United States

The Humid East

The largest and in some ways the most important of the bioclimatic zones, the Humid East was where the Europeans first settled, tamed the land, and adapted to American conditions. In early times almost all of this territory was forested, a fact of central importance in American history that profoundly influenced both soils and wildlife. As in most of the world’s humid lands, soluble minerals have been leached from the earth, leaving a great family of soils called pedalfers, rich in relatively insoluble iron and aluminum compounds.

Both forests and soils, however, differ considerably within this vast region. Since rainfall is ample and summers are warm everywhere, the main differences result from the length and severity of winters, which determine the length of the growing season. Winter, obviously, differs according to latitude, so that the Humid East is sliced into four great east–west bands of soils and vegetation, with progressively more amenable winters as one travels southward. These changes occur very gradually, however, and the boundaries therefore are extremely subtle.

The Sub-Boreal Forest Region is the northernmost of these bands. It is only a small and discontinuous part of the United States, representing the tattered southern fringe of the vast Canadian taiga—a scrubby forest dominated by evergreen needle-leaf species that can endure the ferocious winters and reproduce during the short, erratic summers. Average growing seasons are less than 120 days, though localities in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula have recorded frost-free periods lasting as long as 161 days and as short as 76 days. Soils of this region that survived the scour of glaciation are miserably thin podzols—heavily leached, highly acid, and often interrupted by extensive stretches of bog. Most attempts at farming in the region long since have been abandoned.

Farther south lies the Humid Microthermal Zone of milder winters and longer summers. Large broadleaf trees begin to predominate over the evergreens, producing a mixed forest of greater floristic variety and economic value that is famous for its brilliant autumn colours. As the forest grows richer in species, sterile podzols give way to more productive gray-brown podzolic soils, stained and fertilized with humus. Although winters are warmer than in the Sub-Boreal zone, and although the Great Lakes help temper the bitterest cold, January temperatures ordinarily average below freezing, and a winter without a few days of subzero temperatures is uncommon. Everywhere, the ground is solidly frozen and snow covered for several months of the year.

Still farther south are the Humid Subtropics. The region’s northern boundary is one of the country’s most significant climatic lines: the approximate northern limit of a growing season of 180–200 days, the outer margin of cotton growing, and, hence, of the Old South. Most of the South lies in the Piedmont and Coastal Plain, for higher elevations in the Appalachians cause a peninsula of Northern mixed forest to extend as far south as northern Georgia. The red-brown podzolic soil, once moderately fertile, has been severely damaged by overcropping and burning. Thus much of the region that once sustained a rich, broadleaf-forest flora now supports poor piney woods. Throughout the South, summers are hot, muggy, long, and disagreeable; Dixie’s “frosty mornings” bring a welcome respite in winter.

The southern margins of Florida contain the only real tropics in the coterminous United States; it is an area in which frost is almost unknown. Hot, rainy summers alternate with warm and somewhat drier winters, with a secondary rainfall peak during the autumn hurricane season—altogether a typical monsoonal regime. Soils and vegetation are mostly immature, however, since southern Florida rises so slightly above sea level that substantial areas, such as the Everglades, are swampy and often brackish. Peat and sand frequently masquerade as soil, and much of the vegetation is either salt-loving mangrove or sawgrass prairie.

The Humid Pacific Coast

The western humid region differs from its eastern counterpart in so many ways as to be a world apart. Much smaller, it is crammed into a narrow littoral belt to the windward of the Sierra–Cascade summit, dominated by mild Pacific air, and chopped by irregular topography into an intricate mosaic of climatic and biotic habitats. Throughout the region rainfall is extremely seasonal, falling mostly in the winter half of the year. Summers are droughty everywhere, but the main regional differences come from the length of drought—from about two months in humid Seattle, Wash., to nearly five months in semiarid San Diego, Calif.

Western Washington, Oregon, and northern California lie within a zone that climatologists call Marine West Coast. Winters are raw, overcast, and drizzly—not unlike northwestern Europe—with subfreezing temperatures restricted mainly to the mountains, upon which enormous snow accumulations produce local alpine glaciers. Summers, by contrast, are brilliantly cloudless, cool, and frequently foggy along the West Coast and somewhat warmer in the inland valleys. This mild marine climate produces some of the world’s greatest forests of enormous straight-boled evergreen trees that furnish the United States with much of its commercial timber. Mature soils are typical of humid midlatitude forestlands, a moderately leached gray-brown podzol.

Toward the south, with diminishing coastal rain the moist marine climate gradually gives way to California’s tiny but much-publicized Mediterranean regime. Although mountainous topography introduces a bewildering variety of local environments, scanty winter rains are quite inadequate to compensate for the long summer drought, and much of the region has a distinctly arid character. For much of the year, cool, stable Pacific air dominates the West Coast, bringing San Francisco its famous fogs and Los Angeles its infamous smoggy temperature inversions. Inland, however, summer temperatures reach blistering levels, so that in July, while Los Angeles expects a normal daily maximum of 83 °F (28 °C), Fresno expects 100 °F (38 °C) and is climatically a desert. As might be expected, Mediterranean California contains a huge variety of vegetal habitats, but the commonest perhaps is the chaparral, a drought-resistant, scrubby woodland of twisted hard-leafed trees, picturesque but of little economic value. Chaparral is a pyrophytic (fire-loving) vegetation—i.e., under natural conditions its growth and form depend on regular burning. These fires constitute a major environmental hazard in the suburban hills above Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay, especially in autumn, when hot dry Santa Ana winds from the interior regularly convert brush fires into infernos. Soils are similarly varied, but most of them are light in colour and rich in soluble minerals, qualities typical of subarid soils.

The Dry West

In the United States, to speak of dry areas is to speak of the West. It covers an enormous region beyond the dependable reach of moist oceanic air, occupying the entire Intermontane area and sprawling from Canada to Mexico across the western part of the Great Plains. To Americans nurtured in the Humid East, this vast territory across the path of all transcontinental travelers has been harder to tame than any other—and no region has so gripped the national imagination as this fierce and dangerous land.

In the Dry West nothing matters more than water. Thus, though temperatures may differ radically from place to place, the really important regional differences depend overwhelmingly on the degree of aridity, whether an area is extremely dry and hence desert or semiarid and therefore steppe.

Americans of the 19th century were preoccupied by the myth of a Great American Desert, which supposedly occupied more than one-third of the entire country. True desert, however, is confined to the Southwest, with patchy outliers elsewhere, all without exception located in the lowland rain shadows of the Cordillera. Vegetation in these desert areas varies between nothing at all (a rare circumstance confined mainly to salt flats and sand dunes) to a low cover of scattered woody scrub and short-lived annuals that burst into flamboyant bloom after rains. Soils are usually thin, light-coloured, and very rich with mineral salts. In some areas wind erosion has removed fine-grained material, leaving behind desert pavement, a barren veneer of broken rock.

