Sports in The United States Virgin Islands

Sports In The United States Virgin Islands

Virgin Islander culture reflects the various peoples that have inhabited the present-day U.S. Virgin Islands and British Virgin Islands throughout history. Although the territories are politically separate, they maintain close cultural ties.

Like much of the English speaking Caribbean, Virgin Islands culture is syncretic, deriving chiefly from West African, European and American influences. Though the Danish controlled the present-day U.S. Virgin Islands for many years, the very dominant language has been an English-based Creole since the 19th century, and the islands remain much more receptive to English language popular culture than any other. The Dutch, the French and the Danish also contributed elements to the islands’ culture, as have immigrants from the Arab world, India and other Caribbean islands. The single largest influence on modern Virgin Islander culture, however, comes from the Africans enslaved to work in canefields from the 17th to the mid-19th century. These African slaves brought with them traditions from across a wide swathe of Africa, including what is now Nigeria, Senegal, both Congos, Gambia and Ghana.

Virgin Islands culture continues to undergo creolization, the result of inter-Caribbean migration and cultural contact with other islands in the region, as well as the United States. Migration has altered the social landscape of both countries to the extent that in the British Virgin Islands, half of the population is of foreign (mostly Caribbean) origin and in the U.S. Virgin Islands, most native-born residents can trace their ancestry to other Caribbean islands.

Read more about Sports In The United States Virgin Islands:  Cuisine, Language, Sports, Literature, Dance, Theatre, Religion, See Also

Famous quotes containing the words sports, united, states, virgin and/or islands:

    Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
    Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn;
    Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
    And desolation saddens all thy green;
    One only master grasps the whole domain,
    And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain;
    Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–1774)

    In the United States the whites speak well of the Blacks but think bad about them, whereas the Blacks talk bad and think bad about the whites. Whites fear Blacks, because they have a bad conscience, and Blacks hate whites because they need not have a bad conscience.
    Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)

    Today’s difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.
    Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)

    ‘Tis chastity, my brother, chastity.
    She that has that is clad in complete steel,
    And like a quivered nymph with arrows keen
    May trace huge forests and unharbored heaths,
    Infamous hills and sandy perilous wilds,
    Where, through the sacred rays of chastity,
    No savage fierce, bandit, or mountaineer
    Will dare to soil her virgin purity.
    John Milton (1608–1674)

    Consider the islands bearing the names of all the saints, bristling with forts like chestnut-burs, or Echinidæ, yet the police will not let a couple of Irishmen have a private sparring- match on one of them, as it is a government monopoly; all the great seaports are in a boxing attitude, and you must sail prudently between two tiers of stony knuckles before you come to feel the warmth of their breasts.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)