Dude
Dude is American English slang for an individual male. From the 1870s to the 1960s, dude meant a person who dressed in an fashionable manner or a conspicuous citified person, visiting a rural location, a "city slicker". In the 1960s, dude evolved to mean any male person, a meaning that slipped into mainstream American slang in the 1970s. Current slang retains at least some use of all three of these common meanings; the term “dude” may have derived from the 18th Century word “doodle” as in “Yankee Doodle Dandy”. In the popular press of the 1880s and 1890s, "dude" was a new word for "dandy"—an well-dressed male, a man who paid particular importance to how he appeared; the café society and Bright Young Things of the late 1800s and early 1900s were populated with dudes. Young men of leisure vied to show off their wardrobes; the best known of this type is Evander Berry Wall, dubbed "King of the Dudes" in 1880s New York and maintained a reputation for sartorial splendor all his life. This version of the word is still in occasional use in American slang, as in the phrase "all duded up" for getting dressed in fancy clothes.
The word was used to refer to Easterners and referred to a man with "store bought clothes". The word was used by cowboys to unfavorably refer to the city dwellers. A variation of this was a "well-dressed man, unfamiliar with life outside a large city." In The Home and Farm Manual, author Jonathan Periam used the term "dude" several times to denote an ill-bred and ignorant, but ostentatious, man from the city. The implication of an individual, unfamiliar with the demands of life outside of urban settings gave rise to the definition of dude as a city slicker, or "an Easterner in the West", thus "dude" was used to describe the wealthy men of the expansion of the United States during the 19th century by ranch-and-homestead-bound settlers of the American Old West. This use is reflected in the dude ranch, a guest ranch catering to urbanites seeking more rural experiences. Dude ranches began to appear in the American West in the early 20th century, for wealthy Easterners who came to experience the "cowboy life."
The implicit contrast is with those persons accustomed to a given frontier, mining, or other rural setting. This usage of "dude" was still in use in the 1950s in America, as a word for a tourist—of either gender—who attempts to dress like the local culture but fails. An inverse of these uses of "dude" would be the term "redneck," a contemporary American colloquialism referring to poor farmers and uneducated persons, which itself became pejorative, is still in use; as the word gained popularity and reached the coasts of the U. S. and traveled between borders, variations of the slang began to pop up such as the female versions of dudette and dudines. The slang had gradual decline in usage until the early to mid 20th century when other subcultures of the U. S. began using it more while again deriving it from the type of dress and using it as a descriptor for common male and sometimes female companions. Lower class schools with a greater mix of subcultures allowed the word to spread to all cultures and up the class ladders to become common use in the U.
S. By the late 20th to early 21st century, dude had gained the ability to be used in the form of expression, whether that be disappointment, excitement, or loving and it widened to be able to refer to any general person no matter race, gender, or culture; the term was used as a job description, such as "bush hook dude" as a position on a railroad in the 1880s. For an example, see the Stampede Tunnel. In the early 1960s, dude became prominent in surfer culture as a synonym of fella; the female equivalent was "dudette" or "dudess," but these have both fallen into disuse, "dude" is now used as a unisex term. This more general meaning of "dude" started creeping into the mainstream in the mid-1970s. "Dude," in surfer and "bro" culture, is used informally to address someone or refer to another person. One of the first known references to the word in American film was in the 1969 movie, Easy Rider where Captain America explains to his cellmate lawyer the definition of "Dude": "Dude means nice guy; the usage of the word to mean a "cool person" was further popularized in American films of the 1980s and 1990s such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Wayne's World, Clerks.
