United States of America

E

Education

In most of the United States illiteracy has been virtually eliminated, though census estimates suggest that 2.4 per cent of the population over the age of 25 is functionally illiterate—that is, they are unable to read and write well enough to meet the demands of everyday life. Nevertheless, among Americans aged 25 and older in 1995, about 82 per cent had completed high school, compared with about 25 per cent in 1940. In 1995 nearly 23 per cent of the population had completed four or more years of college education.

Education is offered at all levels from pre-kindergarten to graduate school by both public and private institutions. Elementary and secondary education involves 12 years of schooling, the successful completion of which leads to a high school diploma. Although public education can be defined in various ways, one key concept is the accountability of school officials to the voters. In theory, responsibility for operating the public education system in the United States is local. In fact, much of the local control has been superseded, and state legislation controls financing methods, academic standards, and policy and curriculum guidelines. Because public education is separately developed within each state, variations exist from one state to another.

Public elementary and secondary education is supported financially by three levels of government—local, state, and federal. Local school districts often levy property taxes, which are the major source of financing for the public school systems. One of the problems that arises because of the heavy reliance on local property tax is a disparity in the quality of education received by students. Rich communities can afford to pay more per student than poorer communities; consequently, the disparity in wealth affects the quality of education received. Some states have taken measures to level this imbalance by distributing property tax collections to school districts based on the number of students enrolled.

A unique feature of higher education in the United States is the device known as accreditation, which includes voluntary self-evaluation by a school and appraisal by a group of its peers. This process operates through nationally recognized accrediting agencies and associations and certain state bodies. These agencies or associations have established educational criteria to evaluate institutions in terms of their own objectives and to ascertain whether programmes of educational quality are being maintained.

Before the American Civil War, public school segregation was common both in the South and in the North. In every southern state except Kentucky and Maryland, laws existed that forbade the teaching of reading and writing to slaves. In 1867, after the end of the Civil War, schools for blacks began to be established in various parts of the South. For nearly a century, until 1954, most education facilities in the southern states remained racially segregated by state laws. Not only were schools segregated but, in schools for blacks, the physical conditions and facilities were poor, transport to such schools was meagre or non-existent, and expenditures per black pupil fell below those per white pupil.

In the northern states during this same period, most black children also attended separate schools. Sometimes this was the result of state laws; more often it was the result of policy decisions, either officially acknowledged or clandestine.

In 1954 the Supreme Court of the United States declared racial segregation in schools illegal, in its landmark Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka decision. Since then progress has been made towards desegregation; however, widespread de facto segregation still exists today in both suburban and urban areas.

In 1995 some 60,808 public elementary and 20,282 public secondary schools were in operation in the United States, in addition to 5,131 special-purpose or combined schools. Enrolment in public schools in 1995 totalled about 32.1 million elementary pupils and about 12.6 million secondary students. In addition, private elementary and secondary schools together enrolled about 5.8 million students in 1995. The largest system of private education in the United States is that of the Roman Catholic Church, with some 2.5 million students in 1996.

The first American colleges were small and attended by an aristocratic student body. The earliest institutions were established in the United States between the mid-17th and mid-18th centuries: Harvard University (1636), the College of William and Mary (1693), Yale University (1701), the University of Pennsylvania (1740), Princeton University (1746), Columbia University (1754), Brown University (1764), Rutgers University (1771), and Dartmouth College (1769). These private institutions initially prepared students for careers in theology, law, medicine, and teaching only.

An important development occurred in 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which donated public lands to the several states and territories to provide colleges with the resources necessary to teach such branches of learning as agriculture and the mechanical arts. The Morrill Act was designed to promote the liberal and practical education of the new industrial population. In addition to creating colleges, the Morrill Act extended education to groups that would benefit from higher education regardless of financial background and greatly accelerated the admission of women to institutions of higher learning.

Higher education, like elementary and secondary education, has historically been racially segregated in the United States. Before 1954 most blacks gained access to higher education only by attending colleges and universities established for blacks, nearly all of which were located in the southern states. With the gradual dissolution of most traditional racial barriers, more and more blacks enrolled in institutions where whites made up the majority of the student body. By 1994 only about 19 per cent of all black students were enrolled in the 103 historically black colleges and universities.

Although tuition and fees generally are substantially lower at public institutions than at private ones, the other student costs are about the same. The average cost for tuition, fees, and room and board for the 1995 academic year at private four-year colleges was about $20,010. At public four-year colleges the average combined cost was about $7,082.

F

Performing Arts

The first American symphony orchestra, the Philharmonic Society of New York, was established in 1842; the first classes in a music conservatory were held at Oberlin College in 1865. In the 20th century major American composers such as Charles Ives, Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, and John Cage won international fame. Gospel music, the blues, and jazz were African-American creations. Jazz gained worldwide attention through performers such as Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis. See also American Music; Popular Music; Rock Music.

