What is America? “America… is not a piece of the surface of the earth. America

What is America?
“America… is not a piece of the surface of the earth. America is not merely a body of towns. America is an idea, America is an ideal, America is a vision.”
— Woodrow Wilson
Among other things, this course interrogates the quotation above, essentially asking “what is America?” If Wilson was right, which ideas, ideals, and visions define America?
Are these positive ideas such as freedom and democracy or negative ideas such as white supremacy and overconsumption? Whatever the ideas may be, are they universal or unique to America? Does America live up to these ideals itself? Do other countries resist, emulate, resent or embrace these ideas? Should they? And if Wilson was wrong: what is America then?
This course has taken an historical approach to consider what America has been, is, and may be, keeping in mind that this can be different for different people in different places and situations. You should have thought about what being an American means to you (even if you aren’t one!)
In order to answer the capstone course question in this Final Exam, “What is America?,” please think back over the different “voices” we have read from a range of authors – beginning with Mary Rowlandson and continuing through the Art Spiegelman and ending with the various people you read about in the final chapters of American Yawp.
Now, consider you are teaching a course on American in the World from the 15th century to the present – but you have to organize your course around only 5 PEOPLE to answer the question “What is America?”
Choose any five people that we have read in the course (in the Norton Reading or in American YAWP) and make a case for why these five, writing a paragraph on each of the five and including your favorite image. Please search for your favorite, not just the first one you find on Google (go deeper into the Google search or take a look at the textbook or other sources). Please cite at least one quotation or paraphrasing from the texts for each of the five people.