Cultural Significance
Transatlantic travel played a major role in the expansion of Western civilization into the Americas. It is the Atlantic that separates the "Old World" from the "New World". In modern times, some idioms refer to the ocean in a humorously diminutive way as the Pond, describing both the geographical and cultural divide between North America and Europe, in particular between the English-speaking nations of both continents. Many British people refer to the United States and Canada as "across the pond", and vice versa.
The "Black Atlantic" refers to the role of this ocean in shaping black people's history, not least in diasporas. Irish migration to the US is meant when the term "The Green Atlantic" is used. The "Red Atlantic" is a relatively new term that refers to seafarers as proletarians and revolutionaries who historically resisted exploitation at sea and forged a new multicultural and polyglot Atlantic working-class.
Read more about this topic: Atlantic Ocean
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or significance:
“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)