Major symphony orchestras in the 1990s included the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and St Louis Symphony Orchestra. In addition to these large orchestral ensembles, a growing number of chamber groups such as the Juilliard String Quartet, Guarneri String Quartet, and Kronos Quartet were flourishing in universities and communities throughout the country. Leading opera companies included the Metropolitan Opera of New York, the New York City Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the San Francisco Opera, the Washington Opera, the Santa Fe Opera Company, and the Houston Grand Opera.

The New York City Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre, both founded in the 1930s, exert an important creative influence on contemporary American dance. Other major groups include the travelling companies of Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, the San Francisco Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet in New York, Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Tulsa Ballet, the Boston Ballet, and the Pennsylvania Ballet in Philadelphia. Well-known choreographers include George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Katherine Dunham, Alvin Ailey, and Mark Morris. See also Dance; Popular and Social Dance.

Drama in the United States in the 1980s continued to experience an audience boom that began in the mid-1970s. Broadway shows in New York relied heavily on revivals, long-running shows, and stage spectaculars in addition to new plays. Prominent experimental groups included The New York Shakespeare Festival; La Mama, Etc., Experimental Theatre Club; and the Guthrie Theatre Company in Minneapolis. Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Neil Simon, John Guare, August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet are among the best-known contemporary playwrights. Musical comedies have flourished under the influence of a number of creative teams, including Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.

G

Literature, Film, Architecture, and Art

The first major American novelist was James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), and other works about the frontier. The Romantic period of American literature, from about 1830 to 1865, introduced important novelists such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), in which he explored New England’s Puritan heritage; and Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick (1851), a complex and poetic novel of the sea. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1850-1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe became a best-seller and a vehicle for anti-slavery sentiments.

Realism, prominent in American literature from the close of the Civil War until about the beginning of the 20th century, was the product of a new mass audience and the experience of industrialization. Major figures of this time included writers as diverse as the humorist Mark Twain, with his classic tales of boyhood, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); and Henry James, a stylistic innovator whose works, such as The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Ambassadors (1903), were landmarks in the development of the American novel.

In Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925), Theodore Dreiser described how spiritually empty industrial America had become. This marked the new age of Naturalism, which ran until about 1930. Important novelists of this period included Edith Wharton (Ethan Frome, 1911; The Age of Innocence, 1920); Willa Cather (O Pioneers!, 1913; My Ántonia, 1918); F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, 1925); Sinclair Lewis (Main Street, 1920; Babbitt, 1922), the first American to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1930; Ernest Hemingway, also a Nobel Prize winner (1954), noted for his terse, carefully crafted prose in works such as The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929); Zora Neale Hurston, a novelist and folklorist (Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937); Richard Wright (Native Son, 1940; Black Boy, 1945); and William Faulkner, whose innovative techniques and thoughtful characterizations in such novels as The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) won him the Nobel Prize in 1949. Modernist Gertrude Stein (The Making of Americans, 1925; Everybody’s Autobiography, 1936) experimented radically with language, following the example of Impressionist painters.

Hemingway and Faulkner remained leading writers into the 1950s; they were joined by John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, 1939; Nobel Prize winner, 1962); Robert Penn Warren (All the King’s Men, 1946); James Jones (From Here to Eternity, 1951); James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953); Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, 1948; The Executioner’s Song, 1979); and Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita, 1955; Pale Fire, 1962). Novelists of contemporary note include Flannery O’Connor (Wise Blood, 1952); Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, 1940); Eudora Welty (The Ponder Heart, 1954; The Optimist’s Daughter, 1969), well known also for her short stories; Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March, 1953; Humboldt’s Gift, 1975; Nobel Prize, 1976); Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969); John Updike (Rabbit, Run, 1960); Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine, 1984); Toni Morrison (Beloved, 1987; Nobel Prize, 1993); and Alice Walker (The Color Purple, 1982).

Distinctive American poetry first appeared in the 19th century, with the musical and highly rhythmic works of Edgar Allan Poe, the experimental democratic chant of Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass, 1855), and the tightly wrought lyrical verse of Emily Dickinson. Modern American poetry began in the early 20th century with the lyrics and dramatic poems of the New England poet Robert Frost; the Cantos of Ezra Pound, the founder of Imagism; and the prairie realism of Carl Sandburg. It has continued to be enriched by such gifted poets as Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Anne Sexton, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, and Adrienne Rich. For more information on American prose and poetry, see American Literature.

Hollywood, an unincorporated district within Los Angeles, has been one of the most influential and productive international film capitals. Contemporary trends in film in the United States include escapist films bent on capturing mass audiences and emphasizing imaginative production techniques rather than content; and an opposing move towards the use of film as a medium of social criticism or artistic expression for more sophisticated audiences. Recent film stars, such as Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington, and Jodie Foster, have tended to be less glamorous (or less glamorously presented) and to portray characters more humanly flawed than their classic Hollywood predecessors, such as Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, and Marilyn Monroe. Other recent trends are the upsurge in the production of American documentary films; films written, produced, and directed by women and by black and coloured film-makers; and independent films. See also American Cinema.

