Top
Free Shipping On Orders Over $35!
Get Rewarded for Ordering Your Textbooks! Enroll Now
Customer Reviews Read Reviews
Write a Review
| Introduction | 1 | (22) | |||
|
22 | (39) | |||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
61 | (39) | |||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
100 | (37) | |||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
137 | (40) | |||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
177 | (39) | |||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
216 | (41) | |||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
257 | (39) | |||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
296 | (43) | |||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
339 | (42) | |||
|
|||||
|
|||||
|
381 | (36) | |||
|
|||||
|
|||||
| Index | 417 |
The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
Assimilation or Ethnic Pluralism?
"We are all immigrants." For many Americans, this statement sums up a relatively uncomplicated affirmation of inclusive nationalism. In their view, America is an idea more than a "nation" in the European sense. Rather than affiliations of blood and tradition, Americans sustain consensual ties of citizenship based on common devotion to core principles of liberty, equality, and tolerance. In the words of former New York Governor Mario M. Cuomo, ours is a "politics of inclusion" and, while the struggle to realize this ideal never ends, the trajectory is clear. Unity will come from diversity, the One from the Many.
As an ideal there is much to be said for this formulation (though some would argue whether unity or diversity should be more highly valued). Aside from such ideological questions, however, historians must ask whether a stirring tale of immigrant struggle and successful inclusion adequately captures either the reality or the significance of the immigration experience over several centuries. Why did certain people at certain times leave their homelands? Why did they go to certain destinations? Were they sojourners intending to return to old worlds, or refugees intent on permanently residing in new ones? How did they settle -- in large groups, in family units, as individuals? How did they build new lives -- what work did they find, where did they reside, what sort of cultural institutions did they reproduce or create? To what extent did they retain old world customs, gender relations, and family values, and to what extent did they assimilate into the host culture? What sort of ethnic identity did they develop as an outcome of this process? With what degree of welcome or hostility were they treated by their American predecessors? What was the character of that host culture -- was it Anglo-Saxon, or a diverse mix of subcultures, or some sort of amalgam? What impact did the immigrants have on the society they entered, on local or national politics, on gender and racial practices, on intellectual and cultural developments?
These and many other questions have occupied American historians since the founding of the nation. Crèvecoeur announced even before the Revolution had run its course that the new world immigrant had become a "new man," one who sloughed off his old world skin and set forth toward a new destiny: "Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world." With a minimum of anxiety and full confidence in the future that opened before him, this new man was a creature of his environment, imbibing entirely new ideas, principles, and habits from the salubrious air of freedom all around him. Within the context of a European world that had for several centuries witnessed state oppression of religious minorities as well as bloody religious struggles within and among states, the American social fabric appeared something of a miracle. It seemed to have harmoniously woven together English and French Catholics, Dutch Calvinists, German and Scandinavian Lutherans, Moravian Pietists, Scots Presbyterians, English Congregationalists and Anglicans, as well as Baptists, Quakers, Methodists, and a dizzying proliferation of breakaway Protestant denominations and nearly irreligious Deists and freethinkers. Although the term was not yet in use, "pluralism" was practiced in the United States to a significant and noteworthy extent. But it was a pluralism that was understood as temporary -- eventually the melting pot of America would assimilate these different subgroups into a common "new man" culture.
Although a few dissenting voices could be heard in the century after Crèvecoeur wrote, most American writers and orators continued to sound the confident note of transformation and assimilation that was the hallmark of the "new man" theory of Americanization. Certainly, the brief anti-alien campaign of the 1790s and the more substantial Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s marked moments in which confidence in the assimilative capacity of the American republic (as well as the assimilative intentions of the newcomers) dimmed considerably. More troubling to proponents of assimilation, white Americans almost never entertained the idea of equal coexistence, let alone amalgamation, with the red and black inhabitants of the continent. When forced to consider the unthinkable by abolitionists or advocates of Indian rights, most Americans declined to extend their pluralistic ideals to any but fellow descendants of Europeans. Nevertheless, it was not until the simultaneous arrival of both labor radicalism and millions of new immigrants in the late nineteenth century that large numbers of Americans came seriously to doubt the "new man" myth.
