Ethnic Americans [antikvár]

Editor's IntroductionThere was a time, soon after World War II, when Americans assumed that their "nation of nations" had finally become one. The end of free immigration during the 1920s and the shared ex-periences of the Depression and of the War, seemed to have finally fused all the ethnic elements into a uniform blend. Still unmerged were nonwhites, particularly blacks, but in the 1950s even they appeared likely to eventually coalesce into the new mixture that made up the American people.But this was a mistaken assumption. Blacks, of course, did not lose their separate identity. In fact the events of the 1960s gave them, if anything, a stronger sense of their distinctiveness and their apartness from the rest of America. More to the point here, Americans learned how strong were the emotional ties that these "ethnics" had to their cultural past and to their origins and group identity. Partly in emulation of, partly in reaction to, the new mood of black self-consciousness, Italian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Greek Americans, Polish Americans, and many other varieties of what used to be called "hyphenated" Americans, began to assert their right to cultivate and retain their unique cultural, historical, and even political identities.It is this growing interest in "ethnicity" that has inspired this volume by Professors Dinnerstein and Reimers. The book empha-sizes the successive waves of new arrivals on American shores from the 1840s onward. It examines the circumstances of their departure from their originál homelands and describes their reception in America. It includes an unusually full treatment of the post 1920s arrivals, including the war refugees of the 1935-60 period, and the mass movement of Hispanic peoplesPuerto Ricans, Mexicans, Cubans, and other Latin Americans - to the United States after 1945.