Does the low number of US UNESCO Cultural Heritage Sites embarrass you?

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Background on UNESCO: UNESCO
Background on World Heritage Sites: World Heritage Site
List of US World Heritage Sites.

The US has twenty four World Heritage sites. Of these, 12 are natural sites and 11 are cultural sites. That sounds like a fair number until you inspect the sites that are listed:

1. Mesa Verde
2. Independence Hall
3. Cahokia mounds
4. Forts of San Juan PR
5. Statue of Liberty
6. Chaco Canyon
7. Thomas Jefferson buildings (Monticello and UVA)
8. Taos Pueblo
9. Poverty Point mounds
10. San Antonio Missions
11. Frank Lloyd Wright buildings

Indigenous buildings are in normal font. In italics, structures dating from the European colonial period that the US didn't deign to demolish. Among these, only one of them was in any of the thirteen colonies. The structures in boldface were constructed during and after the point the US became a country. Yes, only four of them! And one of them, the Statue of Liberty, was engineered in Europe, so that makes only three genuine US cultural artifacts in 200+ years of existence.

Compare that to the UK. There are 32 WH sites, of which 27 are cultural heritage monuments. London alone has four of them. The UK also includes 13 industrial age and modern heritage sites dating from the 18th century onward (14 if you include the rebuilt Palace of Westminster), so it's not like they've just nominated every ruined castle in the country to inflate their significance.

Does this not disturb you? Does this not suggest that the arguments that the US levies about UNESCO being "Cultural Marxists" and the repeated threats (sometimes carried through) about defunding UNESCO (see background lit) are themselves a tacit recognition that the US has not created monuments -- culture -- worth identifying or preserving?

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The tentative list -- all proposed World Heritage sites must be drawn from a pre-approved list -- of US sites shows, though, that I have not been the only one embarrassed at having a paltry three cultural sites for the third largest nation on the planet. These is the state as of 2017:

1. Brooklyn Bridge
2. Central Park
3. Civil rights movement sites in AL
4. Dayton Aviation sites
5. Early Chicago Skyscrapers
6. Ellis Island
7. Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks
8. Moravian Church Settlements in PA
9. Mount Vernon
10. Serpent Mound
11. Thomas Jefferson Buildings

This list, similar to the UK list, shows a trend away from nominating "yet another ruined castle" to bump up the number of world heritage sites. More importantly, typical world heritage cultural sites were places of oppression and cultural hegemony. The list of Mexico's WH sites is illustrative:

1. Traditional agave harvesting
2. Aqueducts of Hidalgo
3. Xochicalco
4. Paquime
5. El Camino Real (the road that connected Mexico City to Santa Fe)
6. El Tajin
7. UNAM Frescoes
8. Monasteries of Popocatepetl
9. Franciscan Missions of Queretaro
10. Monte Alban
11. Old city Pueblo, Zacatecas, Campeche, Queretaro, Guanajuato,
16. Tlacotalpan
17. The hospital of Guadelajara
18. Luis Barragan studios
19. Ruins of Palenque, Chichen-Itza, Teotihuacan, Uxmal
24. Caves of Oaxaca
25. San Miguel de Allende
26. Rock paintings of Baja California
27. Calakmul

The listing in italics is a traditional indigenous activity and is part of the living heritage category. The two bold listings are monuments dating after Mexican independence. The remainder are abandoned Mayan or destroyed Aztec monuments and old colonial zocalos.

In that sense, it is for the better that the US simply does not have so many cultural artifacts of this nature about it. But in one sense it does: the old plantations and slave trading ports of the south. The slave ports of the Caribbean and Brazil have already been so designated, so it stands that those in the US would have been designated before the change in understanding.

Still, I can't fault Mexico for designated so many of their old colonial town centers. Just like the case with Quebec City (the only walled city in North America north of Mexico, incidentally), Mexico did a better job of preserving them from ruin than the US would have done in the circumstances.

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Unless you can nominate Corn Dogs, Apple Pie, Ice Cream cones and foods made in America, I don't think we have anything that would be worth it.