To understand the significance of immigration to American history it is useful to consider the scale of the phenomenon. According to one estimate, approximately 100 million people emigrated from a myriad of homelands between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-twentieth century. At least 45 million, i.e., almost half of the total, headed for the United States or the colonies that preceded it, and most of them -- around 38 million -- ended up staying in America. By any measure, this immense migration is a major event in the history of the modern world and especially of the United States. Even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the immigrants were diverse, including not just English but very large numbers of Scottish, Irish, and German migrants, as well as smaller numbers of other western Europeans. By the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, however, the composition of the influx changed significantly. Continuing streams of Irish and Germans were accompanied by larger streams of southern and eastern Europeans, and small but sharply increased numbers of Asian and Mexican immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the Italians, Jews, and Slavs who together sometimes became majorities in industrial towns throughout America, generated fear, anger, and perplexity among millions of older-stock Americans.
From the start, these immigrants were pushed by need and pulled by opportunity. At first, American historians focused on the latter, assuming that "the land of opportunity" was itself an irresistible argument for migration. Of course, historians found themselves referring to "religious oppression" or "economic upheaval" in Europe as a cause of foreigners' determination to come to America. But this dark background (sometimes luridly, but always briefly sketched) only served to set off the glory of America, which always shone brightly in the foreground. In whatever form, the redemptive tale of immigration achieved the status of folk legend or religious epic, and historians usually adopted some version of it in shaping their narratives of national development well into the twentieth century. The Harvard historian Albert Bushnell Hart expostulated in 1907: "O Marvellous Constitution! Magic Parchment! Transforming Word! Maker, Monitor, Guardian of Mankind! Thou hath gathered to thy impartial bosom the peoples of the earth, Columbia, and called them equal...." The far more restrained Frederick Jackson Turner, in his famous 1893 essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," declared: "In the crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics." Whatever we make of these pronouncements today, we should note that such melting pot rhetoric could serve a progressive political function at the beginning of the twentieth century. At a time when many old-stock Americans were lamenting "the passing of the great race" and the mongrelization of America, writers who idealized assimilation were suggesting that America's traditional welcome to the refugees of the world, and the new man myth that underlay it, deserved to be extended indefinitely.
In the twentieth century such views came to be supported not only by folk legend but by social science. Especially in the Chicago School of sociology, historians found a persuasive account of assimilation in stages. As described in the so-called "race relations cycle," immigrants underwent a general and straight-line development from peasants to moderns. The process began with the formation of ethnic communities within a competitive social environment; it proceeded through conflict, accommodation, and assimilation, at which point former outsiders had shed immigrant identities and emerged as fully Americanized moderns. What distinguished the sociological from the mythic tale, however, was the capacity of the former to acknowledge not only the success of assimilation but its costs. In the years following World War II, a new generation of historians was ready to weigh those costs in narrating the story of immigration.
The revised story of immigration emerged after the war concurrently with the entrance into the academic profession of descendants of those new immigrants who had come to the United States in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Even when these social scientists and historians celebrated the transformative and redemptive power of America, they tended to linger more intently than had earlier scholars on the sufferings of immigrants striving to realize the American dream. The greatest of the new immigration historians was Oscar Handlin. HisThe Uprooted,published in 1951, took the form of an "epic," the trajectory of which -- from "uprooting" to "acculturation" -- was faithful to both new man legend and Chicago School theory. What distinguished Handlin's account from that of all his predecessors was his determination to give a dramatic and detailed account of the high costs of the immigration experience. Clearly, Handlin saw the immigrants whose experience he traced as his ancestors, not some mass of anonymous foreigners ready for the melting pot.
