英美文化14-American-Settlements-and-Life.doc

英美社会与文化
American Settlements and Life

I. Settlement patterns
1. The diverse “native” Indian cultures had little influence upon the current American settlement patterns (聚居类型) except in parts of New Mexico. The vastness of the land, the scarcity [ˈskɛəsiti] of labour, and the abundance of migratory [ˈmaiɡrətəri, maiˈɡreitəri] opportunities in a land replete(充满的)with raw physical resources contributed to exceptional human mobility and a quick succession of ephemeral ([iˈfemərəl], lasting for a very short time, 短暂的) forms of land use and settlement. Human endeavours have greatly transformed the landscape, but such efforts have been largely destructive. Most of the pre-European landscape in the United States was so swiftly and radically altered that it is difficult to conjecture intelligently about its earlier appearance.
2. The overall impression of the settled portion of the American landscape, rural or urban, is one of disorder and incoherence, even in areas of strict geometric survey (几何形状). The general effect is untidy. These attributes have been intensified by the acute individualism of the American, vigorous speculation in land (积极的土地投机活动) and other commodities. The landscape is also remarkable for its extensive transportation facilities, which have greatly influenced the configuration (外貌) of the land.
3. The farmsteads (农庄, 农场及其建筑物) have become increasingly urbanized, and agricultural operations have become more automated, while the metropolis grows more gelatinous( [dʒiˈlætinəs] 凝胶状的), unfocused, and pseudo-bucolic ([ˈpsju:dəu] [bju:ˈkɒlɪk]仿田园风味的) along its margins. The relatively concentrated latter-day(近来的, 现代的)villages persist today as amoeba-like ([əˈmi:bə] 阿米巴, 变形虫) entities straggling along converging(收缩的；减小的) roads, neither fully rural nor agglomerated ([əˈɡlɔməreit] 聚集的, 成团的) in form. The only latter-day settlement experiment of notable magnitude to achieve enduring success was a series of Mormon settlements in the Great Basin region of Utah (犹他州,) and adjacent states, with their tightly concentrated farm villages reminiscent of the New England model. Other efforts have been made along ethnic, religious, or political lines, but success has been at best brief and fragile.
II. Urban Life
1. The United States has moved from a predominantly rural settlement into an urban society. In so doing, it has followed the general path that other advanced nations have traveled and one along which developing nations have begun to hasten. About three-fourths of the population live clustered within officially designated urban places and urbanized areas, which account for less than 2 percent of the national territory. At least another 15 percent live in dispersed residences that are actually urban in economic or social orientation.
2. The pre-1900 development of the American city was almost completely a chronicle of the economics of the production, collection, and distribution of physical commodities and basic services dictated by geography, but there have been striking deviations from this pattern. Increasingly, the most successful cities are oriented toward the more advanced modes for the production and consumption of services, specifically the knowledge, managerial ([mænəˈdʒiəriəl]), and recreational industries. The largest cities have become more dependent upon corporate headquarters (大公司，集团的总部), communications, and the manipulation of information for their sustenance. Further, urban centres that contain a major college or university often have enjoyed remarkable expansion.
3. The universality of the automobile, even among the less affluent, and the parallel proliferation (激增) of service facilities (生活服务设施) and highways (公路) greatly loosened and fragmented the American city, which spread over surrounding rural lands. Older, formerly autonomous towns grew swiftly. Many towns became satellites of the larger city or were absorbed. The outcome has been a broad, ragged, semiurbanized belt of land surrounding each city, large or small, and quite often blending imperceptibly into the suburban-exurban ([eksˈə:bən] 城市远郊的) halo encircling a neighbouring metropolitan centre. The traditional city—unitary, concentric in form, with a single well-defined middle—has been replaced by a relatively amorphous (无固定形状的), polycentric (多中心的)metropolitan sprawl(大城市的蔓延).
4. Major business, financial and governmental offices, department stores, and specialty shops dominate the downtown (in the inner city), which is usually fringed by a band of factories and warehouses. The outer parts of the city, like the suburbs, are mainly residential. But in some cities, e.g., in Chicago, people do not reside in the downtown areas, and there is a steady downward gradient in population density per unit area (and more open land and single-family residences) as one moves from the inner city toward the open country. Conversely, there is a general rise in income and social status with increasing distance from the core. Notably Southern blacks and Latin Americans, generally dominate the more run-down neighbourhoods of the inner cities.
