What is cultural history?
Bridget Draxler, Monmouth College
INTG: Citizenship
Why did they come?
According to PBS "Destination America",
immigrants came to America for:
Freedom to worship
Freedom from oppression
Freedom from want
Freedom from fear
Freedom to create
•
•
•
•
•
Which reason motivated your family?
http://www.pbs.org/destinationamerica/index.html
Why did they come HERE?
Bird's eye view of the city of Monmouth,
Warren County, Illinois 1869. Drawn by A. Ruger.
Genealogy
Numerous websites offer services to help
rediscover family history.
•
•
•
•
•
Why is this service appealing?
What would you want to find?
What would you not want to find?
Why are family histories important?
What can we learn from family history?
How would you describe the American Dream?
How would you describe the Spirit of America?
What keywords define America?
• originality
• opportunity
• growth
• posterity
• liberty
• expectation (white picket fence, 2.5 kids)
• upward social mobility
• potentially misleading... not everyone can make it
• different for each person
• independence
• progression
The Declaration of Independence
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
"The Melting Pot"
Where did this term come from?
a) Popularity of the peasant dish fondue, from the
French fondre, "to melt."
b) A play with a Romeo and Juliet style plot.
c) Derived from the steel industry, it refers to
molten iron.
The term melting pot came from a 1908 play by
English writer Israel Zangwill. The melodrama
transposed the plot of Shakespeare's Romeo
and Juliet to New York City, with the starcrossed lovers now from Russian Jewish and
Russian Cossack backgrounds.
In the play's climactic moment, the hero proclaims:
"Understand that America is God's Crucible, the
great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are
melting and reforming! A fig for your feuds and
vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and
Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible
with you all! God is making the American."
http://www.pbs.org/destinationamerica/usim_qz1c.html
How are the American Dream and the Spirit of
America rooted in our history as a nation of
immigrants?
• people came here to make better lives for themselves... or
to pursue better lives
• change, new beginnings
• expansion: moving west, looking for gold "Manifest
Destiny"
• Individual
• US is a collection of external identities... no unique
identity? no national language, culture, food. derivative.
How is immigration different today from 50, 100,
or 200 years ago?
How is immigration the same?
What do these similarities and differences
suggest about where we are as a nation today?
America on the Move: Latino Stories
According to the 2000 United State census, about 12.5 percent of the entire
population is Latino, the largest ethnic minority group in the nation. 51
percent of the foreign-born in the U.S. are Latino and of that number, over
one-fourth are Mexican.
In 2002, the U.S. Census Bureau
pegged the country's foreign-born
population at 11.5%, not far off the
historic high of 15% in 1910.
Most Latino children were born in
the US. Minority births now
outnumber white births in the US.
Suggested Links
New York Public Library--Images of Ellis Island
Library of Congress--American Memory Collections
US Citizenship and Immigration Services
Recommended Readings from PBS
Afkhami, Mahnaz. Women in Exile. University Press of Virginia, 1994.
Archdeacon, Thomas J. Becoming American: An Ethnic History. New York: Free Press, 1984.
Benton, Barbara. Ellis Island: A Pictorial History. New York: Facts on File, 1987.
Brownstone, David M., and Irene M. Franck and Douglass Brownstone (Eds.) Island of Hope, Island of Tears: The
Story of Those Who Entered the New World through Ellis Island In Their Own Words. Metro Books, 2002.
Conover, Ted. Coyotes: A Journey Through the Secret World of America's Illegal Aliens. New York: Vintage,
1978.
Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life.
HarperPerennial, 1991.
Daniels, Roger. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882. New
York: Hill and Wang, 2004.
Dinnerstein, Leonard and Roger L. Nichols and David M. Reimers (Eds.) Natives and Strangers: A Multicultural
History of Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press,
1991.
Foner, Nancy. From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2002.
Recommended Readings, cont.
Gonzalez, Juan. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Grunberger, Michael W., and Hasia R. Diner. From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in
America. New York: George Braziller, 2004.
Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American
People. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Jacoby, Tamar (Ed.) Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What it Means to Be
American. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988.
Moreno, Barry. Encyclopedia of Ellis Island. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.
Portes, Alejandro and Ruben G. Rumbault. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996.
Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. New York: Little
Brown, 1989.
Tanner, Helen Hornbeck. The Settling of North America: Atlas of the Great Migrations from the Ice
Age to the Present. New York: MacMillan, 1995.
The Editors of Time-Life Books. Immigrants: The New Americans. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1999.
Webb, James. Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. New York: Broadway Books, 2004.