has filled with alluvium what otherwise would be an arm of the Gulf, forming a great inland salient of the Coastal Plain called the Mississippi Embayment.
South of New York the Coastal Plain gradually widens, but ocean water has invaded the lower valleys of most of the coastal rivers and has turned them into estuaries. The greatest of these is the Chesapeake Bay, merely the flooded lower valley of the Susquehanna River and its tributaries, but there are hundreds of others. Offshore a line of sandbars and barrier beaches stretches intermittently the length of the Coastal Plain, hampering entry of shipping into the estuaries but providing the eastern United States with a playground that is more than 1,000 miles 1,600 km long.
Poor soils are the rule on the Coastal Plain, though rare exceptions have formed some of America’s most famous agricultural regions—for example, the citrus country of central Florida’s limestone uplands and the Cotton Belt of the Old South, once centered on the alluvial plain of the Mississippi and belts of chalky black soils of eastern Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi. The Atlantic Plain’s greatest natural wealth derives from petroleum and natural gas trapped in domal structures that dot the Gulf Coast of eastern Texas and Louisiana. Onshore and offshore drilling have revealed colossal reserves of oil and natural gas.
The Western Cordillera
West of the Great Plains the United States seems to become a craggy land whose skyline is rarely without mountains—totally different from the open plains and rounded hills of the East. On a map, the alignment of the two main chains—the Rocky Mountains on the east, and the Pacific ranges on the west—tempts one to assume a geologic and hence topographic homogeneity. Nothing could be farther from the truth, for each chain is divided into widely disparate sections.
The Rockies are typically diverse. The Southern Rockies are composed of a disconnected series of lofty elongated upwarps, their cores made of granitic basement rocks, stripped of sediments, and heavily glaciated at high elevations. In New Mexico and along the western flanks of the Colorado ranges, widespread volcanism and deformation of colorful sedimentary rocks have produced rugged and picturesque country, but the characteristic central Colorado or southern Wyoming range is impressively austere rather than spectacular. The Front Range west of Denver is prototypical, rising abruptly from its base at about 6,000 feet (1,825 meters) to rolling alpine meadows between 11,000 and 12,000 feet 3,350 and 3,650 meters. Peaks appear as low hills perched on this high-level surface, so that Colorado, for example, boasts 53 mountains over 14,000 feet (4,270 meters) but not one over 14,500 feet 4,420 meters.
The Middle Rockies cover most of west-central Wyoming. Most of the ranges resemble the granitic upwarps of Colorado, but thrust faulting and volcanism have produced varied and spectacular country to the west, some of which is included in Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks. Much of the subregion, however, is not mountainous at all but consists of extensive intermontane basins and plains—largely floored with enormous volumes of sedimentary waste eroded from the mountains themselves. Whole ranges have been buried, producing the greatest gap in the Cordilleran system, the Wyoming Basin—resembling in geologic structure and topography an intermontane peninsula of the Great Plains. As a result, the Rockies have never posed an important barrier to east-west transportation in the United States; all major routes, from the Oregon Trail to interstate highways, funnel through the basin, essentially circumventing the main ranges of the Rockies.
The Northern Rockies contain the most varied mountain landscapes of the Cordillera, reflecting a corresponding geologic complexity. The region’s backbone is a mighty series of batholiths—huge masses of molten rock that slowly cooled below the surface and were later uplifted. The batholiths are eroded into rugged granitic ranges, which, in central Idaho, compose the most extensive wilderness country in the conterminous United States. East of the batholiths and opposite the Great Plains, sediments have been folded and thrust-faulted into a series of linear north-south ranges, a southern extension of the spectacular Canadian Rockies. Although elevations run 2,000 to 3,000 feet 600 to 900 meters lower than the Colorado Rockies most of the Idaho Rockies lie well below 10,000 feet 3,050 meters, increased rainfall and northern latitude have encouraged glaciation—there as elsewhere a sculptor of the handsome alpine landscape.
The western branch of the Cordillera directly abuts the Pacific Ocean. This coastal chain, like its Rocky Mountain cousins on the eastern flank of the Cordillera, conceals bewildering complexity behind a facade of apparent simplicity. At first glance, the chain consists merely of two lines of mountains with a discontinuous trough between them. Immediately behind the coast is a line of hills and low mountains—the Pacific Coast Ranges. Further inland, averaging 150 miles 240 km from the coast, the line of the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade Range includes the highest elevations in the conterminous United States. Between these two unequal mountain lines is a discontinuous trench, the Troughs of the Coastal Margin.
The apparent simplicity disappears under the most cursory examination. The Pacific Coast Ranges actually contain five distinct sections, each of different geologic origin and each with its own distinctive topography. The Transverse Ranges of southern California are a crowded assemblage of island-like faulted ranges, with peak elevations of more than 10,000 feet but sufficiently separated by plains and low passes so that travel through them is easy. From Point Conception to the Oregon border, however, the main California Coast Ranges are entirely different, resembling the Appalachian Ridge and Valley region, with low linear ranges that result from erosion of faulted and folded rocks. Major faults run parallel to the low ridges, and the greatest—the notorious San Andreas Fault—was responsible for the earthquake that all but destroyed San Francisco in 1906. Along the California–Oregon border, everything changes again. In this region, the wildly rugged Klamath Mountains represent a western salient of interior structure reminiscent of the Idaho Rockies and the northern Sierra Nevada. In western Oregon and southwestern Washington, the Coast Ranges are also different—a gentle, hilly land carved by streams from a broad arch of marine deposits interbedded with tabular lavas. In the northernmost part of the Coast Ranges and the remote northwest, a domal upwarp has produced the Olympic Mountains; its serrated peaks tower nearly 8,000 feet 2,440 meters above Puget Sound and the Pacific, and the heavy precipitation on its upper slopes supports the largest active glaciers in the United States outside of Alaska.
East of these Pacific Coast Ranges the Troughs of the Coastal Margin contain the only extensive lowland plains of the Pacific margin—California’s Central Valley, Oregon’s Willamette River valley, and the half-drowned basin of Puget Sound in Washington. Parts of an inland trench that extends for great distances along the east coast of the Pacific, similar valleys occur in such diverse areas as Chile and the Alaska panhandle. These valleys are blessed with superior soils, easily irritated, and very accessible from the Pacific. They have enticed settlers for more than a century and have become the main centers of population and economic activity for much of the U.S. West Coast.
Still farther east rise the two highest mountain chains in the conterminous United States—the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada. Aside from elevation, geographic continuity, and spectacular scenery, however, the two ranges differ in almost every important respect. Except for its northern section, where sedimentary and metamorphic rocks occur, the Sierra Nevada is largely made of granite, part of the same batholithic chain that creates the Idaho Rockies. The range is grossly asymmetrical, the result of massive faulting that has gently tilted the western slopes toward the Central Valley but has uplifted the eastern side to confront the interior with an escarpment nearly two miles high. At high elevation, glaciers have scoured the granites to a gleaming white, while on the west the ice has carved spectacular valleys such as the Yosemite. The loftiest peak in the Sierras is Mount Whitney, which at 14,494 feet 4,418 meters is the highest mountain in the conterminous states. The upfaulting that produced Mount Whitney is accompanied by downfaulting that formed nearby Death Valley, at 282 feet 86 meters below sea level the lowest point in North America.
The Cascades are made largely of volcanic rock; those in northern Washington contain granite like the Sierras, but the rest are formed from relatively recent lava outpourings of dun-colored basalt and andesite. The Cascades are in effect two ranges. The lower, older range is a long belt of upward lava, rising unspectacularly to elevations between 6,000 and 8,000 feet 1,825 and 2,440 meters. Perched above the low Cascades is a chain of lofty volcanoes that punctuate the horizon with magnificent glacier-clad peaks. The highest is Mount Rainier, which at 14,410 feet 4,392 meters is all the more dramatic for rising from near sea level. Most of these volcanoes are quiescent, but they are far from extinct. Mount Lassen in northern California erupted violently in 1914, as did Mount St. Helens in the state of Washington in 1980. Most of the other high Cascade volcanoes exhibit some sign of seismic activity.
The Western Intermontane Region
The Cordillera’s two main chains enclose a vast intermontane region of arid basins, plateaus, and isolated mountain ranges that stretches from the Mexican border nearly to Canada and extends 600 miles from east to west. This enormous territory contains three huge subregions, each with a distinctive geologic history and its own striking topography.
The Colorado Plateau, nestled against the western flanks of the Southern Rockies, is an extraordinary island of geologic stability set in the turbulent sea of Cordilleran tectonic activity. Stability was not absolute, of course, so parts of the plateau are warped and injected with volcanic, but in general, the landscape results from the erosion by streams of nearly flat-lying sedimentary rocks. The result is a mosaic of angular mesas, buttes, and steplike canyons intricately cut from rocks that often are vividly colored. Large areas of the plateau are so improbably picturesque that they have been set aside as national preserves. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is the most famous of several dozen such areas.
West of the plateau and abutting the Sierra Nevada’s eastern escarpment lies the arid Basin and Range subregion, among the most remarkable topographic provinces of the United States. The Basin and Range extend from southern Oregon and Idaho into northern Mexico. Rocks of great complexity have been broken by faulting, and the resulting blocks have tumbled, eroded, and been partly buried by lava and alluvial debris accumulating in the desert basins. The eroded blocks from mountain ranges are characteristically dozens of miles long, several thousand feet from base to crest, with peak elevations that rarely rise to more than 10,000 feet, and almost always aligned roughly north-south. The basin floors are typically alluvium and sometimes salt marshes or alkali flats.
The third intermontane region, the Columbia Basin, is literally the last, for in some parts its rocks are still being formed. Its entire area is underlain by innumerable tabular lava flows that have flooded the basin between the Cascades and Northern Rockies to undetermined depths. The volume of lava must be measured in thousands of cubic miles, for the flows blanket large parts of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho and in southern Idaho have drowned the flanks of the Northern Rocky Mountains in a basaltic sea. Where the lavas are fresh, as in southern Idaho, the surface is often nearly flat, but more often the floors have been trenched by rivers conspicuously the Columbia and the Snake or by glacial floodwaters that have carved an intricate system of braided canyons in the remarkable Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington. In the surface form, the eroded lava often resembles the topography of the Colorado Plateau, but the gaudy colors of Colorado are replaced here by the somber black and rusty brown of weathered basalt.
Most large mountain systems are sources of varied mineral wealth, and the American Cordillera is no exception. Metallic minerals have been taken from most crystalline regions and have furnished the United States with both romance and wealth the Sierra Nevada gold that provoked the 1849 gold rush, the fabulous silver lodes of western Nevada’s Basin and Range, and gold strikes all along the Rocky Mountain chain. Industrial metals, however, are now far more important; copper and lead are among the base metals, and the more exotic molybdenum, vanadium, and cadmium are mainly useful in alloys.
In the Cordillera, as elsewhere, the greatest wealth stems from fuels. Most major basins contain oil and natural gas, conspicuously the Wyoming Basin, the Central Valley of California, and the Los Angeles Basin. The Colorado Plateau, however, has yielded some of the most interesting discoveries considerable deposits of uranium, and colossal occurrences of oil shale. Oil from the shale, however, probably cannot be economically removed without widespread strip-mining and correspondingly large-scale damage to the environment. Wide exploitation of low-sulfur bituminous coal has been initiated in the Four Corners area of the Colorado Plateau, and open-pit mining has already devastated parts of this once-pristine country as completely as it has West Virginia.
Drainage
As befits a nation of continental proportions, the United States has an extraordinary network of rivers and lakes, including some of the largest and most useful in the world. In the humid East, they provide an enormous mileage of cheap inland transportation; westward, most rivers and streams are unnavigable but are heavily used for irrigation and power generation. Both East and West, however, traditionally have used lakes and streams as public sewers, and despite efforts to clean them up, most large waterways are laden with vast, poisonous volumes of industrial, agricultural, and human wastes.
The Eastern systems
Chief among U.S. rivers is the Mississippi, which, with its great tributaries, Ohio and Missouri, drains most of the midcontinent. The Mississippi is navigable to Minneapolis, nearly 1,200 miles 1,900 km by air from the Gulf of Mexico, and along with the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence system it forms the world’s greatest network of inland waterways. The Mississippi’s eastern branches, chiefly Ohio and Tennessee, are also navigable for great distances. From the west, however, many of its numerous Great Plains tributaries are too seasonal and choked with sandbars to be used for shipping. Missouri, for example, though longer than the Mississippi itself, was essential without navigation until the mid-20th century when a combination of dams, locks, and dredging opened the river to barge traffic.
The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence system, the other half of the midcontinental inland waterway, is connected to the Mississippi–Ohio via Chicago by canals and the Illinois River. The five Great Lakes four of which are shared with Canada constitute by far the largest freshwater lake group in the world and carry a larger tonnage of shipping than any other. The three main barriers to navigation—the St. Marys Rapids, at Sault Sainte Marie; Niagara Falls; and the rapids of St. Lawrence—are all bypassed by locks, whose 27-foot (8-meter) draft lets ocean vessels penetrate 1,300 miles (2,100 km) into the continent, as far as Duluth, Minnesota, and Chicago.
The third group of Eastern rivers drains the coastal strip along the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Except for the Rio Grande, which rises west of the Rockies and flows about 1,900 circuitous miles (3,050 km) to the Gulf, few of these coastal rivers measure more than 300 miles (480 km), and most flow in an almost straight line to the sea. Except in glaciated New England and in arid southwestern Texas, most of the larger coastal streams are navigable for some distance.
The Pacific systems
West of the Rockies, nearly all of the rivers are strongly influenced by aridity. In the deserts and steppes of the intermontane basins, most of the scanty runoff disappears into interior basins, only one of which, the Great Salt Lake, holds any substantial volume of water. Aside from a few minor coastal streams, only three large river systems manage to reach the sea—the Columbia, Colorado, and the San Joaquin–Sacramento system of California’s Central Valley. All three of these river systems are exotic: that is, they flow for considerable distances across drylands from which they receive little water. Both the Columbia and Colorado have carved awesome gorges, the former through the somber lavas of the Cascades and the Columbia Basin, the latter through the brilliantly colored rocks of the Colorado Plateau. These gorges lend themselves to easy damming, and the once-wild Columbia has been turned into a stairway of placid lakes whose waters irrigate the arid plateaus of eastern Washington and power one of the world’s largest hydroelectric networks. Colorado is less extensively developed, and proposals for new dam construction have met fierce opposition from those who want to preserve the spectacular natural beauty of the river’s canyonlands.
Climate
Climate affects human habitats both directly and indirectly through its influence on vegetation, soils, and wildlife. In the United States, however, the natural environment has been altered drastically by nearly four centuries of European settlement, as well as thousands of years of Indian occupancy.
Wherever land is abandoned, however, wild conditions return rapidly, achieving over the long run a dynamic equilibrium among soils, vegetation, and the inexorable strictures of climate. Thus, though Americans have created an artificial environment of continental proportions, the United States still can be divided into a mosaic of bioclimatic regions, each of them distinguished by peculiar climatic conditions and each with potential vegetation and soil that eventually would return in the absence of humans. The main exception to this generalization applies to fauna, so drastically altered that it is almost impossible to know what sort of animal geography would redevelop in the areas of the United States if humans were removed from the scene.
Climatic controls
The pattern of U.S. climates is largely set by the location of the conterminous United States almost entirely in the middle latitudes, by its position with respect to the continental landmass and its fringing oceans, and by the nation’s gross pattern of mountains and lowlands. Each of these geographic controls operates to determine the character of air masses and their changing behavior from season to season.
The conterminous United States lies entirely between the tropic of Cancer and 50° N latitude, a position that confines Arctic climates to the high mountaintops and genuine tropics to a small part of southern Florida. By no means, however, is the climate literally temperate, for the middle latitudes are notorious for extreme variations of temperature and precipitation.
The great size of the North American landmass tends to reinforce these extremes. Since land heats and cools more rapidly than bodies of water, places distant from an ocean tend to have continental climates; that is, they alternate between extremes of hot summers and cold winters, in contrast to the marine climates, which are more equable. Most U.S. climates are markedly continental, the more so because the Cordillera effectively confines the moderating Pacific influence to a narrow strip along the West Coast. Extremes of continentality occur near the center of the country, and in North Dakota temperatures have ranged between a summer high record of 121 °F (49 °C) and a winter low of −60 °F (−51 °C). Moreover, the general eastward drift of air over the United States carries continental temperatures all the way to the Atlantic coast. Bismarck, North Dakota, for example, has a great annual temperature range. Boston, on the Atlantic but largely exempt from its influence, has a lesser but still-continental range, while San Francisco, which is under the strong Pacific influence, has only a small summer–winter differential.
