American Culture

Mott the Hoople said:
But pop music itself has been around longer than America. Almost all forms of American music, except Jazz and it's derivatives, The Blues, R&B and Rock n Roll, came from Europe. Pop and Country music are directly descended from European folk music.
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Actually Mott, even Jazz has it's roots elsewhere....Africa.
 
Panda Hugger said:
No it's not. Europe has contributed pretty much nothing to music in the 20th century, besides stealing techno from us and making it shittier.
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So where did Heavy Metal, Progressive Rock and Modern Folk from bands like Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention come from then? Black Blues musicians in the fifties couldn't catch a cold in the States and had to come over to the UK to make any money at all. Same story with Jimi Hendrix, look up Chas Chandler and grow a clue! How about David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, T-Rex, The Who, Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, Queen, Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode, Level 42 and New Order to name just a few. Oh yeh and what about Abba, I used to love them even when they were deeply unfashionable, I think the Day Before You Came is one of the finest songs in the last 50 years.

 
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iolo said:
Why be proud of the atomic bomb, since all the serious research was done by Europeans? America can be proud of jazz, a great deal of film, the blues, the Abolitionists, slave and free, especially the Quaker one whose name has escaped me, the Wobblies, some writers (T.S. Eliot, for instance), quite a few painters (abstract expressionists, were they called?) a lot of Science Fiction, the New Deal and the greatest American of all time, our HUGE hero when I was young and McCarthy was on the drunken strut, Paul Robeson.
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That's not correct. A great deal of the theoretical research was done by European. Virtually all the applied research was done by the US.
 
Rana said:
Has anyone said the Internet and what about computers? Are they considered Amerian? How about the telephone?
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Again.....we could fill pages and pages with unique American inventions. Europeans invented motorcycles but no mass produced motorcycle has had the cultural impact that Harley Davidson's have had. Same with blue jeans. Trousers were invented millenia ago but blue jeans have had a huge cultural impact. As for computers and internet. Granted the cultural impact is huge but they weren't created by Americans. Computers were first invented by the Chinese and the internet was an international collaberation as the name imples.
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
I not sure how old you are but you really do need to brush up on history. There were no prisoners working on the Manhattan Project.
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I think Tekky is confusing the Manhattan project with the post war rocket project and the captured German scientist and engineers were not prisoners or slaves. They were free to go back to Germany. They would have been idiots to have done so as they were well compensated(far better than they would have been in post war Germany) and free to come and go as they pleased in this nation.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
I think Tekky is confusing the Manhattan project with the post war rocket project and the captured German scientist and engineers were not prisoners or slaves. They were free to go back to Germany. They would have been idiots to have done so as they were well compensated(far better than they would have been in post war Germany) and free to come and go as they pleased in this nation.
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thanks, Mott! As I said in post 39 -
Apologize for mis-speaking; the Germans who worked on the Manhattan project were Jewish refugees from Germany, not prisoners.
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Mott the Hoople said:
I think Tekky is confusing the Manhattan project with the post war rocket project and the captured German scientist and engineers were not prisoners or slaves. They were free to go back to Germany. They would have been idiots to have done so as they were well compensated(far better than they would have been in post war Germany) and free to come and go as they pleased in this nation.
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I have a huge great hardback biography on Oppenheimer, he was an incredibly complex character.
 
Mott the Hoople said:
Again.....we could fill pages and pages with unique American inventions. Europeans invented motorcycles but no mass produced motorcycle has had the cultural impact that Harley Davidson's have had. Same with blue jeans. Trousers were invented millenia ago but blue jeans have had a huge cultural impact. As for computers and internet. Granted the cultural impact is huge but they weren't created by Americans. Computers were first invented by the Chinese and the internet was an international collaberation as the name imples.
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The World Wide Web and HTML were developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee when he was at CERN. The first true computer was designed and constructed by Dr. Tommy Flowers and his team at Bletchley Park.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_berners_lee

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
 
Mott the Hoople said:
I think Tekky is confusing the Manhattan project with the post war rocket project and the captured German scientist and engineers were not prisoners or slaves. They were free to go back to Germany. They would have been idiots to have done so as they were well compensated(far better than they would have been in post war Germany) and free to come and go as they pleased in this nation.
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Britain played a substantial role in the development of nuclear weapons.

http://suite101.com/article/britain-the-atomic-bomb-and-the-manhattan-project-a343472
 
Ok, so I read through the thread. Some I disagree with that I'll get into later but here's? a sure one.

Jeep


Great thread Mott!
 
B.s.
Aoxomoxoa said:
So where did Heavy Metal, Progressive Rock and Modern Folk from bands like Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention come from then? Black Blues musicians in the fifties couldn't catch a cold in the States and had to come over to the UK to make any money at all. Same story with Jimi Hendrix, look up Chas Chandler and grow a clue! How about David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, T-Rex, The Who, Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, Queen, Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode, Level 42 and New Order to name just a few. Oh yeh and what about Abba, I used to love them even when they were deeply unfashionable, I think the Day Before You Came is one of the finest songs in the last 50 years.

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Pretty good points.
 
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