I think it's hard to pin down "American" culture because we're a huge country. A lot of Europeans don't seem to understand that our states are about the size of their countries. We are at a MINIMUM 50 little cultures, and most of us could easily say that our state is very divided culturally as well. We are also a mash of immigrants, though many other countries are too. It's also easy for us to romanticize other countries having "more culture" than we do, but that's really not accurate. Culture is not a matter of more or less, and just about every other developed nation buys mass produced crap too. (Seriously, go to Italy and take a gander at all the ridiculous, cheap little pieces of plastic they put the Pope's face on).

I would say some things that speak to a general American culture would be a sense of personal freedom and independence (individual choice, for better or for worse), a general sense of adventure and roaming (I'm pretty sure we can safely say we invented the modern road trip), a respect for nature's grandeur (our National parks are pretty unrivaled, if I do say so myself, and our love of them is pretty across the board), and a great diversity of ideas being allowed out into the open.

Remember too that jazz started in America, as a mash of creole and African American music, American country music (love it or hate it) is pretty unique to us, and the world's modern sense of rock and roll pretty much started with Elvis.

Food-wise, we have contributed some pretty unappealing things (Twinkies come to mind), but our development of things like mass produced frozen foods pretty much fed the nation during World War II, and brought meat and fish to people who otherwise could not have gotten safe, fresh-tasting protein. We have also developed some great stuff by combining all of our cultural backgrounds: Louisiana's gumbo, so called Tex-Mex, the mash of European traditions that created the Reuben sandwich in New York, etc.

As for art, we have artists everywhere! Glass artists, sculptors, painters, singers, poets, authors...we're literally crawling with them!

We were also the home to the first airplane, the internet, and countless modern technologies that connected people to each other. You could say the idea of a global community came out of America, and we have championed things like uncensored information and freedom to communicate.

Our family values are as different as the number of families that we have, but that's part of our culture too: we choose who to be. We don't believe that you have a set destiny. We believe that you have the right to try to be who you want to be.

We are a young country, so we don't have the 1,000 year old buildings that some people do, or the 500 year old paintings. We don't even have a lot of shared history. But for a young country, we have a lot to experience. You could spend your entire life traveling from city to city, town to town, just trying to get a handle on their mainstream culture (ignoring all of the underground, or "subcultural" groups), and you would die of old age before you really understood even a quarter of them. You can literally make a living in this country studying subcultures and then explaining them to other people.

Gotta love it!