The 1998 film The Big Lebowski featured Jeff Bridges as "The Dude", described as a "lazy deadbeat". The character was inspired by activist and producer Jeff Dowd, called "Dude" since childhood; the film's central character inspired the creation of a neoreligion. The 2000 film Dude, Where's My Car? Uses the word in the title. In 2008, Bud Light aired an advertising campaign in which the dialogue consists of different inflections of "Dude!" and does not mention the product by name. It was a followup to their near-identical and more noted "Whassup?" campaign. Dude – By Kiesling, Scott F. Published in American Speech, Vol. 79, No. 3, Fall 2004, pp. 281–305 Dude, Where's My Dude? – Dudelicious Dissection, From Sontag to Spicoli, New York Observer Words@random: "dude" Material for the Study of Dude – The etymological origin of the word "dude" by Barry Popik, David Shulman, Gerald Cohen. Published i
Yokel
Yokel is one of several derogatory terms referring to the stereotype of unsophisticated country people. The term is only attributed from the early 19th century. In the United States, the term is used to describe someone living in rural areas. Synonyms for yokel include bubba, country bumpkin, chawbacon, redneck and hick. In the UK, yokels are traditionally depicted as wearing the old West Country/farmhand's dress of straw hat and white smock, chewing or sucking a piece of straw and carrying a pitchfork or rake, listening to "Scrumpy and Western" music. Yokels are portrayed as living in rural areas of Britain such as the West Country, East Anglia, the Yorkshire Dales and Wales. British yokels speak with country dialects from various parts of Britain. Yokels are depicted as straightforward, simple and deceived, failing to see through false pretenses, they are depicted as talking about bucolic topics like cows, goats, alfalfa, crops and buxom wenches to the exclusion of all else. Broadly, they are portrayed as unaware of or uninterested in the world outside their own surroundings.
The development of television brought many isolated communities into mainstream British culture in the 1950s and 1960s. The Internet continues this integration, further eroding the town/country divide. In the 21st century British country people are less seen as yokels. In the British TV Show The Two Ronnies, it was asserted that despite political correctness, it is possible to poke fun at yokels as no-one sees themselves as being one. In Scotland, those from the Highlands and Islands, Moray and other rural areas are referred to by urban or lowland Scots as teuchters. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term is a "by-form" of the personal name Richard and Hob for Robert. Although the English word "hick" is of recent vintage, distinctions between urban and rural dwellers are ancient. According to a popular etymology, hick derives from the nickname "Old Hickory" for Andrew Jackson, one of the first Presidents of the United States to come from rural hard-scrabble roots; this nickname suggested that Jackson was enduring like an old Hickory tree.
Jackson was admired by the residents of remote and mountainous areas of the United States, people who would come to be known as "hicks." Another explanation of the term hick describes a time when hickory nut flour was sold. Tough times, such as the depression, led to the use of hickory nuts as an alternative to traditional grains. People who harvested, processed, or sold hickory products, such as hickory flour, were referred to as "hicks"; the term was generalized over time to include people who lived in rural areas and were not considered as sophisticated as their urban counterparts. Though not a term explicitly denoting lower class, some argue that the term degrades impoverished rural people and that "hicks" continue as one of the few groups that can be ridiculed and stereotyped with impunity. In "The Redneck Manifesto," Jim Goad argues that this stereotype has served to blind the general population to the economic exploitation of rural areas in Appalachia, the South, parts of the Midwest.
The Clampetts, in The Beverly Hillbillies TV series Cousin Eddie Johnson of the National Lampoon's Vacation movies The Hazzard County residents, of The Dukes of Hazzard TV series and the related film Moonrunners The hillbilly residents of Dogpatch, in the Li'l Abner comic strip The Hooterville residents, in the sister TV series Green Acres and Petticoat Junction Rose Nylund, portrayed by Betty White, one of the four lead characters from The Golden Girls TV series, from the midwestern town of St. Olaf and told stories from her time living in St. Olaf The Simpsons animated television series character Cletus Spuckler, referred to in a song in one episode as "Cletus, the Slack-Jawed Yokel" Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett, who portray yokels in BBC1 sketch show The Two Ronnies The nurse Nellie Forbush in musical South Pacific, who describes herself as a "hick" from Little Rock, Arkansas Willie Stark in the 1946 novel All the King's Men, who uses the word hick in his speeches to describe the poor voters and himself, for being fooled by the elite.
