United States
In its first centuries the US was settled primarily by immigrants from northern Europe, and it transported slaves from Africa in a forced migration. By the time of the Civil War, the overwhelming number of African Americans were located in the rural South.
Many of the 19th c. and later immigrants were from rural societies and relatively unskilled; they started working in entry-level jobs. By the post–World War II baby and economic booms, their descendants were thriving and there was pent-up demand after the war for improved housing. The subsidized federal highway construction and real estate development of cheaper outlying lands led to suburban development and growth outside cities; commuting by highways and parkways allowed the wealthier residents to bypass older areas filled with newer, poorer immigrants.
During the later twentieth century, industrial restructuring led to major losses of jobs, leaving formerly middle-class working populations suffering poverty, with some unable to move away for new work. Since the 1960s and changed immigration laws, the United States has received immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America; Asian and African nations. Such immigrants have changed the demographics of both cities and suburbs, for at the same time, the US has become a suburban nation. The suburbs have become more diverse. In addition, Latinos, the fastest growing minority group in the US, have begun to migrate within the interior of the nation and away from the traditional entry cities. For instance, some are moving to such Southwest cities as Phoenix and Tucson, where their increasing numbers in 2006 made European Americans a minority in additional cities of the West.
Read more about this topic: White Flight
Famous quotes related to united states:
“In the larger view the major forces of the depression now lie outside of the United States, and our recuperation has been retarded by the unwarranted degree of fear and apprehension created by these outside forces.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“The United States is the only great nation whose government is operated without a budget. The fact is to be the more striking when it is considered that budgets and budget procedures are the outgrowth of democratic doctrines and have an important part in developing the modern constitutional rights.... The constitutional purpose of a budget is to make government responsive to public opinion and responsible for its acts.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never well-informed.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Europe and the U.K. are yesterday’s world. Tomorrow is in the United States.”
—R.W. ‘Tiny’ Rowland (b. 1917)
“There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.... The United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)