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RR 2006/117 The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures Edited by Michael Sletcher Greenwood Press Westport, CT and London 2004 8 vols ISBN 0 313 33266 5 £395, $699.95
Set comprises: New England; The Mid-Atlantic Region; The South; The Southwest; The Pacific Region; Rocky Mountain Region; The Great Plains Region; The Midwest
Keywords Culture, United States of America
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120610647726
Asian and European cultures have not been able to deny the global influence of the increasing power of the economic, industrial, scientific, commercial and military might of the USA as it has developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, with their histories going back over thousands of years, there has always been a deepseated prejudice against that nation's culture in general and "high" culture in particular. This ranges from the ridiculous - Talleyrand's supercilious taunt "I found there a country with thirty-two religions and only one sauce" - to the insane - Georges Clemenceau's statement that "America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilisation". Earlier, Crèvecour, in his classic Letters from an American Farmer (1782), had got it only partially correct, in asking: "What then is the American, this new man? He is either a European, or the descendant of a European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which...