@Tony America was never a melting pot, always a salad bowl. To answer "what is an American" without acknowledging this is to ignore that a salad is not a homogenous pureed baby food. The essence of who we are is complimentary flavors of primarily European cultures and the people who manifest them, mixed up a bit and intermingled in a way that geography and circumstances never would've allowed for. We tend to be a bit boisterous and independent — what else could you expect of the sons and daughters of those who left their homelands in search of better or more? We tend to be generous and friendly to others to a fault, often patronizing even if unintentionally. Many of us cling to an idea of what we think American is in a sort of LARP until it's not way, because it's a challenge to identify with your ancestral home when it's thousands of miles away, possibly split between 4 or more places. We started over with what happened in 1776 and pick what we want from our ethnic past a la carte.