In addition to confining Pacific temperatures to the coastal margin, the Pacific Coast Ranges are high enough to make a local rain shadow in their lee, although the main barrier is the great rampart formed by the the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges. Rainy on their western slopes and barren on the east, this mountain crest forms one of the sharpest climatic divides in the United States.
The rain shadow continues east to the Rockies, leaving the entire Intermontane Region either arid or semiarid, except where isolated ranges manage to capture leftover moisture at high altitudes. East of the Rockies the westerly drift brings mainly dry air, and as a result, the Great Plains are semiarid. Still farther east, humidity increases owing to the frequent incursion from the south of warm, moist, and unstable air from the Gulf of Mexico, which produces more precipitation in the United States than the Pacific and Atlantic oceans combined.
Although the landforms of the Interior Lowlands have been termed dull, there is nothing dull about their weather conditions. Air from the Gulf of Mexico can flow northward across the Great Plains, uninterrupted by topographical barriers, but continental Canadian air flows south by the same route, and, since these two air masses differ in every important respect, the collisions often produce disturbances of monumental violence. Plainsmen and Midwesterners are accustomed to sudden displays of furious weather—tornadoes, blizzards, hailstorms, precipitous drops and rises in temperature, and a host of other spectacular meteorological displays, sometimes dangerous but seldom boring.
The change of seasons
Most of the United States is marked by sharp differences between winter and summer. In winter, when temperature contrasts between land and water are greatest, huge masses of frigid, dry Canadian air periodically spread far south over the midcontinent, bringing cold, sparkling weather to the interior and generating great cyclonic storms where their leading edges confront the shrunken mass of warm Gulf air to the south. Although such cyclonic activity occurs throughout the year, it is most frequent and intense during the winter, parading eastward out of the Great Plains to bring the Eastern states practically all their winter precipitation. Winter temperatures differ widely, depending largely on latitude. Thus, New Orleans, Louisiana, at 30° N latitude, and International Falls, Minnesota, at 49° N, have respective January temperature averages of 55 °F (13 °C) and 3 °F (−16 °C). In the north, therefore, precipitation often comes as snow, often driven by furious winds; farther south, cold rain alternates with sleet and occasional snow. Southern Florida is the only dependably warm part of the East, though polar outbursts have been known to bring temperatures below 0 °F (−18 °C) as far south as Tallahassee. The main uniformity of Eastern weather in the wintertime is the expectation of frequent change.
The Winter climate on the West Coast is very different. A great spiraling mass of relatively warm, moist air spreads south from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, its semipermanent front producing gloomy overcast and drizzles that hang over the Pacific Northwest all winter long, occasionally reaching southern California, which receives nearly all of its rain at this time of year. This Pacific air brings mild temperatures along the length of the coast; the average January day in Seattle, Washington, ranges between 33 and 44 °F (1 and 7 °C) and in Los Angeles between 45 and 64 °F (7 and 18 °C). In southern California, however, rains are separated by long spells of fair weather, and the whole region is a winter haven for those seeking refuge from less agreeable weather in other parts of the country. The Intermontane Region is similar to the Pacific Coast, but with much less rainfall and a considerably wider range of temperatures.
During the summer there is a reversal of the air masses, and east of the Rockies the change resembles the summer monsoon of Southeast Asia. As the midcontinent heats up, the cold Canadian air mass weakens and retreats, pushed north by an aggressive mass of warm, moist air from the Gulf. The great winter temperature differential between North and South disappears as the hot, soggy blanket spreads from the Gulf Coast to the Canadian border. Heat and humidity are naturally most oppressive in the South, but there is little comfort in the more northern latitudes. In Houston, Texas, the temperature on a typical July day reaches 93 °F (34 °C), with relative humidity averaging near 75 percent, but in Minneapolis, Minnesota, more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) north, is only slightly cooler and less humid.
Since the Gulf air is unstable as well as wet, conventional, and frontal summer thunderstorms are endemic east of the Rockies, accounting for a majority of total summer rain. These storms usually drench small areas with short-lived, sometimes violent downpours, so that crops in one Midwestern county may prosper, those in another shrivel in drought, and those in yet another be flattened by hailstones. Relief from the humid heat comes in the northern Midwest from occasional outbursts of cool Canadian air; small but more consistent relief is found downwind from the Great Lakes and at high elevations in the Appalachians. East of the Rockies, however, U.S. summers are distinctly uncomfortable, and air conditioning is viewed as a desirable amenity in most areas.
Again, the Pacific regime is different. The moist Aleutian air retreats northward, to be replaced by mild, stable air from over the subtropical but cool waters of the Pacific, and except in the mountains, the Pacific Coast is nearly rainless though often foggy. In the meanwhile, a small but potent mass of dry hot air raises temperatures to blistering levels over much of the intermontane Southwest. In Yuma, Arizona, for example, the normal temperature in July reaches 107 °F (42 °C), while nearby Death Valley, California, holds the national record, 134 °F (57 °C). During its summer peak, this scorching air mass spreads from the Pacific margin as far as Texas on the east and Idaho to the north, turning the whole interior basin into a summer dessert.
Over most of the United States, as in most continental climates, spring and autumn are agreeable but disappointingly brief. Autumn is particularly idyllic in the East, with a romantic Indian summer of ripening corn and brilliantly colored foliage and of mild days and frosty nights. The shift in dominance between marine and continental air masses, however, spawns furious weather in some regions. Along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, for example, autumn is the season for hurricanes—the American equivalent of typhoons of the Asian Pacific—which rage northward from the warm tropics to create havoc along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts as far north as New England. The Mississippi valley holds the dubious distinction of recording more tornadoes than any other area on Earth. These violent and often deadly storms usually occur over relatively small areas and are confined largely to spring and early summer.
The bioclimatic regions
Three first-order bioclimatic zones encompass most of the conterminous United States—regions in which climatic conditions are similar enough to dictate similar conditions of mature (zonal) soil and potential climax vegetation (i.e., the assemblage of plants that would grow and reproduce indefinitely given stable climate and average conditions of soil and drainage). These are the Humid East, the Humid Pacific Coast, and the Dry West. In addition, the boundary zone between the Humid East and the Dry West is so large and important that it constitutes a separate region, the Humid–Arid Transition. Finally, because the Western Cordillera contains an intricate mosaic of climatic types, largely determined by local elevation and exposure, it is useful to distinguish the Western Mountain Climate. The first three zones, however, are very diverse and require a further breakdown, producing a total of 10 main bioclimatic regions. For two reasons, the boundaries of these bioclimatic regions are much less distinct than the boundaries of landform regions. First, the climate varies from year to year, especially in boundary zones, whereas landforms obviously do not. Second, regions of climate, vegetation, and soils coincide generally but sometimes not precisely. Boundaries, therefore, should be interpreted as zonal and transitional and rarely should be considered as sharp lines in the landscape.
For all of their indistinct boundaries, however, these bioclimatic regions have strong and easily recognized identities. Such regional identity is strongly reinforced when a particular area falls entirely within a single bioclimatic region and at the same time a single landform region. The result—as in the Piedmont South, the central Midwest, or the western Great Plains—is a landscape with an unmistakable regional personality.
The Humid East
The largest and in some ways the most important of the bioclimatic zones, the Humid East was where the Europeans first settled, tamed the land, and adapted to American conditions. In early times almost all of this territory was forested, a fact of central importance in American history that profoundly influenced both soils and wildlife. As in most of the world’s humid lands, soluble minerals have been leached from the earth, leaving a great family of soils called pedalfers, rich in relatively insoluble iron and aluminium compounds.
Both forests and soils, however, differ considerably within this vast region. Since rainfall is ample and summers are warm everywhere, the main differences result from the length and severity of winters, which determine the length of the growing season. Winter, obviously, differs according to latitude, so that the Humid East is sliced into four great east-west bands of soils and vegetation, with progressively more amenable winters as one travels southward. These changes occur very gradually, however, and the boundaries, therefore, are extremely subtle.
The Sub-Boreal Forest Region is the northernmost of these bands. It is only a small and discontinuous part of the United States, representing the tattered southern fringe of the vast Canadian taiga—a scrubby forest dominated by evergreen needle-leaf species that can endure the ferocious winters and reproduce during the short, erratic summers. Average growing seasons are less than 120 days, though localities in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula have recorded frost-free periods lasting as long as 161 days and as short as 76 days. Soils of this region that survived the scour of glaciation are miserably thin podzols—heavily leached, highly acid, and often interrupted by extensive stretches of the bog. Most attempts at farming in the region long since have been abandoned.
Further south lies the Humid Microthermal Zone of milder winters and longer summers. Large broadleaf trees begin to predominate over the evergreens, producing a mixed forest of greater floristic variety and economic value that is famous for its brilliant autumn colors. As the forest grows richer in species, sterile podzols give way to more productive grey-brown podzolic soils, stained and fertilized with hummus. Although winters are warmer than in the Sub-Boreal zone, and although the Great Lakes help temper the bitterest cold, January temperatures ordinarily average below freezing, and winter without a few days of subzero temperatures is uncommon. Everywhere, the ground is solidly frozen and snow-covered for several months of the year.
Still farther south are the Humid Subtropics. The region’s northern boundary is one of the country’s most significant climatic lines: the approximate northern limit of a growing season of 180–200 days, the outer margin of cotton growing, and, hence, of the Old South. Most of the South lies in the Piedmont and Coastal Plain, for higher elevations in the Appalachians cause a peninsula of Northern mixed forest to extend as far south as northern Georgia. The red-brown podzolic soil, once moderately fertile, has been severely damaged by overcropping and burning. Thus much of the region that once sustained a rich, broadleaf-forest flora now supports poor piney woods. Throughout the South, summers are hot, muggy, long, and disagreeable; Dixie’s “frosty mornings” bring a welcome respite in winter.
The southern margins of Florida contain the only real tropics in the conterminous United States; it is an area in which frost is almost unknown. Hot, rainy summers alternate with warm and somewhat drier winters, with a secondary rainfall peak during the autumn hurricane season—altogether a typical monsoonal regime. Soils and vegetation are mostly immature, however, since southern Florida rises so slightly above sea level that substantial areas, such as the Everglades, are swampy and often brackish. Peat and sand frequently masquerade as soil, and much of the vegetation is either salt-loving mangrove or sawgrass prairie.
The Humid Pacific Coast
The western humid region differs from its eastern counterpart in so many ways as to be a world apart. Much smaller, it is crammed into a narrow littoral belt to the windward of the Sierra–Cascade summit, dominated by mild Pacific air, and chopped by irregular topography into an intricate mosaic of climatic and biotic habitats. Throughout the region rainfall is extremely seasonal, falling mostly in the winter half of the year. Summers are droughty everywhere, but the main regional differences come from the length of drought—from about two months in humid Seattle, Washington, to nearly five months in semiarid San Diego, California.
Western Washington, Oregon, and northern California lie within a zone that climatologists call Marine West Coast. Winters are raw, overcast, and drizzly—not unlike northwestern Europe—with subfreezing temperatures restricted mainly to the mountains, upon which enormous snow accumulations produce local alpine glaciers. Summers, by contrast, are brilliantly cloudless, cool, and frequently foggy along the West Coast and somewhat warmer in the inland valleys. This mild marine climate produces some of the world’s greatest forests of enormous straight-bold evergreen trees that furnish the United States with much of its commercial timber. Mature soils are typical of humid midlatitude forestlands, a moderately leached grey-brown podzol.
Toward the south, with diminishing coastal rain the moist marine climate gradually gives way to California’s tiny but much-publicized Mediterranean regime. Although mountainous topography introduces a bewildering variety of local environments, scanty winter rains are quite inadequate to compensate for the long summer drought, and much of the region has a distinctly arid character. For much of the year, cool, stable Pacific air dominates the West Coast, bringing San Francisco its famous fogs and Los Angeles its infamous smoggy temperature inversions. Inland, however, summer temperatures reach blistering levels, so that in July, while Los Angeles expects a normal daily maximum of 83 °F (28 °C), Fresno expects 100 °F (38 °C) and is climatically a desert. As might be expected, Mediterranean California contains a huge variety of vegetal habitats, but the commonest perhaps is the chaparral, a drought-resistant, scrubby woodland of twisted hard-leafed trees, picturesque but of little economic value. Chaparral is a prophetic (fire-loving) vegetation—i.e., under natural conditions, it’s growth and form depend on regular burning. These fires constitute a major environmental hazard in the suburban hills above Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay, especially in autumn, when hot dry Santa Ana winds from the interior regularly convert brush fires into infernos. Soils are similarly varied, but most of them are light in colour and rich in soluble minerals, qualities typical of subgrid soils.
The Dry West
In the United States, to speak of dry areas is to speak of the West. It covers an enormous region beyond the dependable reach of moist oceanic air, occupying the entire Intermontane area and sprawling from Canada to Mexico across the western part of the Great Plains. To Americans nurtured in the Humid East, this vast territory across the path of all transcontinental travelers has been harder to tame than any other—and no region has so gripped the national imagination as this fierce and dangerous land.
In the Dry West nothing matters more than water. Thus, though temperatures may differ radically from place to place, the really important regional differences depend overwhelmingly on the degree of aridity, whether an area is extremely dry and hence desert or semiarid and therefore steppe.
Americans of the 19th century were preoccupied by the myth of a Great American Desert, which supposedly occupied more than one-third of the entire country. True desert, however, is confined to the Southwest, with patchy outliers elsewhere, all without exception located in the lowland rain shadows of the Cordillera. Vegetation in these desert areas varies between nothing at all (a rare circumstance confined mainly to salt flats and sand dunes) to a low cover of scattered woody scrub and short-lived annuals that burst into flamboyant bloom after rains. Soils are usually thin, light-colored, and very rich with mineral salts. In some areas wind erosion has removed fine-grained material, leaving behind desert pavement, a barren veneer of broken rock.
Most of the West, however, lies in the semiarid region, in which rainfall is scanty but adequate to support a thin cover of short bunchgrass, commonly alternating with scrubby brush. Here, as in the desert, soils fall into the large family of the pedals, rich in calcium and other soluble minerals, but in the slightly wetter environments of the West, they are enriched with humus from decomposed grassroots. Under the proper type of management, these chestnut-colored steppe soils have the potential to be very fertile.
Weather in the West resembles that of other dry regions of the world, often extreme, violent, and reliably unreliable. Rainfall, for example, obeys a cruel natural law: as total precipitation decreases, it becomes more undependable. John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath describes the problems of a family enticed to the arid frontier of Oklahoma during a wet period only to be driven out by the savage drought of the 1930s that turned the western Great Plains into the great American Dust Bowl. Temperatures in the West also fluctuate convulsively within short periods, and high winds are infamous throughout the region.
The Humid–Arid Transition
East of the Rockies all climatic boundaries are gradational. None, however, is so important or so imperceptibly subtle as the boundary zone that separates the Humid East from the Dry West and that alternates unpredictably between arid and humid conditions from year to year. Stretching approximately from Texas to North Dakota in an ill-defined band between the 95th and 100th meridians, this transitional region deserves separate recognition, partly because of its great size, and partly because of the fine balance between surplus and deficit rainfall, which produces a unique and valuable combination of soils, flora, and fauna. The native vegetation, insofar as it can be reconstructed, was prairie, the legendary sea of tall, deep-rooted grass now almost entirely tilled and planted to grains. Soils, often of loessial derivation, include the enormously productive chernozem (black earth) in the north, with reddish prairie soils of nearly equal fertility in the south. Throughout the region, temperatures are severely continental, with bitterly cold winters in the north and scorching summers everywhere.
The western edge of the prairie fades gradually into the shortgrass steppe of the High Plains, the change a function of diminishing rainfall. The eastern edge, however, represents one of the few major discordances between a climatic and biotic boundary in the United States, for the grassland penetrates the eastern forest in a great salient across humid Illinois and Indiana. Many scholars believe this part of the prairie was artificially induced by repeated burning and consequent destruction of the forest margins by Indians.
