, including an estimated 11.2 million
illegal immigrants. The third most populous nation in the world, after
China and
India, the United States is the only industrialized nation in which large population increases are projected. With a birth rate of 13.82 per 1,000, 30% below the world average, its
population growth rate is 0.98%, significantly higher than those of Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea. In fiscal year 2010, over 1 million
immigrants were granted
legal residence, most of them entered through
family reunification.
The United States has a very diverse population—thirty-one ancestry groups have more than one million members. White Americans are the largest racial group; German Americans, Irish Americans, and English Americans constitute three of the country's four largest ancestry groups. The census now includes the category "Some Other Race" for "respondents unable to identify with any" of its five official race categories; more than 19 million people were placed in this category in 2010. Between 2000 and 2010, the country's Hispanic population increased 43% while the non-Hispanic population rose just 4.9%. Fertility is also a factor; the average Hispanic woman gives birth to 3.0 children in her lifetime, compared to 2.2 for non-Hispanic black women and 1.8 for non-Hispanic white women (below the replacement rate of 2.1).
About 82% of Americans live in urban areas (as defined by the Census Bureau, such areas include the suburbs); In 2008, 273 incorporated places had populations over 100,000, nine cities had more than 1 million residents, and four global cities had over 2 million (New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston). There are fifty-two metropolitan areas with populations greater than 1 million. Of the fifty fastest-growing metro areas, forty-seven are in the West or South. The metro areas of Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix all grew by more than a million people between 2000 and 2008.
|-
|English (only)||style="text-align: center;"|225.5 million
|-
|Spanish, incl. Creole||style="text-align: center;"|34.5 million
|-
|Chinese||style="text-align: center;"|2.5 million
|-
|French, incl. Creole||style="text-align: center;"|2.0 million
|-
|Tagalog||style="text-align: center;"|1.5 million
|-
|Vietnamese||style="text-align: center;"|1.2 million
|-
|German||style="text-align: center;"|1.1 million
|-
|Korean||style="text-align: center;"|1.1 million
|}
English is the de facto national language. Although there is no official language at the federal level, some laws—such as U.S. naturalization requirements—standardize English. In 2007, about 226 million, or 80% of the population aged five years and older, spoke only English at home. Spanish, spoken by 12% of the population at home, is the second most common language and the most widely taught second language. Some Americans advocate making English the country's official language, as it is in at least twenty-eight states. Both Hawaiian and English are official languages in Hawaii by state law.
While neither has an official language, New Mexico has laws providing for the use of both English and Spanish, as Louisiana does for English and French. Other states, such as California, mandate the publication of Spanish versions of certain government documents including court forms. Several insular territories grant official recognition to their native languages, along with English: Samoan and Chamorro are recognized by American Samoa and Guam, respectively; Carolinian and Chamorro are recognized by the Northern Mariana Islands; Spanish is an official language of Puerto Rico.
Religion
church; most Americans identify as Christian.]]
The United States is officially a secular nation; the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion and forbids the establishment of any religious governance. In a 2002 study, 59% of Americans said that religion played a "very important role in their lives," a far higher figure than that of any other wealthy nation. According to a 2007 survey, 78.4% of adults identified themselves as Christian, down from 86.4% in 1990. Protestant denominations accounted for 51.3%, while Roman Catholicism, at 23.9%, was the largest individual denomination. The study categorizes white evangelicals, 26.3% of the population, as the country's largest religious cohort; The total reporting non-Christian religions in 2007 was 4.7%, up from 3.3% in 1990. About 12% of children are enrolled in parochial or nonsectarian private schools. Just over 2% of children are homeschooled.
The United States has many competitive private and public institutions of higher education, as well as local community colleges with open admission policies. Of Americans twenty-five and older, 84.6% graduated from high school, 52.6% attended some college, 27.2% earned a bachelor's degree, and 9.6% earned graduate degrees. The basic literacy rate is approximately 99%. The United Nations assigns the United States an Education Index of 0.97, tying it for 12th in the world.
Health
The United States life expectancy of 77.8 years at birth is a year shorter than the overall figure in Western Europe, and three to four years lower than that of Norway, Switzerland, and Canada. Over the past two decades, the country's rank in life expectancy has dropped from 11th to 42nd in the world. The infant mortality rate of 6.37 per thousand likewise places the United States 42nd out of 221 countries, behind all of Western Europe. Approximately
one-third of the adult population is obese and an additional third is overweight; the obesity rate, the highest in the industrialized world, has more than doubled in the last quarter-century. Obesity-related
type 2 diabetes is considered epidemic by health care professionals.
in Houston, the world's largest medical center]]
The U.S. adolescent pregnancy rate, 79.8 per 1,000 women, is nearly four times that of France and five times that of Germany. Abortion, legal on demand, is highly controversial. Many states ban public funding of the procedure and restrict late-term abortions, require parental notification for minors, and mandate a waiting period. While the abortion rate is falling, the abortion ratio of 241 per 1,000 live births and abortion rate of 15 per 1,000 women aged 15–44 remain higher than those of most Western nations.
