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Summary Culture and History US (CHUKUS)
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Summary of all lessons and powerpoints with notes from CHUKUS US - CHUKUS - F. Albers - University of Antwerp - Applied Linguistics (TTK) - BA2 - Semester 2
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Tentamen (uitwerkingen) Amerikaanse cultuur American Civilization: An Introduction, ISBN: 9781138631724
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English: Culture and History UK & US (CHUKUS) – UAntwerpen – Toegepaste Taalkunde – 2020-2021Culture and History US
Settlement and Immigration (Mauk & Oakland chapter 3)
The New Colossus – A poem by Emma Lazarus slide 4 poem
- Americans’ core idealism, naivety & pride are embodied in this sonnet, engraved in the
basis/foot of the Statue of Liberty
- Statue made by the French & given to the Americans as a gift (1886)
o US & France were sister republics (the only two republics; all the other were
monarchies)
o There was still rivalry & jealousy between them
o France only gave the statue America had to improvise and made an own foundation
o Fundraising for the statue had begun in 1882. The committee organised a large
number of money-raising events, e.g. an auction of art and manuscripts. Lazarus’s
poem was written for the fundraising; she was demanded to sell her original work
Early Encounters between Europeans and Native Americans
“In a country whose history began with the meeting of Native Americans and European colonists and continued
through the importation of African slaves and several waves of immigrants, there has never been a single national
culture; although for centuries a majority of Anglo-Americans made vigorous efforts to establish one.”
- The 1500s: Europeans for the first time set foot on the ‘New World’ slide 6
o Beginning of the United States of America
- About 10 million native Americans in hundreds of tribes were living here already
o Spoke several 100 different languages, often mutually incomprehensible languages
o There has never been a single national culture in America
- Political correctness: Native Americans American Indians Debates
o ‘American Indians’ was discarded by the presidents of the Navajo, but other Native
Americans are completely fine with this term
- Relationship of conflict, centred around/caused by three issues/elements see below
o Confrontation between Native Americans and European colonists
o A long history of incomprehension & conflict between the Natives and Whites, who
wanted to claim the territory
1) Health
- Native Americans & Europeans made each other sick: they were not immune to the other
one’s viruses Entire tribes in America (& their languages) were wiped out by epidemics
o It had to do with diseases, foods, plants & animals that caused health problems
o Contacts between the Americas & other continents had been rare: two very different
forms/”worlds” with their own plants, animals, diseases & human societies
- Native population of about 10 million people shrank to a little more than two million people
at the end of the 17th c. (a near genocide)
2) Land/trade
Europeans
- European immigrants/founders/settlers held that the land was a commodity: land was
there for you to grab/own/till/buy/sell or to be exploited; it was a wilderness to be turned
into a fruitful lucrative garden (“God sent us to the wilderness to create life, cities, infrastructure”)
- White Christian Europeans who came to the New World had an instrumental view of land
and nature: land and all the natural resources are there for us to use & to satisfy our needs
- Very great interest in trade
Native American population
- For them land was sacred (< pantheist religion): land was there to be
revered/admired/respected
- Nature was viewed not as a source of income but rather as a sort of grand mother nature
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, English: Culture and History UK & US (CHUKUS) – UAntwerpen – Toegepaste Taalkunde – 2020-2021
- Nothing of the entrepreneurial spirit that Europeans brought with them
3) Religion
Native Americans White people from Europe
Pantheist view of religion/nature/man: Mostly protestant: very
they regarded human beings, animals and individualistic idea of their
everything that lives in nature as sort of relationship with God.
partaking in the same divine spirit & be Protestants much more so than
suffused by the same define quality; a Catholics feel personally
human being not necessarily worth any connected to and held
more than an animal responsible by a personal God
(monotheism)
Idea of a sacred nature that was God-given They believed explicitly or
God was not a person: they did not have a implicitly that white people were
vision of the Lord the way Christians do more favoured by God than
others: streak of white
supremacists
believes/convictions inherent in
many religious creeds (privileged &
superior feeling)
The Founders slide 7
First generation of settlers is called ‘the founders’ because they are the first ones who came
to these shores, established colonies and who basically gave birth to the immigrants who
subsequently founded the American civilisation. They created the customs, laws and
institutions two which later arrivals (the first immigrants) had to adjust.