5. The rather chaotic, inharmonious appearance of both inner-city and peripheral zones painfully reflects the absence of any effective collective action concerning such matters. In central regions of the US, Commercial and administrative activities are paramount([ˈpærəmaunt] 最重要), and usually there is little room for church buildings or for parks or other nonprofit enterprises. The role of the cathedral, so central in the medieval European city, is filled by a U.S. invention serving both utilitarian and symbolic purposes, the skyscraper.
III. Farm Life
1. Farm life: Social activity also tended to be widely dispersed among numerous rural churches, schools, or grange halls（农场，田庄的礼堂）; and the climactic event of the year might well be the county fair, political rally（集会）, or religious encampment（宗教露营，即各地信仰者在野外的集会，进行一段时间的宗教活动）—again on a rural site. （This indicates that the United States is a country with wide space for various activities.）
2. In contrast to rural life in many other parts of the world, the farm family lived on an isolated farmstead some distance from town and often from farm neighbours; its property averaged less than one-quarter square mile.
3. The United States has had little success in achieving or maintaining the ideal of the family farm. Through purchase, inheritance, leasing, and other means, some of dubious legality, smaller properties have been merged into much larger entities. This trend toward fewer but larger farms has continued.
4. The huge, heavily capitalized “neoplantation,” essentially a factory in the field, is especially conspicuous in parts of California, Arizona, and the Mississippi Delta, but examples can be found in any state. The trend toward large-scale, capital-intensive farm enterprise has been paralleled by a sharp drop in rural farm population —a slump from the all-time high of some 32,000,000 in the early 20th century to about 5,000,000 in the late 1980s.
5. The metropolitanization (大城市化)of life in the United States has not been limited to city, suburb, or exurb([ˈeɡzə:b, ˈeksə:b] 城市远郊); it now involves most of the rural area and population. The result has been the decline of local crafts and regional peculiarities. In many ways, the countryside is now economically dependent on the city.
6. The rural United States, however, has been the source of many of the nation's values and images, but the population had gravitated to cities (urbanization) for a long period. From the late 1960s until about 1981 the rural and small-town population grew at a faster rate than the metropolitan population, the so-called metro–nonmetro turnaround (从大都会到非大都会的变化), thus reversing more than a century of relatively greater urban growth. Subsequent evidence, however, suggests an approach toward equilibrium between the urban and rural sectors.
7. As Americans have become increasingly mobile, the visual aspect of rural America has altered drastically. The highway has become the central route, and many of the functions once confined to the local town or city now stretch for many miles along major roads.
8. The city dweller is the dominant consumer for products other than those of field(牧场), quarry(采石场), or lumber mill(木材厂); and city location tends to determine patterns of rural economy rather than the reverse. During weekends and the vacation seasons, swarms of city folk stream out to second homes in the countryside and to campgrounds, ski runs(滑雪道), beaches, boating areas, or hunting and fishing tracts(狩猎和钓鱼场所). For many large rural areas, recreation is the principal source of income and employment; and such areas as northern New England and upstate (州北地区) New York have become playgrounds and sylvan refuges (有森林的乡村避难处)for many urban residents.
9. The larger cities reach far into the countryside for their vital supplies of water and energy. There is an increasing reliance upon distant coalfields to provide fuel for electrical power plants, and cities have gone far afield in seeking out rural disposal sites for their ever-growing volumes of garbage.
10. The majority of the rural population now lives within daily commuting range (每日通勤范围)of a sizable city. This enables many farm residents to operate their farms while, at the same time, working part- or full-time at a city job, and it thus helps to prevent the drastic decline in rural population that has occurred in remoter parts of the country. Similarly, many small towns within the shadow of a metropolis, with fewer and fewer farmers to service, have become dormitory satellites (提供集体宿舍的卫星城), serving residents from nearby cities and suburbs.

IV. Complementary material:
1. The essential design of rural activity in the United States bears a strong family resemblance to that of other neo-European lands, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, or tsarist Siberia—places that have undergone rapid occupation and exploitation by immigrants intent upon short-term development and enrichment. Further, these are nonpeasant countrysides, alike in having failed to achieve the intimate symbiosis([simbaiˈəusis] 协作；共生, 互利关系) of people and habitat, the humanized rural landscapes characteristic of many relatively dense, stable, earthbound communities in parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.
