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American

Specialty Definition: American

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Specialty Definition: American

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

American can mean when used as an adjective "of the United States of America" or "of or relating to the Americas"; when used as a noun "United States citizen", "residing in the Americas", or less frequently "American English".

English language speakers generally use "American" to refer to the United States only, especially outside of Latin America.

As many people from the various nations throughout the New World consider themselves to be "Americans", some people think the common usage of "American" to refer to only people from the U.S. should be avoided in international contexts where it might be ambiguous. Many neologisms have been proposed to refer to the United States instead of "American". However, they are virtually unused, and most commentators feel that it is unlikely that they will catch on. See Alternate words for American for more information.

The American race is an obsolete 19th-century racial classification referring to the various peoples now called Native Americans, also historically called the "red" race, although that latter term is often considered deragotory by most people.

See also:

• United States
• North America
• South America
• Central America
• Latin America
• The Americas
• Organization of American States
• Alternate words for American
• Native Americans
• Hypenated American
• American River
• American English
• American Airlines, sometimes referred to as American

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "American."

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American Airlines

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

American Airlines Boeing 777.
Larger version

American Airlines is the largest airline in the world and is based in Fort Worth, Texas in the United States. It's IATA designator is AA.

In 1934, American Airways Company became American Airlines, Inc. It is now one of the divisions operated by its parent company, AMR Corp AMR Corp. also operates American Eagle Airlines, Inc (which includes Executive Air.) and American Connection. Trans World Airlines, LLC was operated by AMR before it was consolidated into AA. The CEO is Gerard Arpey and the chairman is Edward A. Brennan.

American Airlines is part of the airline alliance Oneworld. They also codeshare rail service to stations in France with SNCF French Rail, Belgium with Thalys International, Germany with Deutsche Bahn (AiRail Service) and stations in Switzerland (one of which also serves France), with Swiss Rail

History

American Airlines McDonnell Douglas DC-10; this model of aircraft has been phased out

American Airlines developed from a conglomeration of about 82 small airlines companies through a series of corporate acquisitions and reorganizations. In 1934, American Airways Company, in financial straits, was acquired by a corporate raider, E.L. (Errett Lobban) Cord. who renamed the company "American Airlines".

One of the early American Airlines presidents, C.R. (Cyrus Rowlett) Smith, worked closely with Donald Douglas to develop the DC-2, which American Airlines started flying in 1936.

As of May 2002, American Airlines served 172 cities with a fleet of 833 aircraft - with an average of 2800 daily departures. The average age of their aircraft is 10.8 years. (from the AMR Corp. page at http://www.amrcorp.com/)

American Airlines moved its corporate headquarters from New York City to Fort Worth, Texas in 1979.

Two American Airlines aircraft were hijacked and crashed during the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack, Flight 77, a Boeing 757 and Flight 11, a Boeing 767.

American Airlines almost lost Flight 63 on December 22 of the same year, but the terrorist was foiled.

The 2001 crash of American Airlines Flight 587 was AA's other major disaster that year.

Former CEOs

• C.R. Smith
• G. Marion Sadler
• George Spater
• Al Casey
• Bob Crandall
• Donald J. Carty

Other facts of interest

• American Airlines hired the first American Black commercial airline pilot.
• American Airlines was showcased prominently on the Home Alone movie series.
• Mattel released a series of American Airline stewardess Barbie dolls.

External link

• http://www.aa.com/ - Official homepage

Sources

Eagle by Robert J. Serling, published by St.Martin's/Marek in 1985.
International Directory of Company Histories St. James Press.

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "American Airlines."

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American Empire

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

American Empire is an informal term that is used to collectively describe United States of America's influence and trends toward expansion throughout the world.

Expansion

Unlike many other powerful western nations, the United States had historically not been a country that has participated in traditional imperialist expansion or conquests. This changed following the Spanish American War, which was partially provoked by American politicians and businessmen interested in European-style expansionism. After the war, the defeated Kingdom of Spain agreed to cede most of her colonial possessions to the control of the United States.

The following areas have at one time or another been part of a sort of "American Empire," that is to say colonies that were annexed to the United States, yet not granted statehood or self-rule.

• Alaska (1867-1959) (now a state of the US)
• American Samoa (1900-)
• Cuba (1899-1909) (now independent)
• Dominican Republic (1916-1922) (now independent)
• Guam (1898-)
• Hawaii (1899-1959) (now a state of the US)
• Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (1944-1990) (now 3 independent states Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau and one commonwealth Northern Mariana Islands)
• Panama Canal Zone (1903-1979) (now part of Panama)
• Philippines (1898-1946) (now independent)
• Puerto Rico (1898-1952) (now a commonwealth)
• U.S. Virgin Islands (1917-)
• Okinawa (1945-1972) under US military control

There is also the odd case of Liberia, a nation founded in part by American slaves who were returned to Africa.

Many of America's former colonies have since become independent countries, states of the American union, or self-governing commonwealths.

Contemporary Use of the term

Today, what many consider to be the "American Empire" does not fit historical definitions of imperialism and colonialism, but the United States influence takes on different and discreet forms. America's military presence by itself is breathtaking and influential. According to researchers [1], around the world, the United States maintains 750 military bases or installations staffed by American military personnel in roughly 130 countries.

Term

The term "American Empire" is mostly used as derogatory expression to personify America's military and cultural presence in most nations. American Empire is a book by Andrew J. Bacevich that says the United States started to act like an Empire after the end of the Cold War.

Many statesmen, scholars, and supporters within the United States insist that America "is" and "should be" an empire in every sense. This is exemplified by the conservative, Reagan-ite Project for the New American Century, which became influential in the 2003 decision to invade Iraq. As stated in PNAC's principles:

We need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles. [1]

However, many in opposition to this view value a diversity, and reject the notion of a single dominating superpower in order to maintain "balance", "equality", "mutual respect", and "harmony" among all nations around the world.

See also

History of United States Imperialism, Pax Americana, Empire, Project for the New American Century

Book

In the book Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the USA are seen as central for the development and constitution of a new global regime of power and sovereignty, termed empire by Hardt and Negri. The book is building on neomarxist, postcolonial, postmodern ideas and globalization theories. The empire of Hardt and Negri shouldn't be equalled with the American Empire described in this article.

Alternate history

American Empire is also the name of an alternate history trilogy by Harry Turtledove - after the Great War, the USA and Germany are the dominant world powers. Canada is now under US occupation, and the Confederacy has lost Kentucky and parts of Texas and Virginia to the USA. Jake Featherston, a racist demagogue in the Confederacy, rises to power bent on revenge against the USA, and against the blacks he accuses of 'stabbing the Confederacy in the back'.

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "American Empire."

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American English

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

American English is a form of the English language used in the United States of America. It is the primary language used in the United States. According to the 1990 census, 97 percent of U.S. residents speak English "well" or "very well." Only 0.8 of one percent speak no English at all, as compared with 3.6 percent in 1890.

History

English was inherited from British colonization. The first wave of English-speaking immigrants was settled in North America in the 17th Century:

• Jamestown, Virginia founded in 1607 (the first successful British colony in North America).
• The Plymouth Colony in New England founded in 1620 at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

In this century, there were in North America speakers of Dutch, French, Native American, Spanish and Swedish languages.

In 1763, Britain acquired the French colony of New France and the Spanish colony of Florida.

Phonology

Compared to British English, American English is conservative in its phonology. It is often claimed that certain rural areas in North America speak "Elizabethan English," but in fact the standard American English of the upper Midwest has a sound profile much closer to seventeenth century English than the current speech of England has. The conservatism of American English is largely the result of the fact that it represents a mixture of various dialects from the British Isles. Dialect in North America is most distinctive on the east coast of the continent; this is largely because these areas were in contact with England, and imitated prestige varieties of British English at a time when those varieties were undergoing changes. The country was settled in the interior by people who were no longer closely connected to England and did not travel there often by sea, and as such the inland speech is much more homogeneous than the East Coast speech, and did not participate in changes imitated from England.

Most North American speech is rhotic, as English was everywhere in the seventeenth century. In most varieties of North American English, the sound of the letter "R" is a retroflex semivowel rather than a trill or a tap. This was a sound change that took place in England in the eighteenth century, and in which most current North American varieties did not participate. The loss of syllable-final /r/ in North America is confined mostly to parts of New England, New York, New York, and the southern coast of the United States. In England, lost /r/ was often changed into /ə/ (schwa, SAMPA /@/), giving rise to a new class of falling diphthongs. This does not happen in the non-rhotic varieties of North American speech.

Other British English changes which most North American dialects do not participate include:

• /æ/ (/{/) -> /a/ before /f, s, T, D, z, v/ alone or preceded by /n/: bath -> bawth &c. (only in parts of New England) This is the British broad A.

• intervocalic /t/ -> glottal stop; /bo`@l/ for bottle (does not appear in North America)

• loss of /o:/, replaced by /@u/; cf. southern English v. North American pronunciation of boat.

North American English, while more phonologically conservative, has undergone some sound changes. These include:

• levelling of distinction between /A/ and /O/; father and bother rhyme; the so-called cot-caught merger (almost everywhere except Northeast)

• intervocalic /t/ -> /d/; ladder and latter sound very similar or identical, distinguished perhaps by degree of aspiration of consonant and/or by length of preceding vowel.

Differences in British English and American English

American English has both spelling and grammatical differences from British English, some of which were made as part of an attempt to rationalize the English spelling used by British English at the time. Unlike many 20th century language reforms (e.g., Turkey's alphabet shift, Norway's spelling reform) the American spelling changes were not driven by government, but by textbook writers and dictionary makers.

