The majority of people in the U.S. today still trace their ancestry to England, Scotland and Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia. A large number of prominent Americans also claim Italian and Slavic ancestry (in fact, a significant number of great American songwriters of the early-to-mid 20th Century ‘ including Irving Berlin, the Gershwin brothers, Vernon Duke and Jerome Kern came from Russian or Eastern European families, while many others ‘ among them, Harry Warren and B.G. DaSilva were of Italian extraction).
This is why Europe continues to fascinate most Americans, and why many students choose to study abroad in Europe.
Although one of the smallest continents in terms of area, Europe has an incredible amount of cultural and linguistic diversity. For example, contrast life in a Greek fishing village on an island in the Aegean Sea with that of a similar town in Norway on the coast of the North Sea. Although separated by less than a thousand miles (about the distance between Los Angeles, California and Portland, Oregon), life in the Greek city of Heraklion could not be more different from that in Bergen, Norway.
Europe has also had an influence on world history out of all proportion to its size. There is not one place on Earth that has not been touched by European influence in some way. The U.S. is one significant example of this. Vast parts of what is now the U.S. have at various times in history been controlled by France, Spain and Russia. These cultural influences remain centuries later in places such as Louisiana, Florida, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, Southern California and Alaska.
Those who decide to study in Europe have the opportunity to gain a greater, more in-depth understanding of these countries’ histories and cultures, and how they have evolved and are meeting the challenges of the 21st Century.