Culture of the United States in the context of "Geography of the United States"

Puerto Ricans (Spanish: Puertorriqueños, [pweɾtoriˈkeɲos]), commonly known as Boricuas, but also occasionally referred to as Borinqueños, Borincanos, or Puertorros, are an ethnic group based in the Caribbean archipelago and island of Puerto Rico, and a nation identified with the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico through ancestry, culture, or history. Puerto Ricans are predominately a tri-racial, Spanish-speaking, Christian society, descending in varying degrees from Indigenous Taíno natives, Spanish and other European colonists, and West and Central African slaves, freedmen, and free Blacks. As citizens of a U.S. territory, Puerto Ricans have automatic birthright American citizenship, and are considerably influenced by American culture. The population of Puerto Ricans is between 9 and 10 million worldwide, with the overwhelming majority residing in Puerto Rico and the mainland United States.

Immigration has been a major source of population growth and cultural change in the United States throughout much of its history. As of January 2025, the United States has the largest immigrant population in the world in absolute terms, with 53.3 million foreign-born residents, representing 15.8% of the total U.S. population—both record highs. While the United States represented about 4% of the total global population in 2024, 17% of all international migrants resided in the United States. In March 2025, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimated that approximately 18.6 million illegal immigrants resided in the United States. In 2024, immigrants and their U.S.-born children number more than 93 million people, or 28% of the total U.S. population.According to the 2016 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, the United States admitted a total of 1.18 million legal immigrants (618k new arrivals, 565k status adjustments) in 2016. Of these, 48% were the immediate relatives of United States citizens, 20% were family-sponsored, 13% were refugees or asylum seekers, 12% were employment-based preferences, 4.2% were part of the Diversity Immigrant Visa program, 1.4% were victims of a crime (U1) or their family members were (U2 to U5), and 1.0% who were granted the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) for Iraqis and Afghans employed by the United States Government. The remaining 0.4% included small numbers from several other categories, including 0.2% who were granted suspension of deportation as an immediate relative of a citizen (Z13); persons admitted under the Nicaraguan and Central American Relief Act; children born after the issuance of a parent's visa; and certain parolees from the former Soviet Union, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam who were denied refugee status.

Between 1921 and 1965 policies such as the National Origins Formula limited immigration and naturalization opportunities for people from areas outside Northwestern Europe. Exclusion laws enacted as early as the 1880s generally prohibited or severely restricted immigration from Asia, and quota laws enacted in the 1920s curtailed Southern and Eastern European immigration. The civil rights movement led to the replacement of these ethnic quotas with per-country limits for family-sponsored and employment-based preference visas. Between 1970 and 2007, the number of first-generation immigrants living in the United States quadrupled from 9.6 million to 38.1 million residents. Census estimates show 45.3 million foreign born residents in the United States as of March 2018 and 45.4 million in September 2021, the lowest three-year increase in decades.

In the United States of America, copyright grants monopoly protection for "original works of authorship". With the stated purpose to promote art and culture, copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly. These exclusive rights are subject to a time and generally expire 70 years after the author's death or 95 years after publication. In the United States, works published before January 1, 1930, are in the public domain.

United States copyright law was last generally revised by the Copyright Act of 1976, codified in Title 17 of the United States Code. The United States Constitution explicitly grants Congress the power to create copyright law (and patent law) under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, known as the Copyright Clause. Under the Copyright Clause, Congress has the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Most cultural policy in the United States is enacted at the local and state level, though federal programs also exist to carry out cultural policy. These promote the culture of the United States, including visual art, performing arts, heritage, language, museums, libraries, and sports.

In the United States, evangelicalism is a movement among Protestant Christians who believe in the necessity of being born again, emphasize the importance of evangelism, and affirm traditional Protestant teachings on the authority as well as the historicity of the Bible. Comprising nearly a quarter of the U.S. population, evangelicals are a diverse group drawn from a variety of backgrounds, including nondenominational churches, Pentecostal, Baptist, Reformed, Methodist, Mennonite, Plymouth Brethren, and Quaker.