Ten years earlier, inBoston's Immigrants,Handlin had already shown how sympathetic identification with the travails of the immigrants could generate convincing social history. In that book, however, he tentatively suggested that ethnic identity might endure for a long time alongside the inevitable process of "adjustment" to the host society. InThe Uprootedhe downplayed suggestions of ethnic resilience, while generalizing the story of adjustment to cover the experience of millions. With characteristic grandeur, he identified the immigrant experience with the American experience: "The newcomers were on the way toward being Americans almost before they stepped off the boat, because their own experience of displacement had already introduced them to what was essential in the situation of Americans," i.e., fluidity of social role, acceptance of continuous change, reliance upon individual resources to navigate the shoals of modernity. And with equal grandeur he employed the first person plural to identify himself with the epic of his ancestors and the epic of America: "In our flight, unattached, we discovered what it was to be an individual,...we discovered the unexpected, invigorating effects of recurrent demands upon the imagination, upon all our human capacities." Handlin drew a harrowing picture of the immigrants' plight, their alienation and suffering, and their desperate embrace of one another in the struggle to survive dislocation. In the end, however,The Uprootedleft little doubt that those immigrants eventually departed from peasant conformism and adopted modern individualism. "America was the land of separated men," he declared, and each immigrant eventually learned to become "an individual alone."
Although Handlin's book became the standard for a whole generation of students of immigration, voices of dissent emerged before long. Many historians of immigration discerned flaws in the grand epic and the methods Handlin used to tell it. Why had he dispensed with footnotes? How could he be so sure about the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of the people he depicted -- did he actually have evidence of such states of mind and feeling? Even assuming his evidence was solid, these historians doubted the inferences Handlin drew from that evidence, and the sweeping generalizations and uni-directional narrative he imposed on it. Most particularly, they dissented from the thesis that cultural differences dissolved inevitably into a composite American identity. Handlin's critics insisted that ethnic identity was durable, that ethnic pluralism, not assimilation, has been the American norm. In doing so, historians made use of the ethnic pluralist theory that the philosopher Horace Kallen had propounded earlier in the century. Reacting to anti-immigrant Americanizers, Kallen had insisted that group particularism, not assimilation, was the real story of immigrant adjustment to America. In refusing to be "melted," immigrants not only preserved the distinctive values of their heritage but enriched and strengthened America. A nation of nations, America would be the model of pluralist democracy for the twentieth-century world.
More important than a revival of Kallen's sort of pluralism, new sociological theory encouraged historians in the 1960s to revise their accounts of the assimilation process. In the years just after World War II, Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy and Will Herberg had proposed that assimilation occurred in a "triple melting pot" based on religion, rather than in a single process of cultural conformity. Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish subcultures assimilated diverse co-religionists, but did not themselves melt into a homogeneous American identity. In the 1960s sociologists further revised the Chicago School account of ethnic assimilation, opening the door to a far more pluralistic theory of ethnicity. Milton Gordon developed a highly complex theory that distinguished cultural assimilation from structural assimilation and marital assimilation. For Gordon, structural assimilation -- widespread entrance of outsiders into "cliques, clubs, and institutions" of the dominant group -- was the most decisive of the three. From it proceeded marital assimilation, whereby outsiders and insiders amalgamated and dissolved lines of difference between them. However, cultural assimilation could occur without entailing any of these more substantial forms of interaction. Adopting the styles and foodways, the language and habits of the mainstream society -- as most immigrants or their children had quite readily done -- did not guarantee admission to the circles of influence and hierarchies of power in the society.
In fact, according to Gordon, America was a series of "subsocieties," each with its own subculture. Some of these subsocieties were based on ethnicity, others on class, and the intersections of the two produced what Gordon dubbed "ethclass." The core subsociety of white, Protestant, middle-class folk had elaborated a core subculture to which outsiders could gain access; the children of immigrants had indeed assimilated to that core subculture in many ways. Nevertheless, Gordon insisted, even such culturally assimilated descendants of immigrants retained vital attachment to the ethnic subculture because they continued to need the subsociety -- i.e., the institutions and networks and support systems that linked Poles to Poles, Italians to Italians, Jews to Jews, etc. Boundary crossing of the "triple melting pot" sort was occurring, as well as some old-fashioned cleaving to ethnic enclaves, and resistance on the basis of race to boundary crossing. The overall picture was one of considerable and increasing cultural assimilation, alongside very slowly increasing structural assimilation. In the early 1970s, going even further than Gordon, Michael Novak proposed that ethnicity was "unmeltable," and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer argued that ethnic boundaries defined political entities whose salience was increasing rather than declining. Moynihan and Glazer saw ethnicity not as constraining but as empowering, and insisted that there was no prospect whatever of such an indispensable form of identity melting away.