Most of the West, however, lies in the semiarid region, in which rainfall is scanty but adequate to support a thin cover of short bunchgrass, commonly alternating with scrubby brush. Here, as in the desert, soils fall into the large family of the pedocals, rich in calcium and other soluble minerals, but in the slightly wetter environments of the West, they are enriched with humus from decomposed grass roots. Under the proper type of management, these chestnut-coloured steppe soils have the potential to be very fertile.

Weather in the West resembles that of other dry regions of the world, often extreme, violent, and reliably unreliable. Rainfall, for example, obeys a cruel natural law: as total precipitation decreases, it becomes more undependable. John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath describes the problems of a family enticed to the arid frontier of Oklahoma during a wet period only to be driven out by the savage drought of the 1930s that turned the western Great Plains into the great American Dust Bowl. Temperatures in the West also fluctuate convulsively within short periods, and high winds are infamous throughout the region.

The Humid–Arid Transition

East of the Rockies all climatic boundaries are gradational. None, however, is so important or so imperceptibly subtle as the boundary zone that separates the Humid East from the Dry West and that alternates unpredictably between arid and humid conditions from year to year. Stretching approximately from Texas to North Dakota in an ill-defined band between the 95th and 100th meridians, this transitional region deserves separate recognition, partly because of its great size, and partly because of the fine balance between surplus and deficit rainfall, which produces a unique and valuable combination of soils, flora, and fauna. The native vegetation, insofar as it can be reconstructed, was prairie, the legendary sea of tall, deep-rooted grass now almost entirely tilled and planted to grains. Soils, often of loessial derivation, include the enormously productive chernozem (black earth) in the north, with reddish prairie soils of nearly equal fertility in the south. Throughout the region temperatures are severely continental, with bitterly cold winters in the north and scorching summers everywhere.

The western edge of the prairie fades gradually into the shortgrass steppe of the High Plains, the change a function of diminishing rainfall. The eastern edge, however, represents one of the few major discordances between a climatic and biotic boundary in the United States, for the grassland penetrates the eastern forest in a great salient across humid Illinois and Indiana. Many scholars believe this part of the prairie was artificially induced by repeated burning and consequent destruction of the forest margins by Indians.

The Western mountains

Throughout the Cordillera and Intermontane regions, irregular topography shatters the grand bioclimatic pattern into an intricate mosaic of tiny regions that differ drastically according to elevation and exposure. No small- or medium-scale map can accurately record such complexity, and mountainous parts of the West are said, noncommittally, to have a “mountain climate.” Lowlands are usually dry, but increasing elevation brings lower temperature, decreased evaporation, and—if a slope faces prevailing winds—greater precipitation. Soils vary wildly from place to place, but vegetation is fairly predictable. From the desert or steppe of intermontane valleys, a climber typically ascends into parklike savanna, then through an orderly sequence of increasingly humid and boreal forests until, if the range is high enough, one reaches the timberline and Arctic tundra. The very highest peaks are snow-capped, although permanent glaciers rarely occur outside the cool humid highlands of the Pacific Northwest.

Early models of land allocation

From the beginning the prevalent official policy of the British (except between 1763 and 1776) and then of the U.S. government was to promote agricultural and other settlement—to push the frontier westward as fast as physical and economic conditions permitted. The British crown’s grants of large, often vaguely specified tracts to individual proprietors or companies enabled the grantees to draw settlers by the sale or lease of land at attractive prices or even by outright gift.

Of the numerous attempts at group colonization, the most notable effort was the theocratic and collectivist New England town that flourished, especially in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, during the first century of settlement. The town, the basic unit of government and comparable in area to townships in other states, allotted both rural and village parcels to single families by group decision. Contrary to earlier scholarly belief, in all but a few cases settlement was spatially dispersed in the socially cohesive towns, at least until about 1800. The relatively concentrated latter-day villages persist today as amoeba-like entities straggling along converging roads, neither fully rural nor agglomerated in form. The only latter-day settlement experiment of notable magnitude to achieve enduring success was a series of Mormon settlements in the Great Basin region of Utah and adjacent states, with their tightly concentrated farm villages reminiscent of the New England model. Other efforts have been made along ethnic, religious, or political lines, but success has been at best brief and fragile.

Creating the national domain

With the coming of independence and after complex negotiations, the original 13 states surrendered to the new national government nearly all their claims to the unsettled western lands beyond their boundaries. Some tracts, however, were reserved for disposal to particular groups. Thus, the Western Reserve of northeastern Ohio gave preferential treatment to natives of Connecticut, while the military tracts in Ohio and Indiana were used as bonus payments to veterans of the American Revolution.

A federally administered national domain was created, to which the great bulk of the territory acquired in 1803 in the Louisiana Purchase and later beyond the Mississippi and in 1819 in Florida was consigned. The only major exceptions were the public lands of Texas, which were left within that state’s jurisdiction; such earlier French and Spanish land grants as were confirmed, often after tortuous litigation; and some Indian lands. In sharp contrast to the slipshod methods of colonial land survey and disposal, the federal land managers expeditiously surveyed, numbered, and mapped their territory in advance of settlement, beginning with Ohio in the 1780s, then sold or deeded it to settlers under inviting terms at a number of regional land offices.

The design universally followed in the new survey system (except within the French, Spanish, and Indian grants) was a simple, efficient rectangular scheme. Townships were laid out as blocks, each six by six miles in size, oriented with the compass directions. Thirty-six sections, each one square mile, or 640 acres (260 hectares), in size, were designated within each township; and public roads were established along section lines and, where needed, along half-section lines. At irregular intervals, offsets in survey lines and roads were introduced to allow for the Earth’s curvature. Individual property lines were coincident with, or parallel to, survey lines, and this pervasive rectangularity generally carried over into the geometry of fields and fences or into the townsites later superimposed upon the basic rural survey.

This all-encompassing checkerboard pattern is best appreciated from an airplane window over Iowa or Kansas. There, one sees few streams or other natural features and few diagonal highways or railroads interrupting the overwhelming squareness of the landscape. A systematic rectangular layout, rather less rigorous in form, also appears in much of Texas and in those portions of Maine, western New York and Pennsylvania, and southern Georgia that were settled after the 1780s.

