Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
5,033
result(s) for
"United States -- Ethnic relations -- History"
Sort by:
A different mirror for young people : a history of multicultural America
Focusing on a variety of groups-Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Africans, Irish, Mexicans, Afghans, Vietnamese, and more-this volume tells America's story through the millions of people who came here seeking the opportunity.
Book
The Color of Success
The Color of Successtells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the \"yellow peril\" to \"model minorities\"--peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values--in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership.
Weaving together myriad perspectives, Wu provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. She highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. And she demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawaii statehood, and the African American freedom movement. Together, these illuminate the impact of foreign relations on the domestic racial order and how the nation accepted Asians as legitimate citizens while continuing to perceive them as indelible outsiders.
By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype,The Color of Successreveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.
eBook
We the people : the 500-year battle over who is American
\"'We the People.' The Constitution begins with those deceptively simple words, but how do Americans define that 'We'? In We the People, Ben Railton argues that throughout our history two competing yet interconnected concepts have battled to define our national identity and community: exclusionary and inclusive visions of who gets to be an American\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A Nation Forged in War
World War II shaped the United States in profound ways, and
this new book—the first in the Legacies of War
series—explores one of the most significant changes it
fostered: a dramatic increase in ethnic and religious
tolerance.
A Nation Forged in War is the first full-length study
of how large-scale mobilization during the Second World War
helped to dissolve longstanding differences among White
soldiers of widely divergent backgrounds. Never before or since
have so many Americans served in the armed forces at one time:
more than 15 million donned uniforms in the period from 1941 to
1945. Thomas Bruscino explores how these soldiers' shared
experiences—enduring basic training, living far from
home, engaging in combat—transformed their views of other
ethnic groups and religious traditions. He further examines how
specific military policies and practices worked to counteract
old prejudices, and he makes a persuasive case that throwing
together men of different regions, ethnicities, religions, and
classes not only fostered a greater sense of tolerance but also
forged a new American identity. When soldiers returned home
after the war with these new attitudes, they helped reorder
what it meant to be white in America. Using the presidential
campaigns of Al Smith in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960 as
bookend events, Bruscino notes a key change in religious bias.
Smith's defeat came at the end of a campaign rife with
anti-Catholic sentiment; Kennedy's victory some three decades
later proved that such religious bigotry was no longer an
insurmountable obstacle. Despite such advances, Bruscino notes
that the growing broad-mindedness produced by the war had
limits: it did not extend to African Americans, whose own
struggle for equality would dramatically mark the postwar
decades. Extensively documented,
A Nation Forged in War is one of the few books on the
social and cultural impact of the World War II years. Scholars
and students of military, ethnic, social, and religious history
will be fascinated by this groundbreaking new volume.
eBook
To March for Others
In 1966, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an African American civil rights group with Southern roots, joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union on its 250-mile march from Delano to Sacramento, California, to protest the exploitation of agricultural workers. SNCC was not the only black organization to support the UFW: later on, the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Black Panther Party backed UFW strikes and boycotts against California agribusiness throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.
To March for Othersexplores the reasons why black activists, who were committed to their own fight for equality during this period, crossed racial, socioeconomic, geographic, and ideological divides to align themselves with a union of predominantly Mexican American farm workers in rural California. Lauren Araiza considers the history, ideology, and political engagement of these five civil rights organizations, representing a broad spectrum of African American activism, and compares their attitudes and approaches to multiracial coalitions. Through their various relationships with the UFW, Araiza examines the dynamics of race, class, labor, and politics in twentieth-century freedom movements. The lessons in this eloquent and provocative study apply to a broader understanding of political and ethnic coalition building in the contemporary United States.
eBook
The Colors of Zion
This comparative study focuses on three groups often seen as antagonistic—Blacks, Jews, and Irish. Resolutely aware of past tensions, Bornstein argues that the pendulum has swung too far in that direction and that it is time to recover the history of lost connections and cooperation among the groups. The chronological range stretches from Frederick Douglass’s tour of Ireland during the Great Famine of the 1840s through the 1940s with the catastrophe of World War II. The study ends with the concept of the Righteous Gentile commemorated at the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem--non-Jews who during the Holocaust risked their own lives to rescue Jews from the horror of the Holocaust. Bornstein expands the term here to include all those Irish, Jewish, or African American figures who fought against narrow identification only with their own group and instead championed a wider and more humane vision of a shared humanity that sees hybridity rather than purity and love rather than resentment. The identity politics and culture wars of recent decades often made recognizing those positive qualities problematic. But with the election of a mixed-race president who himself embodies mixture and mutual respect (and who famously described himself as a “mutt\"), the shallow and arbitrary nature of narrow identity politics become evident. This study recuperates strong voices from the past of all three groups in order to let them speak for themselves.
eBook
A New Language, A New World
An examination of Italian immigrants and their children in the early twentieth century, A New Language, A New World is the first full-length historical case study of one immigrant group's experience with language in America. Incorporating the interdisciplinary literature on language within a historical framework, Nancy C. Carnevale illustrates the complexity of the topic of language in American immigrant life. By looking at language from the perspectives of both immigrants and the dominant culture as well as their interaction, this book reveals the role of language in the formation of ethnic identity and the often coercive context within which immigrants must negotiate this process. _x000B__x000B_Carnevale provides the context for understanding the linguistic history of Italian Americans by presenting a brief overview of the politics of language in Italy, with its racialized split between North and South, multiple dialects, and class divisions. During the Age of Migration, Italian immigrants encountered a similarly contested linguistic terrain in America, where immigrant languages in general were devalued and knowledge of the English language served as a criterion for full membership in a racially constructed society._x000B__x000B_Exploring a range of issues faced by Italians once they reached the United States, Carnevale considers the immigrant perspective on translation in both a literal linguistic sense and a figurative translation of self-identity. Italian Americans found a familiar voice in the popular entertainer Farfariello, whose comic songs incorporating the Italo-American idiom expressed problems of immigrant life as problems of communication--often between the sexes--suggesting the centrality of language in the immigrant imagination. And with the rise of fascism in the Italian homeland, the Italian language took on even more conflicted meanings in America as Italian Americans were regarded with suspicion and scrutiny._x000B__x000B_Grounded in a diverse array of archival sources, this study deepens our understanding of linguistic transformations in America and what they mean for ethnic identity and the process of assimilation. The story of Italians living with a new language in a new world forms only one piece of America's larger linguistic history, a history that has been integral to American conceptions of nation, race, and ethnicity.
eBook