What Makes America Great Essay Abstract

This “what makes America great” essay will look at three aspects of American culture and character that help to explain American exceptionalism. America is unlike any other nation in the world.  Its critics like to point out its flaws.  But those who appreciate it for what it is recognize that America is and has always been the “land of opportunity”—more so than any other country in the world (Keuilian).  From the conquistadors to the colonialists to the Founding Fathers to the Fathers of Industry, America has been the stage where the world’s imagination has flourished and found the most food for thought and fuel for innovation.

Introduction

The fact that America is largely an accident is a footnote in history by now.  It was accidentally discovered by Columbus.  (He was shooting for India).  It was considered a Great Experiment by the Founding Fathers.  Washington called it as a much and historian Paul Johnson has remarked that “the creation of the United States is the greatest of all human adventures.  No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind” (3).  America has been called the New Rome, the New Jerusalem and the New World.  It, more than any other nation, has been at the heart of the modern world for the past four centuries.  Its exploits have shaped, determined and impacted the rest of the population on the globe as though it truly were the light shining on the hill.  What is it about America that has made it so great, so powerful, so bright, so big, and so magnificent?  If one had to boil it down to just three things, one could say it is America’s individualism, ingenuity, and all-out toughness.

American Individualism

No “What Makes America Great” essay could be complete without first discussing the idea of American Individualism.  America is truly the birthplace of Freedom.  Paris gets all the credit for its own emphasis on “liberty, equality and fraternity” and its French Revolution—but the American Revolution preceded the French one by a good decade at least.  America set the stage for Revolution.  It wrote its defiant open letter to the King of England and dared to call it a Declaration of Independence, well before doing so was a trend among much smaller nations attempting to throw off the yoke of neo-colonialism.  The colonists wanted the English Crown out of the New World.  The War for Independence won them the right to rule themselves and, ever since, American Individualism has been a force to be reckoned with.

The 31st U.S. President Herbert Hoover declared that “Individualism has been the primary force of American civilization for three centuries. It is our sort of individualism that has supplied the motivation of America’s political, economic, and spiritual institutions in all these years.”  The first colonialists were individuals, branching out on their own in the...