The first American dictionary was written by Noah Webster in 1828. At the time America was a relatively new country and Webster's particular contribution was to show that the region spoke a different dialect from Britain, and so he wrote a dictionary with many spellings differing from the standard. Many of these changes were initiated unilaterally by Webster.

Webster also argued for many "simplifications" to the idiomatic spelling of the period. Somewhat ironically, many, although not all, of his simplifications fell into common usage alongside the original versions, resulting in a situation even more confused than before.

Many words are shortened and differ from other versions of English. Spellings such as center are used instead of centre in other versions of English. And there are many other variations. Conversely, American English can sometimes favor more wordy or elongated versions of British English, as in transportation for transport.

A key area where American English has grown (on both sides of the Atlantic), is in the world of Business and Commerce, where use of the rhetorical euphemism is common. One example would be the phrase "are you comfortable with that". This phrase will typically be used by a business manager introducing a change which may, or may not, be welcome. A negative answer is neither expected nor, indeed invited. However, the question is, at least on the face of it, conciliatory.

American English has further changed due to the influx of non-English speakers whose words sometimes enter American vernacular. Many words have entered American English from Spanish, etc.

Examples of common American English loanwords, not common in British English (many, however, would be recognised due to Hollywood movies):

From African languages

gumbo

okra, or a stew thickened with okra

From Dutch

cookie	baked sweet, never called a biscuit, digestive; sometimes called shortbread
kill	creek

From English

attic	a loft; the topmost story of a house
back and forth	as in backwards and forwards
bug	any kind of insect
bushel	a common unit of measurement
cabin	a humble dwelling
closet	a cupboard
deck	a pack of cards
fall	the season also known as autumn
hog	a pig
jack	a knave within a deck of cards
junk	as in rubbish
rear	as in raising an animal or child
mad	as in the sense of being angry
noon	midday (originally nones, the ninth hour of daylight, or 3pm
plumb	as being complete
rooster	a male fowl
stocks	as in stocks and bonds; shares
zero	as in nought

From French

banquette	a raised sidewalk
beignet	a square, holeless doughnut
boudin	a spicy link sausage
café au lait	a mixture of half milk and half coffee
chowder	a thick seafood stew
étouffée	a spicy stew of vegetables and seafood
jambalaya	rice cooked with herbs, spices, and ham, chicken, or seafood
lagniappe	an extra or unexpected gift
pain perdu	New Orleans-style French toast
pirogue	a canoe made from a hollowed tree trunk
praline	a candy made of nuts suspended in a boiled sugar syrup
toboggan	a sled
zydeco	a native Louisiana style of music

From Native American languages

bayou	a swampy, slow-moving stream or outlet
cape (kepan)	a headland
chinook	a strong wind blowing down off the mountains
hickory (pawcohiccora)	a North American deciduous tree of the genus Carya
high muckamuck	an important person
mugwump	a political independent
that neck of the woods (naiack)	an expression; from whence a person hails
powwow	a gathering or meeting, esp. of Native Americans
raccoon	the raccoon, a small mammal
skunk (seganku)	the skunk, a badgerlike, foul-smelling mammal
squash (askutasquash)	a vegetable, similar to English marrow
succotash	mixture of corn and other vegetables like peas, beans
tipi	a kind of tent
woodchuck (wuchak)	a marmot-like mammal

From Spanish

adobe	a mud-based construction material
arroyo	gulch, often dry except when it has rained recently
barrio	shantytown or historically poverty-afflicted area of a city
burro	donkey
barbecue	a grill
desperado	criminal
fiesta	party
frijoles	beans
gringo	a disparaging term for a foreigner, esp. English or American
hacienda	particular style of house
hammock	a bed
hombre	man
maize	a kind of grain
mesa	flat topped mountain
pronto	immediately

From Yiddish

klutz	a clumsy person
kvetch	complain
lox	cured salmon
schlep	to carry or to travel
schmuck	a fool, or the penis
schmutz	dirt
shlemiel	a fool

From Japanese

tycoon	successful business leader
honcho	leader, ie: "The Head Honcho"

For detailed differences in British English and American English see American and British English differences.

English words that arose in the US

A number of words that have arisen in the United States have become common, to varying degrees, in English as it is spoken internationally. Perhaps the most famous is OK, which is sometimes used in other languages as well. Other American introductions include "blizzard" and "teenager", and there are of course many more.

Regional differences

Written American English is fairly standardized across the country. However, there is some variation in the spoken language. There are several recognizable regional variations (such as that spoken in New York and New Jersey), particularly in pronunciation, but also in slang vocabulary.

Most traditional sources cite Standard Midwestern American English as the unofficial standard accent and dialect of American English. However, many linguists claim California English has become the de facto standard since the 1960s or 1970s due to its central role in the American entertainment industry; others argue that the entertainment industry, despite being in California, uses Midwestern.

African-American colloquial English (sometimes called Ebonics) contains many distinctive forms.

Regional dialects in North America are most strongly differentiated along the eastern seaboard. The distictive speech of important cultural centeres like Boston, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana imposed their marks on the surrounding areas. The Potomac River generally divides a group of Northern coastal dialects from the beginning of Southern coastal dialects. A distinctive speech pattern was also generated by the separation of Canada from the United States, centered on the Great Lakes region.

In the interior, the situation is very different. West of the Appalachian Mountains begins the large river of what is generally called "Midland" speech. This is divided into two general subdivisions, the north Midlands that begins north of the Ohio River valley area; and the south Midlands speech. The North Midlands speech continues to expand westward until it becomes the closely related speech of California. This is the "standard Midwestern" speech that is generally considered free from regional marking in the United States of America.

The southern Midlands dialect follows the Ohio River in a generally southwesterly direction, moves across Arkansas and Oklahoma west of the Mississippi, and peters out in western Texas. This is the dialect associated with truck drivers on the CB radio and country music. It is a version of the Midlands speech that has assimilated some coastal Southern forms, most noticeably the loss of the diphthong /aj/, which becomes /a:/, and the second person plural pronoun "you-all" or "y'all". Unlike coastal Southern, however, southern Midlands is a rhotic dialect, pronouncing /r/ wherever it has historically occurred.

The sounds of American speech can be identified with a number of public figures. President John F. Kennedy spoke the Northeastern coastal dialect associated with Boston, while President Jimmy Carter spoke with a Southern coastal dialect. The North Midlands speech is familiar to those who have heard Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, while the South Midlands speech was the speech of President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

External links and references

• The American Language 4th Edition, Corrected and Enlarged, H. L. Menchen, Random House, 1948, hardcover, ISBN 0394400755
• How We Talk: American Regional English Today, Allan Metcalf, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000, softcover, ISBN 0618043624
• 1st and 2nd supplements of above.
• Dialect Survey of the United States, by Bert Vaux et al., Harvard University. The answers to various questions about pronunciation, word use etc. can be seen in relationship to the regions where they are predominant.
• Phonological Atlas of North America at the University of Pennsylvania

  Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "American English."

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American football

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

American football, known in the United States as simply football, is a competitive team sport that rewards players' speed, agility, tactics, and brute strength as they push, block, tackle, chase, and outrun each other, trying to force a ball further into enemy territory for one hour of game time, which translates into three to four hours of real time. American football is often seen as a metaphor for war, with a great deal of personal violence occurring on every play as players often weighing 300 pounds or more shove each other with every ounce of their strength, and with a clearly defined front line, moving up and down the field, separating the offensive and defensive squads. American football does not much resemble soccer, the sport which most of the rest of the world, except Canada, calls "football". It is a descendant of Rugby Union, and still has recognisable similarities to rugby football.

Popularity

Football is extremely popular in the US. In recent years it has surpassed even baseball as the nation's most popular spectator sport. The professional league, the National Football League (NFL), which consists of 32 teams, is very popular. Its championship game, the Super Bowl, is annually watched by nearly half of US television households, and is also televised in over 150 other countries. College football is extremely popular, with many major colleges and universities playing NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) Division I football, and consistently selling out huge stadiums. College games are widely televised and widely watched. Many colleges in lower NCAA divisions and the NAIA (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics) have varsity football teams, as do most high schools. There are also amateur, club and youth teams (such as teams in the Pop Warner leagues). In addition to those leagues and teams, now there is a American Football World Cup.

Naming

The word football has a number of different meanings. In the United States football almost always means what, in the rest of the English-speaking world, is usually called American football (or in some cases Gridiron football). In most of the rest of the world, the word football means the game that is called soccer in the US, although it is occasionally called Association football or International football. Soccer, the most popular form of football world-wide, is also popular in the US, particlarly as a participation sport for children. It is played at all levels, youth, amateur, high school, college and professional. (see: football (soccer))

The name football might seem a curious name for the sport of American football, as the players' feet rarely have much to do with the ball -- kicking the football is only allowed in certain situations and is most often inadvisable. The vast majority of game time involves players holding the ball in their hands as they run. However, the sport is a direct descendant of rugby union football, as explained below, and has retained the name.

In the remainder of this article, the word football refers to American football.

Professional, college, and other leagues

Football is played at a number of levels in the United States. These include the following.

• Professional (NFL) football
• Women's football
• Arena football - (professional) played indoors
• College football - played by many US colleges (very popular)
• High School football - played by most high schools
• Amateur and youth league football
• Flag football - non-tackle; almost exclusively amateur
• Touch football - also non-tackle and almost exclusively amateur

The descriptions on this page are based primarily on the current rules of the National Football League (NFL, 1920-present). Differences with college rules will be noted.

NFL, college, high school, and amateur rules are similar, as were the rules of professional leagues that no longer exist. The Arena Football League (AFL, 1987-present) plays an indoor adaptation of American football. Flag football and touch football are non-tackle versions of American football.