He calls upon citizens promising he will be the voice of the hicks. Niko Bellic the main character in GTA IV is called a'yokel' on more than one occasion by one of his employers'Vlad Glebov'. Ike and Addley, characters from the 1980 horror film Mother's Day. Cass Parker, a main character on the Australian television series Prisoner. Larry the Cable Guy, a character played by comedian Daniel Lawrence Whitney. Larry the Cable Guy is confused for being Lawrence's real-life persona, though the confusion is enforced by the fact that Lawrence speaks to the public in his real voice, has used the character in various movies, is credited for his roles under this name. Goad, Jim.. The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-83864-8 The Man from Ironbark, an Australian poem Wiltshire Poems, website has an illustration of the traditional Wiltshire/Somerset smock and floppy hat Yokel, definition at askoxford.com
Idiom
An idiom is a phrase or an expression that has a figurative, or sometimes literal, meaning. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiom's figurative meaning is different from the literal meaning. There are thousands of idioms, occurring in all languages, it is estimated that there are at least twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions in the English language. Many idiomatic expressions, in their original use, had literal meaning. Sometimes the attribution of a literal meaning can change as the phrase becomes disconnected from its original roots, leading to a folk etymology. For instance, spill the beans has been said to originate from an ancient method of democratic voting, wherein a voter would put a bean into one of several cups to indicate which candidate he wanted to cast his vote for. If the jars were spilled before the counting of votes was complete, anyone would be able to see which jar had more beans, therefore which candidate was the winner. Over time, the practice was discontinued and the idiom became figurative.
However, this etymology for spill the beans has been questioned by linguists. The earliest known written accounts come from the USA and involve horse racing around 1902–1903, the one who "spilled the beans" was an unlikely horse who won a race, thus causing the favorites to lose. By 1907 the term was being used in baseball, but the subject who "spilled the beans" shifted to players who made mistakes, allowing the other team to win. By 1908 the term was starting to be applied to politics, in the sense that crossing the floor in a vote was "spilling the beans". However, in all these early usages the term "spill" was used in the sense of "upset" rather than "divulge". A Stack Exchange discussion provided a large number of links to historic newspapers covering the usage of the term from 1902 onwards. Other idioms are deliberately figurative. Break a leg, used as an ironic way of wishing good luck in a performance or presentation, may have arisen from the belief that one ought not to utter the words "good luck" to an actor.
By wishing someone bad luck, it is supposed. In linguistics, idioms are presumed to be figures of speech contradicting the principle of compositionality; that compositionality is the key notion for the analysis of idioms is emphasized in most accounts of idioms. This principle states that the meaning of a whole should be constructed from the meanings of the parts that make up the whole. In other words, one should be in a position to understand the whole if one understands the meanings of each of the parts that make up the whole; the following example is employed to illustrate the point: Fred kicked the bucket. Understood compositionally, Fred has kicked an actual, physical bucket; the much more idiomatic reading, however, is non-compositional: Fred is understood to have died. Arriving at the idiomatic reading from the literal reading is unlikely for most speakers. What this means is that the idiomatic reading is, stored as a single lexical item, now independent of the literal reading. In phraseology, idioms are defined as a sub-type of phraseme, the meaning of, not the regular sum of the meanings of its component parts.
John Saeed defines an idiom as collocated words that became affixed to each other until metamorphosing into a fossilised term. This collocation of words redefines each component word in the word-group and becomes an idiomatic expression. Idioms do not translate well; when two or three words are used together in a particular sequence, the words are said to be irreversible binomials, or Siamese twins. Usage will prevent the words from being rearranged. For example, a person may be left "high and dry" but never "dry and high"; this idiom in turn means that the person is left in their former condition rather than being assisted so that their condition improves. Not all Siamese twins are idioms, however. "Chips and dip" is an irreversible binomial, but it refers to literal food items, not idiomatic ones. Idioms possess varying degrees of mobility. While some idioms are used only in a routine form, others can undergo syntactic modifications such as passivization, raising constructions, clefting, demonstrating separable constituencies within the idiom.