The Western mountains
Throughout the Cordillera and Intermontane regions, irregular topography shatters the grand bioclimatic pattern into an intricate mosaic of tiny regions that differ drastically according to elevation and exposure. No small- or medium-scale map can accurately record such complexity, and mountainous parts of the West are said, noncommittally, to have a mountain climate. Lowlands are usually dry, but increasing elevation brings lower temperature, decreased evaporation, and—if a slope faces prevailing winds—greater precipitation. Soils vary wildly from place to place, but vegetation is fairly predictable. From the desert or steppe of intermontane valleys, a climber typically ascends into parklike savanna, then through an orderly sequence of increasingly humid and boreal forests until, if the range is high enough, one reaches the timberline and Arctic tundra. The very highest peaks are snow-capped, although permanent glaciers rarely occur outside the cool humid highlands of the Pacific Northwest.
Peirce F. Lewis
Plantlife
The dominant features of the vegetation are indicated by the terms forest, grassland, desert, and alpine tundra.
A coniferous forest of white and red pine, hemlock, spruce, jack pine, and balsam fir extends interruptedly in a narrow strip near the Canadian border from Maine to Minnesota and southward along the Appalachian Mountains. There may be found smaller stands of tamarack, spruce, paper birch, willow, alder, and aspen or poplar. Southward, a transition zone of mixed conifers and deciduous trees gives way to a hardwood forest of broad-leaved trees. This forest, with varying mixtures of maple, oak, ash, locust, linden, sweetgum, walnut, hickory, sycamore, beech, and the more southerly tulip tree, once extended uninterruptedly from New England to Missouri and eastern Texas. Pines are prominent on the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plain and adjacent uplands, often occurring in nearly pure stands called pine barrens. Pitch, longleaf, slash, shortleaf, Virginia, and loblolly pines are the commonest. Hickory and various oaks combine to form a significant part of this forest, with magnolia, white cedar, and ash was often seen. In the frequent swamps, bald cypress, tupelo, and white cedar predominate. Pines, palmettos, and live oaks are replaced at the southern tip of Florida by the more tropical royal and thatch palms, figs, satinwood, and mangrove.
The grasslands occur principally in the Great Plains area and extend westward into the intermontane basins and benchlands of the Rocky Mountains. Numerous grasses such as buffalo, grama, side oat, bunch, needle, and wheatgrass, together with many kinds of herbs, make up the plant cover. Coniferous forests cover the lesser mountains and high plateaus of the Rockies, Cascades, and the Sierra Nevada. Ponderosa (yellow) pine, Douglas fir, western red cedar, western larch, white pine, lodgepole pine, several spruces, western hemlock, grand fir, red fir, and the lofty redwood are the principal trees of these forests. The densest growth occurs west of the Cascade and Coast ranges in Washington, Oregon, and northern California, where the trees are often 100 feet (30 meters) or more in height. There the forest floor is so dark that only ferns, mosses, and a few shade-loving shrubs and herbs may be found.
The alpine tundra, located in the conterminous United States only in the mountains above the limit of trees, consists principally of small plants that bloom brilliantly for a short season. Sagebrush is the most common plant of the arid basins and semideserts west of the Rocky Mountains, but juniper, nut pine, and mountain mahogany are often found on the slopes and low ridges. The desert, extending from southeastern California to Texas, is noted for the many species of cactus, some of which grow to the height of trees, and for the Joshua tree and other yuccas, creosote bush, mesquite, and acacias.
The United States is rich in the variety of its native forest trees, some of which, as the species of sequoia, are the most massive known. More than 1,000 species and varieties have been described, of which almost 200 are of economic value, either because of the timber and other useful products that they yield or by reason of their importance in forestry.
Besides the native flowering plants, estimated at between 20,000 to 25,000 species, many hundreds of species introduced from other regions—chiefly Europe, Asia, and tropical America—have become naturalized. A large proportion of these is common annual weeds of fields, pastures, and roadsides. In some districts, these naturalized aliens constitute 50 percent or more of the total plant population.
Animal life
With most of North America, the United States lies in the Nearctic faunistic realm, a region containing an assemblage of species similar to Eurasia and North Africa but sharply different from the tropical and subtropical zones to the south. Main regional differences correspond roughly with primary climatic and vegetal patterns. Thus, for example, the animal communities of the Dry West differ sharply from those of the Humid East and from those of the Pacific Coast. Because animals tend to range over wider areas than plants, faunal regions are generally coarser than vegetal regions and harder to delineate sharply.
The animal geography of the United States, however, is far from a natural pattern, for European settlement produced a series of environmental changes that grossly altered the distribution of animal communities. First, many species were hunted to extinction or near extinction, most conspicuously, perhaps, the American bison, which ranged by the millions nearly from coast to coast but now rarely lives outside of zoos and wildlife preserves. Second, habitats were upset or destroyed throughout most of the country—forests cut, grasslands plowed and overgrazed, and migration paths interrupted by fences, railroads, and highways. Third, certain introduced species found hospitable niches and, like the English sparrow, spread over huge areas, often preempting the habitats of native animals. Fourth, though their effects are not fully understood, chemical biocides such as DDT were used for so long and in such volume that they are believed at least partly responsible for catastrophic mortality rates among large mammals and birds, especially predators high on the food chain. Fifth, there has been a gradual northward migration of certain tropical and subtropical insects, birds, and mammals, perhaps encouraged by gradual climatic warming. In consequence, many native animals have been reduced to tiny fractions of their former ranges or exterminated completely, while other animals, both native and introduced, have found the new anthropocentric environment well suited to their needs, with explosive effects on their populations. The coyote, opossum, armadillo, and several species of deer are among the animals that now occupy much larger ranges than they once did.
Arrangement of the account of the distribution of the fauna according to the climatic and vegetal regions has the merit that it can be compared further with the distribution of insects and of other invertebrates, some of which may be expected to fall into the same patterns as the vertebrates, while others, with different modes or different ages of dispersal, have geographic patterns of their own.
The transcontinental zone of the coniferous forest in the north, the taiga, and the tundra zone into which it merges at the northern limit of tree growth are strikingly paralleled by similar vertical zones in the Rockies, and on Mount Washington in the east, where the area above the timberline and below the snow line is often inhabited with tundra animals like the ptarmigan and the white Parnassius butterflies, while the spruce and other conifers below the timberline form a belt sharply set off from the grassland or hardwood forest or desert at still lower elevations.
A whole series of important types of animals spread beyond the limits of such regions or zones, sometimes over most of the continent. Aquatic animals, in particular, may live equally in forests and plains, in the Gulf states, and at the Canadian border. Such widespread animals include the white-tailed (Virginia) deer and black bear, the puma (though only in the remotest parts of its former range) and bobcat, the river otter (though now rare in inland areas south of the Great Lakes), and mink, and the beaver and muskrat. The distinctive coyote ranges over all of western North America and eastward as far as Maine. The snapping turtle ranges from the Atlantic coast to the Rocky Mountains.
In the northern coniferous forest zone, or taiga, the relations of animals with European or Eurasian representatives are numerous, and this zone is also essentially circumpolar. The relations are less close than in the Arctic forms, but the moose, beaver, hare, red fox, otter, wolverine, and wolf are recognizably related to Eurasian animals. Even some fishes, like the whitefishes (Coregonidae), the yellow perch, and the pike, exhibit this kind of Old World–New World relation. A distinctively North American animal in this taiga assemblage is the Canadian porcupine.
The hardwood forest area of the eastern and southeastern pinelands compose the most important of the faunal regions within the United States. A great variety of fishes, amphibians, and reptiles of this region have related forms in East Asia, and this pattern of representation is likewise found in the flora. This area is rich in catfishes, minnows, and suckers. The curious ganoid fishes, the bowfin, and the gar are ancient types. The spoonbill cat, a remarkable type of sturgeon in the lower Mississippi, is represented elsewhere in the world only in the Yangtze in China. The Appalachian region is headquarters for the salamanders of the world, with no less than seven of the eight families of this large group of amphibians represented; no other continent has more than three of the eight families together. The eel-like sirens and amphiumas (congo snakes) are confined to the southeastern states. The lungless salamanders of the family Plethodontidae exhibit a remarkable variety of genera and a number of species centering in the Appalachians. There is a great variety of frogs, and these include tree frogs whose main development is South American and Australian. The emydid freshwater turtles of the southeast parallel those of East Asia to a remarkable degree, though the genus Clemmys is the only one represented in both regions. Much the same is true of the water snakes, pit vipers, rat snakes, and green snakes, though still others are peculiarly American. A familiar alligator is a form with an Asiatic relative, the only other living true alligator being a species in central China.
In its mammals and birds, the southeastern fauna is less sharply distinguished from the life to the north and west and is less directly related to that of East Asia. The forest is the home of the white-tailed deer, the black bear, the gray fox, the raccoon, and the common opossum. The wild turkey and the extinct hosts of the passenger pigeon were characteristic. There is a remarkable variety of woodpeckers. The birdlife, in general, tends to differ from that of Eurasia in the presence of birds, like the tanagers, American orioles, and hummingbirds, that belong to South American families. Small mammals abound with types of the worldwide rodent family Cricetidae, and with distinctive moles and shrews.
Most distinctive of the grassland animals proper is the American bison, whose nearly extinct European relative, the wisent, is a forest dweller. The most distinctive of the American hoofed animals is the pronghorn, or prongbuck, which represents a family intermediate between the deer and the true antelopes in that it sheds its horns like a deer but retains the bony horn cores. The pronghorn is perhaps primarily a desert mammal, but it formerly ranged widely into the shortgrass plains. Everywhere in open country in the West there are conspicuous and distinctive rodents. The burrowing pocket gopher is peculiarly American, rarely seen making its presence known by pushed-out mounds of earth. The ground squirrels of the genus Citellus are related to those of Central Asia, and resemble them inhabit; in North America, the gregarious prairie dog is a closely related form. The American badger, not especially related to the badger of Europe, has its headquarters in the grasslands. The prairie chicken is a bird distinctive of the plains region, which is invaded everywhere by birds from both the east and the west.
The Southwestern deserts are a paradise for reptiles. Distinctive lizards such as the poisonous Gila monster abound, and the rattlesnakes, of which only a few species are found elsewhere in the United States, are common there. Desert reptile species often range to the Pacific Coast and northward into the Great Basin. Noteworthy mammals are the graceful bipedal kangaroo rat (almost exclusively nocturnal), the ring-tailed cat, a relative of the raccoon, and the piglike peccary.
The Rocky Mountains and other western ranges afford distinctive habitats for rock- and cliff-dwelling hoofed animals and rodents. The small pikas, related to the rabbit, inhabit talus areas at high elevations as they do in the mountain ranges of East Asia. Marmots live in the Rockies as in the Alps. Every western range formerly had its own race of mountain sheep. In the north the Rocky Mountain goat lives at high altitudes—it is more properly a goat antelope, related to the takin of the mountains of western China. The dipper, remarkable for its habit of feeding in swift-flowing streams, though otherwise a bird without special aquatic adaptations, is a Rocky Mountain form with relatives in Asia and Europe.
In the Pacific region the extremely distinctive primitive-tailed frog Ascaphus, which inhabits icy mountain brooks, represents a family by itself, perhaps more nearly related to the frogs of New Zealand than to more familiar types. The Cascades and Sierras form centers for salamanders of the families Ambystomoidae and Plethodontidae second only to the Appalachians, and there are also distinctive newts. The burrowing lizards, of the well-defined family Anniellidae, are found only in a limited area in coastal California. The only family of birds distinctive of North America, that of the wren-tits, Chamaeidae, is found in the chaparral of California. The mountain beaver, or sewellel (which is not at all beaverlike), is likewise a type peculiar to North America, confined to the Cascades and Sierras, and there are distinct kinds of moles in the Pacific area.
The mammals of the two coasts are strikingly different, though true seals (the harbor seal and the harp seal) are found on both. The sea lions, with longer necks and with projecting ears, are found only in the Pacific—the California sea lion, the more northern Steller’s sea lion, and the fur seal. On the East Coast the larger rivers of Florida are inhabited by the Florida manatee, or sea cow, a close relative of the more widespread and more distinctively marine West Indian species.
Settlement patterns
Although the land that now constitutes the United States was occupied and much affected by diverse Indian cultures over many millennia, these pre-European settlement patterns have had virtually no impact upon the contemporary nation—except locally, as in parts of New Mexico. A benign habitat permitted a huge contiguous tract of settled land to materialize across nearly all of the eastern half of the United States and within substantial patches of the West. The vastness of the land, the scarcity of labor, and the abundance of migratory opportunities in a land replete with raw physical resources contributed to exceptional human mobility and a quick succession of ephemeral forms of land use and settlement. Human endeavors have greatly transformed the landscape, but such efforts have been largely destructive. Most of the pre-European landscape in the United States was so swiftly and radically altered that it is difficult to conjecture intelligently about its earlier appearance.
The overall impression of the settled portion of the American landscape, rural or urban, is one of disorder and incoherence, even in areas of the strict geometric survey. The individual landscape unit is seldom in visual harmony with its neighbor, so that, however, sound in design or construction the single structure may be, the general effect is untidy. These attributes have been intensified by the acute individualism of the American, vigorous speculation in land and other commodities, a strongly utilitarian attitude toward the land and the treasures above and below it, and government policy and law. The landscape is also remarkable for its extensive transportation facilities, which have greatly influenced the configuration of the land.
Another special characteristic of American settlement, one that became obvious only by the mid-20th century, is the convergence of rural and urban modes of life. The farmsteads—and rural folk in general—have become increasingly urbanized, and agricultural operations have become more automated, while the metropolis grows more gelatinous, unfocused, and pseudo-bucolic along its margins.
Rural settlement
Patterns of rural settlement indicate much about the history, economy, society, and minds of those who created them as well as about the land itself. The essential design of rural activity in the United States bears a strong family resemblance to that of other neo-European lands, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, or tsarist Siberia—places that have undergone rapid occupation and exploitation by immigrants intent upon short-term development and enrichment. In all such areas, under novel social and political conditions and with a relative abundance of territory and physical resources, ideas and institutions derived from a relatively stable medieval or early modern Europe have undergone a major transformation. Further, these are nonpeasant countrysides, alike in having failed to achieve the intimate symbiosis of people and habitat, the humanized rural landscapes characteristic of many relatively dense, stable, earthbound communities in parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.
Early models of land allocation
From the beginning, the prevalent official policy of the British (except between 1763 and 1776) and then of the U.S. government was to promote agricultural and other settlements—to push the frontier westward as fast as physical and economic conditions permitted. The British crown’s grants of large, often vaguely specified tracts to individual proprietors or companies enabled the grantees to draw settlers by the sale or lease of land at attractive prices or even by outright gift.
Of the numerous attempts at group colonization, the most notable effort was the theocratic and collectivist New England town that flourished, especially in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, during the first century of settlement. The town, the basic unit of government and comparable in area to townships in other states, allotted both rural and village parcels to single families by group decision. Contrary to earlier scholarly belief, in all but a few cases settlement was spatially dispersed in the socially cohesive towns, at least until about 1800. The relatively concentrated latter-day villages persist today as amoeba-like entities straggling along converging roads, neither fully rural nor agglomerated in form. The only latter-day settlement experiment of notable magnitude to achieve enduring success was a series of Mormon settlements in the Great Basin region of Utah and adjacent states, with their tightly concentrated farm villages reminiscent of the New England model. Other efforts have been made along ethnic, religious, or political lines, but success has been at best brief and fragile.
Creating the national domain
With the coming of independence and after complex negotiations, the original 13 states surrendered to the new national government nearly all their claims to the unsettled western lands beyond their boundaries. Some tracts, however, were reserved for disposal to particular groups. Thus, the Western Reserve of northeastern Ohio gave preferential treatment to natives of Connecticut, while the military tracts in Ohio and Indiana were used as bonus payments to veterans of the American Revolution.
A federally administered national domain was created, to which the great bulk of the territory acquired in 1803 in the Louisiana Purchase and later beyond the Mississippi and in 1819 in Florida was consigned. The only major exceptions were the public lands of Texas, which were left within that state’s jurisdiction; such earlier French and Spanish land grants as were confirmed, often after tortuous litigation; and some Indian lands. In sharp contrast to the slipshod methods of colonial land survey and disposal, the federal land managers expeditiously surveyed, numbered, and mapped their territory in advance of settlement, beginning with Ohio in the 1780s, then sold or deeded it to settlers under inviting terms at a number of regional land offices.