During the colonial period and the early years of the United States, American architecture in the main followed the trends of British architecture. The first true American contribution to international architecture was the skyscraper, pioneered in Chicago in the late 19th century by architects such as Louis Henri Sullivan (see Chicago School). Subsequent developments incorporated European Modernism to produce the box-shaped, glass-curtain-wall skyscraper common in American cities, and first exemplified by the Secretariat Building of the United Nations in New York. In the 1980s new forms emerged that borrowed stylistic elements from various periods in the history of architecture, incorporating them into buildings that also made use of the newest technology. Examples of this so-called Postmodern architecture included the AT&T Building in New York, a skyscraper designed by Philip C. Johnson and topped with a pediment; and the Public Office Building by Michael Graves in Portland, Oregon, which incorporated Romantic and Classical elements. See also American Art and Architecture; Modern Art and Architecture.

Portraits were the first paintings to be produced in significant numbers in America, including those of famous historical figures painted by John Singleton Copley in the 18th century. Landscape paintings, such as those of Asher B. Durand of the Hudson River School and the dramatic seascapes of Winslow Homer, were prominent during the 19th century. Thomas Eakins achieved a striking realism in his portraits towards the end of that century.

European Modernism was introduced into the United States at the Armory Show in 1913. This exposition of international art, which opened in New York and travelled to Chicago and Boston, was seen by more than 250,000 Americans. Armory Show ideas influenced many American artists, including John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe, and became embodied in the collections and philosophy of the Museum of Modern Art, which was founded in New York in 1929. Following World War II, New York supplanted Paris as the leading centre of the art world; innovative art exhibited and often produced there has included works by the Abstract Expressionist painters Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell and the sculptor David Smith; and by the Pop Art painters Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and sculptor George Segal. See also Painting; Sculpture.

H

Museums and Libraries

Major American art museums include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which has come to represent the “establishment” in modern art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., which also houses modern art; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Museums that house extensive collections of art objects, paintings, and sculpture from all parts of the world from prehistory to the present include the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the M. H. de Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

The United States has more than 7,000 museums, including many historical, science, and art museums. Among the more prominent museums of science are the American Museum of Natural History in New York; the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry, both in Chicago; the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia; the Maryland Academy of Sciences in Baltimore; and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

In 1993 the United States had more than 32,414 libraries. Approximately 47 per cent of these were public libraries and their branches, and 4,619 were college and university libraries. The foremost is the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Other libraries with vast collections include the public libraries of New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Portland, Oregon; and the libraries at academic institutions such as Harvard University, Stanford University, Yale University, the University of Michigan, Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Texas at Austin. Many of these libraries contain special and rare book collections, such as those of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Other noted collections include those of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York; and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

IV

Economy

The United States has been the world’s leading industrial nation since early in the 20th century. Until the second half of the 19th century, agriculture remained the dominant economic activity. After the American Civil War, great advances were made in the production of basic industrial goods. By World War I, exports of manufactured goods had become more important than the export of raw materials; as manufacturing grew, agriculture became increasingly mechanized and efficient, employing fewer and fewer workers. The most important development in the economy since World War II has been the tremendous growth of service industries, government, professional services, trade, and financial activities. Today, service industries make up the most important sector of the economy, employing almost 75 per cent of the workforce. Industry employs approximately 23 per cent of the labour force; and agriculture, forestry, and fishing, about 3 per cent.

From the 1930s onward the government has played an increasingly active role in the economy. Even though the economy in the 1990s was based on free enterprise, the government regulated business in various ways, including legislating to reduce environmental pollution, and to protect consumers from unsafe products and workers from unsafe working conditions. More than 15 per cent of the US labour force works for the government. The federal budget for 2005 included estimated expenditures of US$2,289 billion. Revenue was estimated at US$2,633 billion. The United States has consistently recorded annual budget deficits of US$100 billion or more since the early 1980s, although the amount of the deficit has been declining since the early 1990s.

In the mid-1990s the United States led all nations of the world in the yearly value of its economic production. The nation’s annual GDP was about US$12,417 billion in 2005. With a per-capita GDP of about US$41,889.60 (2005), the people of the United States have one of the world’s highest standards of living.

The US economy consists of three main sectors: the primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary economic activities are those directly involving the natural environment, including agriculture, forestry, fishing, and mining. The primary sector usually contributes about 3 per cent of annual GDP. Secondary economic activities involve processing or combining materials into new products, and include manufacturing and construction. This sector accounts for approximately 21 per cent of GDP. Tertiary economic activities involve the output of services rather than goods, for example wholesale and retail trade, banking, government, and transport. The tertiary is the most important sector by far and accounts for almost 76 per cent of annual GDP.