The Jamestown Virginia settlement (1607) is far better known than the St. Augustin
settlement in Florida (1565). This tells you that the founders came from two different sides:
Florida from the West, where the Spanish arrived, and in the East in Virginia the English
arrived. America was founded by Spanish speaking Europeans on one side and by English
speaking Europeans on the other side. These are two of the earliest settlements in the New
World.
Some important dates
161 First African labourers imported as indentured servants (contractarbeiders)
9 Very early colonial days
Indentured servants: free people who contracted for five to seven
years of servitude. These are people, African people in most cases,
who came or were brought to America under specific conditions: they
agreed or were forced to agree to spend 5/6/7 years as a slave
(servitude) in the New World, after which they could become free
citizens. It was a temporary slavery status that allowed you to move
or to be brought into this new land to work for your owner and then
the deal was that you would be free.
Beginning of slavery: first imports of American slaves in 1619, long
before this land turned into a nation and a state
162 Pilgrims (separatists, Mayflower)
0 The ship the Mayflower carried protestant pilgrims from Europe to
America to escape religious oppression in ENG
Pilgrims were radical separatists from the Church of ENG: religious
people who had fled EU, went to the New World, never to return. EU
was a rotten place and the Lord was not happy with the way
Christians were doing things.
Founded the first of the Northern colonies at Plymouth
Experiment of the separatists on the Mayflower failed completely:
they died and did not settle or create a culture Short-lived religious
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, English: Culture and History UK & US (CHUKUS) – UAntwerpen – Toegepaste Taalkunde – 2020-2021
experiment
o Ship still became famous and you still have e.g. The Daughters of
the Mayflower today
163 Puritans (reformers, Arbella)
0 The flagship the Arbella is much less known yet far more important
for white America
Puritans wanted to purify the Church of England, not separate from it.
They were reformers, who were also disappointed and anxious to do
better than Christians had been doing in EU. They still considered
Catholics to be decadent and a despicable type of believers. They
wanted to found a religious utopia in the New World that was to serve
as an example to the rest of the world, EU in the first place.
o Biblical image: it was their challenge/responsibility to create a city
on a hill (shining, high up, serving as an example of fruitful ideal
of protestant society)
o Radical protestants: very intolerant
Unlike the pilgrims on the Mayflower, the puritans on the Arbella did
succeed: they did not die within one generation and were able to
found a culture, e.g. the Massachusetts Bay colony.
Founding of the “middle colonies” (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania)
The middle part of the East Coast region had many different cultures. The earliest European
communities here were Dutch and Swedish outposts of the fur trade that almost accidentally
grew into colonies. Before it became New York, the city had white, red, brown and black
inhabitants and institutions for Catholics, Jews and Protestants.
- New Netherlands: Dutch culture lingered on for a long time, until it fell to English fleet in
1664
o Although the dominant culture in colonial New York and New Jersey became English by the end of the
1600s, the English authorities continued the tolerant traditions of the Dutch in the city.
- New Sweden (1638-1655; annexed by the Dutch)
- New Amsterdam slide 9
o Tolerance for ethnic, racial & religious groups (diversity)
o 18 different languages (diversity)
o Later became New York
- Pennsylvania’s founders were Quakers who flocked to the colony after Charles II granted
the area to William Penn, an aristocratic Quaker in 1681 as a religious refuge.
Four waves of immigration
After the Founders found the culture for a society. The Founders came for economic gain and
religious freedom, but their descendants were much more severe. Newcomers were only
welcome if they conformed to the culture and wanted to work.