Professional leagues that no longer exist include the World Football League (WFL,1974-75), the United States Football League (USFL,1983-1985), the XFL (XFL,2001), the All America Football Conference (1946-1949), the American Football League (AFL,1960-1969-merged with the NFL in 1970), and the World League of American Football (WLAF,1991-1993-now NFL Europe). Since 2000, there has been a surge of women's professional leagues.

The Game

Play in American football consists of a series of individual plays of short duration, between which the ball is not in play. Substitutions are allowed between plays, which allows for a great deal of specialization, as coaches put in players they think are best suited for any particular situation. The game is very tactical and strategic. With 22 players on the field at a time, (eleven on each team), each with an assigned task for a given play, the strategies are complex.

Object of the game

The object of the game is to advance the ball to the opponents' end of the field and score points. The team with the most points when time has expired wins.

Duration, kickoffs and free kicks

The game is 60 minutes long, divided into two halves separated by a halftime. Each half consists of two quarters, each 15 minutes long. Teams change ends of the field after the first and third quarters. If a game is tied at the end of regulation, overtime is played. Overtime periods are "sudden death", meaning that the teams that scores first, by any means, wins.

A kickoff is a special play used to start each half, and also used to restart the game following a field goal, or a conversion attempt following a touchdown. One team kicks the ball, usually from its own 30-yard line, although a kickoff may occur elsewhere due to a penalty on the preceding play. (Note: the ball is usually kicked from the 35 yard line in college football). The ball must be kicked from the ground (not punted) and in bounds at least 10 yards away. Once the ball has traveled 10 yards upfield it can be fielded by either team. The ball is usually just kicked deep to the receiving team, but sometimes a team will attempt to recover its own kick, in a play that is known as an onside kick.

A free kick is used to restart the game following a safety, which doesn't happen often. The team that was trapped in its own end zone, and therefore conceded two points to the other team, kicks the ball from its own 20-yard line. A free kick may be punted if the kicking team so chooses.

Methods of scoring

Points can be scored in the following ways.

• A field goal, worth 3 points, is scored by placing the ball on the ground and kicking it between the uprights of the goal posts. (If a field goal is missed, the ball is returned to the original line of scrimmage [in the NFL, the spot of the kick], and possession is given to the other team.)
• A touchdown, worth 6 points, is achieved when a player has legal possession of the ball within the opponents' end zone. Scoring a touchdown is the ultimate goal of the offensive team.
• One or two extra points may be scored following a touchdown. The team which scored the touchdown is given a conversion attempt (also called a "try"). The ball is spotted at the 2 yard line (NFL) or 3 yard line (college), and the team which scored the touchdown is allowed to run a single play in which they may score either one or two additional points. The defending team can only score during a conversion attempt by the other team in college football, where if a defender gets possession of the ball and carries it into the opposing end zone, his team gets two points. This rule was adopted by the NCAA in 1990, but is not used anywhere else.
  • An extra point, worth 1 point, is scored in the same way as a field goal is scored during regular play.
  • A two-point conversion is scored in the same way as a touchdown is scored during regular play.
• A safety, worth 2 points, is scored when a player is either tackled or goes out of bounds within his own end zone.

The Field

The field

The field is a rectangle 120 yards long and 53 1/3 yards wide, defined by sidelines running the length of the field and endlines running the width. There is a goal line ten yards in from each end line and parallel to it. The two goal lines are thus 100 yards apart. The area of the field between the goal lines is called the field of play. At each end of the field, the end zone is the area between the goal line and the end line.

Within the field of play, additional markings include yard markers, as well as inbound lines (also called hash marks), every yard the length of the field. The inbound lines (hash marks), which are short lines perpendicular to the yard markers, are 70-3/4 feet from the sidelines in the NFL. (Note: the hash marks are closer to the sidelines in college football) Every 5 yards, the yard markers run the width of the field, and every 10 yards, they are marked by numbers indicating the distance, in yards, from the nearest goal line.

At the center of each end line is a set of goal posts, which have two upright posts extending above a crossbar. The distance between upright posts is 18-1/2 feet, and the top of the crossbar is 10 feet above the ground.

Play Of The Game

A game consists of many individual plays. The vast majority of these are scrimmage plays. Each play from scrimmage is one of a series of downs given to the team with possession. These two concepts, the concept of scrimmage, and the concept of downs, are fundamental to American football, and are what distinguish it, as well as Canadian football, from most other forms of football.

A set of downs begins with a first down, which is given to a team either after it has just gained possession on the previous play, or it has gained the necessary yardage from a previous set of downs. On a first down, the team with possession is given four downs to gain 10 yards (they have "a first and ten", meaning that it is first down, and they need ten yards to get another first down). The line a team must reach in order to gain a first down is technically called the line to gain, although it is commonly called first down yardage. The team with possession is called the offensive team, and the other team the defensive team.

Plays from scrimmage

Each down is a play from scrimmage. Prior to each play from scrimmage, the two teams line up on opposite sides of a line of scrimmage, which is defined by the spot of the ball from the previous play. The spot is, in most cases, the yard line at which the ball became dead on the previous play, plus or minus any penalty yardage. A down, or play from scrimmage, begins with a snap and ends when the ball becomes dead for any reason. A snap is either a handoff between the legs from the center to the quarterback, or it is a pass between the legs from the center to the quarterback, or possibly to a player other than the quarterback, such as a punter or a holder for a field goal attempt. The ball may become dead, ending the down, because a player in possession is tackled, or because his forward progress is stopped, or because he goes out of bounds, or because a forward pass goes incomplete.

Advancing the ball

There are two methods that can be used to advance the ball while still maintaining possession:

• Running with the ball - The quarterback, who is the player that normally has the ball following the snap, may run the ball but, more often, he either hands the ball, or throws a short pass to a running back, who then becomes the ball carrier. Most other players on the offense have blocking assignments.

• A forward pass - A forward pass may only be thrown on a play from scrimmage, and only from behind the line of scrimmage. It must be thrown to an eligible receiver (any player who is not an interior lineman). A completed pass is one caught by an eligible receiver. The player may run with the ball after catching it. An incomplete pass is any forward pass that either hits the ground or goes out of bounds, at which point the ball becomes dead, and is spotted at the preceding line of scrimmage for the following play. An interception is a pass caught by the defense, which transfers possession to the defending team, which may then run with the ball.

It is important for the offense to run a variety of running and passing plays in order to keep the defense uncertain of the next play. If the quarterback has two broken fingers on his throwing hand, for example, the defense can safely risk lining up in a run defense for nearly every play, which should successfully squelch the offense's running backs.

Fourth down situations

If a team uses all four of its downs without gaining the yardage for a first down, possession goes to the other team. Fourth down situations are therefore pivotal. The offense has three choices: "go for it", punt, or attempt a field goal.

Things the offense may decide to do on fourth down:

• "go for it" - If the distance required for a first-down is short, a team may elect to go for it on fourth down, but it is often risky. The safe thing to do is usually to kick the ball.
• punt - A team will punt in order to gain better field position.
• attempt a field goal - Field goal attempts must be made with the ball on the ground (they cannot be punted), so a player called a holder holds the ball for a kicker. (In times past, a kicker may try a "drop kick" -- that is, drop the ball and kick it after it bounces off the ground -- and if the kicker kicks it through the goalposts, it is a field goal. This is difficult to do, as the ball is in the shape of a prolate spheroid and the bounce is unpredictable. Nowadays, the only time you will see this is by a hurried kicker after a broken play.) Failed field goal attempts, if they are short, can be returned by the opponent, but the ball usually goes past the end line and can't be returned. If the field goal attempt fails, the ball is spotted at the original line of scrimmage, and possession is given to the other team. (In the NFL, failed field goal attempts are spotted at the spot of the kick.)

A team will occasionally run a trick play on fourth down. They will line up as if to punt or attempt a field goal, but will instead run the ball or pass it in an attempt to pick up a first down.

Specialized units and players

With its unlimited substitutions, American football is highly specialized, with most teams having three specialized units: an offensive unit, a defensive unit, and special teams. There are many specialized players within each units. Some players may only be used in certain situations. (for details see: offensive unit, defensive unit, special teams.)

Injuries

Despite the helmets and heavy padding worn by all players on the field, injuries are common in football. An "Injury Report" section is ubiquitous in American newspapers' sports sections, detailing each injured player on each team with his injury listed and the amount of time he is expected to be out. Around the middle of each week, all NFL teams report the status of their injured players as "out" (will not play in the coming game); "doubtful" (25% chance of playing); "questionable" 50% chance of playing); or "probable" (75% chance of playing). A similar system is used in all American professional sports.

An average of about eight players die each year in the United States as a result of injuries received in games. About 160 concussions occur every season, and the National Football League now collects benchmark awareness measures for each player which can be used during a game to determine whether he has been concussed.

Penalties

Some of the more common penalties are listed below. In most cases the offending team will be assessed a penalty of 5, 10 or 15 yards, depending on the infraction. There may also be a loss of down for a penalty against the offense. A penalty against the defense may result in an automatic first down. In some cases, the offense will be given the option of declining the penalty and taking the yardage gained on the play. For some infractions by the defense, the penalty is applied in addition to the yardage gained on the play. A personal foul, which involves danger to another player, usually results in a 15 yard penalty.

Note: The neutral zone is the space defined by lines drawn through the ends of the ball parallel to the yard lines when the ball is spotted and ready for play. No player may legally have any part of his body in the neutral when the ball is snapped, with the exception of the center.