Mobile idioms, allowing such movement, maintain their idiomatic meaning where fixed idioms do not: Mobile I spilled the beans on our project. → The beans were spilled on our project. Fixed The old man kicked the bucket. → The bucket was kicked. Many fixed idioms lack semantic composition, meaning that the idiom contains the semantic role of a verb, but not of any object; this is true of kick the bucket. By contrast, the semantically composite idiom spill the beans, meaning reveal a secret, contains both a semantic verb and object and secret. Semantically composite idioms have a syntactic similarity between their semantic forms; the types of movement allowed for certain idiom relate to the degree to which the literal reading of the idiom has a connection to its idiomatic meaning. This is referred to as transparency. While most idioms that do not display semantic composition do not allow non-adjectival modification, those that are motivated allow lexical substitution. For example, oil the wheels and grease the wheels allow variation for nouns that elicit a similar literal meaning.
These types of changes can occur only when speakers c
Cowboy
A cowboy is an animal herder who tends cattle on ranches in North America, traditionally on horseback, performs a multitude of other ranch-related tasks. The historic American cowboy of the late 19th century arose from the vaquero traditions of northern Mexico and became a figure of special significance and legend. A subtype, called a wrangler tends the horses used to work cattle. In addition to ranch work, some cowboys participate in rodeos. Cowgirls, first defined as such in the late 19th century, had a less-well documented historical role, but in the modern world work at identical tasks and have obtained considerable respect for their achievements. Cattle handlers in many other parts of the world South America and Australia, perform work similar to the cowboy; the cowboy has deep historic roots tracing back to Spain and the earliest European settlers of the Americas. Over the centuries, differences in terrain and climate, the influence of cattle-handling traditions from multiple cultures, created several distinct styles of equipment and animal handling.
As the ever-practical cowboy adapted to the modern world, his equipment and techniques adapted, though many classic traditions are preserved. The English word cowboy has an origin from several earlier terms that referred to both age and to cattle or cattle-tending work; the English word cowboy was a direct English translation of vaquero, a Spanish word for an individual who managed cattle while mounted on horseback. It was derived from vaca, it was first used in print by Jonathan Swift in 1725. It was used in Britain from 1820 to 1850 to describe young boys who tended the family or community cows; the English word "cowherd" was used to describe a cattle herder, referred to a pre-adolescent or early adolescent boy, who worked on foot. This word is old in the English language, originating prior to the year 1000. By 1849 "cowboy" had developed its modern sense as an adult cattle handler of the American West. Variations on the word appeared later. "Cowhand" appeared in 1852, "cowpoke" in 1881 restricted to the individuals who prodded cattle with long poles to load them onto railroad cars for shipping.
Names for a cowboy in American English include buckaroo, cowpoke and cowpuncher. Another English word for a cowboy, buckaroo, is an anglicization of vaquero.. Today, "cowboy" is a term common throughout the west and in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, "buckaroo" is used in the Great Basin and California, "cowpuncher" in Texas and surrounding states. Equestrianism required skills and an investment in horses and equipment available to or entrusted to a child, though in some cultures boys rode a donkey while going to and from pasture. In antiquity, herding of sheep and goats was the job of minors, still is a task for young people in various third world cultures; because of the time and physical ability needed to develop necessary skills, both historic and modern cowboys began as an adolescent. Cowboys earned wages as soon as they developed sufficient skill to be hired. If not crippled by injury, cowboys may handle horses for a lifetime. In the United States, a few women took on the tasks of ranching and learned the necessary skills, though the "cowgirl" did not become recognized or acknowledged until the close of the 19th century.
On western ranches today, the working cowboy is an adult. Responsibility for herding cattle or other livestock is no longer considered suitable for children or early adolescents. However, both boys and girls growing up in a ranch environment learn to ride horses and perform basic ranch skills as soon as they are physically able under adult supervision; such youths, by their late teens, are given responsibilities for "cowboy" work on the ranch. "Cowboy" was used during the American Revolution to describe American fighters who opposed the movement for independence. Claudius Smith, an outlaw identified with the Loyalist cause, was called the "Cow-boy of the Ramapos" due to his penchant for stealing oxen and horses from colonists and giving them to the British. In the same period, a number of guerrilla bands operated in Westchester County, which marked the dividing line between the British and American forces; these groups were made up of local farmhands who would ambush convoys and carry out raids on both sides.