2. Utah: a state in the western US; pop. 1,722,850 (1990); capital, Salt Lake City. The region became part of Mexico in 1821 and was ceded to the US in 1848, becoming the 45th state of the US in 1896.
3. A new breed of cities has sprouted across the land: those that cater to the pleasure-seeker, vacationer, and the retired—for example, the young, flourishing cities of Florida or Nevada （[nəˈvædə]） and many locations in California, Arizona, and Colorado.
4. Some cities have felt the need for other bold secular monuments; hence the Gateway Arch looming over St. Louis, Seattle's Space Needle(太空针塔), and Houston's Astrodome(the world's first domed sports stadium). Future archaeologists may well conclude from their excavations that American society was ruled by an oligarchy (寡头政府)of highway engineers, architects, and bulldozer operators([ˈbuldəuzə] 推土机手). The great expressways converging upon, or looping, the downtown area and the huge amount of space devoted to parking lots and garages are even more impressive than the massive surgery executed upon U.S. cities a century ago to hack out room for railroad terminals (铁路终点站; 枢纽站) and marshaling yards (调度场).
5. The conurbation([ˌkɔnəˈbeiʃən] 有卫星城的大都市)—a territorial coalescence of two or more sizable cities whose peripheral zones have grown together—in Great Brtain, Germany, and Japan should be called in the United States megalopolis ([ˌmeɡəˈlɔpəlis]特大城市,由几个城市和郊区连成的).
6. The Mormon settlement uncompromisingly followed the ecclesiastically imposed grid plan composed of square blocks, each with perhaps only four very large house lots, and the block surrounded by extremely wide streets. Those villages in New Mexico in which population and culture were derived from Old Mexico were often built according to the standard Latin-American plan. The distinctive feature is a central plaza dominated by a Roman Catholic Church and encircled by low stone or adobe buildings.
7. Great Basin: an arid region of the western US between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains, including most of Nevada and parts of the adjacent states. 大盆地（美国西部内华达山脉和落基山脉之间的干旱地区，包括内华达州大部及其邻近各州的部分地区）
8. The Homestead Act (宅地法)of 1862 offered title to 160 acres to individual settlers, subject only to residence for a certain period of time and to the making of minimal improvements to the land thus acquired. The legal provisions of such acts have varied with time as the nature of farming technology and of the remaining lands have changed, but their general effect has been to perpetuate the Jeffersonian ideal of a republic in which yeoman farmers own and till self-sufficient properties. The program was successful in providing private owners with relatively choice lands, aside from parcels (份地) reserved for schools and various township and municipal uses. More than one-third of the national territory, however, is still owned by federal and state governments, with much of this land in forest and wildlife preserves. A large proportion of this land is in the West and is unsuited for intensive agriculture or grazing because of the roughness, dryness, or salinity of the terrain; much of it is leased out for light grazing or for timber cutting.
9. In general the farmstead contained dwelling(住宅), barn(牲口棚), storage and sheds (棚) for small livestock and equipment, a small orchard, and a kitchen garden. A woodlot might be found in the least-accessible or least-fertile part of the farm.
10. Among people who have been historically rural, individualistic, and antiurban in bias, many services normally located in urban places might be found in rustic settings (乡下). Thus, much retail business was transacted by means of itinerant peddlers, while small shops for the fabrication, distribution, or repair of various items were often located in isolated farmsteads, as were many post offices.
11. By the late 1980s, when the average farm size had surpassed 460 acres, farms containing 2,000 or more acres accounted for almost half of all farmland (农场)and 20 percent of the cropland (农田,耕地) harvested, even though they comprised less than 3 percent of all farms. At the other extreme were those 60 percent of all farms that contained fewer than 180 acres and reported less than 15 percent of cropland harvested. (表现了集中的趋势，Larger farms have better cropland. )
12. In 1940, farm folk (农业人口, agrarian [əˈɡrɛəriən] population) still numbered more than 30,000,000, and nearly 40 percent of farm operators were tenants, and another 10 percent were only partial owners. The United States has become a highly urbanized, technologically advanced society far removed i