Penalties against the offense

• False start (5 yards) - a lineman moving before the snap in a way that simulates the start of the play
• Illegal motion (5 yards) - having more than one back in motion at the snap
• Illegal shift (5 yards) - not being set before the snap
• Illegal formation (5 yards) - having less than 7 players on the line of scrimmage
• Delay of game (5 yards) - allowing too much time to elapse before the snap
• Ineligible receiver downfield (5 yards) - a lineman beyond the neutral zone prior to a forward pass
• Illegal forward pass (5 yards and loss of down) - thrown from beyond the neutral zone, or a second forward pass on the same play.
• Holding (10 yards) - illegal use of the hands or arms while blocking
• Offensive pass interference (10 yards) - interfering with a defender attempting to catch a pass
• Intentional grounding (10 yards and loss of down) - throwing the ball into the ground to avoid being tackled
• Clipping (15 yards) - an illegal block from behind below the waist
• Illegal block (15 yards) - usually a "crackback block".

Penalties against the defense

• Offsides (5 yards) - making contact with an offensive lineman before the ball is snapped. or being in the neutral zone when the ball is snapped. The offense can decline the penalty and take the yardage gained on the play.
• Running into the kicker (5 yards) - during a kick from scrimmage
• Pass interference - in the NFL, an automatic first down and the ball is moved forward to the location of the interference -- a devastating penalty if the play was a long pass. In college and high school football, 15 yards and an automatic first down.
• Piling on (15 yards)
• Roughing the kicker (15 yards) - tackling the kicker after he has kicked the ball
• Roughing the passer (15 yards) - tackling the quarterback after he has thrown a forward pass

Penalties against either team

• Too many players on the field (5 yards)
• Grabbing the face mask (5 or 15 yards) - if intentional, 15 yards; if unintentional, 5 yards. Just touching an opponent's face mask, without grabbing it, is not illegal.

Development of the game

American football in its current form grew out of a series of three games between Harvard University and McGill University of Montreal in 1874. McGill played by the Rugby Union code while Harvard played the Boston Game, which was closer to Association Football. As often happened in those days of far from universal rules, the teams alternated rules so that both would have a fair chance. The Harvard players liked having the opportunity to run with the ball, and in 1875 persuaded Yale University to adopt Rugby Union rules for their annual game. In 1876 Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia formed the Intercollegiate Football Association, which used the Rugby Union code, except for a slight differnce in scoring.

In 1880 Walter Camp introduced the scrimmage in place of the rugby scrum. In 1882 the system of downs was introduced to thwart Princeton's and Yale's strategy of controlling the ball without trying to score. In 1883 the number of players was reduced, at Camp's urging, to eleven, and Camp introduced the soon standard arrangement of a seven-man offensive line with a quarterback, two halfbacks, and a fullback.

On September 3, 1895 the first professional football game was played, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, between the Latrobe YMCA and the Jeannette Athletic Club. (Latrobe won the contest 12-0.).

By the 1890s interlocking offensive formations such as the flying wedge had made the game extremely dangerous. Despite restrictions on the flying wedge and other precautions, in 1905 eighteen players were killed in games. President Theodore Roosevelt informed the universities that the game must be made safer. However, it was not until 1910, and after further deaths, that interlocking formations were outlawed.

The forward pass was introduced in 1906. In 1912 the field was changed to its current size, the value of a touchdown was increased to 6 points, and a fourth down was added. The game had achieved its modern form.

See also:

• American football glossary
• List of American football players
  • Pro Football Hall of Fame
• Football
  • Canadian football
• List of defunct sports leagues
• Fantasy Football

External Links

• NFL History and the basics
• NFL Digest of Rules - (a basic guide)
• NCAA Playing Rules (complete college football rules are available as a pdf file)
• Guide to referee signals

  Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "American football."

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American League

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

The American League (or formally the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs) is one of two leagues that make up Major League Baseball in the United States of America. It developed from a minor league, the Western League, that aspired to major league status, was formed on January 29, 1900, expanded in 1900-1901 into major cities, and changed its name.

The older National League at first refused to recognize the new league and it was only after much contention that an agreement (the National Agreement) was signed that produced an acceptance of each league by the other as an equal partner in major league baseball.

Teams

Starting in 1901, the eight charter teams were the following:

• Baltimore Orioles
• Boston Americans
• Chicago White Sox
• Cleveland Blues
• Detroit Tigers
• Milwaukee Brewers
• Philadelphia Athletics
• Washington Senators

The Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit franchises exist today in their same cities. The Boston Americans later became the Red Sox, and the Cleveland Blues later became the Indians.

The Baltimore Orioles moved to New York in 1903 and are today known as the New York Yankees. The Milwaukee Brewers became the St. Louis Browns in 1902 and became today's Baltimore Orioles in 1953. The Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City in 1955 and then to Oakland in 1968. The Washington Senators relocated in 1961, becoming the Minnesota Twins.

Expansion and relocation

The American League has expanded four times. The first occurred in 1961, when the Los Angeles Angels and the Washington Senators joined the league, the latter replacing the previous Washington franchise, which had just relocated to Minnesota. The Los Angeles Angels are today known as the Anaheim Angels. The second Washington franchise moved to Texas in 1972 and became the Texas Rangers.

The second expansion occurred in 1969 when the Kansas City Royals and Seattle Pilots joined the league. The Pilots stayed just one season in Seattle before moving to Milwaukee and becoming today's Milwaukee Brewers. In 1977, the third expansion occurred adding the Toronto Blue Jays and Seattle Mariners. A fourth expansion took place in 1998 when the Tampa Bay Devil Rays joined, and in a reorganization, the Milwaukee Brewers moved to the National League.

See Major League Baseball for a complete listing to today's American League teams.

Other leagues

Several other sports have had leagues called "American League", usually with the sport name as a qualifier, such as the "American Football League" (which eventually merged with the National Football League, adopting the latter's name for the combination).

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "American League."

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American Revolution

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

The American Revolution refers to the events and ideas that resulted in the separation of thirteen North American colonies from Great Britain and their transformation into the United States of America.

The revolution included the direct military struggles known as the American Revolutionary War. The War itself is started with the Battle of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 and ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

The broader sense of revolution began much earlier, continued after the peace treaty, and had a much greater impact on the human experience than simply colonial independence. The process created a new view of government and its organization that the world hadn't seen before. The terms republic and democracy had been used in histories of ancient Greece and Rome, but now they was implemented in a government whose authority was based on individual rights rather than on church or king. While earlier historic trends affected it, the revolution itself had its active roots in the Albany Congress of 1754 and ended when George Washington was sworn in as the first President of the United States in 1789.

Before the revolution most people in the British North American Colonies considered themselves loyal subjects of the British Crown, with the same rights and obligations as people in Britain. However, under the doctrine of mercantilism the British considered the Colonies more as a resource to be utilized for the benefit of their own economy and had little respect for the Colonists. This difference in perception led to a vicious cycle of Colonists acting against what they saw as unfair policies, harsh British reaction, followed by stronger Colonial reaction, leading to even harsher British reaction -- all of this spiraling into the revolution.

As the Colonists started rejecting the Crown they also started becoming more radicalized in other ways, paying more attention to the idea of a broad democracy, and people like Thomas Paine who not long before this would have been condemned as a Leveller. Thomas Paine, produced a pamphlet entitled Common Sense arguing that the only solution to the problems with Britain would be Independence.

See also: American exceptionalism, Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, British North America, The Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, Proclamation of 1763, Stamp Congress, Thirteen colonies, Thomas Paine

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "American Revolution."

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American River

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

The American River in California is known for its whitewater rapids, and as the location of Sutter's Mill (where gold was found, leading to the California Gold Rush). It runs from the Sierra Nevada mountains through Sacramento and flows into the Sacramento River on its way to San Francisco Bay.

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "American River."

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Cuisine of the United States

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

Corn full-sized image

Buffalo burger full-sized image

The Cuisine of the United States is characterized by the broad diversity of the possible foods, but more importantly the willingness of the country as a whole to integrate widely divergent foods.

Groups of American Cuisine:

• Tex-Mex
• Soul food
• New American
• California cuisine
• Euro-asian cuisine - a kind of Fusion cuisine
• Suburban cuisine
• Midwestern cuisine
• New England cuisine
• Southern US cuisine
  • Cajun
  • Creole

Related topics

• Cuisines of other countries

  Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Cuisine of the United States."

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Know-Nothing movement

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

The Know-Nothing movement was a nativist American political movement of the 1850s. It grew up as a popular reaction to the large numbers of immigrants -- mostly Irish Roman Catholics -- entering the United States starting in the late 1840s, and was characterized by calls for a number of measures to maintain the United States as a nation of Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Causes of the Movement

Distrust of the Pope

The fact that many of the new immigrants were Roman Catholic sat poorly with much of the United States's largely-Protestant population. In particular, many Protestants viewed with distrust the strong allegiance of Roman Catholics to the Pope; many Protestants saw this allegiance to the Pope as an allegiance to a foreign prince (especially since the Pope is also head of state of The Vatican), and thus dangerous to American independence and possibly even treasonous.

These concerns spawned widely-held conspiracy theories regarding the Pope's purported plans to subjugate the United States through a continuing influx of his followers. The fact that Popes in the past had in fact wielded significant power and entangled themselves in wars and political disputes was frequently pointed to as evidence that the Pope was simply waiting for the right time to regain his lost temporal power, and served to further cement this notion in the minds of many Americans.

