Abstract

In general, the American Dream can be defined as equality of opportunity and freedom that allows all citizens to achieve their goals in life only with effort and determination. Today, this idea refers to that prosperity depends upon one's abilities and their work, not in a rigid social hierarchy, although the meaning of the phrase has changed over the history of America.

American dream

What is the American dream?

The American Dream has a generic definition of the term appears in a book by James Truslow Adams story entitled "The Epic of America" (1931). However, the American dream concept goes back to the sixteenth century. Both in the sixteenth and the seventeenth British pioneers tried to persuade the citizens of your country to move to the British colonies in America, their language and promises of these colonies ended up creating three persistent myths separate yet interrelated (Maume, 1172).

America as a land of plenty.

America as a land of opportunity.

America as a land of destiny.

It depends on each human being, but we end racism, classism and class inequality, which does much damage to our American Dream. He often seeks happiness in every place less within it. The father of our language Don Miguel de Cervantes said: The worst enemies to whom we must fight principally within us referred precisely to the boundaries, obstacles that stand in our pursuit of happiness are in our mind (Merton, 682).

For some it is the opportunity to achieve more wealth than they could have in their home countries, for others it is the opportunity for their children to grow up with a good education and great opportunities, and finally, some people see it as the opportunity for an individual without constraints imposed by reason of race, class, religion and so on (Messner, 60).

While the term is often associated with immigration in the United States, Native Americans also described as "seeking the American dream" or "living the American dream.

The American Dream that there are substantial differences across nations in the number of homicides and robberies per capita, and that America has exceptionally high rates of both of these crimes. IAT is a general account of why some nations exhibit higher rates of serious crime than others, and specifically why America is “exceptional” with respect to levels of serious crime. Messner and Rosenfeld are quick to point out that the hallmarks of the American Dream—a universal achievement orientation in which individual success is defined largely in terms of the accumulation of money—have yielded a variety of innovations in society. But, as Merton also alluded to, they note that the American Dream can yield some undesirable outcomes as well, including high levels of serious crime. In essence, the American Dream represents a distinctive form of cultural imbalance where the pursuit of economic success goals and realization of economic achievement are strongly valued and encouraged while at the same time there is a relatively weak emphasis on the importance of using legitimate means to satisfy those cultural prescriptions (i.e., high levels of anomie).

As Messner and ...