What are prominent cultures that exist in USA and European countries today?

When I was in grade school I was told that Canada is a mosaic.

The Americas were/are the new world, as opposed to the old world, which was Europe. America received immigrants from everywhere. Europe only recently started to become so diverse in so many countries. Sure some European cities have been very diverse for a long time, but overall in the countries not so much.

The America’s have been doing this for a long time. The US developed its own culture, but the subcultures in the country do influence things. For many many years New York City has a lot of Italians and European Jews, and they influenced the culture, accent, food, and more. Now NYC is extremely diverse and not so heavily weighted in just a few nationalities.

Many Dutch settled in NY too, and Irish.

Vikings in Minnesota.

The Spanish in Florida, and then later the English.

Large population of Arabs in Michigan.

I grew up with a lot of people from Iran, Vietnam, South America, Korea, everywhere.

It’s less pocketed now, there are people from everywhere in almost all parts of the US. Previously, as you would guess, major entry points, and the cities surrounding had very large immigrant populations ongoing over time as new countries started coming in.

Just look at this diversity map of the world in this article. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/16/a-revealing-map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-ethnically-diverse-countries/?utm_term=.f1533e84ec00

Well, the white people who eventually took over the entire continent started out being immigrants. Then, very early on, we brought Africans over for the slave labor. We assimilated some of African culture. We quickly interbred with the Native Americans and assimilated their culture (or killed them off >_<) It has been a melting pot since its discovery by Europeans. That can’t quite be said for other nations that have been entrenched in indigenous populations for thousands and thousands of years.
But we have European influences in common. We understand each other better than we understand, say, the Chinese or the Vietnamese or even the Native Americans.

Not exactly what you’re looking for as far as 50 years ago, though.

”The theory that the ancient Norsemen explored Minnesota as much as 1,000 years ago blossomed after Swedish-American farmer Olof Ohman and his son discovered a 200-pound, rune-covered slab of stone in 1898 while clearing stumps near the rural town of Kensington. The inscription on the Kensington Runestone claimed that Vikings led by Paul Knutson had come to the prairies of western Minnesota in 1362 in search of the Vineland colony established by Leif Erickson, whom some Minnesotans believe also visited the state.” Source

The biggest difference between the United States and most European countries is that the United States was a nation composed of waves of immigration from its inception – which were often treated negatively but then assimilated. Many European countries, like the UK and France have been basically homogeneous cultures for several hundred years and only in the past hundred to fifty years ago have had significant waves of immigration. These have often come from former colonies of European countries such as India, the West Indies and northern Africa and also more recently, refugees from the Mid-East and southern Africa. So European cultures are now having to deal with some of the issues of multi-culturalism that the US has dealt with, successfully or unsuccessfully, for years.

@ScienceChick I’m not generalizing in any negative way, I don’t get why you’re upset. If it’s statistically true that America was made up of newcomers from its inception with many waves of new immigrants over time then it’s just a fact. I didn’t create that map or article I linked.

It is not a comment about the people, it’s a comment about where they are from, or their family is from, before the current country. Maybe if you think there is something negative about being less diverse you have your own assumptions about what people from less diverse places are like? I didn’t say anything negative about the people or the cultures of anyone.

If you have information that shows Europe is more diverse go ahead and link it. I’m open to being wrong if I am.

Europeans in many ways are more international now than America. They probably are more traveled if I had to guess, and at the current time some European countries have been very open to accept new immigrants while America has a part of its population being annoying loud and quite awful at times, being very negative about new immigrants.

If you are comparing Norway to Wisconsin, for example, both are about 85% white, Norway 85% Norwegian, while Wisconsin would have whites from more parts of Europe. Just as an example. When I say diverse I include all ethnicity and countries not just white, black, and Asian. I don’t group all whites, or all any group, into one group when talking about our melting pot and cultures in America.

In my area we have a lot of subcultures due to the colleges and medical community. We just took more Saudi students from Canada, as their countries are fussing. Lots of Vietnamese, Chinese, African, Indian, Mexican, etc… Then you have various restaurants and churches and grocery stores for various cultures. ESL offered at the schools. It’s pretty amazing. Most crime is by methhead white folks. Some have cultural centers like the Japanese stroll gardens, and various festivals, too. This is Missouri btw, middle America is pretty diverse.

