United States

The influence of the United States of America upon the rest of the world—for better or for worse—is so heavy as to sometimes obscure the nation's authentic spirit. The country’s Hollywood stars, sports icons, technological obsessions, and foreign policy are familiar to people all over the globe. But the USA—a gigantic entity, stretching from the steamy subtropics to the Arctic Ocean—is as wonderfully motley as they come, full of people, scenes, and traditions that seem worlds removed from the pop culture and nationalistic bombast so many foreigners associate with America.

The country’s scenic diversity has few parallels. The southern toe of Florida, unfurled in the Everglades, feels more Caribbean than North American, just as the hot deserts and mountains of the far Southwest are, ecologically speaking, really a north-of-the-border slice of Mexico. The mixed hardwood forests of New England put on arguably the world’s greatest autumn-foliage show, while the prairies of the Great Plains—haunted by the ghosts of millions of bison (and, increasingly, grazed by recovering herds of these mighty beasts)—roll oceanically to the battlements of the Rocky Mountains. The Great Lakes, the Pacific Northwest temperate rainforests, the baldcypress-tupelo swamps of the South, the golden Coast Ranges of California, the enormous subarctic wilderness of Alaska, the titanic shield volcanoes of Hawai’i—the panoply of landscapes is unbelievably varied and reliably gorgeous. Denali, the Grand Canyon, the Outer Banks, the Yellowstone Plateau, the Boundary Waters, Death Valley, the Adirondacks, the White River Badlands: These and many other natural landmarks are as American as the Lincoln Memorial. After all, it's here where the national park idea was born.

There’s an analogous multiplicity, of course, in the America’s citizenry. This is a nation established in its modern form by immigrants and rooted in thousands of years of American Indian heritage. The persecution and forced removal of the country’s indigenous peoples are dark chapters, but the Cherokee, the Seminole, the Chinook, the Lakota, the Yurok, the Mohegans, the Inuit, and members of hundreds of other aboriginal cultures remain a living presence here. Cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami reveal a breathtaking multicultural spectrum: The “melting-pot” idea has been far from seamless in practice, but there’s no question the U.S. takes pride in the myriad of ethnicities, religions, philosophies, and customs that together constitute national society.

Sampling cultural life in America means getting a sense for regional diversity: Friday fish fries in Wisconsin, the barbecue soirees of the South, theater-hopping in New York City, “second lining” in New Orleans, museum- and monument-touring in Washington, D.C., craft-beer tastings in the Northwest, rodeos and powwows in the Great Plains, Caribbean-style fetes in South Florida, surfing those fabled Southern California shores… The list goes on.

The American experience is, well, an experience. The American dream, the American spirit—you can argue all day over just what those ideals are, or what they mean in the 21st century for the country itself and the globe at large. But what’s undeniable is that they still resonate in the American imagination, from the quietest countryside to the loudest cities. And tracking that dream, that spirit, along the highways and byways of the U.S.A. still delivers romance, surprise, and more than a little beauty.