The U.S. health care system far outspends any other nation's, measured in both per capita spending and percentage of GDP. The World Health Organization ranked the U.S. health care system in 2000 as first in responsiveness, but 37th in overall performance. The United States is a leader in medical innovation. In 2004, the nonindustrial sector spent three times as much as Europe per capita on biomedical research.
Unlike in all other developed countries, health care coverage in the United States is not universal. In 2004, private insurance paid for 36% of personal health expenditures, private out-of-pocket payments covered 15%, and federal, state, and local governments paid for 44%. In 2005, 46.6 million Americans, 15.9% of the population, were uninsured, 5.4 million more than in 2001. The main cause of this rise is the drop in the number of Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance. The subject of uninsured and underinsured Americans is a major political issue. A 2009 study estimated that lack of insurance is associated with nearly 45,000 deaths a year. In 2006, Massachusetts became the first state to mandate universal health insurance. Federal legislation passed in early 2010 will create a near-universal health insurance system around the country by 2014.
Crime and law enforcement
Law enforcement in the United States is primarily the responsibility of local police and sheriff's departments, with state police providing broader services. Federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Marshals Service have specialized duties. At the federal level and in almost every state, jurisprudence operates on a common law system. State courts conduct most criminal trials; federal courts handle certain designated crimes as well as certain appeals from the state systems.
Among developed nations, the United States has above-average levels of violent crime and particularly high levels of gun violence and homicide. In 2007, there were 5.6 murders per 100,000 persons, three times the rate in neighboring Canada. The U.S. homicide rate, which decreased by 42% between 1991 and 1999, has been roughly steady since. and total prison population in the world. At the start of 2008, more than 2.3 million people were incarcerated, more than one in every 100 adults. The current rate is about seven times the 1980 figure. African American males are jailed at about six times the rate of white males and three times the rate of Hispanic males. The country's high rate of incarceration is largely due to sentencing and drug policies.
Though it has been abolished in most Western nations, capital punishment is sanctioned in the United States for certain federal and military crimes, and in thirty-four states. Since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty after a four-year moratorium, there have been more than 1,000 executions. In 2006, the country had the sixth highest number of executions in the world, following China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, and Sudan. In 2007, New Jersey became the first state to legislatively abolish the death penalty since the 1976 Supreme Court decision, followed by New Mexico in 2009 and Illinois in 2011.
Culture
The United States is a
multicultural nation, home to a wide variety of ethnic groups, traditions, and values. Aside from the now small
Native American and
Native Hawaiian populations, nearly all Americans or their ancestors immigrated within the past five centuries. The culture held in common by most Americans—mainstream American culture—is a
Western culture largely derived from the
traditions of European immigrants with influences from many other sources, such as
traditions brought by slaves from Africa. More recent immigration from
Asia and especially
Latin America has added to a cultural mix that has been described as both a homogenizing
melting pot and a heterogeneous
salad bowl in which immigrants and their descendants retain distinctive cultural characteristics. While the mainstream culture holds that the United States is a
classless society, scholars identify significant differences between the country's social classes, affecting
socialization, language, and values. The
American middle and professional class has initiated many contemporary social trends such as
modern feminism,
environmentalism, and multiculturalism. Americans' self-images, social viewpoints, and cultural expectations are associated with their occupations to an unusually close degree. While Americans tend greatly to value socioeconomic achievement, being
ordinary or average is generally seen as a positive attribute. Though the
American Dream, or the perception that Americans enjoy high
social mobility, plays a key role in attracting immigrants, various studies indicate that the United States has less social mobility than Canada and the Nordic countries.
Women now mostly work outside the home and receive a majority of bachelor's degrees. In 2007, 58% of Americans age 18 and over were married, 6% were widowed, 10% were divorced, and 25% had never been married. Same-sex marriage is contentious. Some states permit civil unions in lieu of marriage. Since 2003, several states have permitted gay marriage as the result of judicial or legislative action, while voters in more than a dozen states have barred the practice via referendum.
