Arts. Music and Cinema in the USA

 

American music styles and influences (such as country, jazz, rock and roll, rock, hip-hop, rap) and music based on them can be heard all over the world. Music in the U.S. is diverse. It includes African-American influence in the 20th century. The first half of this century is famous for jazz, introduced by African-Americans in the south. In the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, rock was prevalent.

Ragtime is a musical genre that enjoyed its peak popularity between 1895 and 1918. Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged," rhythm. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of African American communities in St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published as popular sheet music for piano. Ernest Hogan was an innovator and key pioneer who helped develop the musical genre, and is credited with coining the term ragtime.

Representative: Scott Joplin - The King of Ragtime - 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas – famous piece “Maple Leaf Rag”.

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States around the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues have an influence on jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll.

Representative: B.B. King, is an American blues musician, singer, songwriter, and guitarist – “The King of Blues”.

Jazz is a music genre that originated at the beginning of the 20th Century, arguably earlier, within the African-American communities of the Southern United States. Its roots lie in the combining by African-Americans of certain European harmony and form elements, with their existing African-based music.

Representative: Louis Armstrong - was an American jazz trumpeter (трубач) and singer.

Country music is a genre of American popular music that originated in the rural regions of the Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from the southeastern genre of American folk music and Western music. It often consists of ballads and dance tunes with generally simple forms and harmonies accompanied by mostly string instruments such as banjos, electric and acoustic guitars, fiddles, and harmonicas. The term country music gained popularity in the 1940s in preference to the earlier term hillbilly music

Representative: Roy Acuff – “The King of the Country Music”.

Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African-American genres such as blues, jump blues, jazz, and gospel music, together with Western swing and country music. The term "rock and roll" now has at least 2 different meanings, both in common usage: referring to the first wave of music that originated in the US in the 1950s and would later develop into the international style known as "rock music", and as a term simply synonymous with the rock music and culture in the broad sense.

Representative: Elvis Presley - One of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century, he is often referred to as "the King of Rock and Roll", or simply, "the King".

Grunge is a subgenre of alternative rock that emerged during the mid-1980s in the American state of Washington, particularly in the Seattle area. Inspired by hardcore punk, heavy metal, and alternative rock, grunge is generally characterized by heavily distorted electric guitars, contrasting song dynamics, "growling" vocals and apathetic or angst-filled lyrics.

Representative: Nirvana - one of the most influential and important rock bands of the modern era.

Rap - "spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics". Rapping is distinct from spoken word poetry in that it is performed in time to a beat.

Representative: Run–D.M.C - was an American hip hop group.

 

The cinema of the United States, often generally referred to as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early twentieth century. Its history can be separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period.

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, mime and title cards.(the late 1920s)

Classical Hollywood cinema designate both a visual and sound style for making motion pictures and a mode of production used in the American film industry between 1927 and 1963. This period is often referred to as the "golden age of Hollywood".

New Hollywood or post-classical Hollywood "American New Wave", refers to the time from roughly the late-1960s to the early 1980s when a new generation of young filmmakers came to prominence in America, influencing the types of films produced, their production and marketing, and the way major studios approached filmmaking.

Representatives of Cinema of USA:

Actors: Buster Keaton was an American comic actor, filmmaker, producer and writer.He was best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".

Audrey Hepburn was a British actress. Recognised as a film and fashion icon, Hepburn was active during Hollywood's Golden Age. She was ranked by the American Film Institute as the third greatest female screen legend in the history of American cinema. (1 -Katharine Hepburn, 2 - Bette Davis).

Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, model, and singer, who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s and early 1960s. Monroe was ranked as the sixth-greatest female star of all time by the American Film Institute. In the decades following her death, she has often been cited as both a pop and a cultural icon as well as the quintessential American sex symbol.

Directors: John Ford was an Irish-American film director. He was famous for both his Westerns such as The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and adaptations of such classic 20th-century American novels as The Grapes of Wrath. His four Academy Awards for Best Director (1935, 1940, 1941, 1952) are a record, and one of those films, How Green Was My Valley, also won Best Picture.

Martin Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest directors of all time. (“Gangs of New York”)

George Lucas - an American film producer, screenwriter, director, and entrepreneur. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist adventurer character Indiana Jones. Lucas is one of the American film industry's most financially successful filmmakers.

 

The early 1600s saw the beginning of a great tide of emigration from Europe to North America. Emigration from England often was not directly sponsored by the government but by private groups of individuals whose chief motive was profit.

The first English colony was founded at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Early settlements developed in New England, in the Middle Colonies and the Southern Colonies. In 1620, the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower and founded Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts. In 1681, William Penn, a wealthy Quaker, received a large tract of land, which became known as Pennsylvania.. The first German community was established in Pennsylvania in 1683. By 1733, thirteen English colonies had been established along the Atlantic Coast.