Historians readily picked up on this more pluralistic social science theory partly because fellow historians had already been marking the way. As early as 1940, Marcus Lee Hanson had pioneered the argument that immigrants' experiences could not be collapsed into a single, unidirectional theory of assimilation. Over time, he contended, immigrants and their descendants sometimes let go of, and at other times revived or invented versions of ethnicity as historical circumstances demanded. Frank Thistlethwaite insisted in 1960 that immigrants came from many different places, had different motives, goals, and experiences, and interacted in many different ways with transnational labor markets and a variety of host societies. No straight-line theory could comprehend the diversity of experiences within so vast and complex a phenomenon. This more complex view of immigration not only liberated historians from the "new man" myth and the unidirectional assimilation model, it also allowed scholars to study immigration to America in connection with the economic and demographic transformations in the wider Atlantic world and beyond.
Beyond the realm of scholarship, in the late 1950s and 1960s the civil rights movement made Americans more conscious of the wide gap between the nation's ideals and its racial practices. Historians responded by producing a host of new studies of slavery and racial conflict in America. But they also uncovered the history of vicious prejudice against foreigners. Thus, John Higham inStrangers in the Landtraced the cycles of nativist hostility to immigrants from the 1860s to the 1920s. With subtlety and amazing thoroughness, Higham made it plain that America was not as welcoming to strangers as the myth of assimilation would have it. At least at times when national confidence waned in the face of economic downturns or other traumas, a streak of vicious ethnic bigotry was a recurrent thread in the American fabric. This new history coincided with a "new ethnicity": just as African Americans were announcing that "black is beautiful," descendants of the Italian, Jewish, and Slavic immigrants of the early twentieth century began reclaiming names like Korczenowski, Lipschutz, and Pignataro, which had been Anglicized at Ellis Island or abandoned by anxious ancestors. Rather than a fading attachment to tradition, ethnicity increasingly seemed a repository of authentic experience. American "white-bread" culture seemed not just an aesthetically featureless wasteland but a machine for homogenizing people, thereby depriving them of an essential form of personal empowerment. For many reasons, therefore, historians in the 1960s plunged into the search for diverse and persistent ethnic experiences -- and inter-ethnic conflict -- in America.
The first of the new pluralist historians to recast Handlin's picture of immigrant assimilation was Rudolph Vecoli. The southern Italian immigrants he studied in Chicago lived in an ethnic world that excluded not only "American" identity, but even "Italian-American" identity. In tightly bound clusters from specific villages and kinship groups, they had been impelled upon the course of migration by vast economic forces, and were inured to the requirements of the capitalist market and the rhythms of migratory gang labor. They survived the harrowing ordeal by sticking to what they knew, not by embracing the process of heroic transformation outlined by Handlin. "Amoral familism" not "ethnicity" shaped their identity; magic not religion haunted their consciousness; persistence not change characterized their behavior over time. Similarly, if less starkly, Virginia Yans-McLaughlin showed how Italian and Polish immigrants adapted quite differently to the challenges of industrial Buffalo, New York. Bringing energy from the growing women's movement and the burgeoning field of women's history to bear on the subject, Yans-McLaughlin was especially insightful about the role of women in regulating the family, and of the family in governing the immigrants' responses to a threatening social environment. Like Caroline Golab, who studied Poles in Philadelphia, Yans-McLaughlin painted a picture of women-centered families successfully managing the transition to a new world with a minimum of change and disruption.
