50 Facts You Need to Know – USA (Paperback)

A Tour Through the Real America

Stephen Fender

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The Land of the Free is the country everyone loves to attack. But how much do you really know about the USA? “Hot Rods, Handguns and Huckleberry Finn” is a popular exploration of the real America. This is a country with 50 capital cities, few of which anyone can name; a nation with 65 million gun-owners and 35,000 gun deaths each year; a place where there’s one car for every adult, and where twice as many people claim to go to church as actually do. Burning the American flag, so the Supreme Court has ruled, is now a legitimate expression of free speech. One city in Kentucky elected a black Labrador as its mayor. The US produces a quarter of all CO2 emissions, and has a population rising twice as fast as the EU. German might have been the national language, and folk music tops the charts. Republican states especially are generous givers to charity, and they have a world-beating welfare state – the military. Vibrant, proud and yet critical, this is a hugely enjoyable tour of the world’s most powerful but least understood nation.

Stephen Fender was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford and in the UK at Wales and Manchester. He has taught in the States, in Scotland at the University of Edinburgh, and in England at London and Sussex, where he was head of American studies from 1985 to 2003. He now lives in Dulwich, south London.

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