Most emigrants left their homelands to escape political oppression, to seek the freedom to practice their religion, or for adventure and opportunities denied them at home. Most settlers were English, but there were also Dutch, Swedes and Germans, a few French Huguenots and a scattering of Spaniards, Italians and Portuguese. The first African slaves were brought to Virginia in 1619. Initially, many were regarded as indentured servants who could earn their freedom. By the 1660s, however, Africans were brought to America in shackles for a lifetime of involuntary servitude.

Society in the middle colonies was more varied and cosmopolitan than in New England. By the end of the 18th century, 30,000 people lived in Philadelphia, representing many languages, creeds and trades. Though the Quakers dominated in Philadelphia, elsewhere in Pennsylvania others were well represented. Germans became the colony's most skillful farmers. Important, too, were cottage industries such as weaving, shoemaking, cabinetmaking and other crafts. The Scots and Irish tended to settle in the back country, where they cleared land and lived by hunting and subsistence farming.

The southern settlements were predominantly rural. In Virginia and Maryland, the planters, supported by slave labor, held most of the political power and the best land. At the same time, yeoman farmers, who worked smaller tracts of land, sat in popular assemblies and found their way into political office. Charleston, South Carolina, became the leading port and trading center of the South. Whereas Virginia was bound to a single crop - tobacco -, North and South Carolina also exported rice and indigo.

By the early 18th century, colonial legislatures held two significant powers: the right to vote on taxes and expenditures, and the right to initiate legislation rather than merely act on proposals of the governor. The legislatures used these rights to check the power of royal governors and to pass other measures to expand their power and influence. In time, the center of colonial administration shifted from London to the provincial capitals.

 

The American Revolution (1775-83) is also known as the American Revolutionary War and the U.S. War of Independence. The conflict arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain's 13 North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the British crown. Skirmishes between British troops and colonial militiamen in Lexington and Concord in April 1775 kicked off the armed conflict, and by the following summer, the rebels were waging a full-scale war for their independence. France entered the American Revolution on the side of the colonists in 1778, turning what had essentially been a civil war into an international conflict. After French assistance helped the Continental Army force the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1779, the Americans had effectively won their independence, though fighting would not formally end until 1783.

A frontier is the political and geographical areas near or beyond a boundary.

The word "frontier" also means a region at the edge of a settled area, especially in North American development. It is a transition zone where explorers, pioneers and settlers were arriving. That is, as pioneers moved into the "frontier zone", they were changed by the encounter. A frontier can also be referred to as a "front".

The American frontier comprises the geography, history, folklore, and cultural expression of life in the forward wave of American westward expansion that began with English colonial settlements in the early 17th century and ended with the admission of the last mainland territories as states in the early 20th century. Enormous popular attention in the media focuses on the Western United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period sometimes called the Old West, or the Wild West.

As defined by Hine and Faragher, "frontier history tells the story of the creation and defense of communities, the use of the land, the development of markets, and the formation of states." They explain, "It is a tale of conquest, but also one of survival, persistence, and the merging of peoples and cultures that gave birth and continuing life to America."^[1] Through treaties with foreign nations and native tribes, political compromise, military conquest, establishment of law and order, building farms, ranches and towns, marking trails and digging mines, and pulling in great migrations of foreigners, the United States expanded from coast to coast fulfilling the dreams of Manifest Destiny. HistorianFrederick Jackson Turner in his "Frontier thesis" (1893) theorized that the frontier was a process that transformed Europeans into a new people, the Americans, whose values focused on equality, democracy, and optimism, as well as individualism, self-reliance, and even violence.

As the American frontier passed into history, the myths of the West in fiction and film took firm hold in the imagination of Americans and foreigners alike. America is exceptional in choosing its iconic self-image. "No other nation," says David Murdoch, "has taken a time and place from its past and produced a construct of the imagination equal to America’s creation of the West

 

The American Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, or simply the Civil War in the United States (see naming), was a civil war fought from 1861 to 1865 in the United States after several Southern slave states declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of America (the "Confederacy" or the "South"). The states that remained were known as the "Union" or the "North". The war had its origin in the fractious issue of slavery, especially the extension of slavery into the western territories.^[Foreign powers did not intervene. After four years of bloody combat that left over 600,000 soldiers dead and destroyed much of the South's infrastructure, the Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and the difficult Reconstruction process of restoring national unity and guaranteeing rights to the freed slaves began.

In the twelve years after the Civil War—the era of Reconstruction—there were massive changes in American culture, economy, and politics. These were the years of the “Old West,” of cowboys, Indians, and buffalo hunts, of cattle drives, railroads, and ranches. It was also the beginning of the “Gilded Age” in the North, the age of big fortunes, enormous businesses, struggle over labor unions, and the burgeoning of cities filled with immigrants, all of it given an air of desperation by the largest economic depression in United States history beginning in 1873. The events in the West and the North interwove with those in the South, where the central struggles of Reconstruction unfolded.