Evangelicalism has played an important role in shaping American religion and culture. The First Great Awakening of the 18th century marked the rise of evangelical religion in colonial America. As the revival spread throughout the Thirteen Colonies, evangelicalism united Americans around a common faith. The Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century led to what historian Martin Marty calls the "Evangelical Empire", a period in which evangelicals dominated U.S. cultural institutions, including schools and universities. Evangelicals of this era in the northern United States were strong advocates of reform. They were involved in the temperance movement and supported the abolition of slavery, in addition to working toward education and criminal justice reform. In the southern United States, evangelicals split from their northern counterparts on the issue of slavery, establishing new denominations that opposed abolition and defended the practice of racial slavery upon which the South's expanding cash-crops-for-export agricultural economy was built. During the Civil War, each side confidently preached in support of its own cause using Bible verses and Evangelical arguments, which exposed a deep theological conflict that had been brewing for decades and would continue long after Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

The American frontier, also known as the Old West, and popularly known as the Wild West, encompasses the geography, history, folklore, and culture associated with the forward wave of American expansion in mainland North America that began with European colonial settlements in the early 17th century and ended with the admission of the last few contiguous western territories as states in 1912. This era of massive migration and settlement was particularly encouraged by President Thomas Jefferson following the Louisiana Purchase, giving rise to the expansionist attitude known as "manifest destiny" and historians' "Frontier Thesis". The legends, historical events and folklore of the American frontier, known as the frontier myth, have embedded themselves into United States culture so much so that the Old West, and the Western genre of media specifically, has become one of the defining features of American national identity.

Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) was an American painter and illustrator. His works have a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of the country's culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over nearly five decades. Among the best-known of Rockwell's works are the Willie Gillis series, Rosie the Riveter, the Four Freedoms series, Saying Grace, and The Problem We All Live With. He is also noted for his 64-year relationship with the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), during which he produced covers for their publication Boys' Life (now Scout Life), calendars, and other illustrations. These works include popular images that reflect the Scout Oath and Scout Law such as The Scoutmaster, A Scout Is Reverent, and A Guiding Hand.

Rockwell was a prolific artist, producing more than 4,000 original works in his lifetime. Most of his surviving works are in public collections. Rockwell was also commissioned to illustrate more than 40 books, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and to paint portraits of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, as well as those of foreign figures, including Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru. His portrait subjects also included Judy Garland. One of his last portraits was of Colonel Sanders in 1973. His annual contributions for the Boy Scouts calendars between 1925 and 1976 were only slightly overshadowed by his most popular of calendar works: the "Four Seasons" illustrations for Brown & Bigelow that were published for 17 years beginning in 1947 and reproduced in various styles and sizes since 1964. He created artwork for advertisements for Coca-Cola, Jell-O, General Motors, Scott Tissue, and other companies. Illustrations for booklets, catalogs, posters (particularly movie promotions), sheet music, stamps, playing cards, and murals (including "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "God Bless the Hills", which was completed in 1936 for the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey) rounded out Rockwell's oeuvre as an illustrator.

Sayyid Ibrahim Husayn Shadhili Qutb (9 October 1906 – 29 August 1966) was an Egyptian political theorist and revolutionary who was a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

As the author of 24 published books, with around 30 unpublished for different reasons (mainly destruction by the state), and at least 581 articles, including novels, literary arts critique and works on education, Qutb is best known in the Muslim world for his work on what he believed to be the social and political role of Islam, particularly in his books Social Justice and Ma'alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones). His magnum opus, Fi Zilal al-Qur'an (In the Shade of the Qur'an), is a 30-volume commentary on the Quran. Even though most of his observations and criticism were leveled at the Muslim world, Qutb also intensely disapproved of the society and culture of the United States, which he saw as materialistic, and obsessed with violence and sexual pleasures.He advocated violent, offensive jihad.