^^Great point about the festivals. Where I live we do celebrations for St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, Italian Fest, Oktoberfest, Tartan Day, Dyngus Day, Christmas, Chanukah, colonial days, and I’m trying to see if I can coordinate with the high school to do MayDay. We have dancing classes for clogging, tango, flamenco, folk dances (mostly Eastern Europe and Israel, a few Greek) polka, Irish. Plus, we have social clubs for tens of ethnicities and language classes and foreign language conversation clubs.

My city is right around 90% white. My guess is the majority of the 90% were born in America. They just like doing things to celebrate their familiy’s ethnicity, nationality and culture and everyone likes doing it with everyone else.

@janbb… thousands and thousands of years. Not hundreds. The native Americans, who migrated from Siberia, were here for 20,000 years before the white Europeans showed up.

I was talking about Europe when I said they’d been homogeneous for hundreds of years.

I’m talking about Europe too. My point was the native Americans CAME from Europe 20,000 years ago. Therefore Europe had to have human populations long before then. And in face, they have had human population of homogeneous peoples for hundreds of of thousands of years. The earliest migrations were 2 million years ago. The native Americans are relative new comers in the grand scheme of things.

Whatevs

LOL!

Dutchess – 50 yrs is just random number which I gave for comparison sake. Now the World has become like a global village. What are the effects of recent changes you see when you compare 50 yrs back?

’‘White’ isn’t a culture. European isn’t a culture. If the US is a melting pot, then Europe is a melting pot, but with more history and more fighting.

University cities seem to have more of a diverse make up as a result of folks who travel for education and teaching positions. as @KNOWITALL observes in her area in Missouri.

Europe has a population of about 741 million. The US has a population of about 325 million. With every devastating war on the globe, refugees disperse and are displaced to many places. So, just in the 20th century alone, we saw the mass movement of many cultures around the planet. Jewish people from everywhere, then there was Korea, then Vietnam, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and now Syria. If you want to look at the conflicts in Europe from the beginning of the written record, this is a good one. Note the number of cultures in Italy and Germany alone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWWLECJnylM You still meet Germans that refer to themselves as ‘Bavarian’ and Italians will tell you that they are Genoese or Fiorentino to better describe their culture.

There are also distinct signs of the colonised countries. In France, you will meet people who are from or whose families came from countries that France had colonised. Same in the UK. Many families from the West Indies, Kenya, India etc, moved to the UK.

Europe also has indigenous cultures, like the Sami, of Scandinavia, Basque of Spain and France, Nenets, Samoyedic and Komi peoples of northern Russia, and the Circassians of southern Russia and the North Caucasus.

So, when people try to compare cultures by looking at skin colour, it triggers me a bit. (Also, the Vikings explored North American well before Columbus accidentally fell on the West but they didn’t stay. The people in the Midwest claiming Viking heritage are more likely part of immigrant group of farmers, miners and loggers that arrived in the mid 1800’s and they were not Vikings. That’s the part that always makes me laugh a bit.)

That’s what I said, I am not including white as a culture, we white people are made up of many many cultures and nationalities. That’s the point all the Americans here are making, plus we have other races here too, but that’s neither here nor there, race is just one aspect of the diversity in the US, but it’s a minor point, I don’t think of race much at all when I think of diversity.

I guess if you compare Europe to the US you can say Europe is just as diverse, but that is country to continent. I typically think in terms of country to country, and that is what I would guess most Americans in this thread are doing. If you want to do country (the US) to continent (Europe) then that is something else.

Also it varies. Like St Louis, Mo has @170k Bosnians. Who knew? We also have large swathes of Amish and Mennonite which are huge subcultures. Oklahoma has Native reservations and hospitals.

Well, @Rohith the changes in America the last 50 years have taken sole power away from white males and started seeing it distributed among people of color and women. I would say that is the biggest cultural change in the last 50 years.
It is embarrassing to know that I was alive during a time when segregation was a thing, and black people weren’t allowed to use certain bathrooms or to vote.

^Really? I thought segregation was there in 19th century or before that.

@Rohith Slavery was still legal for more than half of the 19th century. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863 and that started the civil war, which ended in 1865 with half the country in shambles. Even though the war ended, Blacks and Whites were strictly segregated: separate schools, separate churches, separate bathrooms, drinking fountains, separate everything.

That kind of segregation wasn’t made illegal until almost a hundred years later (in the 20th century,) in 1954. They still had to fight against a more subtle type of segregation after that. This historic sit-in happened just a few days before I was born.