page_title: European Americans
section_title: Culture
hierarchical_section_title: European Americans / Culture
caption_attribution_description: The Mount Rushmore Monument as seen from the viewing plaza.
context_page_description: European Americans are Americans of European ancestry. This term includes people who are descended from the first European settlers in America as well as people who are descended from more recent European arrivals. European Americans are the largest panethnic group in the United States, both historically and at present.
  The Spaniards are thought to be the first Europeans to establish a continuous presence in what is now the contiguous United States, with Martín de Argüelles in St. Augustine, then a part of Spanish Florida. Virginia Dare, born August 18, 1587, was the first English child to be born in the Americas. She was born in Roanoke Colony, located in present-day North Carolina, which was the first attempt, made by Queen Elizabeth I, to establish a permanent English settlement in North America.
  In the 2016 American Community Survey, German Americans, Irish Americans, English Americans, Italian Americans, and Polish Americans were the five largest self-reported European ancestry groups in the United States forming over a third of the total population.
context_section_description: European-American culture forms the basis of the culture of the United States. As the largest component of the American population, the overall American culture deeply reflects the European-influenced culture that predates the United States of America as an independent state. Much of American culture shows influences from the diverse nations of the United Kingdom and Ireland, such as the English, Irish, Cornish, Manx, Scotch-Irish and Welsh. Colonial ties to Great Britain spread the English language, legal system and other cultural attributes. Scholar David Hackett Fischer asserts in Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America that the folkways of four groups of people who moved from distinct regions of the United Kingdom to the United States persisted and provide a substantial cultural basis for much of the modern United States. Fischer explains "the origins and stability of a social system which for two centuries has remained stubbornly democratic in its politics, capitalist in its economy, libertarian in its laws and individualist in its society and pluralistic in its culture."
  Much of the European-American cultural lineage can be traced back to Western and Northern Europe, which is institutionalized in the government, traditions, and civic education in the United States.
  Since most later European Americans have assimilated into American culture, most European Americans now generally express their individual ethnic ties sporadically and symbolically and do not consider their specific ethnic origins to be essential to their identity; however, European American ethnic expression has been revived since the 1960s. Some European Americans such as Italians, Greeks, Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, Irish, and others have maintained high levels of ethnic identity. In the 1960s, Mexican Americans, Jewish Americans, and African Americans started exploring their cultural traditions as the ideal of cultural pluralism took hold. European Americans followed suit by exploring their individual cultural origins and having less shame of expressing their unique cultural heritage.
caption: Mount Rushmore was sculpted by Danish-American Gutzon Borglum. Sculptures of the heads of former U.S. presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln. It has become an iconic symbol of the United States.[55]
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