Popular media
The world's first commercial motion picture exhibition was given in New York City in 1894, using
Thomas Edison's
Kinetoscope. The next year saw the first commercial screening of a projected film, also in New York, and the United States was in the forefront of
sound film's development in the following decades. Since the early 20th century, the U.S. film industry has largely been based in and around
Hollywood, California. Director
D. W. Griffith was central to the development of
film grammar and
Orson Welles's
Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited as the greatest film of all time. American screen actors like
John Wayne and
Marilyn Monroe have become iconic figures, while producer/entrepreneur
Walt Disney was a leader in both
animated film and movie
merchandising. The
major film studios of Hollywood have produced the most commercially successful movies in history, such as
(1977) and
Titanic (1997), and the products of Hollywood today dominate the global film industry.
Americans are the heaviest television viewers in the world, and the average viewing time continues to rise, reaching five hours a day in 2006. The four major broadcast networks are all commercial entities. Americans listen to radio programming, also largely commercialized, on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day. Aside from web portals and search engines, the most popular websites are Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger, eBay, and Craigslist.
The rhythmic and lyrical styles of African-American music have deeply influenced American music at large, distinguishing it from European traditions. Elements from folk idioms such as the blues and what is now known as old-time music were adopted and transformed into popular genres with global audiences. Jazz was developed by innovators such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington early in the 20th century. Country music developed in the 1920s, and rhythm and blues in the 1940s. Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were among the mid-1950s pioneers of rock and roll. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan emerged from the folk revival to become one of America's most celebrated songwriters and James Brown led the development of funk. More recent American creations include hip hop and house music. American pop stars such as Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna have become global celebrities.
Literature, philosophy, and the arts
, one of the best-known figures of the Beat Generation, a group of writers that came to prominence in the 1950s]]
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, American art and literature took most of its cues from Europe. Writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau established a distinctive American literary voice by the middle of the 19th century. Mark Twain and poet Walt Whitman were major figures in the century's second half; Emily Dickinson, virtually unknown during her lifetime, is now recognized as an essential American poet. A work seen as capturing fundamental aspects of the national experience and character—such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925)—may be dubbed the "Great American Novel."
Eleven U.S. citizens have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recently Toni Morrison in 1993. William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway are often named among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Popular literary genres such as the Western and hardboiled crime fiction developed in the United States. The Beat Generation writers opened up new literary approaches, as have postmodernist authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.
The transcendentalists, led by Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, established the first major American philosophical movement. After the Civil War, Charles Sanders Peirce and then William James and John Dewey were leaders in the development of pragmatism. In the 20th century, the work of W. V. Quine and Richard Rorty, built upon by Noam Chomsky, brought analytic philosophy to the fore of U.S. academics. John Rawls and Robert Nozick led a revival of political philosophy.
In the visual arts, the Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century movement in the tradition of European naturalism. The realist paintings of Thomas Eakins are now widely celebrated. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an exhibition of European modernist art, shocked the public and transformed the U.S. art scene. Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others experimented with new styles, displaying a highly individualistic sensibility. Major artistic movements such as the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and the pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed largely in the United States. The tide of modernism and then postmodernism has brought fame to American architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.
in New York City, part of the Broadway theater district]]
One of the first major promoters of American theater was impresario P. T. Barnum, who began operating a lower Manhattan entertainment complex in 1841. The team of Harrigan and Hart produced a series of popular musical comedies in New York starting in the late 1870s. In the 20th century, the modern musical form emerged on Broadway; the songs of musical theater composers such as Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Stephen Sondheim have become pop standards. Playwright Eugene O'Neill won the Nobel literature prize in 1936; other acclaimed U.S. dramatists include multiple Pulitzer Prize winners Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and August Wilson.
Though largely overlooked at the time, Charles Ives's work of the 1910s established him as the first major U.S. composer in the classical tradition; other experimentalists such as Henry Cowell and John Cage created a distinctive American approach to classical composition. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin developed a new synthesis of popular and classical music. Choreographers Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham helped create modern dance, while George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins were leaders in 20th century ballet. Americans have long been important in the modern artistic medium of photography, with major photographers including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Ansel Adams. The newspaper comic strip and the comic book are both U.S. innovations. Superman, the quintessential comic book superhero, has become an American icon.
Food
Mainstream American cuisine is similar to that in other Western countries. Wheat is the primary cereal grain. Traditional American cuisine uses indigenous ingredients, such as turkey, venison, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, squash, and maple syrup, which were consumed by Native Americans and early European settlers. Slow-cooked pork and beef barbecue, crab cakes, potato chips, and chocolate chip cookies are distinctively American foods.
Soul food, developed by African slaves, is popular around the South and among many African Americans elsewhere.
Syncretic cuisines such as
Louisiana creole,
Cajun, and
Tex-Mex are regionally important.