Culture Clash

While significant in their own right, the concerns about the Pope largely exacerbated already-present anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic feelings held by many Americans. The newcomers differed culturally from most Americans, so their influx was seen as a threat to maintaining American culture. The immigrants brought with them their strong accents, Irish traditions and culture, and Roman Catholicism, and didn't seem likely to become "Americanized" anytime soon. A vocal minority of American Puritans also protested against the immigrants' alcohol consumption. While alcohol consumption already quite popular among the general public in the United States (even George Washington had run a distillery), the Puritan elements managed to promulgate a caricature of the Irish as drunkards, and thus gained some support for their anti-alcohol crusade by painting drinking as foreign and un-American.

The Political Movement

History

The growing anti-immigrant sentiment led to a dissatisfaction with the major parties -- the Democrats were seen as too dependent on the votes of immigrants, and the Whigs were seen as ineffectual, and were largely in decline in any case. Thus anti-immigrant activists began splitting off from the major parties and forming secret groups, coordinating their votes and throwing their weight en masse behind candidates sympathetic to their cause (regardless of political party). When asked about these secret organizations, members would reply "I know nothing," which led to them popularly being called Know-Nothings. The Know-Nothings in effect gained control of a large number of local offices, especially in the North, through the early 1850s ("in effect" because the officeholders were still technically either Democrats or Republicans, as the Know-Nothings were not yet an actual party).

In 1854 they won significant victories in Congress and at the State level, again as an unofficial party driven by coordinated votes for sympathetic candidates; the secret societies themselves supplemented by supporting votes from the population at large, once it was made known who was sympathetic to the Know-Nothings' cause. The results of this election were so favorable to the Know-Nothings that they formed officially as a political party, called the American Party, and swallowed many members of the now nearly-defunct Whig party, as well as a significant number of Democrats, especially Northern Democrats.

The height of their success came in the Election of 1856, in which they threw their weight behind Millard Fillmore (a Whig who had been president from 1850 to 1852). Fillmore lost, but won 22% of the popular vote and Maryland's 8 electoral votes. However, by this time the newly-formed party was beginning to be rent by differences over slavery, and greatly declined in strength. Know-Nothings remained strong on the local and state levels in many northern states, but by the Election of 1860, they were no longer a serious national political movement. Most of the anti-slavery Know-Nothings went on to join the new Republican Party.

Platform

The platform of the American Party called for, among other things:

• Severe limits on immigration, especially from Catholic countries.
• Restricting political office to native-born Americans (the United States Constitution only restricts the office of President in this way).
• Mandating a wait of 21 years before an immigrant could gain citizenship.
• Restricting public school teaching to Protestants.
• Mandating daily Bible readings in public schools (from the Protestant version of the Bible).
• Restricting the sale of liquor.

See also: List of political parties in the United States

Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Know-Nothing movement."

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Literature of the United States

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

The literature of the United States may be considered as belonging to English literature or as a distinct body of literature.

Much early American literature is derivative: European forms and styles transferred to new locales. For example, Wieland and other novels by Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) are energetic imitations of the Gothic novels then being written in England. Even the well-wrought tales of Washington Irving (1783-1859), notably Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, seem comfortably European despite their New World settings.

Perhaps the first American writer to produce boldly new fiction and poetry was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). In 1835, Poe began writing short stories -- including The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue -- that explore previously hidden levels of human psychology and push the boundaries of fiction toward mystery and fantasy.

Meanwhile, in 1837, the young Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) collected some of his stories as Twice-Told Tales, a volume rich in symbolism and occult incidents. Hawthorne went on to write full-length "romances," quasi-allegorical novels that explore such themes as guilt, pride, and emotional repression in his native New England. His masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, is the stark drama of a woman cast out of her community for committing adultery.

Hawthorne's fiction had a profound impact on his friend Herman Melville (1819-1891), who first made a name for himself by turning material from his seafaring days into exotic novels. Inspired by Hawthorne's example, Melville went on to write novels rich in philosophical speculation. In Moby Dick, an adventurous whaling voyage becomes the vehicle for examining such themes as obsession, the nature of evil, and human struggle against the elements. In another fine work, the short novel Billy Budd, Melville dramatizes the conflicting claims of duty and compassion on board a ship in time of war. His more profound books sold poorly, and he had been long forgotten by the time of his death. He was rediscovered in the early decades of the 20th century.

In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), an ex-minister, published a startling nonfiction work called Nature, in which he claimed it was possible to dispense with organized religion and reach a lofty spiritual state by studying and responding to the natural world. His work influenced not only the writers who gathered around him, forming a movement known as Transcendentalism, but also the public, who heard him lecture.

Emerson's most gifted fellow-thinker was Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), a resolute nonconformist. After living mostly by himself for two years in a cabin by a wooded pond, Thoreau wrote Walden, a book-length memoir that urges resistance to the meddlesome dictates of organized society. His radical writings express a deep-rooted tendency toward individualism in the American character.

Mark Twain (the pen name of Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast -- in the border state of Missouri. His regional masterpieces were the memoir Life on the Mississippi and the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain's style -- influenced by journalism, wedded to the vernacular, direct and unadorned but also highly evocative and irreverently funny -- changed the way Americans write their language. His characters speak like real people and sound distinctively American, using local dialects, newly invented words, and regional accents.

Henry James (1843-1916) confronted the Old World-New World dilemma by writing directly about it. Although born in New York City, he spent most of his adult years in England. Many of his novels center on Americans who live in or travel to Europe. With its intricate, highly qualified sentences and dissection of emotional nuance, James's fiction can be daunting. Among his more accessible works are the novellas Daisy Miller, about an enchanting American girl in Europe, and The Turn of the Screw, an enigmatic ghost story.

America's two greatest 19th-century poets could hardly have been more different in temperament and style. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was a working man, a traveler, a self-appointed nurse during the American Civil War (1861-1865), and a poetic innovator. His magnum opus was Leaves of Grass, in which he uses a free-flowing verse and lines of irregular length to depict the all-inclusiveness of American democracy. Taking that motif one step further, the poet equates the vast range of American experience with himself -- and manages not to sound like a crass egotist. For example, in Song of Myself, the long, central poem in Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: "These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me...."

Whitman was also a poet of the body -- "the body electric," as he called it. In Studies in Classic American Literature, the English novelist D.H. Lawrence wrote that Whitman "was the first to smash the old moral conception that the soul of man is something `superior' and `above' the flesh."

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), on the other hand, lived the sheltered life of a genteel unmarried woman in small-town Massachusetts. Within its formal structure, her poetry is ingenious, witty, exquisitely wrought, and psychologically penetrating. Her work was unconventional for its day, and little of it was published during her lifetime.

Many of her poems dwell on death, often with a mischievous twist. "Because I could not stop for Death," one begins, "He kindly stopped for me." The opening of another Dickinson poem toys with her position as a woman in a male-dominated society and an unrecognized poet: "I'm nobody! Who are you? / Are you nobody too?"

At the beginning of the 20th century, American novelists were expanding fiction's social spectrum to encompass both high and low life. In her stories and novels, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) scrutinized the upper-class, Eastern-seaboard society in which she had grown up. One of her finest books, The Age of Innocence, centers on a man who chooses to marry a conventional, socially acceptable woman rather than a fascinating outsider. At about the same time, Stephen Crane (1871-1900), best known for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, depicted the life of New York City prostitutes in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. And in Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) portrayed a country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman.

Experimentation in style and form soon joined the new freedom in subject matter. In 1909, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), by then an expatriate in Paris, published Three Lives, an innovative work of fiction influenced by her familiarity with cubism, jazz, and other movements in contemporary art and music.

The poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was born in Idaho but spent much of his adult life in Europe. His work is complex, sometimes obscure, with multiple references to other art forms and to a vast range of literature, both Western and Eastern. He influenced many other poets, notably T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), another expatriate. Eliot wrote spare, cerebral poetry, carried by a dense structure of symbols. In "The Waste Land" he embodied a jaundiced vision of post-World War I society in fragmented, haunted images. Like Pound's, Eliot's poetry could be highly allusive, and some editions of The Waste Land come with footnotes supplied by the poet. In 1948, Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

American writers also expressed the disillusionment following upon the war. The stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's characteristic theme, expressed poignantly in The Great Gatsby, is the tendency of youth's golden dreams to dissolve in failure and disappointment.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) saw violence and death first-hand as an ambulance driver in World War I, and the senseless carnage persuaded him that abstract language was mostly empty and misleading. He cut out unnecessary words from his writing, simplified the sentence structure, and concentrated on concrete objects and actions. He adhered to a moral code that emphasized courage under pressure, and his protagonists were strong, silent men who often dealt awkwardly with women. The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are generally considered his best novels; in 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In addition to fiction, the 1920s were a rich period for drama. There had not been an important American dramatist until Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) began to write his plays. The 1936 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, O'Neill drew upon classical mythology, the Bible, and the new science of psychology to explore inner life. He wrote frankly about sex and family quarrels, but his preoccupation was with the individual's search for identity. One of his greatest works is Long Day's Journey Into Night, a harrowing drama, small in scale but large in theme, based largely on his own family.

Another strikingly original American playwright was Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), who expressed his southern heritage in poetic yet sensational plays, usually about a sensitive woman trapped in a brutish environment. Several of his plays have been made into films, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Five years before Hemingway, another American novelist had won the Nobel Prize: William Faulkner (1897-1962). Faulkner managed to encompass an enormous range of humanity in Yoknapatawpha, a Mississippi county of his own invention. He recorded his characters' seemingly unedited ramblings in order to represent their inner states -- a technique called "stream of consciousness." (In fact, these passages are carefully crafted, and their seeming randomness is an illusion.) He also jumbled time sequences to show how the past -- especially the slave-holding era of the South -- endures in the present. Among his great works are The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom, Go Down, Moses, and The Unvanquished.

