American culture?

The people of almost every nation are descended from immigrants. The folks who now call themselves "British" aren't even Britons. They're descended from a mix of Angles and Saxons who immigrated after the downfall of the Roman Empire and drove the true Celtic Britons out of their own homeland, and the Norman French who immigrated when they conquered them in 1066. And the original Celts immigrated over the Channel no earlier than about 3000BCE. There were plenty of people living there already who were overrun by that first wave of Indo-Europeans; they're the ones who built Stonehenge.

We don't know how many waves of immigration washed over the European mainland and the British Isles, but no one living there now has more than a drop or two of the blood of the first humans to colonize that part of the world after the Wurm Glaciation receded. Well, maybe the Basques. Anthropologists have had no luck identifying their origins.

What is American culture? Like British culture, it's basically Greco-Roman civilization (which is an offshoot of Mesopotamian) with its own modifications and accretions. It has more in common with Britain than any other single source, but ask any Englishman who's been here and he will assure you that the relationship is not solid enough to always even be discernable, with a few obvious exceptions like the language and the legal system. And the fact that we love England more than any other foreign country and consider the English to be our kin, even those of us whose ancestors came from elsewhere. If necessary, England can always depend on America to defend it to the death because this would simply not be Mother Earth if there were no England on it.

But the cultures have simply diverged. So much has happened since the colonial era, and the intervening centuries have been ones of profound change all over the industrialized world... starting with the impact of industrialization itself. It's hard to describe the difference succinctly, especially for an American like me who's never set foot in England. But British culture is very European and American culture is very not. We're profligate, we're risk takers, we're rude, we're informal, we're innovators. We move around a lot, we don't form stable families, we don't respect our elders, we're not embarrassed by our fondness for trashy entertainment.

We're also obviously heavily influenced by the many waves of non-English immigrants. It's most obvious in our food. The English love Indian and Chinese and affect a fondness for French cooking, but our cuisine embraces Italian, Mexican, Japanese, German, and dozens of other sources. That's a metaphor for our entire culture. Our legends, our slang, our music, all of its components are more richly influenced by outsiders than you find in the U.K. You can't dismiss a culture as not "real" just because it's an amalgamation.

As to when it appeared, it happened gradually. I don't know when the first English visitor wrote home to his wife, "These people are really different from us," but it would have been sometime in the latter half of the 19th Century. By the dawn of the 20th, America was distinct.

 

A key difference between us is that we respect popular culture and take it seriously. We are not elitists.

The Beatles are firmly within the bounds of pop culture but they created an entire catalog of new motifs that will echo through music for centuries.

And we created the music form of rock and roll, without which the Beatles would still be playing skiffle music. Rock and roll is probably the most representative sample of American culture that could be put on display. It is one of the greatest forces of unification in the world. It started by bringing the children of black and white, Northern and Southern, established and recently immigrated families together in the 1950s. Now it's doing the same for whole countries.

We're America. We don't do no stinkin' classic culture.