There were two separate groups: the "skinners" fought for the pro-independence side, while the "cowboys" supported the British. In the Tombstone, Arizona area during the 1880s, the term "cowboy" or "cow-boy" was used pejoratively to describe men, implicated in various crimes. One loosely organized band was dubbed "The Cowboys," and profited from smuggling cattle and tobacco across the U. S.–Mexico border. The San Francisco Examiner wrote in an editorial, "Cowboys the most reckless class of outlaws in that wild country... infinitely worse than the ordinary robber." It became an insult in the area to call someone a "cowboy", as it suggested he was a horse thief, robber, or outlaw. Cattlemen were called herders or ranchers; the Cowboys' activities were curtailed by the Gunfight at the O. K. Corral and the resulting Earp Vendetta Ride; the origins of the cowboy tradition come from Spain, beginning with the hacienda system of medieval Spain. This style of cattle ranching spread throughout much of the Iberian peninsula, was imported to the Americas.
Both regions possessed a dry climate with sp
Film
A film called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, or photoplay, is a series of still images that, when shown on a screen, create the illusion of moving images. This optical illusion causes the audience to perceive continuous motion between separate objects viewed in rapid succession; the process of filmmaking is both an industry. A film is created by photographing actual scenes with a motion-picture camera, by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques, by means of CGI and computer animation, or by a combination of some or all of these techniques, other visual effects; the word "cinema", short for cinematography, is used to refer to filmmaking and the film industry, to the art of filmmaking itself. The contemporary definition of cinema is the art of simulating experiences to communicate ideas, perceptions, beauty or atmosphere by the means of recorded or programmed moving images along with other sensory stimulations. Films were recorded onto plastic film through a photochemical process and shown through a movie projector onto a large screen.
Contemporary films are now fully digital through the entire process of production and exhibition, while films recorded in a photochemical form traditionally included an analogous optical soundtrack. Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures, they reflect those cultures. Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment, a powerful medium for educating—or indoctrinating—citizens; the visual basis of film gives it a universal power of communication. Some films have become popular worldwide attractions through the use of dubbing or subtitles to translate the dialog into other languages; the individual images that make up a film are called frames. In the projection of traditional celluloid films, a rotating shutter causes intervals of darkness as each frame, in turn, is moved into position to be projected, but the viewer does not notice the interruptions because of an effect known as persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after its source disappears.
The perception of motion is due to a psychological effect called the phi phenomenon. The name "film" originates from the fact that photographic film has been the medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion-picture, including picture, picture show, moving picture and flick; the most common term in the United States is movie. Common terms for the field in general include the big screen, the silver screen, the movies, cinema. In early years, the word sheet was sometimes used instead of screen. Preceding film in origin by thousands of years, early plays and dances had elements common to film: scripts, costumes, direction, audiences and scores. Much terminology used in film theory and criticism apply, such as mise en scène. Owing to the lack of any technology for doing so, the moving images and sounds could not be recorded for replaying as with film; the magic lantern created by Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s, could be used to project animation, achieved by various types of mechanical slides.
Two glass slides, one with the stationary part of the picture and the other with the part, to move, would be placed one on top of the other and projected together the moving slide would be hand-operated, either directly or by means of a lever or other mechanism. Chromotrope slides, which produced eye-dazzling displays of continuously cycling abstract geometrical patterns and colors, were operated by means of a small crank and pulley wheel that rotated a glass disc. In the mid-19th century, inventions such as Joseph Plateau's phenakistoscope and the zoetrope demonstrated that a designed sequence of drawings, showing phases of the changing appearance of objects in motion, would appear to show the objects moving if they were displayed one after the other at a sufficiently rapid rate; these devices relied on the phenomenon of persistence of vision to make the display appear continuous though the observer's view was blocked as each drawing rotated into the location where its predecessor had just been glimpsed.