First wave: 1680-1776 (colonial immigrants/immigration)
- 1776: year of independence for the colonies
- This first wave of immigration already decreased influence/position of English in the New
World: “The first wave of immigration transformed the demography of the colonies. By 1776,
English dominance had decreased from four-fifths in the early days to a bare majority of 52% of the
population.”
o A lot of people think that until very recently (10 or 20 years ago) America was
predominantly an English-speaking country, but there were always many languages.
The influence of the Spanish and the Latino culture has made America into a virtually
bilingual country by now (it used to be very much a West Coast phenomenon, e.g.
California, New Mexico, Nevada…). These days, even if you go to the East Coast,
America is very much a bilingual country, which is not to say that there are only two
languages spoken in America. It was never as dominantly English speaking as many
people think it was.
3
, English: Culture and History UK & US (CHUKUS) – UAntwerpen – Toegepaste Taalkunde – 2020-2021
- African American slaves in that first wave and in that first couple of generations of
immigration to America composed 20% of the population, so slavery has been part of the
makeup of America from the very beginning
- Mainly slaves
o Largest group: Scots-Irish who crossed the Atlantic to become indentured servants.
They fled because of the discrimination from the Crown.
o Largest non-English speaking group: Germans
Second wave: 1820-1890 (“old” immigrants)
- = people who are coming from Europe: Germans, Irish, Britons, Scandinavians, Swiss,
Dutch
- Homestead Act of 1862
o In the middle of the Civil War (president = Abraham Lincoln) Land was very cheap &
plentiful in America (‘unlimited’ supply of land) Pull factor
o Entitles every family head to 65 acres of land in the west (at no cost or only for a little
fee), provided that you will stay there and work the land for at least five years
o Made America even more appealing to many immigrants from Europe Rise of
immigrant numbers Resistance to new immigrants
Nativism: attitude that says ‘we who were already here dislike the newcomers
because this country is ours’; the dislike of people and things foreign
Trump claiming that Obama was born in another country: borderism =
dislike/hatred towards foreign things & people (type of nativism)
Also antisemitic stream
Anti-foreign agitation reached a peak in the 1850s
- Another pull factor was work: the US needed (un)skilled labour
o America sent immigration agents to Europe to recruit people with promise of fertile
farms or jobs with higher wages than they were already earning
- America before Donald Trump was already not as hospitable or ‘free for all’ as people think
o Whole history of anti-immigration sentiment, immigration-controlling & reducing
legislation
- Chinese Exclusion Act 1882
Third wave: 1890-1930 (“new” immigrants)
- Millions of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe (change in origin of most
immigrants)
o Around 1890, immigrants from north-western Europe declined sharply More
immigration from southern & eastern Europe caused by WWII, Nazis’ regimes &
Holocaust (Italians, Jews, Syrians, Japanese…)
o To most Americans the change mostly involved the feeling that the typical immigrants
had become much less like them: different religion, language, manners and dress
(exotic and rather incomprehensible)
- America: culture of immigrants Discussions still going on today: Is the American a new
type of person/race? The American race? Hybrid or not? A mix of different identities,
cultures, languages…, kept together by an ideology, a myth or capitalism?
- Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot (1908)
o Title of play caught on: America as a melting pot
o A new type of culture, where many races and cultures would become a new people
through intermarriage Nativists hated this idea of mongrelising, blending or
rendering opaque the white race. There is the white race and other ethnicities and that
is the way it should remain = cultural pluralism: the believe in diverse cultures united
by loyalty to the same political and civic ideals
o Tension between people who believe in the melting pot People who think it is a
myth/fiction; the best we can hope for is cultural pluralism
- Falling train and steamship ticket prices made immigration more affordable, attracting new
immigrants who were younger, more often single and more likely to travel as individuals
- Ellis Island (1892-1954) slide 10
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