Distribution of rural lands

Since its formation, Congress has enacted a series of complex schemes for distribution of the national domain. The most famous of these plans was the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered title to 160 acres to individual settlers, subject only to residence for a certain period of time and to the making of minimal improvements to the land thus acquired. The legal provisions of such acts have varied with time as the nature of farming technology and of the remaining lands have changed, but their general effect has been to perpetuate the Jeffersonian ideal of a republic in which yeoman farmers own and till self-sufficient properties.

The program was successful in providing private owners with relatively choice lands, aside from parcels reserved for schools and various township and municipal uses. More than one-third of the national territory, however, is still owned by federal and state governments, with much of this land in forest and wildlife preserves. A large proportion of this land is in the West and is unsuited for intensive agriculture or grazing because of the roughness, dryness, or salinity of the terrain; much of it is leased out for light grazing or for timber cutting.

Patterns of farm life

During the classic period of American rural life, around 1900, the typical American lived or worked on a farm or was economically dependent upon farmers. In contrast to rural life in many other parts of the world, the farm family lived on an isolated farmstead some distance from town and often from farm neighbours; its property averaged less than one-quarter square mile. This farmstead varied in form and content with local tradition and economy. In particular, barn types were localized—for example, the tobacco barns of the South, the great dairy barns of Wisconsin, or the general-purpose forebay barns of southeastern Pennsylvania—as were modes of fencing. In general, however, the farmstead contained dwelling, barn, storage and sheds for small livestock and equipment, a small orchard, and a kitchen garden. A woodlot might be found in the least-accessible or least-fertile part of the farm.

Successions of such farms were connected with one another and with the towns by means of a dense, usually rectangular lattice of roads, largely unimproved at the time. The hamlets, villages, and smaller cities were arrayed at relatively regular intervals, with size and affluence determined in large part by the presence and quality of rail service or status as the county seat. But, among people who have been historically rural, individualistic, and antiurban in bias, many services normally located in urban places might be found in rustic settings. Thus, much retail business was transacted by means of itinerant peddlers, while small shops for the fabrication, distribution, or repair of various items were often located in isolated farmsteads, as were many post offices.

Social activity also tended to be widely dispersed among numerous rural churches, schools, or grange halls; and the climactic event of the year might well be the county fair, political rally, or religious encampment—again on a rural site. Not the least symptomatic sign of the strong tendency toward spatial isolation are the countless family burial plots or community cemeteries so liberally distributed across the countryside.

Regional small-town patterns

There has been much regional variation among smaller villages and hamlets, but such phenomena have received relatively little attention from students of American culture or geography. The distinctive New England village, of course, is generally recognized and cherished: it consists of a loose clustering of white frame buildings, including a church (usually Congregationalist or Unitarian), town hall, shops, and stately homes with tall shade trees around the central green, or commons—a grassy expanse that may contain a bandstand and monuments or flowers. Derivative village forms were later carried westward to sections of the northern Midwest.

Less widely known but equally distinctive is the town morphology characteristic of the Midland, or Pennsylvanian, culture area and most fully developed in southeastern and central Pennsylvania and Piedmont Maryland. It differs totally from the New England model in density, building materials, and general appearance. Closely packed, often contiguous buildings—mostly brick, but sometimes stone, frame, or stucco—abut directly on a sidewalk, which is often paved with brick and usually thickly planted with maple, sycamore, or other shade trees. Such towns are characteristically linear in plan, have dwellings intermingled with other types of buildings, have only one or two principal streets, and may radiate outward from a central square lined with commercial and governmental structures.

Midwest States: History and PeopleEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.The most characteristic U.S. small town is the one whose pattern evolved in the Midwest. Its simple scheme is usually based on the grid plan. Functions are rigidly segregated spatially, with the central business district, consisting of closely packed two- or three-story brick buildings, limited exclusively to commercial and administrative activity. The residences, generally set well back within spacious lots, are peripheral in location, as are most rail facilities, factories, and warehouses.

Even the modest urbanization of the small town came late to the South. Most urban functions long were spatially dispersed—almost totally so in the early Chesapeake Bay country or North Carolina—or were performed entirely by the larger plantations dominating the economic life of much of the region. When city and town began to materialize in the 19th and 20th centuries, they tended to follow the Midwestern model in layout.

Although quite limited in geographic area, the characteristic villages of the Mormon and Hispanic-American districts are of considerable interest. The Mormon settlement uncompromisingly followed the ecclesiastically imposed grid plan composed of square blocks, each with perhaps only four very large house lots, and the block surrounded by extremely wide streets. Those villages in New Mexico in which population and culture were derived from Old Mexico were often built according to the standard Latin-American plan. The distinctive feature is a central plaza dominated by a Roman Catholic church and encircled by low stone or adobe buildings.

Weakening of the agrarian ideal

The United States has had little success in achieving or maintaining the ideal of the family farm. Through purchase, inheritance, leasing, and other means, some of dubious legality, smaller properties have been merged into much larger entities. By the late 1980s, for example, when the average farm size had surpassed 460 acres, farms containing 2,000 or more acres accounted for almost half of all farmland and 20 percent of the cropland harvested, even though they comprised less than 3 percent of all farms. At the other extreme were those 60 percent of all farms that contained fewer than 180 acres and reported less than 15 percent of cropland harvested. This trend toward fewer but larger farms has continued.

The huge, heavily capitalized “neoplantation,” essentially a factory in the field, is especially conspicuous in parts of California, Arizona, and the Mississippi Delta, but examples can be found in any state. There are also many smaller but intensive operations that call for large investments and advanced managerial skills. This trend toward large-scale, capital-intensive farm enterprise has been paralleled by a sharp drop in rural farm population—a slump from the all-time high of some 32,000,000 in the early 20th century to about 5,000,000 in the late 1980s; but even in 1940, when farm folk still numbered more than 30,000,000, nearly 40 percent of farm operators were tenants, and another 10 percent were only partial owners.

As the agrarian population has dwindled, so too has its immediate impact lessened, though less swiftly, in economic and political matters. The rural United States, however, has been the source of many of the nation’s values and images. The United States has become a highly urbanized, technologically advanced society far removed in daily life from cracker barrel, barnyard, corral, or logging camp. Although Americans have gravitated, sometimes reluctantly, to the big city, in the daydreams and assumptions that guide many sociopolitical decisions, the memory of a rapidly vanishing agrarian America is well noted. This is revealed not only in the works of contemporary novelists, poets, and painters but also throughout the popular arts: in movies, television, soap operas, folklore, country music, political oratory, and in much leisure activity.