Some historians in the 1970s found considerable assimilation, even submergence, of immigrants into the dominant Anglo-American culture, but usually their subjects were English, Scandinavians, Germans, or other northern Europeans. More recently, historians have more substantially qualified the picture sketched by Vecoli and other neo-pluralists in the 1960s and 1970s. They contend that neither the ethnic enclave nor American society itself was ever as unitary as Handlin and his many critics all made it seem. Along with considerable ethnic resilience, considerable assimilation took place, because immigrants neither resisted nor accommodated something called "America." Rather, they came to terms with local and changing circumstances, over decades and generations, in ways that require tales with multiple trajectories. These historians also give greater credence to ordinary people's agency in shaping their lives. Many immigrants sought to assimilate into American ways not out of cultural self-abandonment or self-hatred but as the result of a reasoned accommodation to a relatively tolerant environment. When that environment proved itself hostile to their interests and sense of dignity, they resisted it, defending their traditions though not abjuring their commitment to assimilation. Thus, Eva Morawska has found considerable cultural adaptation among Slavic immigrants in Pennsylvania, some of it in the direction of ethnic identity, some of it evolving toward a highly assimilated, working-class Americanism. In this view, ethnicity is not a primordial feature of the immigrants' cultural identity but a tool to help them negotiate labor markets, social networks, and political crosscurrents. Neither peasant villagers nor alienated moderns, the immigrants and their children discovered a variety of ways of "becoming American" that rejected repressive versions of Americanization while validating more inclusive forms of American identity.
In the mid-1980s, two major synthetic accounts of immigration history appeared, each in its own way striving to recast along more pluralist lines the tale of migration, settlement, and assimilation. Although embracing the findings of the neo-pluralists, both Thomas Archdeacon inBecoming Americanand John Bodnar inThe Transplantedfind ample evidence of assimilation as well as ethnic, racial, and class divisions in the United States. Even in their titles, both authors announce the intention to set the narrative of immigration on a course more complex than that proposed either by new man myth, or by Chicago School sociology, or by advocates of cultural pluralism. "Becoming" emphasizes the elastic quality of identity formation, while "transplanted" suggests not alienation from the past but the re-rooting of durable stock in new environments. In both Archdeacon and Bodnar, international capitalism drives the migrants; families and larger groups and institutions, not individuals, are the key historical actors; racial division plays a part in assimilating descendants of immigrants to a white American mainstream, even as it reinforces the political assertion of ethnic "rights"; multiple melting pots appear to work effectively for some purposes, but pale in significance before the determinant power of class, race, and gender in shaping historical outcomes. The stories told with such an approach are more complex than those allowed by the simple assimilationist or pluralist models of the past, as this quote from Bodnar shows:
Between the microscopic forces of daily life, often centering around ethnic communal and kinship ties, and the macroscopic world of economic change and urban growth stood the culture of everyday life. This was a culture not based exclusively on ethnicity, tradition, class, or progress. More precisely, it was a mediating culture which confronted all these factors....Even within similar ethnic aggregations, a preoccupation with the practical and the attainable did not create identical life strategies.
Both readings in this chapter reflect this maturation of immigration history in the last decade. James R. Barrett emphasizes the significance of class in shaping both assimilation and resistance to it by immigrants and their descendants in the first half of the twentieth century. Barrett sees ethnic identity as one among many forms of consciousness developed by people who were also men and women, workers and citizens. Most importantly, as Lizabeth Cohen has similarly argued, ethnicity is transitional, evolving by the 1930s into a trans-ethnic working-class identity. What both Barrett and Cohen suggest is a working-class melting pot that, like the religious melting pots proposed by Herberg and Kennedy in the 1950s, assimilated immigrants across ethnic lines while falling short of absorbing them into an undifferentiated American mainstream.
George J. Sanchez shows in the second reading that Mexican immigrants forged a new identity that drew on all their resources, including Mexican, Anglo-American, and newly synthesized elements, all the while dealing with the hard realities of class hierarchy in America. As Sanchez sees it, the "new ethnicity" paradigm that dominated so much of the scholarship in the field of immigration history in the 1970s and 1980s treated ethnicity as "an undifferentiated cultural position." Both old-world and United States cultures were "depicted largely as static, impermeable,...bipolar cultural opposites" by proponents of a highly pluralist view of history. Moreover, by presenting the alternatives as either absorption by the "dominant culture" or courageous preservation of a precious "ethnic identity," pluralists made questions about class and gender divisions within an immigrant community seem almost a form of cultural betrayal.
