What is American Culture?—You Asked Series

American culture no longer belongs to America, and in truth it never did. Different types of American pop culture have roots in other cultures’ traditions: Musical comedy owes its provenance to European opera; jazz came out of New Orleans by way of the Caribbean and, before that, Africa; and the trail of detective fiction winds back through the quintessentially British Sherlock Holmes to Poe’s oddly French Inspector Dupin, to Dickens’ Inspector Bucket from Bleak House.

(Pamphlet, 2 pgs.)