Impact of the motor vehicle

Since about 1920 more genuine change has occurred in American rural life than during the preceding three centuries of European settlement in North America. Although the basic explanation is the profound social and technological transformations engulfing most of the world, the most immediate agent of change has been the internal-combustion engine. The automobile, truck, bus, and paved highway have more than supplanted a moribund passenger and freight railroad system. While many local rail depots have been boarded up and scores of secondary lines have been abandoned, hundreds of thousands of miles of old dirt roads have been paved, and a vast system of interstate highways has been constructed to connect major cities in a single nonstop network. The net result has been a shrinking of travel time and an increase in miles traveled for the individual driver, rural or urban.

Small towns in the United States have undergone a number of changes. Before 1970 towns near highways and urban centres generally prospered; while in the less-fortunate towns, where the residents lingered on for the sake of relatively cheap housing, downtown businesses often became extinct. From the late 1960s until about 1981 the rural and small-town population grew at a faster rate than the metropolitan population, the so-called metro–nonmetro turnaround, thus reversing more than a century of relatively greater urban growth. Subsequent evidence, however, suggests an approach toward equilibrium between the urban and rural sectors.

As Americans have become increasingly mobile, the visual aspect of rural America has altered drastically. The highway has become the central route, and many of the functions once confined to the local town or city now stretch for many miles along major roads.

Reversal of the classic rural dominance

The metropolitanization of life in the United States has not been limited to city, suburb, or exurb; it now involves most of the rural area and population. The result has been the decline of local crafts and regional peculiarities, quite visibly in such items as farm implements, fencing, silos, and housing and in commodities such as clothing or bread. In many ways, the countryside is now economically dependent on the city.

The city dweller is the dominant consumer for products other than those of field, quarry, or lumber mill; and city location tends to determine patterns of rural economy rather than the reverse. During weekends and the vacation seasons, swarms of city folk stream out to second homes in the countryside and to campgrounds, ski runs, beaches, boating areas, or hunting and fishing tracts. For many large rural areas, recreation is the principal source of income and employment; and such areas as northern New England and upstate New York have become playgrounds and sylvan refuges for many urban residents.

The larger cities reach far into the countryside for their vital supplies of water and energy. There is an increasing reliance upon distant coalfields to provide fuel for electrical power plants, and cities have gone far afield in seeking out rural disposal sites for their ever-growing volumes of garbage.

The majority of the rural population now lives within daily commuting range of a sizable city. This enables many farm residents to operate their farms while, at the same time, working part- or full-time at a city job, and it thus helps to prevent the drastic decline in rural population that has occurred in remoter parts of the country. Similarly, many small towns within the shadow of a metropolis, with fewer and fewer farmers to service, have become dormitory satellites, serving residents from nearby cities and suburbs.

Classic patterns of siting and growth

Although more than 95 percent of the population was rural during the colonial period and for the first years of independence, cities were crucial elements in the settlement system from the earliest days. Boston; New Amsterdam (New York City); Jamestown, Va.; Charleston, S.C.; and Philadelphia were founded at the same time as the colonies they served. Like nearly all other North American colonial towns of consequence, they were ocean ports. Until at least the beginning of the 20th century the historical geography of U.S. cities was intimately related with that of successive transportation systems. The location of successful cities with respect to the areas they served, as well as their internal structure, was determined largely by the nature of these systems.

The colonial cities acted as funnels for the collection and shipment of farm and forest products and other raw materials from the interior to trading partners in Europe, the Caribbean, or Africa and for the return flow of manufactured goods and other locally scarce items, as well as immigrants. Such cities were essentially marts and warehouses, and only minimal attention was given to social, military, educational, or religious functions. The inadequacy and high cost of overland traffic dictated sites along major ocean embayments or river estuaries; the only pre-1800 nonports worthy of notice were Lancaster and York, both in Pennsylvania, and Williamsburg, Va. With the populating of the interior and the spread of a system of canals and improved roads, such new cities as Pittsburgh, Pa.; Cincinnati, Ohio; Buffalo, N.Y.; and St. Louis, Mo., mushroomed at junctures between various routes or at which modes of transport were changed. Older ocean ports, such as New Castle, Del.; Newport, R.I.; Charleston, S.C.; Savannah, Ga.; and Portland, Maine, whose locations prevented them from serving large hinterlands, tended to stagnate.

From about 1850 to 1920 the success of new cities and the further growth of older ones in large part were dependent on their location within the new steam railroad system and on their ability to dominate a large tributary territory. Such waterside rail hubs as Buffalo; Toledo, Ohio; Chicago; and San Francisco gained population and wealth rapidly, while such offspring of the rail era as Atlanta, Ga.; Indianapolis, Ind.; Minneapolis, Minn.; Fort Worth, Texas; and Tacoma, Wash., also grew dramatically. Much of the rapid industrialization of the 19th and early 20th centuries occurred in places already favoured by water or rail transport systems; but in some instances, such as in the cities of northeastern Pennsylvania’s anthracite region, some New England mill towns, and the textile centres of the Carolina and Virginia Piedmont, manufacturing brought about rapid urbanization and the consequent attraction of transport facilities. The extraction of gold, silver, copper, coal, iron, and, in the 20th century, gas and oil led to rather ephemeral centres—unless these places were able to capitalize on local or regional advantages other than minerals.

A strong early start, whatever the inital economic base may have been, was often the key factor in competition among cities. With sufficient early momentum, urban capital and population tended to expand almost automatically. The point is illustrated perfectly by the larger cities of the northeastern seaboard, from Portland, Maine, through Baltimore, Md. The nearby physical wealth is poor to mediocre, and they are now far off-centre on the national map; but a prosperous mercantile beginning, good land and sea connections with distant places, and a rich local accumulation of talent, capital, and initiative were sufficient to bring about the growth of one of the world’s largest concentrations of industry, commerce, and people.

New factors in municipal development

The pre-1900 development of the American city was almost completely a chronicle of the economics of the production, collection, and distribution of physical commodities and basic services dictated by geography, but there have been striking deviations from this pattern. The physical determinants of urban location and growth have given way to social factors. Increasingly, the most successful cities are oriented toward the more advanced modes for the production and consumption of services, specifically the knowledge, managerial, and recreational industries. The largest cities have become more dependent upon corporate headquarters, communications, and the manipulation of information for their sustenance. Washington, D.C., is the most obvious example of a metropolis in which government and ancillary activities have been the spur for vigorous growth; but almost all of the state capitals have displayed a similar demographic and economic vitality. Further, urban centres that contain a major college or university often have enjoyed remarkable expansion.

With the coming of relative affluence and abundant leisure to the population and a decrease of labour input in industrial processes, a new breed of cities has sprouted across the land: those that cater to the pleasure-seeker, vacationer, and the retired—for example, the young, flourishing cities of Florida or Nevada and many locations in California, Arizona, and Colorado.

