Cultural Significance
Transatlantic travel played a major role in the expansion of Western civilization into the Americas. It is the Atlantic that separates the "Old World" from the "New World". In modern times, some idioms refer to the ocean in a humorously diminutive way as the Pond, describing both the geographical and cultural divide between North America and Europe, in particular between the English-speaking nations of both continents. Many British people refer to the United States and Canada as "across the pond", and vice versa.
The "Black Atlantic" refers to the role of this ocean in shaping black people's history, not least in diasporas. Irish migration to the US is meant when the term "The Green Atlantic" is used. The "Red Atlantic" is a relatively new term that refers to seafarers as proletarians and revolutionaries who historically resisted exploitation at sea and forged a new multicultural and polyglot Atlantic working-class.
Read more about this topic: Atlantic Ocean
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or significance:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
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