The design universally followed in the new survey system (except within the French, Spanish, and Indian grants) was a simple, efficient rectangular scheme. Townships were laid out as blocks, each six by six miles in size, oriented with the compass directions. Thirty-six sections, each one square mile, or 640 acres (260 hectares), in size, were designated within each township; and public roads were established along section lines and, where needed, along half-section lines. At irregular intervals, offsets in survey lines and roads were introduced to allow for the Earth’s curvature. Individual property lines were coincident with, or parallel to, survey lines, and this pervasive rectangularity generally carried over into the geometry of fields and fences or into the townsites later superimposed upon the basic rural survey.
This all-encompassing checkerboard pattern is best appreciated from an airplane window over Iowa or Kansas. There one sees few streams or other natural features and few diagonal highways or railroads interrupting the overwhelming squareness of the landscape. A systematic rectangular layout, rather less rigorous in form, also appears in much of Texas and in those portions of Maine, western New York and Pennsylvania, and southern Georgia that were settled after the 1780s.
Distribution of rural lands
Since its formation, Congress has enacted a series of complex schemes for the distribution of the national domain. The most famous of these plans was the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered title to 160 acres to individual settlers, subject only to residence for a certain period of time and to the making of minimal improvements to the land thus acquired. The legal provisions of such acts have varied with time as the nature of farming technology and of the remaining lands have changed, but their general effect has been to perpetuate the Jeffersonian ideal of a republic in which yeoman farmers own and till self-sufficient properties.
The program was successful in providing private owners with relatively choice lands, aside from parcels reserved for schools and various township and municipal uses. More than one-third of the national territory, however, is still owned by federal and state governments, with much of this land in forest and wildlife preserves. A large proportion of this land is in the West and is unsuited for intensive agriculture or grazing because of the roughness, dryness, or salinity of the terrain; much of it is leased out for light grazing or for timber cutting.
Patterns of farm life
During the classic period of American rural life, around 1900, the typical American lived or worked on a farm or was economically dependent upon farmers. In contrast to rural life in many other parts of the world, the farm family lived on an isolated farmstead some distance from town and often from farm neighbors; its property averaged less than one-quarter square mile. This farmstead varied in form and content with local tradition and economy. In particular, barn types were localized—for example, the tobacco barns of the South, the great dairy barns of Wisconsin, or the general-purpose forebay barns of southeastern Pennsylvania—as were modes of fencing. In general, however, the farmstead contained a dwelling, barn, storage, and sheds for small livestock and equipment, a small orchard, and a kitchen garden. A woodlot might be found in the least-accessible or least-fertile part of the farm.
Successions of such farms were connected with one another and with the towns by means of a dense, usually rectangular lattice of roads, largely unimproved at the time. The hamlets, villages, and smaller cities were arrayed at relatively regular intervals, with size and affluence determined in large part by the presence and quality of rail service or status as the county seat. But, among people who have been historically rural, individualistic, and antiurban in bias, many services normally located in urban places might be found in rustic settings. Thus, much retail business was transacted by means of itinerant peddlers, while small shops for the fabrication, distribution, or repair of various items were often located in isolated farmsteads, as were many post offices.
Social activity also tended to be widely dispersed among numerous rural churches, schools, or grange halls; and the climactic event of the year might well be the county fair, political rally, or religious encampment—again on a rural site. Not the least symptomatic sign of the strong tendency toward spatial isolation are the countless family burial plots or community cemeteries so liberally distributed across the countryside.
Regional small-town patterns
There has been much regional variation among smaller villages and hamlets, but such phenomena have received relatively little attention from students of American culture or geography. The distinctive New England village, of course, is generally recognized and cherished: it consists of a loose clustering of white frame buildings, including a church (usually Congregationalist or Unitarian), town hall, shops, and stately homes with tall shade trees around the central green, or commons—a grassy expanse that may contain a bandstand and monuments or flowers. Derivative village forms were later carried westward to sections of the northern Midwest.
Less widely known but equally distinctive is the town morphology characteristic of the Midland, or Pennsylvanian, culture area and most fully developed in southeastern and central Pennsylvania and Piedmont Maryland. It differs totally from the New England model in density, building materials, and general appearance. Closely packed, often contiguous buildings—mostly brick, but sometimes stone, frame, or stucco—abut directly on a sidewalk, which is often paved with brick and usually thickly planted with maple, sycamore, or other shade trees. Such towns are characteristically linear in plan, have dwellings intermingled with other types of buildings, have only one or two principal streets, and may radiate outward from a central square lined with commercial and governmental structures.
The most characteristic U.S. small town is the one whose pattern evolved in the Midwest. Its simple scheme is usually based on the grid plan. Functions are rigidly segregated spatially, with the central business district, consisting of closely packed two- or three-story brick buildings, limited exclusively to commercial and administrative activity. The residences, generally set well back within spacious lots, are peripheral in location, as are most rail facilities, factories, and warehouses.
Even the modest urbanization of the small town came late to the South. Most urban functions long were spatially dispersed—almost totally so in the early Chesapeake Bay country or North Carolina—or were performed entirely by the larger plantations dominating the economic life of much of the region. When cities and towns began to materialize in the 19th and 20th centuries, they tended to follow the Midwestern model in layout.
Although quite limited in a geographic area, the characteristic villages of the Mormon and Hispanic-American districts are of considerable interest. The Mormon settlement uncompromisingly followed the ecclesiastically imposed grid plan composed of square blocks, each with perhaps only four very large house lots, and the block was surrounded by extremely wide streets. Those villages in New Mexico in whose population and culture was derived from Old Mexico were often built according to the standard Latin-American plan. The distinctive feature is a central plaza dominated by a Roman Catholic church and encircled by low stone or adobe buildings.
The rural-urban transition
Weakening of the agrarian ideal
The United States has had little success in achieving or maintaining the ideal of the family farm. Through purchase, inheritance, leasing, and other means, some of the dubious legality, smaller properties have been merged into much larger entities. By the late 1980s, for example, when the average farm size had surpassed 460 acres, farms containing 2,000 or more acres accounted for almost half of all farmland and 20 percent of the cropland harvested, even though they comprised less than 3 percent of all farms. At the other extreme were those 60 percent of all farms that contained fewer than 180 acres and reported less than 15 percent of cropland harvested. This trend toward fewer but larger farms has continued.
The huge, heavily capitalized new plantation, essentially a factory in the field, is especially conspicuous in parts of California, Arizona, and the Mississippi delta, but examples can be found in any state. There are also many smaller but intensive operations that call for large investments and advanced managerial skills. This trend toward large-scale, capital-intensive farm enterprise has been paralleled by a sharp drop in rural farm population—a slump from the all-time high of some 32,000,000 in the early 20th century to about 5,000,000 in the late 1980s; but even in 1940, when farm folk still numbered more than 30,000,000, nearly 40 percent of farm operators were tenants, and another 10 percent were only partial owners.
As the agrarian population has dwindled, so too has its immediate impact lessened, though less swiftly, in economic and political matters. The rural United States, however, has been the source of many of the nation’s values and images. The United States has become a highly urbanized, technologically advanced society far removed in daily life from cracker barrels, barnyards, corrals, or logging camps. Although Americans have gravitated, sometimes reluctantly, to the big city, in the daydreams and assumptions that guide many sociopolitical decisions, the memory of a rapidly vanishing agrarian America is well noted. This is revealed not only in the works of contemporary novelists, poets, and painters but also throughout the popular arts: in movies, television, soap operas, folklore, country music, political oratory, and in much leisure activity.
Impact of the motor vehicle
Since about 1920 more genuine change has occurred in American rural life than during the preceding three centuries of European settlement in North America. Although the basic explanation is the profound social and technological transformations engulfing most of the world, the most immediate agent of change has been the internal-combustion engine. The automobile, truck, bus, and paved highway have more than supplanted a moribund passenger and freight railroad system. While many local rail depots have been boarded up and scores of secondary lines have been abandoned, hundreds of thousands of miles of old dirt roads have been paved, and a vast system of interstate highways has been constructed to connect major cities in a single nonstop network. The net result has been a shrinking of travel time and an increase in miles traveled for the individual driver, rural or urban.
Small towns in the United States have undergone a number of changes. Before 1970 towns near highways and urban centers generally prospered; while in the less-fortunate towns, where the residents lingered on for the sake of relatively cheap housing, downtown businesses often became extinct. From the late 1960s until about 1981 the rural and small-town population grew at a faster rate than the metropolitan population, the so-called metro–nonmetro turnaround, thus reversing more than a century of relatively greater urban growth. Subsequent evidence, however, suggests an approach toward equilibrium between the urban and rural sectors.
As Americans have become increasingly mobile, the visual aspect of rural America has altered drastically. The highway has become the central route, and many of the functions once confined to the local town or city now stretch for many miles along major roads.
Reversal of the classic rural dominance
The metropolitan nation of life in the United States has not been limited to cities, suburbs, or exurbs; it now involves most of the rural areas and populations. The result has been the decline of local crafts and regional peculiarities, quite visibly in such items as farm implements, fencing, silos, and housing and in commodities such as clothing or bread. In many ways, the countryside is now economically dependent on the city.
The city dweller is the dominant consumer for products other than those of field, quarry, or lumber mill; and city location tends to determine patterns of the rural economy rather than the reverse. During weekends and the vacation seasons, swarms of city folk stream out to second homes in the countryside and to campgrounds, ski runs, beaches, boating areas, or hunting and fishing tracts. For many large rural areas, recreation is the principal source of income and employment; and such areas as northern New England and upstate New York have become playgrounds and sylvan refuges for many urban residents.
The larger cities reach far into the countryside for their vital supplies of water and energy. There is an increasing reliance upon distant coalfields to provide fuel for electrical power plants, and cities have gone far afield in seeking out rural disposal sites for their ever-growing volumes of garbage.
The majority of the rural population now lives within the daily commuting range of a sizable city. This enables many farm residents to operate their farms while, at the same time, working part- or full-time at a city job, and it thus helps to prevent the drastic decline in rural population that has occurred in remoter parts of the country. Similarly, many small towns within the shadow of a metropolis, with fewer and fewer farmers to service, have become dormitory satellites, serving residents from nearby cities and suburbs.
Urban settlement
The United States has moved from a predominantly rural settlement into an urban society. In so doing, it has followed the general path that other advanced nations have traveled and one along which developing nations have begun to hasten. More than four-fifths of the population lives clustered within officially designated urban places and urbanized areas, which account for less than 2 percent of the national territory. At least another 15 percent live in dispersed residences that are actually urban in economic or social orientation.
Classic patterns of siting and growth
Although more than 95 percent of the population was rural during the colonial period and for the first years of independence, cities were crucial elements in the settlement system from the earliest days. Boston; New Amsterdam (New York City); Jamestown, Virginia; Charleston, South Carolina; and Philadelphia were founded at the same time as the colonies they served. Like nearly all other North American colonial towns of consequence, they were ocean ports. Until at least the beginning of the 20th century, the historical geography of U.S. cities was intimately related to that of successive transportation systems. The location of successful cities with respect to the areas they served, as well as their internal structure, was determined largely by the nature of these systems.
The colonial cities acted as funnels for the collection and shipment of farm and forest products and other raw materials from the interior to trading partners in Europe, the Caribbean, or Africa and for the return flow of manufactured goods and other locally scarce items, as well as immigrants. Such cities were essentially marts and warehouses, and only minimal attention was given to social, military, educational, or religious functions. The inadequacy and high cost of overland traffic dictated sites along major ocean embayments or river estuaries; the only pre-1800 nonports worthy of notice were Lancaster and York, both in Pennsylvania, and Williamsburg, Virginia. With the populating of the interior and the spread of a system of canals and improved roads, such new cities as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Cincinnati, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; and St. Louis, Missouri, mushroomed at junctures between various routes or at which modes of transport were changed. Older ocean ports, such as New Castle, Delaware; Newport, Rhode Island; Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; and Portland, Maine, whose locations prevented them from serving large hinterlands, tended to stagnate.
From about 1850 to 1920 the success of new cities and the further growth of older ones in large part was dependent on their location within the new steam railroad system and on their ability to dominate a large tributary territory. Such waterside rail hubs as Buffalo; Toledo, Ohio; Chicago; and San Francisco gained population and wealth rapidly, while such offspring of the rail era as Atlanta, Georgia; Indianapolis, Indiana; Minneapolis; Fort Worth, Texas; and Tacoma, Washington, also grew dramatically. Much of the rapid industrialization of the 19th and early 20th centuries occurred in places already favored by water or rail transport systems, but in some instances—such as in the cities of northeastern Pennsylvania’s anthracite region, some New England mill towns, and the textile centers of the Carolina and Virginia Piedmont—manufacturing brought about rapid urbanization and the consequent attraction of transport facilities. The extraction of gold, silver, copper, coal, iron, and, in the 20th century, gas and oil led to rather ephemeral centers—unless these places were able to capitalize on local or regional advantages other than minerals.
A strong early start, whatever the initial economic base may have been, was often the key factor in competition among cities. With sufficient early momentum, urban capital and population tended to expand almost automatically. The point is illustrated perfectly by the larger cities of the northeastern seaboard, from Portland, Maine, through Baltimore, Maryland. The nearby physical wealth is poor to mediocre, and they are now far off-center on the national map, but a prosperous mercantile beginning, good land and sea connections with distant places, and a rich local accumulation of talent, capital, and initiative were sufficient to bring about the growth of one of the world’s largest concentrations of industry, commerce, and people.
New factors in municipal development
The pre-1900 development of the American city was almost completely a chronicle of the economics of the production, collection, and distribution of physical commodities and basic services dictated by geography, but there have been striking deviations from this pattern. The physical determinants of urban location and growth have given way to social factors. Increasingly, the most successful cities are oriented toward the more advanced modes for the production and consumption of services, specifically the knowledge, managerial, and recreational industries. The largest cities have become more dependent upon corporate headquarters, communications, and the manipulation of information for their sustenance. Washington, D.C., is the most obvious example of a metropolis in which government and ancillary activities have been the spur for vigorous growth; but almost all of the state capitals have displayed a similar demographic and economic vitality. Further, urban centers that contain a major college or university often have enjoyed remarkable expansion.
With the coming of relative affluence and abundant leisure to the population and a decrease of labor input in industrial processes, a new breed of cities has sprouted across the land: those that cater to the pleasure-seeker, vacationer, and the retired—for example, the young, flourishing cities of Florida or Nevada and many locations in California, Arizona, and Colorado.
The automobile as a means of personal transportation was developed about the time of World War I, and the American city was catapulted into a radically new period, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in the further evolution of physical form and function. The size, density, and internal structure of the city were previously constrained by the limitations of the pedestrian and early mass-transit systems. Only the well-to-do could afford a horse and carriage or a secluded villa in the countryside. Cities were relatively small and compact, with a single clearly defined center, and they grew by accretion along their edges, without any significant spatial hiatuses except where commuter railroads linked outlying towns to the largest of metropolises. Workers living beyond the immediate vicinity of their work had to locate within reach of the few horse-drawn omnibuses or the later electric street railways.
The universality of the automobile, even among the less affluent, and the parallel proliferation of service facilities and highways greatly loosened and fragmented the American city, which spread over surrounding rural lands. Older, formerly autonomous towns grew swiftly. Many towns became satellites of the larger city or were absorbed. Many suburbs and subdivisions arose with single-family homes on lots larger than had been possible for the ordinary householder in the city. These communities were almost totally dependent on the highway for the flow of commuters, goods, and services, and many were located in splendid isolation, separated by tracts of farmland, brush, or forest from other such developments. At the major interchanges of the limited-access highways, a new form of agglomerated settlement sprang up. In a further elaboration of this trend, many larger cities have been girdled by a set of mushrooming complexes. These creations of private enterprise embody a novel concept of urban existence: a metropolitan module no longer reliant on the central city or its downtown. Usually anchored on a cluster of shopping malls and office parks, these hypersuburbs, whose residents and employees circulate freely within the outer metropolitan ring, offer virtually all of the social and economic facilities needed for the modern lifestyle.