Each sequence was limited to a small number of drawings twelve, so it could only show endlessly repeating cyclical motions. By the late 1880s, the last major device of this type, the praxinoscope, had been elaborated into a form that employed a long coiled band containing hundreds of images painted on glass and used the elements of a magic lantern to project them onto a screen; the use of sequences of photographs in such devices was limited to a few experiments with subjects photographed in a series of poses because the available emulsions were not sensitive enough to allow the short exposures needed to photograph subjects that were moving. The sensitivity was improved and in the late 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge created the first animated image sequences photographed in real-time. A row of cameras was used, each, in turn, capturing one image on a photographic glass plate, so the total number of images in each sequence was limited by the number of cameras, about two dozen at most. Muybridge used his system to analyze the movements of a wi
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in daily newspapers, while Sunday newspapers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections. With the development of the internet, they began to appear online as webcomics. There were more than 200 different comic strips and daily cartoon panels in South Korea alone each day for most of the 20th century, for a total of at least 7,300,000 episodes. Strips are drawn by a comics artist or cartoonist; as the name implies, comic strips can be humorous. Starting in the late 1920s, comic strips expanded from their mirthful origins to feature adventure stories, as seen in Popeye, Captain Easy, Buck Rogers and The Adventures of Tintin. Soap-opera continuity strips such as Judge Parker and Mary Worth gained popularity in the 1940s.
All are called, comic strips, though cartoonist Will Eisner has suggested that "sequential art" would be a better genre-neutral name. In the UK and the rest of Europe, comic strips are serialized in comic book magazines, with a strip's story sometimes continuing over three pages or more. Comic strips have appeared in American magazines such as Liberty and Boys' Life and on the front covers of magazines, such as the Flossy Frills series on The American Weekly Sunday newspaper supplement. Storytelling using a sequence of pictures has existed through history. One medieval European example in textile form is the Bayeux Tapestry. Printed examples emerged in 19th-century Germany and in 18th-century England, where some of the first satirical or humorous sequential narrative drawings were produced. William Hogarth's 18th century English cartoons include both narrative sequences, such as A Rake's Progress, single panels; the Biblia pauperum, a tradition of picture Bibles beginning in the Middle Ages, sometimes depicted Biblical events with words spoken by the figures in the miniatures written on scrolls coming out of their mouths—which makes them to some extent ancestors of the modern cartoon strips.
In China, with its traditions of block printing and of the incorporation of text with image, experiments with what became lianhuanhua date back to 1884. The first newspaper comic strips appeared in North America in the late 19th century; the Yellow Kid is credited as one of the first newspaper strips. However, the art form combining words and pictures developed and there are many examples which led up to the comic strip. Swiss author and caricature artist Rodolphe Töpffer is considered the father of the modern comic strips, his illustrated stories such as Histoire de M. Vieux Bois, first published in the USA in 1842 as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck or Histoire de Monsieur Jabot, inspired subsequent generations of German and American comic artists. In 1865, German painter and caricaturist Wilhelm Busch created the strip Max and Moritz, about two trouble-making boys, which had a direct influence on the American comic strip. Max and Moritz was a series of moralistic tales in the vein of German children's stories such as Struwwelpeter.
Max and Moritz provided an inspiration for German immigrant Rudolph Dirks, who created the Katzenjammer Kids in 1897. Familiar comic-strip iconography such as stars for pain, sawing logs for snoring, speech balloons, thought balloons originated in Dirks' strip. Hugely popular, Katzenjammer Kids occasioned one of the first comic-strip copyright ownership suits in the history of the medium; when Dirks left William Randolph Hearst for the promise of a better salary under Joseph Pulitzer, it was an unusual move, since cartoonists deserted Pulitzer for Hearst. In a unusual court decision, Hearst retained the rights to the name "Katzenjammer Kids", while creator Dirks retained the rights to the characters. Hearst promptly hired Harold Knerr to draw his own version of the strip. Dirks renamed his version Fritz. Thus, two versions distributed by rival syndicates graced the comics pages for decades. Dirks' version distributed by United Feature Syndicate, ran until 1979. In the United States, the great popularity of comics sprang from the newspaper war between Pulitzer and Hearst.