The automobile as a means of personal transportation was developed about the time of World War I, and the American city was catapulted into a radically new period, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in the further evolution of physical form and function. The size, density, and internal structure of the city were previously constrained by the limitations of the pedestrian and early mass-transit systems. Only the well-to-do could afford horse and carriage or a secluded villa in the countryside. Cities were relatively small and compact, with a single clearly defined centre, and they grew by accretion along their edges, without any significant spatial hiatuses except where commuter railroads linked outlying towns to the largest of metropolises. Workers living beyond the immediate vicinity of their work had to locate within reach of the few horse-drawn omnibuses or the later electric street railways.

The universality of the automobile, even among the less affluent, and the parallel proliferation of service facilities and highways greatly loosened and fragmented the American city, which spread over surrounding rural lands. Older, formerly autonomous towns grew swiftly. Many towns became satellites of the larger city or were absorbed. Many suburbs and subdivisions arose with single-family homes on lots larger than had been possible for the ordinary householder in the city. These communities were almost totally dependent on the highway for the flow of commuters, goods, and services, and many were located in splendid isolation, separated by tracts of farmland, brush, or forest from other such developments. At the major interchanges of the limited-access highways, a new form of agglomerated settlement sprang up. In a further elaboration of this trend, many larger cities have been girdled by a set of mushrooming complexes. These creations of private enterprise embody a novel concept of urban existence: a metropolitan module no longer reliant on the central city or its downtown. Usually anchored on a cluster of shopping malls and office parks, these “hypersuburbs,” whose residents and employees circulate freely within the outer metropolitan ring, offer virtually all of the social and economic facilities needed for the modern life-style.

The new look of the metropolitan area

The outcome has been a broad, ragged, semiurbanized belt of land surrounding each city, large or small, and quite often blending imperceptibly into the suburban-exurban halo encircling a neighbouring metropolitan centre. There is a great similarity in the makeup and general appearance of all such tracts: the planless intermixture of scraps of the rural landscape with the fragments of the scattered metropolis; the randomly distributed subdivisions or single homes; the vast shopping centres, the large commercial cemeteries, drive-in theatres, junkyards, and golf courses and other recreational enterprises; and the regional or metropolitan airport, often with its own cluster of factories, warehouses, or travel-oriented businesses. The traditional city—unitary, concentric in form, with a single well-defined middle—has been replaced by a relatively amorphous, polycentric metropolitan sprawl.

The inner city of a large U.S. metropolitan area displays some traits that are common to the larger centres of all advanced nations. A central business district, almost always the oldest section of the city, is surrounded by a succession of roughly circular zones, each distinctive in economic and social-ethnic character. The symmetry of this scheme is distorted by the irregularities of surface and drainage or the effects of radial highways and railroads. Land is most costly, and hence land use is most intensive, toward the centre. Major business, financial and governmental offices, department stores, and specialty shops dominate the downtown, which is usually fringed by a band of factories and warehouses. The outer parts of the city, like the suburbs, are mainly residential.

With some exceptions—e.g., large apartment complexes in downtown Chicago—people do not reside in the downtown areas, and there is a steady downward gradient in population density per unit area (and more open land and single-family residences) as one moves from the inner city toward the open country. Conversely, there is a general rise in income and social status with increasing distance from the core. The sharply defined immigrant neighbourhoods of the 19th century generally persist in a somewhat diluted form, though specific ethnic groups may have shifted their location. Later migrant groups, notably Southern blacks and Latin Americans, generally dominate the more run-down neighbourhoods of the inner cities.

Individual and collective character of cities

American cities, more so than the small-town or agrarian landscape, tend to be the product of a particular period rather than of location. The relatively venerable centres of the Eastern Seaboard—Boston; Philadelphia; Baltimore, Md.; Albany, N.Y.; Chester, Pa.; Alexandria, Va.; or Georgetown (a district of Washington, D.C.), for example—are virtual replicas of the fashionable European models of their early period rather than the fruition of a regional culture, unlike New Orleans and Santa Fe, N.M., which reflect other times and regions. The townscapes of Pittsburgh; Detroit, Mich.; Chicago; and Denver, Colo., depict national modes of thought and the technological development of their formative years, just as Dallas, Texas; Las Vegas, Nev.; San Diego, Calif.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Albuquerque, N.M., proclaim contemporary values and gadgetry more than any local distinctiveness. When strong-minded city founders instituted a highly individual plan and their successors managed to preserve it—as, for example, in Savannah, Ga.; Washington, D.C.; and Salt Lake City, Utah—or when there is a happy combination of a spectacular site and appreciative residents—as in San Francisco or Seattle, Wash.—a genuine individuality does seem to emerge. Such an identity also may develop where immigration has been highly selective, as in such places as Miami, Fla.; Phoenix, Ariz.; and Los Angeles.

As a group, U.S. cities differ from cities in other countries in both type and degree. The national political structure, the social inclinations of the people, and the strong outward surge of urban development have led to the political fragmentation of metropolises that socially and economically are relatively cohesive units. The fact that a single metropolitan area may sprawl across numerous incorporated towns and cities, several townships, and two or more counties and states has a major impact upon both its appearance and the way it functions. Not the least of these effects is a dearth of overall physical and social planning (or its ineffectuality when attempted), and the rather chaotic, inharmonious appearance of both inner-city and peripheral zones painfully reflects the absence of any effective collective action concerning such matters.

The American city is a place of sharp transitions. Construction, demolition, and reconstruction go on almost ceaselessly, though increasing thought has been given to preserving monuments and buildings. From present evidence, it would be impossible to guess that New York City and Albany date from the 1620s or that Detroit was founded in 1701. Preservation and restoration do occur, but often only when it makes sense in terms of tourist revenue. Physical and social blight has reached epidemic proportions in the slum areas of the inner city; but, despite the wholesale razing of such areas and the subsequent urban-renewal projects (sometimes as apartment or commercial developments for the affluent), the belief has become widespread that the ills of the U.S. city are incurable, especially with the increasing flight of capital, tax revenue, and the more highly educated, affluent elements of the population to suburban areas and the spatial and political polarization of whites and nonwhites.

In the central sections of U.S. cities, there is little sense of history or continuity; instead, one finds evidence of the dominance of the engineering mentality and of the credo that the business of the city is business. Commercial and administrative activities are paramount, and usually there is little room for church buildings or for parks or other nonprofit enterprises. The role of the cathedral, so central in the medieval European city, is filled by a U.S. invention serving both utilitarian and symbolic purposes, the skyscraper. Some cities have felt the need for other bold secular monuments; hence the Gateway Arch looming over St. Louis, Seattle’s Space Needle, and Houston’s Astrodome. Future archaeologists may well conclude from their excavations that American society was ruled by an oligarchy of highway engineers, architects, and bulldozer operators. The great expressways converging upon, or looping, the downtown area and the huge amount of space devoted to parking lots and garages are even more impressive than the massive surgery executed upon U.S. cities a century ago to hack out room for railroad terminals and marshaling yards.

