The Cultural Regions of the United States I. Introduction “What is an American?” is a great question to ask. However, any generalizing answer to it would be unable to comprehend the concept of American fully. Since the land that the United States covers is vast, and it has grown significantly from the time when Crevecoeur uttered the question and attempted to elaborate it, it is no surprise that the nation or the concept of American is not easy to define. Accordingly, as part of the Western way of understanding concepts from the time of Aristotle, mostly geography has been attempting to categorize the whole country or the land into sections and regions in order to understand how the United States of America has maintained its independence as a unique nation although it is constituted with people from several ethnic identities in a questionably melting pot. But, possibly, the question will always remain unanswered because the dynamics are almost impossible to be combined to get a concrete image in front of us. Nonetheless, it would be too unfair to state that the study of defining and redefining the categories of the whole, namely the regions or the sections, is meaningless. In the course of history, scholars trying to define the characteristics of the regions of the United States are known to follow diverse approaches. To name some, it can be said that, first of all the, country is tried to be categorized according to economic diversifications among the regions. However, in time, as economy was no longer bound merely to the geographical features of the land as it was in the past, this approach can be discussed to have dealt mostly with agriculture (Gastil 122-3). So, gradually, economy and agriculture is combined with culture so as to (re)define the regions, extending the borders to a larger scale including some parts of Canada and Mexico as well (Gastil 123). Another prominent approach is Frederick Jackson Turner’s idea that the regions of the country are mostly constituted themselves upon the sectional struggles between one another (North vs. South, or East vs. West) and their dynamical process of constant development according to certain paradigms over time. Thus, the interactions between the areas can be regarded as a factor which influences the formation of certain characteristics of the regions. Furthermore, possibly by the recent influence of cultural studies on social sciences, the latest dominant approach for defining the regions is called cultural geography. According to this approach, the regions are “defined by the historical experience and qualities of people that make up their population” (Gastil 123).