The Little Bears was the first American comic strip with recurring characters, while the first color comic supplement was published by the Chicago Inter-Ocean sometime in the latter half of 1892, followed by the New York Journal's first color Sunday comic pages in 1897. On January 31, 1912, Hearst introduced the nation's first full daily comic page in his New York Evening Journal; the history of this newspaper rivalry and the rapid appearance of comic strips in most major American newspapers is discussed by Ian Gordon. Numerous events in newspaper comic strips have reverberated throughout society at large, though few of these events occurred in recent years, owing to the declining role of the newspaper comic strip as an entertainment form; the longest-running American comic strips are: The Katzenjammer Kids Gasoline Alley Ripley's Believe It or Not! Barney Google and Snuffy Smith Thimble Theater/Popeye Blondie Bringing Up Father (1913–2000.
Eastern United States
The Eastern United States referred to as the American East or the East, is the region of the United States lying to the north of the Ohio River and to the east of the Mississippi River. In 2011 the 26 states east of the Mississippi had an estimated population of 179,948,346 or 58.28% of the total U. S. population of 308,745,358. The Southern United States constitutes a large region in the south-eastern and south-central United States enumerated as the following: Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana, its unique cultural and historic heritage includes the following aspects: Native Americans early European settlements of English, Scots-Irish and German heritage importation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans growth of a large proportion of African Americans in the population reliance on slave labor legacy of the Confederacy after the American Civil War. These led to "the South" developing distinctive customs, musical styles, varied cuisines, that have profoundly shaped traditional American culture.
Many aspects of the South's culture remain rooted in the American Civil War. In the last few decades, the Southern US has been attracting domestic and international migrants, the American South is among the fastest-growing areas in the United States. New England is a region of the United States located in the northeastern corner of the country, bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the state of New York, consisting of the modern states of Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut. In one of the earliest English settlements in the New World, English Pilgrims from Europe first settled in New England in 1620, in the colony of Plymouth. In the late 18th century, the New England colonies would be among the first North American British colonies to demonstrate ambitions of independence from the British Crown, although they would threaten secession over the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain. New England produced the first examples of American literature and philosophy and was home to the beginnings of free public education.
In the 19th century, it played a prominent role in the movement to abolish slavery in the United States. It was the first region of the United States to be transformed by the Industrial Revolution. An area in which parts were Republican, it is now a region with one of the highest levels of support for the Democratic Party in the United States, with the majority of voters in every state voting for the Democrats in the 1992, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016 Presidential elections, every state but New Hampshire voting for Al Gore in 2000; the Midwestern United States is one of the four geographic regions within the United States that are recognized by the United States Census Bureau. Seven states in the central and inland northeastern US, traditionally considered to be part of the Midwest, can be classified as being part of the Eastern United States: Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. A 2006 Census Bureau estimate put the population at 66,217,736; the United States Census Bureau divides this region into the East North Central States and the West North Central States.
Chicago is the largest city in the region, followed by Columbus. Chicago has the largest metropolitan statistical area, followed by Detroit, Minneapolis – Saint Paul. Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan is the oldest city in the region, having been founded by French missionaries and explorers in 1668; the term Midwest has been in common use for over 100 years. Another term sometimes applied to the same general region is "the heartland". Other designations for the region have fallen into disuse, such as the "Northwest" or "Old Northwest" and "Mid-America". Since the book Middletown appeared in 1929, sociologists have used Midwestern cities as "typical" of the entire nation; the region has a higher employment-to-population ratio than the Northeast, the West, the South, or the Sun Belt states. Four of the states associated with the Midwestern United States are traditionally referred to as belonging in part to the Great Plains region; the following is a list of the 24 largest cities in the East by population: East Coast of the United States Eastern Canada Territories of the United States on stamps