Within many urban sites there has been radical physical transformation of shoreline, drainage systems, and land surface that would be difficult to match elsewhere in the world. Thus, in their physical lineaments, Manhattan and inner Boston bear scant resemblance to the landscapes seen by their initial settlers. The surface of downtown Chicago has been raised several feet above its former swamp level, the city’s lakefront extensively reshaped, and the flow of the Chicago River reversed. Los Angeles, notorious for its disregard of the environment, has its concrete arroyo bottoms, terraced hillsides and landslides, and its own artificial microclimate.

The supercities

The unprecedented outward sprawl of American urban settlement has created some novel settlement forms, for the quantitative change has been so great as to induce qualitative transformation. The conurbation—a territorial coalescence of two or more sizable cities whose peripheral zones have grown together—may have first appeared in early 19th-century Europe. There are major examples in Great Britain, the Low Countries, and Germany, as well as in Japan.

Nothing elsewhere, however, rivals in size and complexity the aptly named megalopolis, that supercity stretching along the Atlantic from Portland, Maine, past Richmond, Va. Other large conurbations include, in the Great Lakes region, one centred on Chicago and containing large slices of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana; another based in Detroit, embracing large parts of Michigan and Ohio and reaching into Canada; and a third stretching from Buffalo through Cleveland and back to Pittsburgh. All three are reaching toward one another and may form another megalopolis that, in turn, may soon be grafted onto the seaboard megalopolis by a corridor through central New York state.

Another example of a growing megalopolis is the huge southern California conurbation reaching from Santa Barbara, through a dominating Los Angeles, to the Mexican border. The solid strip of urban territory that lines the eastern shore of Puget Sound is a smaller counterpart. Quite exceptional in form is the slender linear multicity occupying Florida’s Atlantic coastline, from Jacksonville to Miami, and the loose swarm of medium-sized cities clustering along the Southern Piedmont, from south-central Virginia to Birmingham, Ala.; also of note are the Texas cities of Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio, which have formed a rapidly growing—though discontinuous—urbanized triangle.

One of the few predictions that seem safe in so dynamic and innovative a land as the United States is that, unless severe and painful controls are placed on land use, the shape of the urban environment will be increasingly megalopolitan: a small set of great constellations of polycentric urban zones, each complexly interlocked socially and physically with its neighbours.

New England

United States: New EnglandEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.New England was the dominant region during the century of rapid expansion following the American Revolution and not merely in terms of demographic or economic expansion. In social and cultural life—in education, politics, theology, literature, science, architecture, and the more advanced forms of mechanical and social technology—the area exercised its primacy. New England was the leading source of ideas and styles for the nation from about 1780 to 1880; it furnishes an impressive example of the capacity of strongly motivated communities to rise above the constraints of a harsh environment.

During its first two centuries, New England had an unusually homogeneous population. With some exceptions, the British immigrants shared the same nonconformist religious beliefs, language, social organization, and general outlook. A distinctive regional culture took form, most noticeably in terms of dialect, town morphology, and folk architecture. The personality of the people also took on a regional coloration both in folklore and in actuality; there is sound basis for the belief that the traditional New England Yankee is self-reliant, thrifty, inventive, and enterprising. The influx of immigrants that began in the 1830s diluted and altered the New England identity, but much of its early personality survived.

By virtue of location, wealth, and seniority, the Boston metropolitan area has become the cultural economic centre of New England. This sovereignty is shared to some degree, however, with two other old centres, the lower Connecticut Valley and the Narragansett Bay region of Rhode Island.

The early westward demographic and ideological expansion of New England was so influential that it is justifiable to call New York, northern New Jersey, northern Pennsylvania, and much of the Upper Midwest “New England Extended.” Further, the energetic endeavours of New England whalers, merchants, and missionaries had a considerable impact on the cultures of Hawaii, various other Pacific isles, and several points in the Caribbean. New Englanders also were active in the Americanization of early Oregon and Washington, with results that are still visible. Later, the overland diffusion of New England natives and practices meant a recognizable New England character not only for the Upper Midwest, from Ohio to the Dakotas, but also in the Pacific Northwest in general, though to a lesser degree.

The South

United States: The Upper SouthEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.By far the largest of the three original Anglo-American culture areas, the South is also the most idiosyncratic with respect to national norms—or slowest to accept them. The South was once so distinct from the non-South in almost every observable or quantifiable feature and so fiercely proud of its peculiarities that for some years the question of whether it could maintain political and social unity with the non-South was in serious doubt. These differences are still observable in almost every realm of human activity, including rural economy, dialect, diet, costume, folklore, politics, architecture, social customs, and recreation. Only during the 20th century can an argument be made that it has achieved a decisive convergence with the rest of the nation, at least in terms of economic behaviour and material culture.

A persistent deviation from the national mainstream probably began in the first years of settlement. The first settlers of the South were almost purely British, not outwardly different from those who flocked to New England or the Midland, but almost certainly distinct in terms of motives and social values and more conservative in retaining the rurality and the family and social structure of premodern Europe. The vast importation of African slaves was also a major factor, as was a degree of contact with the Indians that was less pronounced farther north. In addition, the unusual pattern of economy (much different from that of northwestern Europe), settlement, and social organization, which were in part an adaptation to a starkly unfamiliar physical habitat, accentuated the South’s deviation from other culture areas.

In both origin and spatial structure, the South has been characterized by diffuseness. In the search for a single cultural hearth, the most plausible choice is the Chesapeake Bay area and the northeastern corner of North Carolina, the earliest area of recognizably Southern character. Early components of Southern population and culture also arrived from other sources. A narrow coastal strip from North Carolina to the Georgia–Florida border and including the Sea Islands is decidedly Southern in character, yet it stands apart self-consciously from other parts of the South. Though colonized directly from Great Britain, it had also significant connections with the West Indies, in which relation the African cultural contribution was strongest and purest. Charleston and Savannah, which nurtured their own distinctive civilizations, dominated this subregion. Similarly, French Louisiana received elements of culture and population—to be stirred into the special Creole mixture—not only, putatively, from the Chesapeake Bay hearth area but also indirectly from France, French Nova Scotia, the French West Indies, and Africa. In south central Texas, the Germanic and Hispanic influx was so heavy that a special subregion can be designated.