The new look of the metropolitan area
The outcome has been abroad, a ragged, semi-urbanized belt of land surrounding each city, large or small, and quite often blending imperceptibly into the suburban-exurban halo encircling a neighboring metropolitan center. There is a great similarity in the makeup and general appearance of all such tracts: the planless intermixture of scraps of the rural landscape with the fragments of the scattered metropolis; the randomly distributed subdivisions or single homes; the vast shopping centers, the large commercial cemeteries, drive-in theatres, junkyards, and golf courses and other recreational enterprises; and the regional or metropolitan airport, often with its own cluster of factories, warehouses, or travel-oriented businesses. The traditional city—unitary, concentric in form, with a single well-defined middle—has been replaced by a relatively amorphous, polycentric metropolitan sprawl.
The inner city of a large U.S. metropolitan area displays some traits that are common to the larger centers of all advanced nations. A central business district, almost always the oldest section of the city, is surrounded by a succession of roughly circular zones, each distinctive in economic and social-ethnic character. The symmetry of this scheme is distorted by the irregularities of surface and drainage or the effects of radial highways and railroads. The land is most costly, and hence land use is most intensive, toward the center. Major businesses, financial and governmental offices, department stores, and specialty shops dominate the downtown, usually fringed by a band of factories and warehouses. The outer parts of the city, like the suburbs, are mainly residential.
With some exceptions—e.g., large apartment complexes in downtown Chicago—people do not reside in the downtown areas, and there is a steady downward gradient in population density per unit area and more open land and single-family residences as one moves from the inner city toward the open country. Conversely, there is a general rise in income and social status with increasing distance from the core. The sharply defined immigrant neighborhoods of the 19th century generally persist in a somewhat diluted form, though specific ethnic groups may have shifted their location. Later migrant groups, notably Southern Blacks and Latin Americans, generally dominate the more run-down neighborhoods of the inner cities.
The individual and collective character of cities
American cities, more so than the small-town or agrarian landscape, tend to be the product of a particular period rather than of location. The relatively venerable centers of the Eastern Seaboard—Boston; Philadelphia; Baltimore; Albany, New York; Chester, Pennsylvania; Alexandria, Virginia; or Georgetown (a district of Washington, D.C.), for example—are virtual replicas of the fashionable European models of their early period rather than the fruition of regional culture, unlike New Orleans and Santa Fe, New Mexico, which reflect other times and regions. The townscapes of Pittsburgh; Detroit, Michigan; Chicago; and Denver, depict national modes of thought and the technological development of their formative years, just as Dallas, Texas; Las Vegas, Nevada; San Diego; Tucson, Arizona; and Albuquerque, New Mexico, proclaim contemporary values and gadgetry more than any local distinctiveness. When strong-minded city founders instituted a highly individual plan and their successors managed to preserve it—as, for example, in Savannah, Georgia; Washington, D.C.; and Salt Lake City, Utah—or when there is a happy combination of a spectacular site and appreciative residents—as in San Francisco or Seattle—a genuine individuality does seem to emerge. Such an identity also may develop where immigration has been highly selective, as in such places as Miami, Florida; Phoenix, Arizona; and Los Angeles.
As a group, U.S. cities differ from cities in other countries in both type and degree. The national political structure, the social inclinations of the people, and the strong outward surge of urban development have led to the political fragmentation of metropolises that socially and economically are relatively cohesive units. The fact that a single metropolitan area may sprawl across numerous incorporated towns and cities, several townships, and two or more counties and states has a major impact on both its appearance and the way it functions. Not the least of these effects is a dearth of overall physical and social planning (or its ineffectuality when attempted), and the rather chaotic, inharmonious appearance of both inner-city and peripheral zones painfully reflects the absence of any effective collective action concerning such matters.
An American city is a place of sharp transitions. Construction, demolition, and reconstruction go on almost ceaselessly, though increasing thought has been given to preserving monuments and buildings. From present evidence, it would be impossible to guess that New York City and Albany date from the 1620s or that Detroit was founded in 1701. Preservation and restoration do occur, but often only when it makes sense in terms of tourist revenue. Physical and social blight has reached epidemic proportions in the slum areas of the inner city; but, despite the wholesale razing of such areas and the subsequent urban-renewal projects (sometimes as apartment or commercial developments for the affluent), the belief has become widespread that the ills of the U.S. city are incurable, especially with the increasing flight of capital, tax revenue, and the more highly educated, affluent elements of the population to suburban areas and the spatial and political polarization of whites and nonwhites.
In the central sections of U.S. cities, there is little sense of history or continuity; instead, one finds evidence of the dominance of the engineering mentality and of the credo that the business of the city is business. Commercial and administrative activities are paramount, and usually, there is little room for church buildings or for parks, or other nonprofit enterprises. The role of the cathedral, so central in the medieval European city, is filled by a U.S. invention serving both utilitarian and symbolic purposes, the skyscraper. Some cities have felt the need for other bold secular monuments; hence the Gateway Arch looming over St. Louis, Seattle’s Space Needle, and Houston’s Astrodome. Future archaeologists may well conclude from their excavations that American society was ruled by an oligarchy of highway engineers, architects, and bulldozer operators. The great expressways converging upon, or looping, the downtown area and the huge amount of space devoted to parking lots and garages are even more impressive than the massive surgery executed upon U.S. cities a century ago to hack out room for railroad terminals and marshaling yards.
Within many urban sites, there has been a radical physical transformation of shorelines, drainage systems, and land surface that would be difficult to match elsewhere in the world. Thus, in their physical lineaments, Manhattan and inner Boston bear scant resemblance to the landscapes seen by their initial settlers. The surface of downtown Chicago has been raised several feet above its former swamp level, the city’s lakefront extensively reshaped, and the flow of the Chicago River reversed. Los Angeles, notorious for its disregard of the environment, has its concrete arroyo bottoms, terraced hillsides and landslides, and its own artificial microclimate.
The supercities
The unprecedented outward sprawl of American urban settlement has created some novel settlement forms, for the quantitative change has been so great as to induce qualitative transformation. The conurbation—a territorial coalescence of two or more sizable cities whose peripheral zones have grown together—may have first appeared in early 19th-century Europe. There are major examples in Great Britain, the Low Countries, and Germany, as well as in Japan.
Nothing elsewhere, however, rivals in size and complexity the aptly named megalopolis, that supercity stretching along the Atlantic from Portland, Maine, past Richmond, Virginia. Other large conurbations include, in the Great Lakes region, one centered on Chicago and containing large slices of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana; another based in Detroit, embracing large parts of Michigan and Ohio and reaching into Canada; and a third stretching from Buffalo through Cleveland and back to Pittsburgh. All three are reaching toward one another and may form another megalopolis that, in turn, may soon be grafted onto the seaboard megalopolis by a corridor through central New York state.
Another example of a growing megalopolis is the huge southern California conurbation reaching from Santa Barbara, through a dominating Los Angeles, to the Mexican border. The solid strip of urban territory that lines the eastern shore of Puget Sound is a smaller counterpart. Quite exceptional in form is the slender linear multicity occupying Florida’s Atlantic coastline, from Jacksonville to Miami, and the loose swarm of medium-sized cities clustering along with the Southern Piedmont, from south-central Virginia to Birmingham, Alabama; also of note are the Texas cities of Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio, which have formed a rapidly growing—though discontinuous—urbanized triangle.
One of the few predictions that seem safe in so dynamic and innovative a land as the United States is that, unless severe and painful controls are placed on land use, the shape of the urban environment will be increasingly megalopolitan: a small set of great constellations of polycentric urban zones, each complexly interlocked socially and physically with its neighbors.
Traditional regions of the United States
The differences among America’s traditional regions, or culture areas, tend to be slight and shallow as compared with such areas in most older, more stable countries. The muted, often subtle nature of interregional differences can be ascribed to the relative newness of American settlement, a perpetually high degree of mobility, a superb communications system, and the galloping centralization of economy and government. It might even be argued that some of these regions are quaint vestiges of a vanishing past, of interest only to antiquarians.
Yet, in spite of the nationwide standardization in many areas of American thought and behavior, the lingering effects of the older culture areas do remain potent. In the case of the South, for example, the differences helped to precipitate the gravest political crisis and bloodiest military conflict in the nation’s history. More than a century after the Civil War, the South remains a powerful entity in political, economic, and social terms, and its peculiar status is recognized in religious, educational, athletic, and literary circles.
Even more intriguing is the appearance of a series of essentially 20th-century regions. Southern California is the largest and perhaps the most distinctive region, and its special culture has attracted large numbers of immigrants to the state. Similar trends are visible in southern Florida; in Texas, whose mystique has captured the national imagination; and to a certain degree in the more ebullient regions of New Mexico and Arizona as well. At the metropolitan level, it is difficult to believe that such distinctive cities as San Francisco, Las Vegas, Dallas, Tucson, and Seattle have become like all other American cities. A detailed examination, however, would show significant if sometimes subtle interregional differences in terms of language, religion, diet, folklore, folk architecture and handicrafts, political behavior, social etiquette, and a number of other cultural categories.
The hierarchy of cultural areas
A multitiered hierarchy of cultural areas might be postulated for the United States; but the most interesting levels are, first, the nation as a whole and, second, the five to 10 large subnational regions, each embracing several states or major portions thereof. There is a remarkably close coincidence between the political United States and the cultural United States. Crossing into Mexico, the traveler passes across a cultural chasm. If the contrasts are less dramatic between the two sides of the U.S.-Canadian boundary, they are nonetheless real, especially to the Canadians. Erosion of the cultural barrier has been largely limited to the area that stretches from northern New York state to Aroostook county, Maine. There, a vigorous demographic and cultural immigration by French-Canadians has gone far toward eradicating international differences.
While the international boundaries act as a cultural container, the interstate boundaries are curiously irrelevant. Even when the state had a strong autonomous early existence—as happened with Massachusetts, Virginia, or Pennsylvania—subsequent economic and political forces have tended to wash away such initial identities. Actually, it could be argued that the political divisions of the 48 conterminous states are anachronistic in the context of contemporary socioeconomic and cultural forces. Partially convincing cases might be built for equating Utah and Texas with their respective cultural areas because of exceptional historical and physical circumstances, or perhaps Oklahoma, given its very late European occupation and its dubious distinction as the territory to which exiled Indian tribes of the East were relegated. In most instances, however, the states either contain two or more distinctly different culture and political areas or fragments thereof or are part of a much larger single culture area. Thus sharp North-South dichotomies characterize California, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Florida, while Tennessee advertises that there are really three Tennessee. In Virginia, the opposing cultural forces were so strong that actual fission took place in 1863 (with the admission to the Union of West Virginia) along one of those rare interstate boundaries that approximate a genuine cultural divide.
Much remains to be learned about the cause and effect relations between economic and cultural areas in the United States. If the South or New England could at one time be correlated with a specific economic system, this is no longer easy to do. Cultural systems appear to respond more slowly to agents of change than do economic or urban systems. Thus the Manufacturing Belt, a core region for many social and economic activities, now spans parts of four traditional cultural areas—New England, the Midland, the Midwest, and the northern fringes of the South. The great urban sprawl, from southern Maine to central Virginia, blithely ignores the cultural slopes that are still visible in its more rural tracts.
The cultural hearths
The cultural areas of the United States are generally European in origin, the result of importing European colonists and ways of life and the subsequent adaptation of social groups to new habitats. The aboriginal cultures have had relatively little influence on the nation’s modern culture. In the Southwestern and the indistinct Oklahoman subregions, the Indian element merits consideration only as one of several ingredients making up the regional mosaic. With some exceptions, the map of American culture areas in the East can be explained in terms of the genesis, development, and expansion of the three principal colonial cultural hearths along the Atlantic seaboard. Each was basically British in character, but their personalities remain distinct because of, first, different sets of social and political conditions during the critical period of first effective settlement and, second, local physical and economic circumstances. The cultural gradients between them tend to be much steeper and the boundaries more distinct than is true for the remainder of the nation.
New England
New England was the dominant region during the century of rapid expansion following the American Revolution and not merely in terms of demographic or economic expansion. In social and cultural life—in education, politics, theology, literature, science, architecture, and the more advanced forms of mechanical and social technology—the area exercised its primacy. New England was the leading source of ideas and styles for the nation from about 1780 to 1880; it furnishes an impressive example of the capacity of strongly motivated communities to rise above the constraints of a harsh environment.
During its first two centuries, New England had an unusually homogeneous population. With some exceptions, the British immigrants shared the same nonconformist religious beliefs, language, social organization, and general outlook. A distinctive regional culture took form, most noticeably in terms of dialect, town morphology, and folk architecture. The personality of the people also took on a regional coloration both in folklore and in actuality; there is a sound basis for the belief that the traditional New England Yankee is self-reliant, thrifty, inventive, and enterprising. The influx of immigrants that began in the 1830s diluted and altered the New England identity, but much of its early personality survived.
By virtue of location, wealth, and seniority, the Boston metropolitan area has become the cultural-economic center of New England. This sovereignty is shared to some degree, however, with two other old centers, the lower Connecticut Valley and the Narragansett Bay region of Rhode Island.
The early westward demographic and ideological expansion of New England was so influential that it is justifiable to call New York, northern New Jersey, northern Pennsylvania, and much of the Upper Midwest New England Extended. Further, the energetic endeavors of New England whalers, merchants, and missionaries had a considerable impact on the cultures of Hawaii, various other Pacific isles, and several points in the Caribbean. New Englanders also was active in the Americanization of early Oregon and Washington, with results that are still visible. Later, the overland diffusion of New England natives and practices meant a recognizable New England character not only for the Upper Midwest, from Ohio to the Dakotas but also in the Pacific Northwest in general, though to a lesser degree.
The South of the United States
By far the largest of the three original Anglo-American culture areas, the South is also the most idiosyncratic with respect to national norms—or slowest to accept them. The South was once so distinct from the non-South in almost every observable or quantifiable feature and so fiercely proud of its peculiarities that for some years the question of whether it could maintain political and social unity with the non-South was in serious doubt. These differences are still observable in almost every realm of human activity, including rural economy, dialect, diet, costume, folklore, politics, architecture, social customs, and recreation. Only during the 20th century can an argument be made that it has achieved a decisive convergence with the rest of the nation, at least in terms of economic behavior and material culture.
A persistent deviation from the national mainstream probably began in the first years of settlement. The first settlers of the South were almost purely British, not outwardly different from those who flocked to New England or the Midland, but almost certainly distinct in terms of motives and social values and more conservative in retaining the rurality and the family and social structure of premodern Europe. The vast importation of enslaved Africans was also a major factor, as was a degree of contact with the Indians that was less pronounced farther north. In addition, the unusual pattern of the economy (much different from that of northwestern Europe), settlement, and social organization, which were in part an adaptation to a starkly unfamiliar physical habitat, accentuated the South’s deviation from other cultural areas.
In both origin and spatial structure, the South has been characterized by diffuseness. In the search for a single cultural hearth, the most plausible choice is the Chesapeake Bay area and the northeastern corner of North Carolina, the earliest area of recognizably Southern character. Early components of the Southern population and culture also arrived from other sources. A narrow coastal strip from North Carolina to the Georgia–Florida border and including the Sea Islands is decidedly Southern in character, yet it stands apart self-consciously from other parts of the South. Though colonized directly from Great Britain, it had also significant connections with the West Indies, in which relation the African cultural contribution was strongest and purest. Charleston and Savannah, which nurtured their own distinctive civilizations, dominated this subregion. Similarly, French Louisiana received elements of culture and population—to be stirred into the special Creole mixture—not only, putatively, from the Chesapeake Bay hearth area but also indirectly from France, French Nova Scotia, the French West Indies, and Africa. In south-central Texas, the Germanic and Hispanic influx was so heavy that a special subregion can be designated.
It would seem, then, that the Southern culture area may be an example of convergent, or parallel, the evolution of a variety of elements arriving along several paths but subject to some single general process that could mold one larger regional consciousness and way of life.
Because of its slowness in joining the national technological mainstream, the South can be subdivided into a much greater number of subregions than is possible for any of the other older traditional regions. Those described above are of a lesser order than the two principal Souths, variously called Upper and Lower (or Deep) South, Upland, Lowland South, or Yeoman and Plantation South.
The Upland South, which comprises the southern Appalachians, upper Appalachian Piedmont, the Cumberland and other low interior plateaus, and the Ozarks and Ouachitas, was colonized culturally and demographically from the Chesapeake Bay hearth area and the Midland; it is most emphatically white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) in character. The latter area, which contains a large Black population, includes the greater part of the South Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains and the lower Appalachian Piedmont. Its early major influences came from the Chesapeake Bay area, with only minor elements from the coastal Carolina–Georgia belt, Louisiana, and elsewhere. The division between the two subregions remains distinct from Virginia to Texas, but each region can be further subdivided. Within the Upland South, the Ozark region might legitimately be detached from the Appalachian; and, within the latter, the proud and prosperous Kentucky Bluegrass, with its emphasis on tobacco and Thoroughbreds, certainly merits special recognition.
Toward the margins of the South, the difficulties in delimiting subregions become greater. The outer limits themselves are a topic of special interest. There seems to be more than an accidental relation between these limits and various climatic factors. The fuzzy northern boundary, definitely not associated with the conventional Mason and Dixon Line or the Ohio River, seems most closely associated with the length of the frost-free season or with temperature during the winter. As the Southern cultural complex was carried to the West, it not only retained its strength but became more intense, in contrast to the influence of New England and the Midland. But the South finally fades away as one approaches the 100th meridian, with its critical decline in annual precipitation. The apparent correlation between the cultural South and a humid subtropical climatic regime is in many ways valid.
The Texas subregion is so large, distinctive, vigorous, and self-assertive that it presents some vexing classificatory questions. Is Texas simply a subregion of the Greater South, or has it acquired so strong and divergent an identity that it can be regarded as a major region in its own right? It is likely that a major region has been born in a frontier zone in which several distinct cultural communities confront one another and in which the mixture has bred the vigorous, extroverted, aggressive Texas personality so widely celebrated in song and story. Similarly, peninsular Florida may be considered either within or juxtaposed to the South but not necessarily part of it. In the case of Florida, an almost empty territory began to receive significant settlement only after about 1890, and if, like Texas, most of it came from the older South, there were also vigorous infusions from elsewhere.
The significance of this region has not been less than that of New England or the South, but its characteristics are the least conspicuous to outsiders as well as to its own residents—reflecting, perhaps, its centrality in the course of U.S. development. The Midland (a term not to be confused with Midwest) comprises portions of Middle Atlantic and Upper Southern states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Serious European settlement of the Midland began a generation or more after that of the other major cultural centers and after several earlier, relatively ineffectual trials by the Dutch, Swedes, Finns, and British. But once begun late in the 17th century by William Penn and his associates, the colonization of the area was a success. Within southeastern Pennsylvania this culture area first assumed its distinctive character: a prosperous, sober, industrious agricultural society that quickly became a mixed economy as mercantile and later industrial functions came to the fore. By the mid-18th century, much of the region had acquired a markedly urban character, resembling in many ways the more advanced portions of the North Sea countries. In this respect, at least, the Midland was well ahead of neighboring areas to the north and south.
It differed also in its polyglot ethnicity. From almost the beginning, the various ethnic and religious groups of the British Isles were joined by immigrants from the European mainland. This diversity has grown and is likely to continue. The mosaic of colonial ethnic groups has persisted in much of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, as has the remarkable variety of nationalities and churches in coalfields, company towns, cities, and many rural areas. Much of the same ethnic heterogeneity can be seen in New England, the Midwest, and a few other areas, but the Midland stands out as perhaps the most polyglot region of the nation. The Germanic element has always been notably strong, if irregularly distributed, in the Midland, accounting for more than 70 percent of the population of many towns. Had the Anglo-American culture not triumphed, the area might well have been designated, Pennsylvania German.
Physiography and migration carried the Midland culture area into the Maryland Piedmont. Although its width tapers quickly below the Potomac, it reaches into parts of Virginia and West Virginia, with traces legible far down the Appalachian zone and into the South.
The northern half of the greater Midland region (the New York subregion, or New England Extended) cannot be assigned unequivocally to either New England or this Midland. Essentially it is a hybrid formed mainly from two regional strains of almost equal strength: New England and the post-1660 British element moving up the Hudson Valley and beyond. There has also been a persistent if slight, the residue of early Dutch culture and some subtle filtering northward of Pennsylvanian influences. Apparently within the New York subregion occurred the first major fusion of American regional cultures, especially within the early 19th-century Burned-Over District, around the Finger Lakes and Genesee areas of central and western New York. This locality, the seedbed for a number of important social innovations, was a major staging area for westward migration and possibly a major source for the people and notions that were to build the Midwestern culture area.
Toward the west, the Midland retains its integrity for only a short distance—certainly no further than eastern Ohio—as it becomes submerged within the Midwest. Still, its significance in the genesis of the Midwest and the national culture should not be minimized. Its success in projecting its image upon so much of the country may have drawn attention away from the source area. As both name and location suggest, the Midland is intermediate in character in many respects, lying between New England and the South. Its residents are much less concerned with or conscious of, a strong regional identity (excepting the Pennsylvania Dutch caricatures) than is true for the other regions, and, in addition, the Midland lacks its strong political and literary traditions, though it is unmistakable in its distinctive townscapes and farmsteads.
The newer cultural areas
The Midwest
There is no such self-effacement in the Midwest, that large triangular region justly regarded as the most nearly representative of the national average. Everyone within or outside of the Midwest knows of its existence, but no one is certain where it begins or ends. The older apex of the eastward-pointing triangle appears to rest around Pittsburgh, while the two western corners melt away somewhere in the Great Plains, possibly in southern Manitoba in the north and southern Kansas in the south. The eastern terminus and the southern and western borders are broad, indistinct transitional zones.
A serious study of the historical geography of the Midwest began only in the 20th century, but it seems likely that this culture region was the combination of all three colonial regions and that this combination first took place in the upper Ohio valley. The early routes of travel—Ohio and its tributaries, the Great Lakes, and the low, level corridor along the Mohawk and the coastal plains of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie—converge upon Ohio. There, the people and cultural traits from New England, the Midland, and the South were first funneled together. There seems to have been a fanlike widening of the new hybrid area into the West as settlers worked their way frontier wars.
Two major subregions are readily discerned, the Upper and Lower Midwest. They are separated by a line, roughly approximating the 41st parallel, that persists as far west as Colorado in terms of speech patterns and indicates differences in regional provenance in ethnic and religious terms as well. Much of the Upper Midwest retains a faint New England character, although Midland influences are probably as important. A rich mixture of German, Scandinavian, Slavic and other non-WASP elements has greatly diversified a stock in which the British element usually remains dominant and the range of church denominations is great. The Lower Midwest, except for the relative scarcity of Blacks, tends to resemble the South in its predominantly Protestant and British makeup. There are some areas with sizable Roman Catholic and non-WASP populations, but on the whole, the subregion tends to be more WASP in inclination than most other parts of the nation.
The problem of the West
The foregoing cultural areas account for roughly the eastern half of the conterminous United States. There is a dilemma in classifying the remaining half. The concept of the American West, strong in the popular imagination, is reinforced constantly by romanticized cinematic and television images of the cowboy. It is facile to accept the widespread Western livestock complex as epitomizing the full gamut of Western life because although the cattle industry may have once accounted for more than one-half of the active Western domain as measured in acres, it employed only a relatively small fraction of the total population. As a single subculture, it cannot represent the total regional culture.
It is not clear whether there is a genuine, single, grand Western culture region. Unlike the East, where virtually all the land is developed and cultural areas and subregions abut and overlap in splendid confusion, the eight major and many lesser nodes of the population in the western United States resemble oases, separated from one another by wide expanses of nearly unpopulated mountain or arid desert. The only obvious properties these isolated clusters have in common are, first, the intermixture of several strains of culture, primarily from the East but with additions from Europe, Mexico, and East Asia, and, second, except for one subregion, general modernity, having been settled in a serious way no earlier than the 1840s. Some areas may be viewed as inchoate, or partially formed, cultural entities; the others have acquired definite personalities but are difficult to classify as first-order or lesser order culture areas.
There are several major tracts in the western United States that reveal a genuine cultural identity: the Upper Rio Grande region, the Mormon region, southern California, and, by some accounts, northern California. To this group, one might add the anomalous Texan and Oklahoman subregions, which have elements of both the West and the South.
The term Upper Rio Grande region was coined to denote the oldest and strongest of the three sectors of Hispanic-American activity in the Southwest, the others being southern California and portions of Texas. Although covering the valley of the upper Rio Grande, the region also embraces segments of Arizona and Colorado as well as other parts of New Mexico. European communities and culture have been present there, with only one interruption, since the late 16th century. The initial sources were Spain and Mexico, but after 1848 at least three distinct strains of Anglo-American culture were increasingly well represented—the Southern, Mormon, and a general undifferentiated Northeastern culture—plus a distinct Texan subcategory. For once this has occurred without obliterating the Indians, whose culture endures in various stages of dilution, from the strongly Americanized or Hispanicized to the almost undisturbed.
The general mosaic is a fabric of Indian, Anglo, and Hispanic elements, and all three major groups, furthermore, are complex in character. The Indian component is made up of Navajo, Pueblo, and several smaller groups, each of which is quite distinct from the others. The Hispanic element is also diverse—modally Mexican mestizo, but ranging from pure Spanish to nearly pure pre-Spanish aboriginal.
The Mormon region is expansive in the religious and demographic realms, though it has ceased to expand territorially as it did in the decades after the first settlement in the Salt Lake valley in 1847. Despite its Great Basin location and an exemplary adaptation to environmental constraints, this cultural complex appears somewhat non-Western in spirit: the Mormons may be in the West, but they are not entirely of it. Their historical derivation from the Midwest and from ultimate sources in New York and New England is still apparent, along with the generous admixture of European converts to their religion.
As in New England, the power of the human will and an intensely cherished abstract design have triumphed over an unfriendly habitat. The Mormon way of life is expressed in the settlement landscape and economic activities within a region more homogeneous internally than any other U.S. culture area.
In contrast, northern California has yet to gain its own strong cultural coloration. From the beginning of the great 1849 gold rush, the area drew a diverse population from Europe and Asia as well as the older portions of the United States. Whether the greater part of northern California has produced a culture amounting to more than the sum of the contributions brought by immigrants is questionable. San Francisco, the regional metropolis, may have crossed the qualitative threshold. An unusually cosmopolitan outlook that includes an awareness of the Orient stronger than that of any other U.S. city, fierce self-esteem, and a unique townscape may be symptomatic of a genuinely new, emergent local culture.
Southern California is the most spectacular of the Western regions, not only in terms of economic and population growth but also for the luxuriance, regional particularism, and general avant-garde character of its swiftly evolving cultural pattern. Until the coming of a direct transcontinental rail connection in 1885, the region was remote, rural, and largely inconsequential. Since then, the invasion by persons from virtually every corner of North America and by the world has been massive, but since the 1960s in-migration has slackened perceptibly, and many residents have begun to question the doctrine of unlimited growth. In any event, a loosely articulated series of urban and suburban developments continue to encroach upon what little is left of arable or habitable land in the Coast Ranges and valleys from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border.
Although every major ethnic and racial group and every other U.S. culture area is amply represented in southern California, there is reason to suspect that a process of selection for certain types of people, attitudes, and personality traits may have been at work at both source and destination. The region is distinct from, or perhaps in the vanguard of, the remainder of the nation. One might view southern California as the super-American region or the outpost of a post-industrial future, but its cultural distinctiveness is very evident in landscape and social behavior. Southern California in no way approaches being a traditional region, or even the smudged facsimile of such, but rather the largest, boldest experiment in creating a voluntary region, one built through the self-selection of immigrants and their subsequent interaction.
The remaining identifiable Western regions—the Willamette Valley of Oregon, the Puget Sound region, the Inland Empire of eastern Washington, and adjacent tracts of Idaho and Oregon, central Arizona, and the Colorado Piedmont—can be treated jointly as potential, or emergent, culture areas, still too close to the national mean to display any cultural distinctiveness. In all of these regions is evident the arrival of a cross-section of the national population and the growth of regional life around one or more major metropolises. A New England element is noteworthy in the Willamette Valley and Puget Sound regions, while a Hispanic-American component appears in the Colorado Piedmont and central Arizona. Only time and further study will reveal whether any of these regions, so distant from the historic sources of U.S. population and culture, have the capacity to become an independent cultural area.
People of the United States
A country for less than two and a half centuries, the United States is a relatively new member of the global community, but its rapid growth since the 18th century is unparalleled. The early promise of the New World as a refuge and land of opportunity was realized dramatically in the 20th century with the emergence of the United States as a world power. With a total population exceeded only by those of China and India, the United States is also characterized by an extraordinary diversity in ethnic and racial ancestry. A steady stream of immigration, notably from the 1830s onward, formed a pool of foreign-born persons unmatched by any other nation; 60 million people immigrated to U.S. shores in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many were driven, seeking escape from political or economic hardship, while others were drawn, by a demand for workers, abundant natural resources, and expansive cheap land. Most arrived hoping to remake themselves in the New World.
Americans also have migrated internally with great vigor, exhibiting a restlessness that thrived in the open lands and on the frontier. Initially, migratory patterns ran east to west and from rural areas to cities, then, in the 20th century, from the South to the Northeast and Midwest. Since the 1950s, though, the movement has been primarily from the cities to outlying suburbs and from aging northern metropolises to the growing urban agglomerations of the South, Southwest, and West.
At the dawn of the 21st century, the majority of the U.S. population had achieved a high level of material comfort, prosperity, and security. Nonetheless, Americans struggled with the unexpected problems of relative affluence, as well as the persistence of residual poverty. Crime, drug abuse, affordable energy sources, urban sprawl, voter apathy, pollution, high divorce rates, AIDS, and excessive litigation remained continuing subjects of concern, as were inequities and inadequacies in education and managed health care. Among the public policy issues widely debated were abortion, gun control, welfare reforms, and capital punishment.
Many Americans perceive social tension as the product of their society’s failure to extend the traditional dream of equality of opportunity to all people. Ideally, social, political, economic, and religious freedom would assure the like treatment of everyone, so that all could achieve goals in accord with their individual talents, if only they worked hard enough. This strongly held belief has united Americans throughout the centuries. The fact that some groups have not achieved full equality troubles citizens and policy-makers alike.
Ethnic distribution
After decades of immigration and acculturation, many U.S. citizens can trace no discernible ethnic identity, describing themselves generically only as “American,” while others claim mixed identities. The 2000 U.S. census introduced a new category for those who identified themselves as a member of more than one race, and, of 281.4 million counted, 2.4 percent chose this multiracial classification. Ten years later, in the 2010 census, those figures had grown to 2.9 percent of 308.7 million.
Ethnic European Americans
Although the term ethnic is frequently confined to the descendants of the newest immigrants, its broader meaning applies to all groups unified by their cultural heritage and experience in the New World. In the 19th century, Yankees formed one such group, marked by a common religion and by habits shaped by the original Puritan settlers. From New England, the Yankees spread westward through New York, northern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas. Tightly knit communities, firm religious values, and a belief in the value of education resulted in prominent positions for Yankees in business, in literature and law, and in cultural and philanthropic institutions. They long identified with the Republican Party. Southern whites and their descendants, by contrast, remained preponderantly rural as migration took them westward across Tennessee and Kentucky to Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. These people inhabited small towns until the industrialization of the South in the 20th century, and they preserved affiliations with the Democratic Party until the 1960s.
The colonial population also contained other elements that long sustained their group identities. The Pennsylvania Germans, held together by religion and language, still pursue their own way of life after three centuries, as exemplified by the Amish. The great 19th-century German migrations, however, were made up of families who dispersed in the cities as well as in the agricultural areas to the West; to the extent that ethnic ties have survived they are largely sentimental. That is also true of the Scots, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, and Dutch, whose colonial nuclei received some reinforcement after 1800 but who gradually adapted to the ways of the larger surrounding groups.
Distinctive language and religion preserved some coherence among the descendants of the Scandinavian newcomers of the 19th century. Where these people clustered in sizeable settlements, as in Minnesota, they transmitted a sense of identity beyond the second generation; and emotional attachments to the lands of origin lingered.
Religion was a powerful force for cohesion among the Roman Catholic Irish and the Jews, both tiny groups before 1840, both reinforced by mass migration thereafter. Both have now become strikingly heterogeneous, displaying a wide variety of economic and social conditions, as well as a degree of conformity to the styles of life of other Americans. But the pull of external concerns—in the one case, the unification of Ireland; in the other, Israel’s security—have helped to preserve group loyalty.
Indeed, by the 1970s ethnic (in its narrow connotation) had come to be used to describe the Americans of Polish, Italian, Lithuanian, Czech, and Ukrainian extraction, along with those of other eastern and southern European ancestry. Tending to be Roman Catholic and middle-class, most settled in the North and Midwest. The city neighborhoods in which many of them lived initially had their roots in the Little Italy and Polish Hills established by the immigrants. By the 1980s and ’90s a significant number had left these enclaves for nearby suburbs. The only European ethnic group to arrive in large numbers at the end of the 20th century were Russians, especially Russian Jews, benefiting from perestroika.
In general, a pattern of immigration, self-support, and then assimilation was typical. Recently established ethnic groups often preserve greater visibility and greater cohesion. Their group identity is based not only upon a common cultural heritage but also on the common interests, needs, and problems they face in the present-day United States. As the immigrants and their descendants, most have been taught to believe that the road to success in the United States is achieved through individual effort. They tend to believe in equality of opportunity and self-improvement and attribute poverty to the failing of the individual and not to inequities in society. As the composition of the U.S. population changed, it was projected that sometime in the 21st century, Americans of European descent would be outnumbered by those from non-European ethnic groups.
African Americans
From colonial times, African Americans arrived in large numbers as enslaved persons and lived primarily on plantations in the South. In 1790, enslaved and free Blacks together comprised about one-fifth of the U.S. population. As the nation split between Southern slave and Northern free states prior to the American Civil War, the Underground Railroad spirited thousands of escaped enslaved people from the South to the North. In the century following abolition, this migration pattern became more pronounced as some six million Blacks moved from rural areas of the South to northern and western cities between 1916 and 1970 during the so-called Great Migration. On the heels of this massive internal shift came new immigrants from Western Africa and the West Indies, principally Haiti, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic.
The American civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s awakened the country’s conscience to the plight of African Americans, who had long been denied first-class citizenship. The movement used nonviolence and passive resistance to change discriminatory laws and practices, primarily in the South. As a result, increases in median income and college enrollment among the Black population were dramatic in the late 20th century. Widening access to professional and business opportunities included noteworthy political victories. By the early 1980s Black mayors in Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., had gained election with white support. In 1984 and 1988 Jesse Jackson ran for U.S. president; he was the first African American to contend seriously for a major party nomination. In 2008 Barack Obama became the first African American elected to the country’s highest office. However, despite an expanding Black middle-class and equal-opportunity laws in education, housing, and employment, African Americans continue to face staunch social and political challenges, especially those living in the inner cities, where some of American society’s most difficult problems (such as crime and drug trafficking) are acute.
Hispanics
Hispanics (Latinos) make up between one-sixth and one-fifth of the U.S. population. They constitute the country’s largest ethnic minority. More than half of the increase in the country’s total population from 2000 to 2010 was due to growth in the Hispanic population alone. The growth rate of the Hispanic population during this period was 43 percent—four times the growth rate of the general population. Hispanics live in all regions of the United States, but more than three-fourths live in the West or the South. They make up the largest share of the overall population in the West, where nearly three-tenths of the region’s residents are Hispanic. Almost half of the country’s total Hispanic population resides in the states of California and Texas, where they make up more than one-third of the population in each state.
Although they generally share Spanish as a second (and sometimes first) language, Hispanics are hardly a monolithic group. The majority, more than three-fifths, are of Mexican origin—some descended from settlers in portions of the United States that were once part of Mexico (Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California), others legal and illegal migrants from across the Mexico–U.S. border. The greater opportunities and higher living standards in the United States have long attracted immigrants from Mexico and Central America.
Puerto Ricans are the second largest group of Hispanics in the country. Their experience in the United States is markedly different from that of Mexican Americans. Most importantly, Puerto Ricans are American citizens by virtue of the island commonwealth’s association with the United States. As a result, migration between Puerto Rico and the United States has been fairly fluid, mirroring the continuous process by which Americans have always moved to where chances seem best. While most of that migration traditionally has been toward the mainland, by the end of the 20th century in- and out-migration between the island and the United States equalized. Puerto Ricans now make up nearly one-tenth of the U.S. Latino population.
Quite different, though also Spanish-speaking, are the Cubans who fled Fidel Castro’s communist revolution of 1959 and their descendants. While representatives of every social group are among them, the initial wave of Cubans was distinctive because of the large number of professional and middle-class people who migrated. Their social and political attitudes differ significantly from those of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, though this distinction was lessened by an influx of 120,000 Cuban refugees in the 1980s, known as the Mariel immigrants.
The United States three largest Hispanic groups are concentrated in different parts of the country. Most Mexicans live in western states; most Puerto Ricans live in northeastern states; and most Cubans live in southern states primarily Florida.
After 1960 easy air travel and political and economic instability stimulated a significant migration from the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. The arrivals from Latin America in earlier years were often political refugees, more recently they usually have been economic refugees. Constituting about one-fourth of the Hispanic diaspora, this group comprises largely Central Americans, Colombians, and Dominicans, the last of whom have acted as a bridge between the Black and Latino communities. Of Central American groups, three had population increases of more than 100 percent between 2000 and 2010. Hondurans (191 percent), Guatemalans (180 percent), and Salvadorans (152 percent). Latinos have come together for better health, housing, and municipal services, for bilingual school programs, and for improved educational and economic opportunities.
Asian Americans
Asian Americans as a group have confounded earlier expectations that they would form an indigestible mass in American society. The Chinese, the earliest to arrive (in large numbers from the mid-19th century, principally as laborers, notably on the transcontinental railroad), and the Japanese were long victims of racial discrimination. In 1924 the law barred further entries; those already in the United States had been ineligible for citizenship since the previous year. In 1942 thousands of Japanese, many born in the United States and therefore American citizens were interned in relocation camps because their loyalty was suspect after the United States engaged Japan in World War II. Subsequently, anti-Asian prejudice largely dissolved, and Chinese and Japanese, along with others such as the Vietnamese and Taiwanese, have adjusted and advanced. Among generally more recent arrivals, many Koreans, Filipinos, and Asian Indians have quickly enjoyed economic success. Though enumerated separately by the U.S. census, Pacific Islanders, such as native Hawaiians, constitute a small minority but contribute to making Hawaii and California the states with the largest percentages of Asian Americans.
Middle Easterners
Among the trends of Arab immigration in the 20th century were the arrival of Lebanese Christians in the first half of the century and Palestinian Muslims in the second half. Initially Arabs inhabited the East Coast, but by the end of the century there was a large settlement of Arabs in the greater Detroit area. Armenians, also from southwest Asia, arrived in large numbers in the early 20th century, eventually congregating largely in California, where, later in the century, Iranians were also concentrated. Some recent arrivals from the Middle East maintain national customs such as traditional dress.
Native Americans
Native Americans form an ethnic group only in a very general sense. In the East, centuries of coexistence with whites has led to some degree of intermarriage and assimilation and to various patterns of stable adjustment. In the West the hasty expansion of agricultural settlement crowded the Native Americans into reservations, where federal policy has vacillated between efforts at assimilation and the desire to preserve tribal cultural identity, with unhappy consequences. The Native American population has risen from its low point of 235,000 in 1900 to 2.5 million at the turn of the 21st century.
The reservations are often enclaves of deep poverty and social distress, although the many casinos operated on their land have created great wealth in some instances. The physical and social isolation of the reservation prompted many Native Americans to migrate to large cities, but, by the end of the 20th century, a modest repopulation occurred in rural counties of the Great Plains. In census numerations, Native Americans are categorized as Alaskan natives, notably Aleuts and Eskimos. In the latter half of the 20th century, intertribal organizations were founded to give Native Americans a unified, national presence.
Religious groups
The U.S. government has never supported an established church, and the diversity of the population has discouraged any tendency toward uniformity in worship. As a result of this individualism, thousands of religious denominations thrive within the country. Only about one-sixth of religious adherents are not Christian, and, although Roman Catholicism is the largest single denomination (about one-fifth of the U.S. population), the many churches of Protestantism constitute the majority. Some are the products of native development—among them the Disciples of Christ (founded in the early 19th century), Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons; 1830), Seventh-day Adventists (officially established 1863), Jehovah’s Witnesses (1872), Christian Scientists (1879), and the various Pentecostal churches (late 19th century).
Other denominations had their origins in the Old World, but even these have taken distinctive American forms. Affiliated Roman Catholics look to Rome for guidance, although there are variations in practice from diocese to diocese. More than 5.5 million Jews are affiliated with three national organizations (Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform), as well as with many smaller sects. Most Protestant denominations also have European roots, the largest being Baptists, Pentecostals, and Methodists. Among other groups are Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, various Eastern churches (including Orthodox), Congregationalists, Reformed, Mennonites and Amish, various Brethren, Unitarians, and the Friends (Quakers). By 2000 substantial numbers of recent immigrants had increased the Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu presence to about 4 million, 2.5 million, and 1 million believers, respectively.
Immigration
Immigration legislation began in earnest in the late 19th century, but it was not until after World War I that the era of mass immigration came to an abrupt end. The Immigration Act of 1924 established an annual quota (fixed in 1929 at 150,000) and established the national-origins system, which was to characterize immigration policy for the next 40 years. Under it, quotas were established for each country based on the number of persons of that national origin who were living in the United States in 1920. The quotas reduced drastically the flow of immigrants from southeastern Europe in favor of the countries of northwestern Europe. The quota system was abolished in 1965 in favor of a predominantly first-come, first-served policy. An annual ceiling of immigrant visas was established for nations outside the Western Hemisphere (170,000, with 20,000 allowed to any one nation) and for all persons from the Western Hemisphere (120,000).
The new policy radically changed the pattern of immigration. For the first time, non-Europeans formed the dominant immigrant group, with new arrivals from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. In the 1980s and ’90s, immigration was further liberalized by granting amnesty to illegal aliens, raising admission limits, and creating a system for validating refugees. The plurality of immigrants, both legal and illegal, recently hail from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, though Asians form a significant percentage.
Economy
The United States is the world’s greatest economic power in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) and historically has been among the world’s highest-ranking countries in terms of GDP per capita. With less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States produces about one-fifth of the world’s economic output.
The sheer size of the U.S. economy makes it the most important single factor in global trade. Its exports represent more than one-tenth of the world’s total. The United States also influences the economies of the rest of the world because it is a significant source of investment capital. Just as direct investment, primarily by the British, was a major factor in 19th-century U.S. economic growth, so direct investment abroad by U.S. firms is a major factor in the economic well-being of Canada, Mexico, China, and many countries in Latin America, Europe, and Asia.
Strengths and weaknesses
The U.S. economy is marked by resilience, flexibility, and innovation. In the first decade of the 21st century, the economy was able to withstand a number of costly setbacks. These included the collapse of stock markets following an untenable run-up in technology shares, losses from corporate scandals, the September 11 attacks in 2001, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast near New Orleans in 2005, and the punishing economic downturn that became widely known as the Great Recession, which officially dated from December 2007 to June 2009 and was caused in part by a financial debacle related to subprime mortgages.
For the most part, the U.S. government plays only a small direct role in running the country’s economic enterprises. Businesses are free to hire or fire employees and open or close operations. Unlike the situation in many other countries, new products and innovative practices can be introduced with minimal bureaucratic delays. The government does, however, regulate various aspects of all U.S. industries. Federal agencies oversee worker safety and work conditions, air and water pollution, food and prescription drug safety, transportation safety, and automotive fuel economy—to name just a few examples. Moreover, the Social Security Administration operates the country’s pension system, which is funded through payroll taxes. The government also operates public health programs such as Medicaid (for the poor) and Medicare (for the elderly).
In an economy dominated by privately owned businesses, there are still some government-owned companies. These include the U.S. Postal Service, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Amtrak (formally the National Railroad Passenger Corporation), and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The federal government also influences economic activity in other ways. As a purchaser of goods, it exerts considerable leverage on certain sectors of the economy—most notably in the defense and aerospace industries. It also implements antitrust laws to prevent companies from colluding on prices or monopolizing market shares.
Despite its ability to weather economic shocks, in the earliest years of the 21st century, the U.S. economy developed many weaknesses that pointed to future risks. The country faces a chronic trade deficit; imports greatly outweigh the value of U.S. goods and services exported to other countries. For many citizens, household incomes have effectively stagnated since the 1970s, while indebtedness reached record levels. Moreover, many observers have pointed to an increasing gap in income disparity between the small cohort at the top of the economic pyramid and the rest of the country’s citizens. Rising energy prices made it more costly to run businesses, heat homes, and transport goods and people. The country’s aging population placed new burdens on public health spending and pension programs (including Social Security). At the same time, the burgeoning federal budget deficit limited the amount of funding available for social programs.
Taxation
Nearly all of the federal government’s revenues come from taxes, with total income from federal taxes representing about one-fifth of GDP. The most important source of tax revenue is the personal income tax (accounting for roughly half of federal revenue). Gross receipts from corporate income taxes yield a far smaller fraction (about one-eighth) of total federal receipts. Excise duties yield yet another small portion (less than one-tenth) of total federal revenue; however, individual states levy their own excise and sales taxes. Federal excises rest heavily on alcohol, gasoline, and tobacco. Other sources of revenue include Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes (which account for almost two-fifths of federal revenue) and estate and gift taxes (yielding only about 1 percent of the total).
Labour force
With an unemployment rate that returned to the traditional level of roughly 5 percent per year following the higher rates that had resulted from the Great Recession, the U.S. labor market is in line with those of other developed countries. The service sector accounts for more than three-fourths of the country’s jobs, whereas industrial and manufacturing trades employ less than one-fifth of the labor market.
After peaking in the 1950s, when 36 percent of American workers were enrolled in unions, union membership at the beginning of the 21st century had fallen to less than 15 percent of U.S. workers, nearly half of the government employees. The transformation in the late 20th century to a service-based economy changed the nature of labor unions. Organizational efforts, once aimed primarily at manufacturing industries, are now focused on service industries. The country’s largest union, the National Education Association (NEA), represents teachers. In 2005 three large labor unions broke their affiliation with the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the nationwide federation of unions, and formed a new federation, the Change to Win coalition, with the goal of reviving union influence in the labor market. Although the freedom to strike is qualified with provisions requiring cooling-off periods and in some cases compulsory arbitration, major unions are able and sometimes willing to embark on long strikes.
Agriculture, forestry, and fishing
Despite the enormous productivity of U.S. agriculture, the combined outputs of the agriculture, forestry, and fishing contribute to only a small percentage of GDP. Advances in farm productivity stemming from mechanization and organizational changes in commercial farming have enabled a smaller labor force to produce greater quantities than ever before. Improvements in yields have also resulted from the increased use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides and from changes in agricultural techniques such as irrigation. Among the most important crops are corn (maize), soybeans, wheat, cotton, grapes, and potatoes.
Agriculture, forestry, and fishing
Despite the enormous productivity of U.S. agriculture, the combined outputs of the agriculture, forestry, and fishing contribute to only a small percentage of GDP. Advances in farm productivity (stemming from mechanization and organizational changes in commercial farming) have enabled a smaller labour force to produce greater quantities than ever before. Improvements in yields have also resulted from the increased use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides and from changes in agricultural techniques such as irrigation. Among the most important crops are corn (maize), soybeans, wheat, cotton, grapes, and potatoes.
Manufacturing
Since the mid-20th century, services (such as health care, entertainment, and finance) have grown faster than any other sector of the economy. Nevertheless, while manufacturing jobs have declined since the 1960s, advances in productivity have caused manufacturing output, including construction, to remain relatively constant at about one-sixth of GDP.
Significant economic productivity occurs in a wide range of industries. The manufacture of transportation equipment (including motor vehicles, aircraft, and space equipment) represents a leading sector. Computer and telecommunications firms (including software and hardware) remain strong, despite a downturn in the early 21st century. Other important sectors include drug manufacturing and biotechnology, health services, food products, chemicals, electrical and nonelectrical machinery, energy, and insurance.
