Invention and Adaptation

"When it came to modernity, the true American specialty was not invention but adaption. Just as American artists, writers, and entertainers would reassemble and repackage the ideas they received from abroad before retransmitting them in altered form to the rest of the world, so American industrialists adopted foreign economic innovations and transformed these into consumer products on a global scale."

--Richard Pells, Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture (2011), p. 13-14