The political Reconstruction of the South progressed in two distinct eras. The first was Presidential Reconstruction, from 1865 through early spring 1867, when Andrew Johnson shaped the pace and depth of the reintegration of the South into the United States following the Confederacy’s surrender. The United States government, including President Lincoln, had defined no explicit and coherent plan for the postwar South and Lincoln’s assassination and Johnson’s rise to the presidency threw things into even greater uncertainty. Johnson, who had defended the Union as a United States senator and wartime governor of Tennessee and who was elected vice president under Lincoln in 1864, proved surprisingly lenient with white Southerners and unsympathetic to the people who had been held in slavery. Johnson hoped to create a national party devoted to the Union and sought the support of the former leaders of the South. He sacrificed black Southerners’ interests in the process.

Under Johnson, white Southerners held on to all they could of the old order. They passed “Black Codes” that narrowly defined the possibilities of life for freedpeople, preventing them from renting land or owning firearms and placing their children in coercive “apprenticeships” to their former owners. Former Confederates violently attacked black people in New Orleans, in Memphis, and in the countryside across the region. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized those who challenged white supremacy in any way. White Southerners resisted the Freedmen’s Bureau, which aided impoverished whites and blacks with surplus United States Army material, used special courts to adjudicate conflicts between freedpeople and their former masters, and tried to prevent violence against African Americans.

 

The United States became the world's leading industrial power at the turn of the 20th century due to an outburst of entrepreneurship in the North And Midwest, and the arrival of millions of immigrant workers and farmers from Europe. The national railroad network was completed with the work of Chinese immigrants, and large-scale mining and factories industrialized the Northeast and Midwest. Mass dissatisfaction with corruption, inefficiency and traditional politics stimulated the Progressive movement, from the 1890s to 1920s, which led to many social and political reforms. In 1920 the 19th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed women's suffrage (right to vote). This followed the 16th and 17th amendments in 1909 and 1912, which established the first national income tax and direct election of U.S. senators to Congress.

Initially neutral in World War I, the U.S. declared war on Germany in 1917, and funded the Allied victory the following year. After a prosperous decade in the 1920s, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 marked the onset of the decade-long world-wide Great Depression. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the Republican dominance of the White House and implemented his New Deal programs for relief, recovery, and reform. They defined modern American liberalism. These included relief for the unemployed, support for farmers, Social Security and a minimum wage. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States enteredWorld War II alongside the Allies especially Britain and the Soviet Union. It financed the Allied war effort and helped defeat Nazi Germany in Europe and, with the detonation of newly invented atomic bombs, Japan in the Far East.

The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as rival superpowers after World War II. Around 1947 they began the Cold War, confronting one another indirectly in the arms race and Space Race. U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War was built around the support of Western Europe and Japan, and the policy of "containment" or stopping the spread of Communism. The U.S. became involved in wars in Korea and Vietnam to stop the spread. In the 1960s, especially due to the strength of the civil rights movement, another wave of social reforms were enacted during the administrations of Kennedy and Johnson, enforcing the constitutional rights of voting and freedom of movement to African Americans and other minorities. Native American activism also rose. The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, leaving the United States the world's only superpower.

 

19. History. The 21st Century.

September 11 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society. The September 11 attacks were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks launched by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda upon the United States in New York City and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. On September 11th, 2001 two planes crashed into the North and South Twin Towers, The Pentagon, and an attempt to attack the White House. In total there were 2,819 people killed in the attacks and 20 percent of Americans knew someone hurt or killed in the attacks.

(7 Oct 2001) War in Afghanistan (2001–present) refers to the intervention by NATO and allied forces in the Afghan political struggle, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to dismantle the al-Qaeda terrorist organization and to remove from power the Taliban government, which at the time controlled 90% of Afghanistan and hosted al-Qaeda leadership. U.S. President George W. Bush demanded that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden and expel the al-Qaeda network which was supporting the Taliban in its war with the Afghan Northern Alliance. The Taliban recommended that bin Laden leave the country but declined to extradite him without evidence of his involvement in the 9/11 attacks. The United States refused to negotiate and launched Operation Enduring Freedom on 7 October 2001 with the United Kingdom and later joined by Germany and other western allies, to attack the Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in conjunction with the Northern Alliance.

2004 - The United States presidential election of 2004 was the 55th quadrennial presidential election. Republican Party candidate and incumbent President George W. Bush defeated Democratic Partycandidate John Kerry, Bush won.

(29 Aug 2005) Hurricane Katrina was the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Katrina formed in the Bahamas and made its biggest impact as a Category 3 storm in New Orleans,LA.

Pluto Reclassified as a dwarf planet - 13 Sep 2006

Barack Obama's Election -4 Nov 2008. Barack Obama became the first African-American President.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also referred to as the BP oil spill, the BP oil disaster) began on 20 April 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico on the BP-operated Macondo Prospect. On the evening of 20 April 2010, a gas release and subsequent explosion occurred on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig working on the Macondo exploration well for BP in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven people died as a result of the accident and others were injured

Boston Marathon bombings - On April 15, 2013, double bombings near the finish line of the Boston Marathon killed three people and injured at least 264.

 

 

20.Economy. General Features. The Primary Sector.

The US is the world’s greatest economic power.

General features of American Economy: