ABSTRACT

If one word were to be chosen to describe the character of the US, it might well be ‘mobility’. The land was settled by migrants from other continents-first Europe, later Asia and South America. The growth of the US is characterized by movement: movement from the coastal settlements to the interior, from the East to the mid-West and then to the far West. And the ‘nonmigrants’ did not stay still: they moved constantly in search of new opportunities or better employment or improved housing conditions (and later for improved environments for leisure or retirement). The same restlessness or, more accurately, the same keenness to discover, to initiate, and to experiment, the same desire for advancement, the love of the new, is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. The US was born of the search for better ways of living, and the search continues.