By the 1980s, a new generation of scholars, many of them feminists and some influenced by postmodernist thought, sought to "de-essentialize" ethnicity. That is, they insisted that ethnic identity, like race, gender, and other seemingly "natural" or "essential" qualities, was actually a social construction; that it was unstable and ever-changing in response to circumstances; and that it was a part, not the whole, of anyone's identity. Thus, a lesbian Latina scholar, Gloria Anzaldua, could find in her Mexican heritage both treasure and dross. Rejecting the homophobia and "cultural tyranny," she gloried especially in the pre-Hispanic Aztec spirituality that had been a submerged element in her upbringing. Aware of cultural criticism such as Anzaldua's, Sanchez argues "in favor of the possibility of multiple identities and contradictory positions" among immigrants and their descendants. Ethnicity is "a collective identity that emerged from daily experience in the United States," neither "Mexican" nor "American," but an evolving synthesis of elements. Finally, recalling Milton Gordon's assertion that cultural assimilation can occur without entailing structural assimilation, Sanchez argues that for Mexican Americans, "cultural adaptation occurred without substantial social mobility."
In the last decade historians have even further emphasized the significance of race as a social category in American history. Some of these scholars make race the crucial factor in shaping American ethnic identity, even as they come to quite different conclusions about it. Many "multiculturalists," inspired by the huge new inflows of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, believe that recognizing the diversity of the American population in past and present entails a radical pluralism. Thus Ronald Takaki insists that fully acknowledging the history of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and other racial outsiders will finally allow Americans to discard Anglocentric notions and construct a realistic picture of their heterogeneous society. Many commentators see the multilingualism of cities such as New York, Miami, and Los Angeles as evidence of the approach of a radically de-centered, postmodern society, which will make it impossible for any one group to dominate the national culture. Ironically, Takaki suggests that acknowledging diversity will lead Americans to an almost mystical unity. He ends his book with paeans to "wholeness" and a quote from Whitman: "Of every hue and caste am I,...I resist any thing better than my own diversity."
Far from trying to find an affirmative note of "America singing," those scholars who associate themselves with "whiteness studies" have constructed a grim tale of racial division in America. Most European immigrants, in this viewpoint, learned quickly after arriving that America was free and full of opportunity for those who could win recognition as white. At one time or another, many of them -- Irish, Italians, and Jews, among others -- were denied membership, especially during the flush years of racial nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Still, by virtue of skin color most of these -- or at least their children -- could aspire to and eventually win a place within the world of whiteness. For Asians, Latinos, and American Indians, the chances were far lower. Historians of Asian American experience have made especially clear the extent to which racial hatred and racial ideology repeatedly subverted efforts to generate class solidarity or pluralist national identity among working-class Americans in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Whatever the fate of immigrants, for African Americans racial otherness was an indelible feature of their social identity. White Americans could not allow that crucial dividing line to be breached and still hope to retain the opportunities and privileges that kept them ahead in America's competitive economic and social system. The psychic investment that whites -- including descendants of immigrants -- made in their whiteness was too valuable to tamper with. Solving America's racial dilemma, then, would require not just good will but a readiness on the part of whites to disinvest themselves in whiteness and to suffer the material consequences of doing so. It also requires scholars to abandon their fixation on the narrative of inclusion and assimilation and to focus instead on America's racial divide.
Some scholars of "whiteness" seem to resort to a uni-directional narrative that makes the building and maintenance of racial hegemony the master dynamic of American history. Resisting this tendency, the intellectual historian David A. Hollinger has sought to trace a middle way between the narrative of smooth assimilation and that of racial polarization. He insists that "ethnos" neither has nor should dominate American culture, that a "cosmopolitan" alternative exists and has historic roots, and that only by facing class inequalities can Americans give to ethnicity the important but limited place it deserves in their lives. In somewhat different terms, Lawrence H. Fuchs insists that "Americans have gone farther than any other multiethnic nation in developing a humane and decent multiethnic society," and rejects any suggestion that immigrant assimilation depends upon reinforcement of the racial divide. On the other hand,
Excerpted from Interpretations of American History: Patterns and Perspectives Through Reconstruction by Francis G. Couvares, Martha Saxton
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Need Help? Copyright © 1999-2024