Faulkner was part of a southern literary renaissance that also included such figures as Truman Capote (1924-1984) and Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). Although Capote wrote short stories and novels, fiction and nonfiction, his masterpiece was In Cold Blood, a factual account of a multiple murder and its aftermath, which fused dogged reporting with a novelist's penetrating psychology and crystalline prose. Other practitioners of the "nonfiction novel" have included Norman Mailer (1923- ), who wrote about an antiwar march on The Pentagon in Armies of the Night, and Tom Wolfe (1931- ), who wrote about American astronauts in The Right Stuff.

Flannery O'Connor was a Catholic -- and thus an outsider in the heavily Protestant South in which she grew up. Her characters are Protestant fundamentalists obsessed with both God and Satan. She is best known for her tragicomic short stories.

The 1920s had seen the rise of an artistic black community in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. The period called the Harlem Renaissance produced such gifted poets as Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Countee Cullen (1903-1946), and Claude McKay (1889-1948). The novelist Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960) combined a gift for storytelling with the study of anthropology to write vivid stories from the African-American oral tradition. Through such books as the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God -- about the life and marriages of a light-skinned African-American woman -- Hurston influenced a later generation of black women novelists.

After World War II, a new receptivity to diverse voices brought black writers into the mainstream of American literature. James Baldwin (1924-1987) expressed his disdain for racism and his celebration of sexuality in Giovanni's Room. In \Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) linked the plight of African Americans, whose race can render them all but invisible to the majority white culture, with the larger theme of the human search for identity in the modern world.

In the 1950s the West Coast spawned a literary movement, the poetry and fiction of the "Beat Generation," a name that referred simultaneously to the rhythm of jazz music, to a sense that post-war society was worn out, and to an interest in new forms of experience through drugs, alcohol, and Eastern mysticism. Poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) set the tone of social protest and visionary ecstasy in Howl, a Whitmanesque work that begins with this powerful line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...." Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) celebrated the Beats' carefree, hedonistic life-style in his episodic novel On the Road.

From Irving and Hawthorne to the present day, the short story has been a favorite American form. One of its 20th-century masters was John Cheever (1912-1982), who brought yet another facet of American life into the realm of literature: the affluent suburbs that have grown up around most major cities. Cheever was long associated with The New Yorker, a magazine noted for its wit and sophistication.

Although trend-spotting in literature that is still being written can be dangerous, the recent emergence of fiction by members of minority groups has been striking. Here are only a few examples. Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko (1948- ) uses colloquial language and traditional stories to fashion haunting, lyrical poems such as In Cold Storm Light. Amy Tan (1952- ), of Chinese descent, has described her parents' early struggles in California in The Joy Luck Club. Oscar Hijuelos (1951- ), a writer with roots in Cuba, won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. In a series of novels beginning with A Boy's Own Story, Edmund White (1940- ) has captured the anguish and comedy of growing up gay in America. Finally, African-American women have produced some of the most powerful fiction of recent decades. One of them, Toni Morrison (1931- ), author of Beloved and other works, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, only the second American woman to be so honored.

Related topics

• Culture of the United States

References

• New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage by Alpana Sharma Knippling (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996)
• Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook by Emmanuel S. Nelson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000)

  Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Literature of the United States."

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Music of the United States

(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)

The music of the United States includes forms derived from multiple ethnic groups. The original inhabitants of the United States included hundreds of Native American tribes, as well as native Hawaiians played the first music in the area, eventually augmented by immigrants from England, Spain, Sweden and France. Africans imported as slaves provided the musical underpinnings of much of modern American music, while other influences include Spanish-native mestizos from Mexico, Cuba and Puerto Rico, Cajuns, descended from French-Canadians and Eastern European Jews.

Information about the roots of modern American music can be found at American roots music. This article will discuss developments since approximately 1940, when folk-based styles like blues, jazz, gospel, Tejano, Cajun and Creole, klezmer and country music evolved into pop music.

1940s and 1950s

In the 1940s, the major strands of American music combined to form rock and roll. Based most strongly off an electric guitar-based version of the Chicago blues, rock also incorporated jazz, country, folk, swing and other types of music; in particular, bebop jazz and boogie woogie blues were in vogue and greatly influenced the music's style. It had developed by 1949, and quickly became popular among blacks nationwide (see 1949 in music). Mainstream success was slow to develop, though (in spite of early success with Bill Haley & the Comets' "Rock Around the Clock"), and didn't begin in earnest until Elvis Presley ("Hound Dog"), a white man, began singing rock, R&B and rockabilly songs in a devoted black style. He quickly became the most famous and best-selling artist in American history, and a watershed point in the development of music.

Country, bluegrass and folk music

In 1938, Bill Monroe formed the Blue Grass Boys (named after his native state of Kentucky, the blue grass state) and combined diverse influences into Appalachian folk music. These include Scottish, Irish and Eastern European folk, as well as blues, jazz and gospel. Monroe became the father of bluegrass music, and his band was a training ground for most of bluegrass' future stars, especially Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. Scruggs and Flatt popularized bluegrass as part of the Foggy Mountain Boys, which they formed in 1948. Though bluegrass never quite achieved mainstream status, it did become well-known through its use in several soundtracks, including the T.V. theme song for The Beverly Hillbillies and the movies Bonnie and Clyde and Deliverance. In the 1950s, bluegrass artists included Stanley Brothers, Osborne Brothers and Jimmy Martin's Sunny Mountain Boys.

Close harmony duets had grown popular in the 1940s, and were made mainstream in the mid-1950s by the Louvin Brothers. This inspired Pete Seeger's brother, Mike Seeker, who formed the New Lost City Ramblers who played traditional Appalachian folk music and helped popularize it. This became known as old-time music, and paralleled the rise of "folk singers", singer-songwriters who played updated versions of the same music. The old-time phenomenon also led to the rediscovery of musicians like Doc Watson, Dock Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb and Clarence Ashley. Some, including Watson, got their career revitalized after the 1961 Newport Folk Festival.

The 1950s also saw the popular dominance of the Nashville sound in country music, and the beginning of popular folk music with groups like The Weavers. Country's Nashville sound was slick and soulful, and a movement of rough honky tonk developed in a reaction against the mainstream orientation of Nashville. This movement was centered in Bakersfield, California with musicians like Buck Owens ("Act Naturally"), Merle Haggard ("Sing a Sad Song") and Wynn Stewart ("It's Such a Pretty World Today") helping to define the sound among the community, made up primarily of Oklahoman immigrants to California, who had fled unemployment and drought. A similarly hard-edged sound also arose in Lubbock, Texas (Lubbock sound).

By the late 1950s, a revival of Appalachian folk music was taking place across the country, and bands like The Weavers were paving the way for future mainstream stars like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Bluegrass was similarly revitalized and updated by artists including Tony Rice, Clarence White, Richard Green, Bill Keith and David Grisman. The Dillards, however, were the ones to break bluegrass into mainstream markets in the early 1960s.

Gospel and doo wop

Following World War 2, gospel began its golden age. Artists like the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, The Swan Silvertones, Clara Ward Singers and Sensational Nightingales became stars across the country; other early artists like Sam Cooke, Dionne Warwick, Dinah Washington, Johnny Taylor, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston and Wilson Pickett began their career in gospel quartets during this period, only to achieve even greater fame in the 60s as the pioneers of soul music, itself a secularized, R&B-influenced form of gospel. Mahalia Jackson and The Staple Singers were undoubtedly the most successful of the golden age gospel artists.

In addition, doo wop achieved widespread popularity in the 1950s. Doo wop was a harmonically complex style of choral singing that developed in cities like Chicago, New York, and, most importantly, Baltimore. Groups like The Crows ("Gee"), The Ventures ("Walk-Don't Run"), The Orioles ("It's Too Soon to Know") and Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers ("Why Do Fools Fall in Love") had a string of hit songs that brought the genre to chart domination by 1958 (see [1958 in music]]).

Latin music

Cuban mambo, chachachá and charanga bands enjoyed brief periods of popularity, and helped establish a viable Latin-American music industry, which led the way to the invention of salsa music among Cubans and Puerto Ricans in New York City in the 1970s. The 50s also saw success for Mexican ranchera divas, while a Mexican-American mariachi scene was developing on the West Coast], and Puerto Rican plena, Brazilian bossa nova and other Latin genres became popular.

Mexican-Texans had been playing conjunto music for decades by the end of World War 2, female duos created the first popular style of Mexican-American music, música norteña. Mexican romantic ballads called bolero were also popular, especially singers like the Queen of the Bolero, Chelo Silva. In the mid-1950s, when Mexican ranchera was used in Hollywood film soundtracks and the upper-class enjoyed stately orquestas Tejanas and conjunto evolved into a distinctively Mexican-American genre called Tejano. Artists of this era include Esteban Jordan, Tony de la Rosa and El Conjunto Bernal.

Cajun and Creole music

The 1940s saw a return to the roots of Cajun music, led by Irvy LeJeune, Nathan Abshire and other artists, alongside musicians who incorporated rock and roll, including Laurence Walker and Aldus Roger. In the late 1940s, Clifton Chenier, a Creole, began playing an updated form of la la called zydeco. Zydeco was briefly popular among some mainstream listeners during the 1950s. Artists like Boozoo Chavis, Queen Ida, Rockin' Dopsie and Rockin' Sidney have continued to bring zydeco to national audiences in the following decades. Zydeco shows major influences from rock, and artists lke Beau Jocque have combined other influences, including hip hop.

