Symbols are often seen in places we don’t look, hiding beneath the surface, existing in our minds but invisible.

For example, most people wouldn’t even think about the symbolic significance of jeans, seeing them as a simple article of clothing, but a closer look at its evolution throughout our nation’s history reveals how jeans have shaped American culture and what they tell us about the American identity.

Through a variety of symbols one can see the values that shape a complex American identity. The American ethos is encapsulated by inventiveness, innovation, consumerism, materialism, and tradition; these are all values that can be displayed through even a simple, universal symbol. In positive and negative ways these symbols have been important to the American dream since the English Puritans brought their work ethic across the Atlantic seeking escape from religious persecution, shaping American individualism for centuries.

How do these symbols affect what people from other countries observe about Americans or how Americans view themselves? Several European exchange students recently visited my school in a leafy suburb of New Jersey. In our school newspaper these exchange students offered insights on their perspective of the U.S. based on their visit. One student remarked, “Everything is bigger in America — houses, lawns, portion sizes.” Symbols serve as models for the way Americans see themselves as well as the way visitors see Americans. Often, these viewpoints do not converge. Connotations are symbols in disguise.

What does Silicon Valley suggest to hundreds of millions of Americans? Getting an iPhone, for instance, is a symbol of moving up in the world, a status symbol. In many countries, including the U.S., an iPhone is a symbol of wealth. It can also represent good design and American creativity, inventiveness, and ingenuity. For others, the iPhone can signify the ill effects of capitalism or poor conditions in the sweatshops in China where they are produced.

McDonald’s has become another truly American symbol that represents abundance and, its darker side, overindulgence. McDonald’s is recognized as one of the first businesses to attempt to bring consistency to restaurants — a stark departure from the variability that defined most restaurants at the time. Richard and Maurice McDonald set up their first hamburger restaurant in 1940. Now, many large, homogenized chain restaurants serve food cheaply and efficiently. This is a distinctly American phenomenon that has since proliferated around the globe. McDonald’s restaurants built in other countries represent a shift to American values and culture. They can also symbolize maturation of the economy and infrastructure in a developing country.

Obesity is an epidemic in the United States, something people visiting from other countries notice immediately. Despite various efforts to decrease portion sizes and to include healthy food in its menu, McDonald’s is still the quintessential symbol of fast food in America; and is equated with the consumption of unhealthy food in large quantities for not much money. As McDonald’s continues to globalize, its golden arches have come to symbolize brand consistency, American culture, and capitalism. McDonald’s restaurants built in other countries are a symbol of “Americanization” as well as modernization. Nelson James, COO of Signs.com, notes in an article about logos, “Outside the United States, McDonald’s represents America. When McDonald’s builds its first restaurant in another country, the word ‘Americanization’ is often bandied about.” McDonald’s is even linked with an “American” lifestyle. The hurried nature and standardized lifestyle associated with America are embodied in the principles of McDonald’s food production. Maoz Azaryahu, professor at the University of Haifa in Israel, adds, “The proliferation of the golden arches of McDonald’s epitomized the Americanization of Israel…” Now transported all over the world, McDonald’s in many ways represents the story of America.

Baseball is a distinctly American activity and can symbolize the American rags to riches story, or entertainment and leisure, or the idea of providing a communal spectator sport. It can also shed light on the issue of racial segregation in the United States. Because of Jim Crow laws and racism, African Americans were excluded from playing on white major league professional teams. They formed their own Negro Leagues and played professional ball throughout the south and Latin America. It was not until after World War II that black players were allowed to integrate into white major league teams. Baseball, as a national pastime, evolved and as America changed, baseball mirrored those changes. It is a symbol of American spirit, a pastime that stands for the American dream and a sport that survived through America’s toughest times.

The American dream is about taking advantage of opportunities. Through sports, people can take advantage of opportunities to further their careers, although not always guaranteeing success. Transforming playing baseball into a career, a relatively new phenomenon during the early 1900s, and only afforded to white men, was possible even if you were poor and untrained. The writer Douglass Walop wrote, “America was the land of opportunity where even a poor boy could grow up to be Babe Ruth.” Baseball has manifested itself as a historical symbol of America’s present mood. In many ways it embodies people’s struggles and ambitions.

Malls are also a symbol of America and its abundance and serve a wide range of functions for different groups. For young people, they can be a place to “see and be seen.” They can be a place for people to hang out, socialize, and sometimes even shop. For some older people, malls are often a place to exercise, as a whole community of “mall walkers” has emerged similar to the way in which elderly people flock to parks in China to do tai chi or yoga. BBC writer Jonathan Glancey writes in an article about American shopping malls, “[they are] a central part of contemporary U.S. culture and a model for much of the rest of a world keen on emulating an American way of life.” Similar to the throngs of people who meander through the bazaars of Istanbul, foreign tourists like to experience going to the mall as a uniquely American activity. Other countries have shopping centers and markets, but the mall culture in the U.S. is like no other. Many Americans are famous for going to the mall.

Jeans have been an important symbol in American culture for more than a century. What started out, when Levi Strauss began making them in the mid 1800s, as basic denim pants for miners, particularly in the American West, over time has become a staple piece of clothing for all types of Americans. During the Great Depression, because money was tight, jeans were popular for the whole family because they were durable and did not wear out. Jeans became the working man’s pants, a staple of the middle and lower classes. They then made their way into more mainstream society in the 1950s, as young people wore them as an expression of rebellion. By the 1960s and 1970s, as the youth culture evolved, blue jeans were dyed different colors, made into bell-bottoms, ripped, seen as anti-establishment clothing; by the 1990s fashion designers had turned jeans into a universal phenomena. Jeans have been a long-standing symbol of America and its values, evolving over the decades. Today jeans mean different things to different people; they can be comfort clothes or a fashion statement. Jeans depict an American culture that both accepts change and emphasizes tradition. As the economy and society changed, so did jeans, but the tradition of jeans as a staple of American clothing remained constant. In a sense, jeans don’t represent a certain aspect of the American ethos as much as they symbolize the process of America changing from an agricultural economy to a consumer economy. They also represented the culture’s change from utilizing clothes for comfort to wearing clothes to express themselves.

For Americans, baseball, malls, Silicon Valley, jeans, or McDonald’s provide models of values around which our society revolves, such as innovation, creativity, consumerism, materialism, tradition, and change; and they also show those values our culture lacks. In a more general sense, symbols are a way to search for meaning where people struggle to define what is important in their lives. People look for symbols to make things matter, to find patterns in an often frustratingly incomprehensible world; a way of putting things together that makes sense and justifies the actions we take and the decisions we make. Symbols are a means of communication: they represent a universal language that has existed since the beginning of man. McDonald’s, iPhones, malls: these are meaningful symbols within the American identity because they were created in response to values or out of necessity or imagination. These are symbols that came about because of American culture, not because symbols made American culture. Symbols characterize history and describe all we perceive in our world, but they by no means define it.