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'Give me your tired, your poor - Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,' reads the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. And the world did, fueling the dynamism of America with waves of ambitious immigrants from every downtrodden corner of the globe. Immigration is one of the defining characteristics of America's national identity, though calling the US a 'nation of immigrants' neatly sidesteps Native Americans (already here) and African-American slaves (brought against their will).

For a country with such a mixed racial background, the US can be surprisingly insular and xenophobic. In the past 30 years, the old notion of America as a melting pot - a stew in which immigrants' individual differences are lost in a bland new uniformity - has given way to the salad bowl model, in which the individual pieces still retain their flavor while contributing to the whole, since most ethnic groups in America don't aspire to Anglo-Saxon norms.

Americans are constitutionally guaranteed freedom to worship. Protestants traditionally formed the backbone of middle-class America, while Irish, Italian and Polish migrants have been the foot soldiers of Catholicism. There are more than 5 million Jews, whose prowess in business and sciences has allowed them to play a far larger role inventing and defining America than their numbers would suggest. There are plenty of indigenous faiths as well, such as Christian Scientists, Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons. Cults are equally prevalent: Charlie Manson, Jim Jones and the militant Branch Davidians are climactic examples.

Don't be misled by the fact that you already know English, since some say 'tomayto' and some say 'tomahto.' American English has a multitude of regional accents of differing degrees of intelligibility: New Yorkers are renowned for their blunt nasal delivery; Californians for their flat drawl and rich beach slang; Southerners for their slow-motion speech; and urban blacks for a street patois unintelligible to outsiders. Spanish has effective dual language status in parts of southern California, New Mexico, Texas and Miami. There are 400,000 speakers of Native American dialects and some 375,000 Yiddish kibitzers.

Modern American culture is a juicy burger of mass culture garnished with fifteen minutes of fame. It owes as much to marketing savvy, communications technology and mass production techniques as it does to the artists and entertainers. Radio, TV, film, the Internet - you name it and American companies have invented, packaged and disseminated it to as many consumers as cheaply and conveniently as possible.

What religion and politics were to defining the essence of what it meant to be an American until the end of the 1800s, cinema and television are to the 20th century. For most of this century Hollywood has been searing every national dream and nightmare onto celluloid, making movies the public subconscious.The advent of TV in the 1950s shook Hollywood to its core, but both media have managed to coexist, even find 'synergies' with one another. The global distribution of American movies and TV shows has shaped the world's perception of the country to such a degree that audiences worldwide find New York's underbelly and LA's palm-studded boulevards as recognizable as their own backyards.

The American music industry is the world's most powerful and pervasive, though low-key groundswell movements remain the driving force of American pop. African-American's influence on American music can hardly be exaggerated. The work songs of slaves mutated into the blues. Jazz emerged primarily from early 20th-century New Orleans, where self-taught musicians playing instruments left over from the Spanish-American War in Cuba invented a heavily syncopated stew of ragtime and blues, improvising into the wee hours in brothels and nightclubs.

A good chunk of the early commercial history of American popular music was the story of white businessmen hiring black musicians to entertain white audiences, but when Elvis 'The Pelvis' began singing and gyrating, white boys realized they could strut their stuff too, took up R&B and the rest is rock and roll history. Rap, America's inner-city sound, places an equal emphasis on an ultra heavy beat, sound montage, street cred and macho posturing. Its appeal to middle-class white America will no doubt bemuse sociologists for decades.

Despite the pervasive American fear of illiteracy sweeping the next generation, the US has churned out a veritable forest of literature. The illustrious line-up begins with Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Henry James and Edith Wharton, and moves into the modern era with William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Backpack Kerouac, Arthur Miller, both the Williamses, Saul Bellow, John Updike and Toni Morisson. Traditionally, the Grand Sweeping Generalization of American literature is this: the single most important American novel is Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

After WWII, the focus of the international art world shifted from Paris to New York City. Artists leaving war-torn Europe brought the remnants of surrealism to the Big Apple, inspiring a group of young American painters, including Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, to create the first distinct American painting style, which we now define as Abstract Expressionism. The relentless ascendancy of mass media such as TV and advertising gave birth to the quintessential American art movement, Pop Art. Slick, surface-oriented and purposely banal paintings like Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans are now American icons. Warhol, with his shock of white hair and his pithy quote about his fame becoming more recognizable than any of his creations, was one of the first artists to become a pop culture icon.

When we think of US cities, we think of skyscrapers (best not to think of the suburbs) - those architectural testaments to market forces and American optimism. Chicago, with gems like the Manhattan Building and the Tribune and Sears towers, is a living museum of high-rise development. New York boasts its fair share of stunners too, including the Flatiron Building; King Kong's perch, the Empire State Building; and the Art Deco Chrysler Building. Despite increasing homogenization and Californication, rural America retains its idiosyncrasies, and distinctive vernacular architectural styles persist in New England (Clapboard), California (Spanish Mission) and New Mexico (Adobe).

American sports developed separately from the rest of the world and, consequently, home-grown games such as baseball, football and basketball dominate the sports scene. The success of the American-hosted 1994 World Cup has raised the profile of soccer, but ice hockey continues to be the most popular runner-up to the established sporting trinity. Urban America also invented the great indoors: aerobics and the gym, indoor skiing and rock-climbing - examples of what can go wrong when too much disposable income hits up against too little leisure time.