Diversification of pop music

In the early to mid-1960s, soul music and R&B dominated American audiences. Girl groups (The Angels ("My Boyfriend's Back"), The Shirelles ("Dedicated to the One I Love")) and blue eyed soul (The Righteous Brothers ("You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling"), Mitch Ryder ("Devil With a Blue Dress On")) helped to popularize the music as mainstream, as well as polishing it and removing the grit of gospel. With the popularity of Elvis and other white singers (like Gene Vincent ("Be-Bop-A-Lula"), Roy Acuff ("The Wreck on the Highway"), Jerry Lee Lewis ("Great Balls of Fire") and Chet Atkins ("Mr. Sandman")), as well as black vocalists like Little Richard ("Tutti Frutti"), Chuck Berry ("Johnny B. Goode"), Fats Domino ("The Fat Man") and Chubby Checker ("The Twist"), a new generation of teens began playing in their own rock bands. The 60s also saw the arrival of Mexican-American pop, rock and soul acts that drew upon Tejano and other influences. These include Sunny Ozuna ("Talk to Me", "Reina de mi Amor"), Roberto Pulido y Los Clasicos and Latin Breed.

White rock music developed primarily in two places: southern California, where musicians like Dick Dale (Let's Go Surfing) invented surf rock, and Britain, where mod and merseybeat bands (such as The Who (The Who Sings My Generation) and The Rolling Stones) (The Rolling Stones (England's Newest Hitmakers)) began playing their own version of rock that drew more heavily upon American blues pioneers like Howlin' Wolf ("Evil"), Muddy Waters ("I Be's Troubled") and Jimmy Yancey ("The Fives") than their American counterparts, who mostly played a polished form of pop.

The early 1960s saw four centers of American musical innovation

• Southern California surf rock bands like The Beach Boys ("Surfin' Safari")
• Detroit-area Motown groups like Marvin Gaye ("Can I Get a Witness"), Curtis Mayfield ("(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Gonna Go") and Al Green (Al Green Gets Next to You)
• country music's capital, Nashville
• the now mainstream Bakersfield sound

Invention of psychedelia

In addition, Britain's new generation of blues rock gained popularity in parts of their homeland, especially cities like Liverpool, and cult fame in the States. The popularity of folk singers like Peter, Paul & Mary ("Puff the Magic Dragon") and Bob Dylan (The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan) influenced all of these groups as they became more closely aligned with the counterculture and drugs. The national sound was moving towards an electric, psychedelic version of rock. In 1962 (see 1962 in music), The Beatles (Please Please Me) emerged from England and popularized British rock, while The Beach Boys' success brought harmony-laden surf music to the forefront of the American scene. With country and soul musicians unable to maintain their hipness, both faded from mass consciousness. The mid-1960s saw the collapse of The Beach Boys as a result of singer and songwriter Brian Wilson's mental problems after releasing one of the most influential rock albums in history, Pet Sounds. The Beatles went on to lead the psychedelic revolution of the end of the decade, with few Americans able to challenge them, exceptions including The Mamas & the Papas ("California Dreaming") and Jimi Hendrix (Are You Experienced). The most hard-edged psychedelic bands, like Americans Jefferson Airplane (Surrealistic Pillow) and The Grateful Dead (American Beauty), achieved limited success; the Grateful Dead, the first jam band, could also be considered the first cult act.

In the late 1960s, popular music underwent a sea change. Psychedelia-inflected rock dominated black and white audiences. During this period, most of American musical styles for the next forty years began in one form or another, including heavy metal, punk rock, electronic music and hip hop. Perhaps most importantly were two developments. First was the popularization of the LP as a distinct artistic statement. Prior to the early 1960s (and later in most cases), an LP was nothing more than a collection of singles bound together with filler. As the psychedelic revolution progressed, however, lyrics grew more complex and LPs developed to enable the artists to make a more in depth statement than a single song could allow. In addition, rules as to what could be allowed in popular music were lessened -- singles lasted longer than three minutes (Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" was the first of these); singing could be gruff, guttural and not classically beautiful and lyrics could focus on more than simple tales of youth, love songs and ballads to include politically and socially aware lyrics. The idea that popular music could and should change the way one feels and lead social change largely developed during this period, though it was certainly not unheard of before.

Funk, gospel and album-oriented soul

Black music in the late 1960s diversified. Soul music had arisen as a secularized form of gospel music. With the rise of psychedelia and folk, however, artists that had previously been best-sellers found themselves unpopular with the new sound. Many, such as The Temptations and The Supremes, never fully recovered, unable to adjust to the changes in music. Soul music, led at the time by singers like James Brown ("Sex Machine"), developed into psychedelia-influenced funk. Bands like Parliament (The Mothership Connection), War (All Day Music) and Funkadelic (One Nation Under a Groove) merged soul with psychedelic rock to cult acclaim but little popular success. Meanwhile, Sly Stone (Stand) and other similar artists achieved popular success with their mixture of soul and psychedelia. Pure soul adapted to the new face of popular music by expanding beyond the simple lyricism of singles to more cohesive and socially-aware, album-oriented soul. This is usually said to have begun with the success of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On and Curtis Mayfield's Superfly. They both described the gritty realities of ghetto life with funky, danceable beats and led to the dominant sounds of soul in the 1970s, such as Philadelphia soul.

Nonsecularized gospel was still popular, though not near the levels of the 1950s boom. Reverend James Cleveland was the most influential artist of the period; he introduced choirs to gospel with 1962's Peace Be Still, recorded with the Angelic Choir of Nutley from New Jersey. Six years later he founded the annual Gospel Music Workshop of America, which have spread across the world. Edwin Hawkins ("Oh Happy Day") was another major artist of the period. Beginning with artists like Ray Repp in 1964, a slick soft rock and gospel fusion called Christian Contemporary Music (or CCM) became popular, which helped lead the way for future rock Christian artists including light country star Amy Grant and Christian heavy metal pioneers Stryper.

Progressive, punk and heavy metal

A few bands popular among only a small crowd of devoted followers emerged in the late 1960s. The Nice (The Nice) and The Moody Blues (Days of Future Passed) (both British) began releasing a series of complex, classical tinged concept albums that began a sound known as progressive rock. Other British bands like Led Zeppelin (Led Zeppelin I) and Black Sabbath (Paranoid) emerged with a form of hard-edged electric blues that came to be known as heavy metal music. American bands like the Velvet Underground (White Light/White Heat), Blue Cheer (Vincebus Eruptum) and The Stooges (Raw Power) also emerged with fatalistic, artsy lyrics and a fast-driving energetic sound; this was the beginning of punk rock.

Country and newgrass

In the 1960s, the Bakersfield Sound began its rise to mainstream, led by Merle Haggard. Bands like Muleskinner and Old And In the Way invented a progressive form of bluegrass that came to be known as newgrass. Though this never achieved much mainstream success, newgrass has become a major part of the American country scene. New forms, incuding spacegrass and supergrass, arose in the 80s, and remained low-key. Other artists, including Alison Krauss, achieved some mainstream success and helped pave the way for the surprise success of the traditional old-time music soundtrack O Brother, Where Are Thou.

The rise of the Bakersfield Sound was a popular example of a roots revival in folk music, in which artists and audiences revitalize the traditional music forms of their ancestors, generally as a reaction against dilution of the original culture for mainstream acceptance. In the 1960s and 70s, roots revivals occurred across the globe. The United States saw Appalachian folk music, blues and jazz adapt to rock and roll, forming heavy metal, psychedelia and progressive rock. Other folk forms were also popularized as part of a 1960s roots revival, including Cajun and Hawaiian folk. Cajun music entered the national mainstream for the first time (mostly in the form of cover songs called swamp pop), becoming a fixture at the influential Newport Folk Festival. CoDoFiL (Council for the Development of French in Louisiana), founded in 1968, helped to lead this trend, establishing the Festivals Acadiens and Zydeco Festival, for example. Cajun artists during this period included the Balfa Brothers, D. L. Menard, Eddie LeJeune, Michael Doucet's Beausoleil and Barry Ancelet.

1970s

In the early 1970s, singer-songwriters like James Taylor ("Fire and Rain") and Carol King (Tapestry) topped the charts while prog rock, heavy metal and punk began to differentiate themselves from mainstream music. While most singer-songwriters drew on Anglo folk roots, some, like XIT (Plight of the Redman) drew on their Native American origins, following in the path of pioneers like Buffy Sainte-Marie ("Now That the Buffalo's Gone"); other Native American bands like Redbone fused Native American and rock influences. The mid-1970s saw the development of power pop, the marriage of glam and heavy metal to form hair metal and the emergence of disco. By the late 1970s, disco, an electronically-based dance music, dominated the sound of the US, aided by the breakthrough success of Saturday Night Fever. Originally associated with urban blacks and gay white males, disco spent a few years at the top of the charts just as country rock and prog rock achieved their greatest mainstream success. Country rock bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd (Second Helping) and pop-prog bands like Chicago (Chicago II) and Styx (Kilroy Was Here) dominated the portion of the market not listening to disco with long, bizarre progressive pieces and electric blues based southern rock. Country rock had developed primarily from British blues, and added an element of popular country. At the time, outlaw country artists like Willie Nelson (The Red Headed Stranger) and David Allan Coe ("You Never Even Called Me By Name") dominated the country music charts with tales of cowboys and rebels.

Underground trends

Heavy metal bands like Blue Oyster Cult (Agents of Fortune) began to attract some mainstream attention, while punk influenced the developing glam rock scene. Taking its cue from the energetic, dirty psychedelia of The Doors, glam musicians like David Bowie (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars) rose to prominence among segments of the population in the early 1970s.

Jamaican immigrants, most notably including DJ Kool Herc, moved to New York City and brought with them the practice of speaking over isolated percussion breaks from popular songs during long dance parties called block parties; this was the beginning of hip hop. Meanwhile, Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians drew on mambo and other Cuban genres to form salsa music. Early artists included Hector Lavoe and Willie Colón.

