1. Physical Features
The forty-eight contiguous states lie between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, Canada and Mexico. Alaska and Hawaii are located in the far northwest corner of the continent and the middle of the Pacific Ocean, respectively. The interior lowland is the heart of what American politicians would like to call four points酒店“middle America.” The region is drained by the Mississippi River and its great tributaries. The Appalachians on the east stretch almost unbroken from Alabama to the Canadian border and beyond. They are much-eroded old mountains and are set back from the Atlantic by a broad belt of coastal lowland. To the west of the interior basin lies the mighty system of mountains that Spanish explorers named “Cordillera”—a collective term for all the high rough country of the western third of the United States.
2. The Humid East
Throughout the whole region drought is a rare occurrence. The region stretches along the Atlantic in broad swaths in three climatic categories: continental, subtropical and tropical.
3. The Arid West
铁路最好的5个专业Although the west is known to be dry and arid, there are important regional differences within the arid west. There is the desert that lies in the rain-shadow of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges and stretches north from Mexico across Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada into southern Oregon.
十大不吉利花4. The Humid-Arid Transition
兰州交通大学地址Between the humid east and the arid West, there is the great zone of transition, known as the humid-arid transition. This great stretch of land, often called the “Barn of America”, offers fine farmland. 5. The Humid Pacific Coast
The only substantial humid region in the western United States is a narrow strip between the Pacific coast and the Sierra-Cascade ridge line, containing two climatic categories: maritime and Mediterranean.
6. The Northeast
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Stretching from Maine south through Maryland and west to the border of Ohio, the whole section is known to be densely populated and highly urban, and only recently economically troubled due to its declining old industries. Since this area is one of the two earliest settlements by British colonists (the other being Virginia), Americans tend to trace many of the nation’s core values (WASP) to the region. One of the region’s greatest strengths in its economic competition with other regions is its long tradition of support for education, which dates from the seventeenth century.
7. The South
Traditionally, the southern region refers to the eleven states that left the Union to form the Confederacy during the Civil War period. The legacy of rigid social structure where everyone belongs to a clearly defined social group can still be strongly felt in the South. Racial tension tends to be high there, and southern whites, relatively speaking, are more conservative than white people in other regions.
8. The Midwest
The Midwest includes the states boarding the Great Lakes and the first tiers of states west of the Mississippi River from Missouri and Kansas north to Canada. As the Great Lakes states contain many large manufacturing centers, they are usually termed the Industrial Midwest, even though they are also important farm states. Of all the major cities in the Midwest, Chicago remains the region’s premier city, for it is not only the national hub of the commodities market and the regional hub of air transportation, but also the home of widely diversified industry and cultural institutions.
9. The West
“The West” has a place in the American mind as a myth as well as a set of values. It represents possibility, freedom, self-reliance, and the future. The Southwest consists of New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of surrounding states from Texas to southern California. The Mountain States include Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. Las Vegas and Reno stand out as “American dreamland”. The PacificCoast grew as a po
pulated area in the wake of the 1849 Gold Rush when many people were attracted there by the discovery of gold. The LA metropolis is home to the Hollywood film and media conglomerates as well as major energy, defense and aerospace companies.
10. Europeans
About 67 % of all American citizens are descended wholly and directly from people born in Europe. Of those who consider themselves to have an identifiable origin in some particular country, the largest single group, even now, feel “British”—just over a tenth of the population. The great majority of Americans are Caucasian, and the mainstream culture of the United States is primarily WASP in character. America still reflects its British origins in ways that go far beyond the language, particularly in architectural design and legal system.
11. Black Americans
Black people in 2005 represent about 12.8% of the total population in the U. S. A. African
s were brought to the American South in the early 1600s as slaves. Southern slavery was ended only with the victory of the northern states in the Civil War of 1861-1865. Martin Luther King became the leader of the Civil Rights Movement. Between the late 1950s and the 1960s, the United States witnessed active protests, both non-violent and violent, against racial segregation of all kinds in most of its major cities. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, many laws were passed to eliminate racial discrimination, and southern racism was soon in full retreat.