Characteristic dishes such as apple pie, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs derive from the recipes of various immigrants. French fries, Mexican dishes such as burritos and tacos, and pasta dishes freely adapted from Italian sources are widely consumed. Americans generally prefer coffee to tea. Marketing by U.S. industries is largely responsible for making orange juice and milk ubiquitous breakfast beverages. During the 1980s and 1990s, Americans' caloric intake rose 24%; Highly sweetened soft drinks are widely popular; sugared beverages account for 9% of the average American's caloric intake.
Sports
quarterback looking to
pass the ball]]
Baseball has been regarded as the
national sport since the late 19th century, even after being eclipsed in popularity by
American football.
Basketball and
ice hockey are the country's next two leading professional team sports.
College football and
basketball attract large audiences. American football is now by several measures the most popular spectator sport. Boxing and horse racing were once the most watched individual sports, but they have been eclipsed by
golf and
auto racing, particularly
NASCAR.
Soccer is played widely at the youth and amateur levels.
Tennis and many outdoor sports are popular as well.
While most major U.S. sports have evolved out of European practices, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, snowboarding, and cheerleading are American inventions. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact. Eight Olympic Games have taken place in the United States. The United States has won 2,301 medals at the Summer Olympic Games, more than any other country, and 253 in the Winter Olympic Games, the second most.
Measurement systems
The country retains United States customary units, constituted largely by British
imperial units such as miles,
yards, and
degrees Fahrenheit. Distinct units include the U.S. gallon and U.S. pint volume measurements. Along with
Burma and
Liberia, the United States is one of the three countries that have not adopted the
International System of Units. However,
metric units are increasingly used in science, medicine, and many industrial fields.
See also
Index of United States–related articles
Outline of the United States
References
External links
;Government
Official U.S. Government Web Portal Gateway to government sites
House Official site of the United States House of Representatives
Senate Official site of the United States Senate
White House Official site of the President of the United States
[ Supreme Court] Official site of the Supreme Court of the United States
;Overviews and Data
InfoUSA Portal to U.S. Information Agency resources
Library of Congress Official site of the U.S. Library of Congress
Demographic Highlights Statistics from the Population Reference Bureau
The 50 States of the U.S.A. Collected informational links for each state
from Wikitravel
United States Encyclopædia Britannica entry
U.S. Census Housing and Economic Statistics Wide-ranging data from the U.S. Census Bureau
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Official government site
State Fact Sheets Population, employment, income, and farm data from the U.S. Economic Research Service
State Energy Profiles Economic, environmental, and energy data for each state from the U.S. Energy Information Administration
;History
Historical Documents Collected by the National Center for Public Policy Research
U.S. National Mottos: History and Constitutionality Analysis by the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
USA Collected links to historical data
;Maps
National Atlas of the United States Official maps from the U.S. Department of the Interior
United States Satellite view at WikiMapia (not affiliated with Wikipedia/Wikimedia Foundation)
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[[File:I.M. Pei.JPG" />
![View of Rio Grande, Big Bend National Park, designated Wild River in 1978, Texas, United States[8]](http://web.archive.org./web/20110826222941im_/http://cdn1.wn.com/pd/e8/b4/d68ee2836b53b8f3fd73b0bf1276_grande.jpg "View of Rio Grande, Big Bend National Park, designated Wild River in 1978, Texas, United States[8]")
![Second Bank of the United States, Philadelphia, 1824. Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the first volume of The Antiquities of Athens,[5] and though he never practiced in the style Jefferson was to prove instrumental in introducing Greek Revival architecture to the United States.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110826222941im_/http://cdn1.wn.com/pd/c2/c0/51deda0bafa069959da761723d36_grande.jpg "Second Bank of the United States, Philadelphia, 1824. Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the first volume of The Antiquities of Athens,[5] and though he never practiced in the style Jefferson was to prove instrumental in introducing Greek Revival architecture to the United States.")
![View of Rio Grande, Big Bend National Park, designated Wild River in 1978, Texas, United States[8]](http://web.archive.org./web/20110826222941im_/http://cdn0.wn.com/pd/e8/b4/d68ee2836b53b8f3fd73b0bf1276_thumb.jpg "View of Rio Grande, Big Bend National Park, designated Wild River in 1978, Texas, United States[8]")
![Second Bank of the United States, Philadelphia, 1824. Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the first volume of The Antiquities of Athens,[5] and though he never practiced in the style Jefferson was to prove instrumental in introducing Greek Revival architecture to the United States.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110826222941im_/http://cdn0.wn.com/pd/c2/c0/51deda0bafa069959da761723d36_thumb.jpg "Second Bank of the United States, Philadelphia, 1824. Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the first volume of The Antiquities of Athens,[5] and though he never practiced in the style Jefferson was to prove instrumental in introducing Greek Revival architecture to the United States.")