I thought that the UNESCO World Heritage program is so popular and so successful (as far as UN initiatives go) precisely because it was a way for other nations to escape US cultural hegemony.

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I live in the country with the most UNESCO Heritage Sites in the world - 55. Only two of them were built after 1861 (that is after the unification of Italy) and one of the two is primarily in Switzerland.

The United States have probably the most diverse natural landscape of any nation in the world. They should just stuff the tentative list with natural sites like the Joshua Tree National Park or the Great Salt Lake or even things like the Missouri Rhineland.

I looked at the tentative list of Italy, and you're right -- not one of the proposals is from modern Italy, but there are including a few more natural sites.

The US is adding the natural monuments
1. Big Bend National Park
2. California coast line (this will make NIMBYs upset)
3. Marianas Trench
4. Reefs of American Samoa
5. Okefenokee Swamp
6. Remote Pacific Islands
7. Petrified Forest
8. White Sands

Three of them are in remote Oceania, and three more are in deserts. Okefenokee Swamp is interesting, but if the Everglades are an endangered site, then this one will be another.

Those other sites have too much mining potential or are already used as testing facilities and will not be considered. Just like how the US unlike Europe won't declare usable agricultural lands or prairies as site, either.

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I think I share the feelings most many Usonians on this: "Who cares about UNESCO?"

What I don't share is the question "What the frack is UNESCO?"

For many years, the U.S. wasn't even part of UNESCO, and except when used as a way for conservatives to complain about UN excesses, UNESCO hasn't been a priority for quite some time here. Frankly, if anything, I'm shocked as many U.S. sites are listed as there have been, thanks to the almost total disinterest here in things such as this promulgated by the UN.

Yes, a basic purpose of the World Heritage program is to bring attention and interest to the educational and literacy functions of UNESCO itself. Nations wouldn't support UNESCO to the same extent if its sole purpose was expanding female literacy in Africa or its other "worthy" tasks.

There is no secret why US conservatives complain about the WH program itself: it intentionally limits the type and extent of development of a declared site, natural or cultural. The Everglades is already a threatened because of too much South Florida suburban runoff contaminating it. Dresden/Elbe Valley was delisted because a new autobahn was built through it.

You can argue that the most (in)famous places in the US like the NOLA French Quarter don't need any more attention, but if a heritage listing keeps a less well known site (like those Moravian churches in PA) from being demolished, then why not add it. Even if USians aren't impressed with a UNESCO designation, foreign visitors are.

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It's the Natives' fault for not building enough permanent structures. They should be embarrassed, but I'm not.

Possibly, but English/Dutch built permanent structures in the thirteen colonies, and we don't care for those, either. Old City Quebec would not have survived 1950s "urban renewal" in the US.

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The US was caught between Israel and the Arab states (ab)using UNESCO for purposes of cultural chauvinism: Israel nominating sites in Palestine that it didn't directly control, while the Arab states filibustering Israel for nominating sites located within Israel itself. (Imagine if Russia attempted to include the Orthodox churches of Sitka and Ft Ross in California as new entries of Russia's tentative list of sites). The US backed Israel and left -- again -- in 2018.

It is a shame that the US remove itself from an organization it created. UNESCO, besides the African literacy initiatives, was the organization that saved Abu Simbel from being flooded by the Aswan Dam. Among rational people this is not a controversial mission.

I hope one of the things a Biden administration does it to readmit the US into UNESCO -- for the third time -- because its mission is one of the only laudable ones that the UN has.

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Just because UNESCO thinks a place is "culturally, historically, or scientifically significant" doesn't make it any less arbitrary than any other jackass' opinion

That .. is not how a World Heritage designation works.

It is the nominating nation that declares whether a site (natural or cultural) is significant. Yes UNESCO maintains criteria of what the body considers "significant", but the nation doing the nomination understands those rules when it makes its selection. That is not hegemonic, especially since the US was the prime driver for creating the World Heritage program.