It would seem, then, that the Southern culture area may be an example of convergent, or parallel, evolution of a variety of elements arriving along several paths but subject to some single general process that could mold one larger regional consciousness and way of life.

Because of its slowness in joining the national technological mainstream, the South can be subdivided into a much greater number of subregions than is possible for any of the other older traditional regions. Those described above are of lesser order than the two principal Souths, variously called Upper and Lower (or Deep) South, Upland and Lowland South, or Yeoman and Plantation South.

The Upland South, which comprises the southern Appalachians, the upper Appalachian Piedmont, the Cumberland and other low interior plateaus, and the Ozarks and Ouachitas, was colonized culturally and demographically from the Chesapeake Bay hearth area and the Midland; it is most emphatically white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) in character. The latter area, which contains a large black population, includes the greater part of the South Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains and the lower Appalachian Piedmont. Its early major influences came from the Chesapeake Bay area, with only minor elements from the coastal Carolina–Georgia belt, Louisiana, and elsewhere. The division between the two subregions remains distinct from Virginia to Texas, but each region can be further subdivided. Within the Upland South, the Ozark region might legitimately be detached from the Appalachian; and, within the latter, the proud and prosperous Kentucky Bluegrass, with its emphasis on tobacco and Thoroughbreds, certainly merits special recognition.

Toward the margins of the South, the difficulties in delimiting subregions become greater. The outer limits themselves are a topic of special interest. There seems to be more than an accidental relation between these limits and various climatic factors. The fuzzy northern boundary, definitely not associated with the conventional Mason and Dixon Line or the Ohio River, seems most closely associated with length of frost-free season or with temperature during the winter. As the Southern cultural complex was carried to the West, it not only retained its strength but became more intense, in contrast to the influence of New England and the Midland. But the South finally fades away as one approaches the 100th meridian, with its critical decline in annual precipitation. The apparent correlation between the cultural South and a humid subtropical climatic regime is in many ways valid.

The Texas subregion is so large, distinctive, vigorous, and self-assertive that it presents some vexing classificatory questions. Is Texas simply a subregion of the Greater South, or has it acquired so strong and divergent an identity that it can be regarded as a major region in its own right? It is likely that a major region has been born in a frontier zone in which several distinct cultural communities confront one another and in which the mixture has bred the vigorous, extroverted, aggressive Texas personality so widely celebrated in song and story. Similarly, peninsular Florida may be considered either within or juxtaposed to the South but not necessarily part of it. In the case of Florida, an almost empty territory began to receive significant settlement only after about 1890, and if, like Texas, most of it came from the older South, there were also vigorous infusions from elsewhere.

The Midland

United States: Middle Atlantic regionEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.The significance of this region has not been less than that of New England or the South, but its characteristics are the least conspicuous to outsiders as well as to its own residents—reflecting, perhaps, its centrality in the course of U.S. development. The Midland (a term not to be confused with Midwest) comprises portions of Middle Atlantic and Upper Southern states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Serious European settlement of the Midland began a generation or more after that of the other major cultural centres and after several earlier, relatively ineffectual trials by the Dutch, Swedes, Finns, and British. But once begun late in the 17th century by William Penn and his associates, the colonization of the area was a success. Within southeastern Pennsylvania this culture area first assumed its distinctive character: a prosperous, sober, industrious agricultural society that quickly became a mixed economy as mercantile and later industrial functions came to the fore. By the mid-18th century much of the region had acquired a markedly urban character, resembling in many ways the more advanced portions of the North Sea countries. In this respect, at least, the Midland was well ahead of neighbouring areas to the north and south.

It differed also in its polyglot ethnicity. From almost the beginning, the various ethnic and religious groups of the British Isles were joined by immigrants from the European mainland. This diversity has grown and is likely to continue. The mosaic of colonial ethnic groups has persisted in much of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, as has the remarkable variety of nationalities and churches in coalfields, company towns, cities, and many rural areas. Much of the same ethnic heterogeneity can be seen in New England, the Midwest, and a few other areas, but the Midland stands out as perhaps the most polyglot region of the nation. The Germanic element has always been notably strong, if irregularly distributed, in the Midland, accounting for more than 70 percent of the population of many towns. Had the Anglo-American culture not triumphed, the area might well have been designated Pennsylvania German.

Physiography and migration carried the Midland culture area into the Maryland Piedmont. Although its width tapers quickly below the Potomac, it reaches into parts of Virginia and West Virginia, with traces legible far down the Appalachian zone and into the South.

The northern half of the greater Midland region (the New York subregion, or New England Extended) cannot be assigned unequivocally to either New England or this Midland. Essentially it is a hybrid formed mainly from two regional strains of almost equal strength: New England and the post-1660 British element moving up the Hudson valley and beyond. There has also been a persistent, if slight, residue of early Dutch culture and some subtle filtering northward of Pennsylvanian influences. Apparently within the New York subregion occurred the first major fusion of American regional cultures, especially within the early 19th-century “Burned-Over District,” around the Finger Lakes and Genesee areas of central and western New York. This locality, the seedbed for a number of important social innovations, was a major staging area for westward migration and possibly a major source for the people and notions that were to build the Midwestern culture area.

Toward the west the Midland retains its integrity for only a short distance—certainly no further than eastern Ohio—as it becomes submerged within the Midwest. Still, its significance in the genesis of the Midwest and the national culture should not be minimized. Its success in projecting its image upon so much of the country may have drawn attention away from the source area. As both name and location suggest, the Midland is intermediate in character in many respects, lying between New England and the South. Its residents are much less concerned with, or conscious of, a strong regional identity (excepting the Pennsylvania Dutch caricatures) than is true for the other regions, and, in addition, the Midland lacks their strong political and literary traditions, though it is unmistakable in its distinctive townscapes and farmsteads.

The Midwest

United States: The MidwestEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc. There is no such self-effacement in the Midwest, that large triangular region justly regarded as the most nearly representative of the national average. Everyone within or outside of the Midwest knows of its existence, but no one is certain where it begins or ends. The older apex of the eastward-pointing triangle appears to rest around Pittsburgh, while the two western corners melt away somewhere in the Great Plains, possibly in southern Manitoba in the north and southern Kansas in the south. The eastern terminus and the southern and western borders are broad, indistinct transitional zones.

Serious study of the historical geography of the Midwest began only in the 20th century, but it seems likely that this culture region was the combination of all three colonial regions and that this combination first took place in the upper Ohio valley. The early routes of travel—the Ohio and its tributaries, the Great Lakes, and the low, level corridor along the Mohawk and the coastal plains of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie—converge upon Ohio. There, the people and cultural traits from New England, the Midland, and the South were first funneled together. There seems to have been a fanlike widening of the new hybrid area into the West as settlers worked their way frontierward.

