Unit 1 The Country

1. Physical Features

The forty-eight contiguous states lie between the Atlantic and

Pacific Oceans, Canada and Mexico. Alaska and Hawaii are located
in the far northwest corner of the continent and the middle of the
Pacific Ocean, respectively. The interior lowland is the heart of what
American politicians would like to call “middle America.” The region
is drained by the Mississippi River and its great tributaries. The
Appalachians on the east stretch almost unbroken from Alabama to
the Canadian border and beyond. They are much-eroded old
mountains and are set back from the Atlantic by a broad belt of
coastal lowland. To the west of the interior basin lies the mighty
system of mountains that Spanish explorers named “Cordillera”—a
collective term for all the high rough country of the western third of
the United States.

2. The Humid East

Throughout the whole region drought is a rare occurrence. The

region stretches along the Atlantic in broad swaths in three climatic
categories: continental, subtropical and tropical.

3. The Arid West

Although the west is known to be dry and arid, there are important
regional differences within the arid west. There is the desert that
lies in the rain-shadow of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges
and stretches north from Mexico across Arizona, New Mexico, and
Nevada into southern Oregon.

4. The Humid-Arid Transition

Between the humid east and the arid West, there is the great zone
of transition, known as the humid-arid transition. This great stretch
of land, often called the “Barn of America”, offers fine farmland.

5. The Humid Pacific Coast

The only substantial humid region in the western United States is a

narrow strip between the Pacific coast and the Sierra-Cascade ridge
line, containing two climatic categories: maritime and
Mediterranean.
6. The Northeast

Stretching from Maine south through Maryland and west to the

border of Ohio, the whole section is known to be densely populated
and highly urban, and only recently economically troubled due to its
declining old industries. Since this area is one of the two earliest
settlements by British colonists (the other being Virginia),
Americans tend to trace many of the nation’s core values (WASP) to
the region. One of the region’s greatest strengths in its economic
competition with other regions is its long tradition of support for
education, which dates from the seventeenth century.

7. The South

Traditionally, the southern region refers to the eleven states that

left the Union to form the Confederacy during the Civil War period.
The legacy of rigid social structure where everyone belongs to a
clearly defined social group can still be strongly felt in the South.
Racial tension tends to be high there, and southern whites,
relatively speaking, are more conservative than white people in
other regions.

8. The Midwest

The Midwest includes the states boarding the Great Lakes and the
first tiers of states west of the Mississippi River from Missouri and
Kansas north to Canada. As the Great Lakes states contain many
large manufacturing centers, they are usually termed the Industrial
Midwest, even though they are also important farm states. Of all the
major cities in the Midwest, Chicago remains the region’s premier
city, for it is not only the national hub of the commodities market
and the regional hub of air transportation, but also the home of
widely diversified industry and cultural institutions.

9. The West

“The West” has a place in the American mind as a myth as well as a

set of values. It represents possibility, freedom, self-reliance, and
the future. The Southwest consists of New Mexico, Arizona, and
parts of surrounding states from Texas to southern California. The
Mountain States include Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming,
Montana and Idaho. Las Vegas and Reno stand out as “American
dreamland”. The PacificCoast grew as a populated area in the wake
of the 1849 Gold Rush when many people were attracted there by
the discovery of gold. The LA metropolis is home to the Hollywood
film and media conglomerates as well as major energy, defense and
aerospace companies.

10. Europeans

About 67 % of all American citizens are descended wholly and

directly from people born in Europe. Of those who consider
themselves to have an identifiable origin in some particular country,
the largest single group, even now, feel “British”—just over a tenth
of the population. The great majority of Americans are Caucasian,
and the mainstream culture of the United States is primarily WASP
in character. America still reflects its British origins in ways that go
far beyond the language, particularly in architectural design and
legal system.

11. Black Americans

Black people in 2005 represent about 12.8% of the total population

in the U. S. A. Africans were brought to the American South in the
early 1600s as slaves. Southern slavery was ended only with the
victory of the northern states in the Civil War of 1861-1865. Martin
Luther King became the leader of the Civil Rights Movement.
Between the late 1950s and the 1960s, the United States witnessed
active protests, both non-violent and violent, against racial
segregation of all kinds in most of its major cities. During the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations, many laws were passed to
eliminate racial discrimination, and southern racism was soon in full
retreat.

12. Latinos/Hispanics

Americans have been using the term to refer to American residents

from such countries as Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cubans—the three
major groups in the Latino population in the United States. In 2000,
Latino population replaced African Americans as the largest minority
group in the United States. By living standards, Mexican Americans
or Chicanos are at the bottom of the Latino population, whereas
Cubans are at the top and Puerto Ricans somewhere in between.

13. Asian Americans

Thanks to the 1965 immigration law, Asian Americans have soared

in numbers, there were altogether over 10 million Asian Americans
residing in the United States, representing about 3.6 percent of the
population. The first Asians to arrive in the United States in
significant numbers were the Chinese, who initially worked in the
gold mines and, later, in building the transcontinental railroad.
Praised for their industriousness, heralded for their educational
attainments, and lauded for their economic success, Asian
Americans are often viewed as the “model minority”.

14. Native Americans

Long before Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the American

continent, people began to cross the land bridge connecting Alaska
with the Asian continent, perhaps as long ago as forty thousand
years. When Europeans arrived in the American continent, Native
Americans soon found themselves the victims of their greed for
gold, silver, and other treasures. The overpowered Indians were
compelled to move to some remote interior areas, known nowadays
as “Indian Reservations.” It is estimated that some 2.5 million
people in the United States identified themselves as Indian, and
about half of them live in “reservations.” Native Americans in the
reservations remain outside the mainstream of economic
development, unable to make their living standards match that of
white Americans.

15. Colonial Settlement

In the few decades after Columbus’s journey of 1492, the

exploration soon gathered an astonishing momentum. In 1607, a
London merchants’ company gathered a group of men who bound
themselves to a period of “indentured” service. They landed at a
place which they called Jamestown. In 1620, a group of English
Puritans, now known as the Pilgrim Fathers, landed at Cape Cod
near Boston after sailing in the small ship Mayflower for months.
Those people settled there as British colonists, organizing the east
coast area into thirteenth colonies.

16. American Revolution

There were conflicts between the colonies and the mother country,
as both sides found their interests increasingly run into clashes over
such issues as the Stamp Act and the Tea Act. The thirteen colonies
decided to form an “Association”, and together they declared
independence from Great Britain in 1776. The American Revolution
lasted for about seven years and in 1783 the United States became
independent.

17. Civil War

By 1853, the country had added the huge territory of the Louisiana
Purchase, acquired Florida from Spain, and swept westward over
Texas, California, and Oregon. At the same time, it sharpened the
sectional conflict between the North and the South when the
question arose as to whether slavery should be allowed in the newly
acquired land. When many thousands of Southerners saw the
triumph of Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 election as not simply a
political defeat but also a threat to all southern institutions and the
southern way of life, they decided to secede from the Union, which
immediacy led to the outbreak of the Civil War..

18. Prosperity at the Turn of the 20th Century

For most Americans, the industrialization of American economy was

the most significant development of the closing decades of the
nineteenth century. A commitment to private property and the profit
system gave the Rockefellers, the Morgans, Ford and the Carnegies
the incentive to build corporate empires. The 1920s is regarded as a
period of material success and spiritual frustration

19. Progressive Era

The opening decades of the twentieth century saw strenuous efforts

on the part of a large number of Americans to improve the quality of
life at home and abroad. Progressive reformers of the era assumed
that behavior could be altered and the performance of institutions
improved. Many of the systems through which American public
utilities are regulated and US banking system coordinated
originated in the legislation of the Progressive era. The 19th
amendment of voting rights for women was passed in 1919. The
failure of Wilson to achieve at Versailles the realization of his
Fourteen Points, in many ways a Progressive program for
international affairs, led the nation to reject the treaty and the
League of Nations.

20. Great Depression

The prosperity of the 1920s came to an abrupt end in 1929. The

stock market in October of that year was soon followed by a
breakdown of the nation’s entire economy. The causes of the Great
Depression can be found in the unbalance economy—both domestic
and international—of the twenties. The Depression of the 1930s
touched almost every facet of American life. Unemployment was the
most serious problem. Additionally, industrial productivity declined
sharply, crop prices tumbled, and foreclosures on houses and farms
became everyday occurrences. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
“New Deal” helped alleviate the disastrous impact of the Great
Depression on the American economy. The Depression came to an
end when US Congress voted huge appropriations for fighting World
War II.

21. Cold War

Postwar American euphoria was only short-lived, for the high

expectations of a new world order dominated by the United States
quickly gave way to conflicts between America and the Soviet
Union, which eventually led to the outbreak of the Cold War. At any
rate, between the inception of the Cold War, symbolized by Winston
Church’s “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946 and the end of the Cold War,
marked by the falling-down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the United
States lived under the long shadow cast by the Cold War. The
Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the Korea War, the
Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and Reagan’s “Star Wars” all rolled
out of this Cold War mentality.

22. Reforms and Movements in the 1960s

In response to the widespread poverty in the so-called “affluent

society,” President John Kennedy proposed his ambitious New
Frontier program, offering medical care for the elderly, providing
federal aid to education, and carrying out reforms in taxation,
housing immigration. By Great Society, Johnson meant to solve such
problems as civil rights, poverty, urban renewal, health care, public
school education, immigration, and conservation. Spearheaded by
the Civil Rights Movement, launched in 1955 with the Montgomery
bus boycott, many more social movements soon got off the ground.
By 1967, many civil rights leaders, left and freak students, and
radical women, despairing of ever achieving the kinds of
fundamental reforms that they sought within existing political
structures, led to the outbreak of such movements as the
Counterculture Movement, the New Left Movement, the Feminist
Movement, the Anti-War Movement, and the Environmental
Protection Movement.
23. New Conservatism

In the election of 1968, Richard Nixon was elected president, which

marked the end of a period dominated by the forces of liberal
reformism and the start of a conservative resurgence. The failure of
the U.S. war in Vietnam filled most Americans with shame. The
revelations of the Watergate scandals filled most Americans with
disgust. In both domestic and foreign policies, Ronald Reagan was
conservative to the quick: cutting taxes for the rich, slashing public
service spending for the poor, and escalating the arms race with the
Soviet Union. As conflicts between the United States and the Arabic
world intensified, terrorist activities against the United States
increased both at home and abroad, culminating in the 9/11 attacks
on the World Trade Center in 2001.