Culture
Mount Rushmore was sculpted by Danish American Gutzon Borglum. Sculptures of the heads of former United States presidents (from left to right) Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln. Walt Disney who created Mickey Mouse was of Irish, English, French and German descent.European American cultural lineage can be traced back to western Europe and is institutionalized in the form of its government, traditions, and civic education. The Solutrean hypothesis suggested that Europeans may have been among the first in the Americas. More recent research has argued this not to be the case and that the founding Native American population came from Siberia through Beringia. An article in the American Journal of Human Genetics states "Here we show, by using 86 complete mitochondrial genomes, that all Native American haplogroups, including haplogroup X, were part of a single founding population, thereby refuting multiple-migration models."
Since most later European Americans have assimilated into American culture, most European Americans now generally express their individual ethnic ties sporadically and symbolically and do not consider their specific ethnic origins to be essential to their identity; however, European American ethnic expression has been revived since the 1960s. Southern Europeans, specifically Italian and Greeks (see Greek American), have maintained high levels of ethnic identity. Same applied to Polish Americans. In the 1960s, Mexican Americans and African Americans started exploring their cultural traditions as the ideal of cultural pluralism took hold. European Americans followed suit by exploring their individual cultural origins and having less shame of expressing their unique cultural heritage.
Read more about this topic: European American
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Our culture has become something that is completely and utterly in love with its parent. It’s become a notion of boredom that is bought and sold, where nothing will happen except that people will become more and more terrified of tomorrow, because the new continues to look old, and the old will always look cute.”
—Malcolm McLaren (b. 1946)
“Unthinking people will often try to teach you how to do the things which you can do better than you can be taught to do them. If you are sure of all this, you can start to add to your value as a mother by learning the things that can be taught, for the best of our civilization and culture offers much that is of value, if you can take it without loss of what comes to you naturally.”
—D.W. Winnicott (20th century)
“The local is a shabby thing. There’s nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)