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:
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“All our civilization had meant nothing. The same culture that had nurtured the kindly enlightened people among whom I had been brought up, carried around with it war. Why should I not have known this? I did know it, but I did not believe it. I believed it as we believe we are going to die. Something that is to happen in some remote time.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)
“As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their ocellated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)