Tribute to the Neighbors
Happy Independence Day USA
July 2009
Main Street Magazine
The sport that evokes more nostalgia among Americans than any other is baseball. So many people play the game as children that it has become known as "the national pastime." It is also a democratic game. Unlike football and basketball, baseball can be played well by people of average height and weight.
The average American, according to a recent study, spends about eight hours a day with the print and electronic media which reflects the rich culture of USA - at home, at work, and traveling by car. This total includes four hours watching television, three hours listening to radio, a half hour listening to recorded music, and another half hour reading the newspaper.
It is African-American rhythms embedded in gospel hymns of usa culture, bluegrass music, and hip hop of usa culture, and it is the Lakota flutist rendering anew his people's ancient courtship songs. In passing the American Folklife Preservation Act in 1976, Congress bolstered its call to "preserve and present American folklife" as a culture of usa by establishing the American Folklife Center. It includes the Archive of Folk Culture, which was founded in the Music Division at the Library of Congress in 1928 and has grown to become one of the most significant collections of usa culture research materials in the world, including manuscripts, sound and video recordings, still photographs, and related ephemera. Following are the contributions of America as the culture of usa to the world.
The Mississippi-Missouri is the longest river in the USA. Lake Michigan, one of the Great Lakes, is the USA's largest lake. The Grand Canyon, in the State of Arizona, is one of the USA's World Heritage Sites. Six hundred and forty thousand years ago, a massive volcanic eruption took place in present-day Yellowstone Park (Wyoming). The caldera is seventy kilometers long and thirty kilometers wide. Yellowstone became the world's first National Park in 1872. Skeletons of prehistoric animals buried by volcanic ash in the State of Nebraska can be seen at the Ashfall State Historical Park. Sixteen thousand years ago North America was covered with trees, such as pines, poplar and spruce. Wolves, coyotes, saber-toothed cats and mammoths inhabited the country. Fossilized remains of mammoths and other creatures have been found in Tennessee. Twenty thousand years ago nomadic people, thought to have traveled from Asia, hunted mammoths and antelope in New Mexico.
The Indian princess Pocahontas (1595-1617) was a friend to the colonists of Jamestown in Virginia at a time when they were finding life difficult. During a period when she was held captive, to exchange for English prisoners, Pocahontas met and married the colonist John Rolfe.
Well remembered Native American Indian leaders include Cochise (Apache) Geronimo (Apache) and Sitting Bull (Sioux). Famous American outlaws include Jesse James, Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy. Oklahoma was a centre of the early cattle industry. The State of Louisiana was named after the French King Louis XIV. Henry Wadsworth' Longfellow wrote the poem "Paul Revere's Ride". It tells the story of the ride through the country to alert people to the beginning of the American War of Independence: Between 1927 and 1941.