Jewish-American musicians launched a revival of klezmer music in the mid-1970s, led by Berkeley, California's The Klezmorim, whose frontman, Henry Sapoznik, formed the Archive of Recorded Sound at the Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. This led to the founding of the KlezKamp festival, where stars like Howie Lees, Max Epstein and Sid Beckerman.

The roots of world music, a fusion of rock, pop and other Western music with traditional folk from around the world, arose in the 1970s. Taj Mahal's Happy to Be Just Like I Am (1972), Joni Mitchell's The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975) and Ry Cooder's 1976 Chicken Skin Music (with Flaco Jiménez and Gabby Pahinui) helped to launch the genre, which was solidified in 1981 with David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

The late 1970s also saw the coalescence of what eventually became known as punk music. Arty singers like Patti Smith (Horses) and grungy bands like The Ramones (The Ramones) emerged from New York, based out of the popular club CBGB's. Just as The Clash (The Clash) and the Sex Pistols (Nevermind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols) defined and popularized the sound of punk in the UK, a similar scene was developing throughout the US. In the early 1980s, disco died a quick death. The popular reaction against disco was swift and final, and the music had ended its reign of commercial influence by 1982 (see 1982 in music). New Wave filled in as the dominant American sound. It had developed out of arty punk bands like the Talking Heads (More Songs About Buildings and Food), and was popularized by Depeche Mode (Speak and Spell), Duran Duran (Rio) and others.

1980s

New Wave's mainstream popularity was brief. By 1984 (1984 in music), hair metal, long a dormant part of the Los Angeles music scene, started its reign on the charts. Led by hypermasculine bands like Quiet Riot (Metal Health), Van Halen (Van Halen) and Mötley Crüe (Shout at the Devil), hair metal reached its popular peak in the late 1980s with Guns 'n' Roses' Appetite for Destruction and Def Leppard's Pyromania.

Black music in the 1980s focused on two developments. A smooth, ballad-oriented pop-soul evolved and dominated the pop charts, especially in the early part of the decade. Lionel Richie (Can't Slow Down), Michael Jackson (Thriller), Whitney Houston (Whitney Houston) and Prince (Purple Rain) exemplified this field. The other major development in black music was the rise of hip hop as a commercial force.

Hip hop

Hip hop began its course to mainstream popularity with occasional fringe success in the early 80s -- Kurtis Blow (Kurtis Blow) and LL Cool J (Radio) introduced the sound to white listeners, while Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force ("Planet Rock") and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five ("The Message") innovated new methods in MCing and DJing. Distinct regional variations including Miami bass, LA electro hop, DC go go and Chicago hip house became popular locally and influenced later artists. Of these, bass artists like 2 Live Crew (2 Live Crew Is What We Are) became most famous for sexually explicit lyrics and controversy, while hip house has proven enormously influential on the then developing house music scene and would go on to influence much of electronica and techno.

Punk rock

In the 1980s, punk music began incorporating reggae, ska and other international influences, while heavy metal diversified in the wake of the success of hair metal. Thrash, death and power metal emerged. Pop bands like U2 (The Joshua Tree) and R.E.M (Murmur) also led an interest in the alternative rock scene. All around the country, pop- and hard rock-oriented bands evolving in a state of popular dismissal but critical acclaim had developed a unique sound. Bands like the Pixies (Doolittle) and Hüsker Dü (New Day Rising) made only minor waves on the charts, but fomented a serious revolution in music. A new generation of listeners hated the bombastic, corporate sterility of formulaic hair metal bands, and reacted against them.

Other genres

The 1980s also saw intense diversification in salsa music, which added Latin rap, jazz and other influences. Cuban songo influenced the form, and helped lead to a period of Cuban salsa dominating the genre. Popular salsa from the United States during the 80s including salsa romantica and Miami Sound performers.

1980s gospel was marked by a slick, pop form of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), most influentially performed by artists like Amy Grant, as well as both traditional and radical singers and choirs, including Kirk Franklin and the Sounds of Blackness. The Detroit Sound of gospel arose during the 80s and remained current in the 90s, dominated by The Winans and The Clarks.

Klezmer music took two different directions during the 1980s. Perennial favorites The Klezmatics, alongside artists like the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band and Brave Old World, radically reinvented the genre, adding influences from around the world. Another movement, based primarily in Europe, brought klezmer back to its traditional roots.

In 1983, R. Carlos Nakai, a Navajo-Ute, released Changes, a multi-platinum album that launched a revival in the Native American flute. Combined with sounds of nature and ambient electronics, this set the stage for the modern incarnation of New Age music. Three years later, a tradition of Navajo spoken word poetry began with John Trudell's Aka Graffiti Man.

In 1981, David Byrne and Brian Eno released My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which defined what came to be known as world music by fusing African and Arab vocals over trance-like dance beats. A year later, Peter Gabriel launched WOMAD in Britain; the festival has since become a world music showcase and launched the careers of artists like Youssou N'Dour. In 1986, Paul Simon's blockbuster Graceland made world music briefly mainstream, bringing in South African artists like Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Mahlathini & the Mahotella Queens. In 1989, David Byrne and Peter Gabriel founded record labels (Luaka Bop and RealWorld, respectively) that soon dominated the field.

1990s

The result was the grunge explosion in the early 1990s. By 1992 (1992 in music), hair metal bands were massively unpopular as grunge groups like Nirvana (Nevermind), Pearl Jam (Ten) and Alice in Chains (Dirt) dominated the charts. Their success lasted only a few years, however, as bands found it difficult to maintain their "alternative" sound after going mainstream. In addition, former N.W.A member Dr. Dre (The Chronic) brought gangsta rap to pop audiences. By the mid-90s, alternative rock groups had died out among mainstream listeners, and gangsta rap took over. The middle of the decade also saw a boom in techno music's popularity. Developed primarily in Britain (though Detroit and Chicago were also influential), techno's many permutations achieved some mainstream success throughout the last half of the decade. Bubblegum pop like the Spice Girls also returned after a decade of more-or-less dormancy during the period of hair metal and grunge, both highly opposed to clean, slick and shiny content.

Gangsta rap in the 1980s had focused on the two coasts originally, with West Coast pioneers like Ice-T ("6 N Da Mornin'") and Too $hort (Born to Mack) and East Coast artists like Schoolly D (Saturday Night - The Album) achieving fame among blacks and mainstream success being limited to hardcore groups like N.W.A (Straight Outta Compton), politically controversial groups like Public Enemy (It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back) and fledgling alternative hip hop groups like De La Soul (3 Feet High and Rising). East Coast rappers like Slick Rick (The Great Adventures of Slick Rick) had defined that coast's sound in the late 80s, and it had been far and away the center for hip hop until Dr. Dre's The Chronic put the West Coast on the hip hop map. Boasting a radio-friendly G funk sound, based primarily off funk samples, West Coast rap soon became the dominant sound among pop audiences with rappers like Snoop Doggy Dogg (Doggystyle) and Tupac Shakur (Me Against the World) achieving mainstream success. East Coast rappers like Notorious B.I.G (Ready to Die) and Nas (Illmatic) tended to be more well-received critically, but were consistently unable to match the West Coast in pop sales. The rivalry between the two coasts came to a head by 1996 (1996 in music), when the deaths of Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur rocked the world of hip hop. With West Coast head Suge Knight imprisoned (unrelated to the murders) and East Coast quickly becoming dominated by Puff Daddy's releases aimed at purely pop audiences, rap music splintered. A new generation of southern rappers like OutKast (ATLiens) and Goodie Mob (Soul Food) emerged from Atlanta, as well as vibrant scenes in St. Louis and New Orleans. The Fugees (The Score) also fused hip hop sounds with dub, dancehall and reggae, popular Jamaican forms, to great mainstream success. East Coast rap's reputation among critics during its popular domination by watered-down pop acts like Puff Daddy (No Way Out) and Mase (Harlem World) was saved by the Wu Tang Clan (Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)), DMX (And Then There Was X), Busta Rhymes (The Coming) and other rappers that used a distinctively East Coast sound without catering to mainstream markets. On the West Coast, a period of relatively poor sales for Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg and the imprisonment of Suge Knight, led to the subsequent collapse of Death Row Records and a drought in mainstream popularity. In the late part of the decade, Eminem (The Marshall Mathers LP) emerged as one of the country's biggest stars. The Detroit-born rapper achieved success early in his career with radio-friendly hooks and funky beats; he quickly became the first white rapper to cross over to mainstream audiences without losing his critical viability.

Other 90s trends

Power pop bands like Weezer (The Blue Album), jam bands like Phish (A Picture of Nectar) and punk-pop and skacore groups like Green Day (Dookie) and Sublime (Sublime) rose to some prominence, with late punk and ska bands achieving the most mainstream success. No Doubt (Tragic Kingdom), Rancid (...And Out Come the Wolves) and similar bands released blockbuster albums in the middle of the decade.

Soul music, languishing since the popular demise of Michael Jackson and Prince some ten years earlier, re-emerged with a return to the sounds of early 70s soul; Lauryn Hill (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill), Erykah Badu (Baduizm) and D'Angelo (Voodoo) spearheaded this movement. In hard rock, multiple trends developed.

Thrash metal, invented in the late 80s by bands like Metallica (Kill 'Em All), achieved some mainstream success before mutating into nu metal (such as System of a Down (Toxicity)) in the middle of the decade. Rapcore bands (that mix hip hop and metal) also emerged; Limp Bizkit (Significant Other) and Korn (Peachy) were the most popular, drawing h