Finance
Under the Federal Reserve System, which regulates bank credit and influences the money supply, central banking functions are exercised by 12 regional Federal Reserve banks. The Board of Governors, appointed by the U.S. president, supervises these banks. Based in Washington, D.C., the board does not necessarily act in accord with the administration’s views on economic policy. The U.S. Treasury also influences the working of the monetary system through its management of the national debt (which can affect interest rates) and by changing its own deposits with the Federal Reserve banks (which can affect the volume of credit). While only about two-fifths of all commercial banks belong to the Federal Reserve System, these banks hold almost three-fourths of all commercial bank deposits. Banks incorporated under the national charters must be members of the system, while banks incorporated under state charters may become members. Member banks must maintain minimum legal reserves and must deposit a percentage of their savings and checking accounts with a Federal Reserve bank. There are also thousands of nonbank credit agencies such as personal credit institutions and savings and loan associations (S&Ls).
Although banks supply less than half of the funds used for corporate finance, bank loans represent the country’s largest source of capital for business borrowing. A liberalizing trend in state banking laws in the 1970s and ’80s encouraged both intra- and interstate expansion of bank facilities and bank holding companies. Succeeding mergers among the country’s largest banks led to the formation of large regional and national banking and financial services corporations. In serving both individual and commercial customers, these institutions accept deposits, provide checking accounts, underwrite securities, originate loans, offer mortgages, manage investments, and sponsor credit cards.
Financial services are also provided by insurance companies and security brokerages. The federal government sponsors credit agencies in the areas of housing (home mortgages), farming (agricultural loans), and higher education (student loans). New York City has three organized stock exchanges—the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), NYSE Amex Equities, and NASDAQ—which account for the bulk of all stock sales in the United States. The country’s leading markets for commodities, futures, and options are the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), and the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE). The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) specializes in futures contracts for greenhouse gas emissions (carbon credits). Smaller exchanges operate in a number of American cities.
Foreign trade
International trade is crucial to the national economy, with the combined value of imports and exports equivalent to about three-tenths of the gross national product. Canada, China, Mexico, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and South Korea are principal trading partners. Leading exports include electrical and office machinery, chemical products, motor vehicles, airplanes and aviation parts, and scientific equipment. Major imports include manufactured goods, petroleum and fuel products, and machinery and transportation equipment.
Transportation of the United States
The economic and social complexion of life in the United States mirrors the country’s extraordinary mobility. A pervasive transportation network has helped transform the vast geographic expanse into a surprisingly homogeneous and close-knit social and economic environment. Another aspect of mobility is flexibility, and this freedom to move is often seen as a major factor in the dynamism of the U.S. economy. Mobility has also had destructive effects: it has accelerated the deterioration of older urban areas, multiplied traffic congestion, intensified pollution of the environment, and diminished support for public transportation systems.
Roads and railroads
Central to the U.S. transportation network is the 45,000-mile (72,000-km) Interstate System, officially known as the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways. The system connects about nine-tenths of all cities with at least 50,000 population. Begun in the 1950s, the highway system carries about one-fifth of the country’s motor traffic. Nearly nine-tenths of all households own at least one automobile or truck. At the end of the 20th century, these added up to more than 100 million privately owned vehicles. While most trips in metropolitan areas are made by automobile, the public transit and rail commuter lines play an important role in the most populous cities, with the majority of home-to-work commuters traveling by public carriers in such cities as New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. Although railroads once dominated both freight and passenger traffic in the United States, government regulation and increased competition from trucking reduced their role in transportation. Railroads move about one-third of the nation’s intercity freight traffic. The most important items carried are coal, grain, chemicals, and motor vehicles. Many rail companies had given up passenger service by 1970, when Congress created the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (known as Amtrak), a government corporation, to take over passenger service. Amtrak operates a 21,000-mile (34,000-km) system serving more than 500 stations across the country.
Water and air transport
Navigable waterways are extensive and center upon the Mississippi River system in the country’s interior, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway system in the north, and the Gulf Coast waterways along the Gulf of Mexico. Barges carry more than two-thirds of domestic waterborne traffic, transporting petroleum products, coal and coke, and grain. The country’s largest ports in tonnage handled are the Port of South Louisiana; the Port of Houston, Texas; the Port of New York/New Jersey; and the Port of New Orleans.
Air traffic has experienced spectacular growth in the United States since the mid-20th century. From 1970 to 1999, passenger traffic on certified air carriers increased 373 percent. Much of this growth occurred after airline deregulation, which began in 1978. There are more than 14,000 public and private airports, the busiest being in Atlanta and Chicago for passenger traffic. Airports in Memphis, Tennessee (the hub of package-delivery company Federal Express), and Los Angeles handle the most freight cargo.
Government and society
Constitutional framework
The Constitution of the United States, written to redress the deficiencies of the country’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation (1781–89), defines a federal system of government in which certain powers are delegated to the national government and others are reserved to the states. The national government consists of executive, legislative, and judicial branches that are designed to ensure, through separation of powers and through checks and balances, that no one branch of government is able to subordinate the other two branches. All three branches are interrelated, each with overlapping yet quite distinct authority.
The U.S. Constitution (see original text), the world’s oldest written national constitution still in effect, was officially ratified on June 21, 1788 (when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the document), and formally entered into force on March 4, 1789, when George Washington was sworn in as the country’s first president. Although the Constitution contains several specific provisions (such as age and residency requirements for holders of federal offices and powers granted to Congress), it is vague in many areas and could not have comprehensively addressed the complex myriad of issues (e.g., historical, technological, etc.) that have arisen in the centuries since its ratification. Thus, the Constitution is considered a living document, its meaning changing over time as a result of new interpretations of its provisions. In addition, the framers allowed for changes to the document, outlining in Article V the procedures required to amend the Constitution. Amending the Constitution requires a proposal by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress or by a national convention called for at the request of the legislatures of two-thirds of the states, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures or by conventions in as many states.
In the more than two centuries since the Constitution’s ratification, there have been 27 amendments. All successful amendments have been proposed by Congress, and all but one—the Twenty-first Amendment (1933), which repealed Prohibition—have been ratified by state legislatures. The first 10 amendments, proposed by Congress in September 1789 and adopted in 1791, are known collectively as the Bill of Rights, which places limits on the federal government’s power to curtail individual freedoms. The First Amendment, for example, provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Though the First Amendment’s language appears absolute, it has been interpreted to mean that the federal government (and later the state governments) cannot place undue restrictions on individual liberties but can regulate speech, religion, and other rights. The Second and Third amendments, which, respectively, guarantee the people’s right to bear arms and limit the quartering of soldiers in private houses, reflect the hostility of the framers to standing armies. The Fourth through Eighth amendments establishes the rights of the criminally accused, including safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures, protection from double jeopardy (being tried twice for the same offense), the right to refuse to testify against oneself, and the right to a trial by jury. The Ninth and Tenth amendments underscore the general rights of the people. The Ninth Amendment protects the unenumerated residual rights of the people (i.e., those not explicitly granted in the Constitution), and the Tenth Amendment reserves to the states or to the people those powers not delegated to the United States nor denied to the states.
The guarantees of the Bill of Rights are steeped in controversy, and debate continues over the limits that the federal government may appropriately place on individuals. One source of conflict has been the ambiguity in the wording of many of the Constitution’s provisions—such as the Second Amendment’s right “to keep and bear arms” and the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.” Also problematic is the Tenth Amendment’s apparent contradiction of the body of the Constitution; Article I, Section 8, enumerates the powers of Congress but also allows that it may make all laws “which shall be necessary and proper,” while the Tenth Amendment stipulates that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The distinction between what powers should be left to the states or to the people and what is a necessary and proper law for Congress to pass has not always been clear.
Between the ratification of the Bill of Rights and the American Civil War (1861–65), only two amendments were passed, and both were technical in nature. The Eleventh Amendment (1795) forbade suits against the states in federal courts, and the Twelfth Amendment (1804) corrected a constitutional error that came to light in the presidential election of 1800 when Democratic-Republicans Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr each won 73 electors because electors were unable to cast separate ballots for president and vice president. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Thirteenth (1865) abolished slavery, while the Fifteenth (1870) forbade denial of the right to vote to formerly enslaved men. The Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship rights to formerly enslaved people and guaranteed to every citizen due process and equal protection of the laws, was regarded for a while by the courts as limiting itself to the protection of formerly enslaved people, but it has since been used to extend protections to all citizens. Initially, the Bill of Rights applied solely to the federal government and not to the states. In the 20th century, however, many (though not all) of the provisions of the Bill of Rights were extended by the Supreme Court through the Fourteenth Amendment to protect individuals from encroachments by the states. Notable amendments since the Civil War include the Sixteenth (1913), which enabled the imposition of a federal income tax; the Seventeenth (1913), which provided for the direct election of U.S. senators; the Nineteenth (1920), which established woman suffrage; the Twenty-fifth (1967), which established succession to the presidency and vice presidency; and the Twenty-sixth (1971), which extended voting rights to all citizens 18 years of age or older.
The executive branch
The executive branch is headed by the president, who must be a natural-born citizen of the United States, at least 35 years old, and a resident of the country for at least 14 years. A president is elected indirectly by the people through the Electoral College system to a four-year term and is limited to two elected terms of office by the Twenty-second Amendment (1951). The president’s official residence and office is the White House, located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W. in Washington, D.C. The formal constitutional responsibilities vested in the presidency of the United States include serving as commander in chief of the armed forces; negotiating treaties; appointing federal judges, ambassadors, and cabinet officials; and acting as head of state. In practice, presidential powers have expanded to include drafting legislation, formulating foreign policy, conducting personal diplomacy, and leading the president’s political party.
The members of the president’s cabinet—the attorney general and the secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Education, Energy, and Veterans Affairs—are appointed by the president with the approval of the Senate; although they are described in the Twenty-fifth Amendment as the principal officers of the executive departments, significant power has flowed to non-cabinet-level presidential aides, such as those serving in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Council of Economic Advisers, the National Security Council (NSC), and the office of the White House Chief of Staff; cabinet-level rank may be conferred to the heads of such institutions at the discretion of the president. Members of the cabinet and presidential aides serve at the pleasure of the president and may be dismissed by him at any time.
The executive branch also includes independent regulatory agencies such as the Federal Reserve System and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Governed by commissions appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate (commissioners may not be removed by the president), these agencies protect the public interest by enforcing rules and resolving disputes over federal regulations. Also part of the executive branch is government corporations (e.g., the Tennessee Valley Authority, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation [Amtrak], and the U.S. Postal Service), which supply services to consumers that could be provided by private corporations, and independent executive agencies (e.g., the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), which comprise the remainder of the federal government.
The legislative branch
The U.S. Congress, the legislative branch of the federal government, consists of two houses: the Senate and the House of Representatives. Powers granted to Congress under the Constitution include the power to levy taxes, borrow money, regulate interstate commerce, impeach and convict the president, declare war, discipline its own membership, and determine its rules of procedure.
With the exception of revenue bills, which must originate in the House of Representatives, legislative bills may be introduced in and amended by either house and a bill—with its amendments—must pass both houses in identical form and be signed by the president before it becomes law. The president may veto a bill, but a veto can be overridden by a two-thirds vote of both houses. The House of Representatives may impeach a president or another public official by a majority vote; trials of impeached officials are conducted by the Senate, and a two-thirds majority is necessary to convict and remove the individual from office. Congress is assisted in its duties by the General Accounting Office (GAO), which examines all federal receipts and expenditures by auditing federal programs and assessing the fiscal impact of proposed legislation, and by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a legislative counterpart to the OMB, which assesses budget data, analyzes the fiscal impact of alternative policies, and makes economic forecasts.
The House of Representatives is chosen by the direct vote of the electorate in single-member districts in each state. The number of representatives allotted to each state is based on its population as determined by a decennial census; states sometimes gain or lose seats, depending on population shifts. The overall membership of the House has been 435 since the 1910s, though it was temporarily expanded to 437 after Hawaii and Alaska were admitted as states in 1959. Members must be at least 25 years old, residents of the states from which they are elected, and previously citizens of the United States for at least seven years. It has become a practical imperative—though not a constitutional requirement—that a member is an inhabitant of the district that elects him. Members serve two-year terms, and there is no limit on the number of terms they may serve. The speaker of the House, who is chosen by the majority party, presides over debate, appoints members of select and conference committees, and performs other important duties; he is second in the line of presidential succession (following the vice president). The parliamentary leaders of the two main parties are the majority floor leader and the minority floor leader. The floor leaders are assisted by party whips, who are responsible for maintaining contact between the leadership and the members of the House. Bills introduced by members in the House of Representatives are received by standing committees, which can amend, expedite, delay, or kill legislation. Each committee is chaired by a member of the majority party, who traditionally attained this position on the basis of seniority, though the importance of seniority has eroded somewhat since the 1970s. Among the most important committees are those on Appropriations, Ways and Means, and Rules. The Rules Committee, for example, has significant power to determine which bills will be brought to the floor of the House for consideration and whether amendments will be allowed on a bill when it is debated by the entire House.
Each state elects two senators at large. Senators must be at least 30 years old, residents of the state from which they are elected, and previously citizens of the United States for at least nine years. They serve six-year terms, which are arranged so that one-third of the Senate is elected every two years. Senators also are not subject to term limits. The vice president serves as president of the Senate, casting a vote only in the case of a tie, and in his absence, the Senate is chaired by a president pro tempore, who is elected by the Senate and is third in the line of succession to the presidency. Among the Senate’s most prominent standing committees are those on Foreign Relations, Finance, Appropriations, and Governmental Affairs. Debate is almost unlimited and may be used to delay a vote on a bill indefinitely. Such a delay, known as a filibuster, can be ended by three-fifths of the Senate through a procedure called cloture. Treaties negotiated by the president with other governments must be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the Senate. The Senate also has the power to confirm or reject presidentially appointed federal judges, ambassadors, and cabinet officials.
The judicial branch
The judicial branch is headed by the Supreme Court of the United States, which interprets the Constitution and federal legislation. The Supreme Court consists of nine justices (including a chief justice) appointed to life terms by the president with the consent of the Senate. It has appellate jurisdiction over the lower federal courts and over state courts if a federal question is involved. It also has original jurisdiction (i.e., it serves as a trial court) in cases involving foreign ambassadors, ministers, and consuls and in cases to which a U.S. state is a party.
Most cases reach the Supreme Court through its appellate jurisdiction. The Judiciary Act of 1925 provided the justices with the sole discretion to determine their caseload. In order to issue a writ of certiorari, which grants a court hearing to a case, at least four justices must agree on the Rule of Four. Three types of cases commonly reach the Supreme Court: cases involving litigants of different states, cases involving the interpretation of federal law, and cases involving the interpretation of the Constitution. The court can take official action with as few as six judges joining in deliberation, and a majority vote of the entire court is decisive; a tie vote sustains a lower-court decision. The official decision of the court is often supplemented by concurring opinions from justices who support the majority decision and dissenting opinions from justices who oppose it.
Because the Constitution is vague and ambiguous in many places, it is often possible for critics to fault the Supreme Court for misinterpreting it. In the 1930s, for example, the Republican-dominated court was criticized for overturning much of the New Deal legislation of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the area of civil rights, the court has received criticism from various groups at different times. It’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared school segregation unconstitutional, was harshly attacked by Southern political leaders, who were later joined by Northern conservatives. A number of decisions involving the pretrial rights of prisoners, including the granting of Miranda rights and the adoption of the exclusionary rule, also came under attack on the ground that the court had made it difficult to convict criminals. On divisive issues such as abortion, affirmative action, school prayer, and flag burning, the court’s decisions have aroused considerable opposition and controversy, with opponents sometimes seeking constitutional amendments to overturn the court’s decisions.
At the lowest level of the federal court system are district courts see the United States District Court. Each state has at least one federal district court and at least one federal judge. District judges are appointed to life terms by the president with the consent of the Senate. Appeals from district-court decisions are carried to the U.S. courts of appeals see United States Court of Appeals. Losing parties at this level may appeal for a hearing from the Supreme Court. Special courts handle property and contract damage suits against the United States Court of Federal Claims, review customs rulings United States Court of International Trade and hear complaints by individual taxpayers United States Tax Court) or veterans United States Court of Appeals for Veteran Claims, and apply the Uniform Code of Military Justice United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.