Two major subregions are readily discerned, the Upper and Lower Midwest. They are separated by a line, roughly approximating the 41st parallel, that persists as far west as Colorado in terms of speech patterns and indicates differences in regional provenance in ethnic and religious terms as well. Much of the Upper Midwest retains a faint New England character, although Midland influences are probably as important. A rich mixture of German, Scandinavian, Slavic, and other non-WASP elements has greatly diversified a stock in which the British element usually remains dominant and the range of church denominations is great. The Lower Midwest, except for the relative scarcity of blacks, tends to resemble the South in its predominantly Protestant and British makeup. There are some areas with sizable Roman Catholic and non-WASP populations, but on the whole the subregion tends to be more WASP in inclination than most other parts of the nation.

The problem of “the West”

Mountain Region: History and PeopleEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.The foregoing culture areas account for roughly the eastern half of the coterminous United States. There is a dilemma in classifying the remaining half. The concept of the American West, strong in the popular imagination, is reinforced constantly by romanticized cinematic and television images of the cowboy. It is facile to accept the widespread Western livestock complex as epitomizing the full gamut of Western life, because although the cattle industry may have once accounted for more than one-half of the active Western domain as measured in acres, it employed only a relatively small fraction of the total population. As a single subculture, it cannot represent the total regional culture.

It is not clear whether there is a genuine, single, grand Western culture region. Unlike the East, where virtually all the land is developed and culture areas and subregions abut and overlap in splendid confusion, the eight major and many lesser nodes of population in the western United States resemble oases, separated from one another by wide expanses of nearly unpopulated mountain or arid desert. The only obvious properties these isolated clusters have in common are, first, the intermixture of several strains of culture, primarily from the East but with additions from Europe, Mexico, and East Asia, and, second, except for one subregion, a general modernity, having been settled in a serious way no earlier than the 1840s. Some areas may be viewed as inchoate, or partially formed, cultural entities; the others have acquired definite personalities but are difficult to classify as first-order or lesser order culture areas.

There are several major tracts in the western United States that reveal a genuine cultural identity: the Upper Rio Grande region, the Mormon region, southern California, and, by some accounts, northern California. To this group one might add the anomalous Texan and Oklahoman subregions, which have elements of both the West and the South.

United States: The SouthwestEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.The term Upper Rio Grande region was coined to denote the oldest and strongest of the three sectors of Hispanic-American activity in the Southwest, the others being southern California and portions of Texas. Although covering the valley of the upper Rio Grande, the region also embraces segments of Arizona and Colorado as well as other parts of New Mexico. European communities and culture have been present there, with only one interruption, since the late 16th century. The initial sources were Spain and Mexico, but after 1848 at least three distinct strains of Anglo-American culture were increasingly well represented—the Southern, Mormon, and a general undifferentiated Northeastern culture—plus a distinct Texan subcategory. For once this has occurred without obliterating the Indians, whose culture endures in various stages of dilution, from the strongly Americanized or Hispanicized to the almost undisturbed.

The general mosaic is a fabric of Indian, Anglo, and Hispanic elements, and all three major groups, furthermore, are complex in character. The Indian component is made up of Navajo, Pueblo, and several smaller groups, each of which is quite distinct from the others. The Hispanic element is also diverse—modally Mexican mestizo, but ranging from pure Spanish to nearly pure pre-Spanish aboriginal.

United States: The northern Mountain regionEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.The Mormon region is expansive in the religious and demographic realms, though it has ceased to expand territorially as it did in the decades after the first settlement in the Salt Lake valley in 1847. Despite its Great Basin location and an exemplary adaptation to environmental constraints, this cultural complex appears somewhat non-Western in spirit: the Mormons may be in the West, but they are not entirely of it. Their historical derivation from the Midwest and from ultimate sources in New York and New England is still apparent, along with the generous admixture of European converts to their religion.

As in New England, the power of the human will and an intensely cherished abstract design have triumphed over an unfriendly habitat. The Mormon way of life is expressed in the settlement landscape and economic activities within a region more homogeneous internally than any other U.S. culture area.

CaliforniaEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.In contrast, northern California has yet to gain its own strong cultural coloration. From the beginning of the great 1849 gold rush the area drew a diverse population from Europe and Asia as well as the older portions of the United States. Whether the greater part of northern California has produced a culture amounting to more than the sum of the contributions brought by immigrants is questionable. San Francisco, the regional metropolis, may have crossed the qualitative threshold. An unusually cosmopolitan outlook that includes an awareness of the Orient stronger than that of any other U.S. city, a fierce self-esteem, and a unique townscape may be symptomatic of a genuinely new, emergent local culture.

Southern California is the most spectacular of the Western regions, not only in terms of economic and population growth but also for the luxuriance, regional particularism, and general avant-garde character of its swiftly evolving cultural pattern. Until the coming of a direct transcontinental rail connection in 1885, the region was remote, rural, and largely inconsequential. Since then, the invasion by persons from virtually every corner of North America and by the world has been massive, but since the 1960s in-migration has slackened perceptibly, and many residents have begun to question the doctrine of unlimited growth. In any event, a loosely articulated series of urban and suburban developments continue to encroach upon what little is left of arable or habitable land in the Coast Ranges and valleys from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border.

Although every major ethnic and racial group and every other U.S. culture area is amply represented in southern California, there is reason to suspect that a process of selection for certain types of people, attitudes, and personality traits may have been at work at both source and destination. The region is distinct from, or perhaps in the vanguard of, the remainder of the nation. One might view southern California as the super-American region or the outpost of a postindustrial future, but its cultural distinctiveness is very evident in landscape and social behaviour. Southern California in no way approaches being a “traditional region,” or even the smudged facsimile of such, but rather the largest, boldest experiment in creating a “voluntary region,” one built through the self-selection of immigrants and their subsequent interaction.

United States: The northern Pacific CoastEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.The remaining identifiable Western regions—the Willamette valley of Oregon, the Puget Sound region, the Inland Empire of eastern Washington and adjacent tracts of Idaho and Oregon, central Arizona, and the Colorado Piedmont—can be treated jointly as potential, or emergent, culture areas, still too close to the national mean to display any cultural distinctiveness. In all of these regions is evident the arrival of a cross section of the national population and the growth of regional life around one or more major metropolises. A New England element is noteworthy in the Willamette valley and Puget Sound regions, while a Hispanic-American component appears in the Colorado Piedmont and central Arizona. Only time and further study will reveal whether any of these regions, so distant from the historic sources of U.S. population and culture, have the capacity to become an independent cultural area.