Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World by Foner Eric

Author:Foner, Eric [Foner, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2003-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

THE ENDURING CIVIL WAR

SEVEN

WHO IS AN AMERICAN?

In 1995, the New York Council for the Humanities selected me as its second Scholar of the Year. For my talk at the award ceremony, I chose to address a subject then at the center of a fierce national debate—the definition of American nationality.

This was a moment when the Republican party of California had embarked on an anti-immigrant crusade (with what turned out to be politically disastrous results), bilingual education in the nation’s schools was under fierce attack by those proclaiming English the nation’s “official” language, and the writer Peter Brimelow had received much attention for his book Alien Nation, which warned that nonwhite immigration was destroying America’s “ethno-cultural community,” a community grounded, he insisted, in shared European ancestry. At the same time, commentators were blaming the “new social history,” which emphasizes the diverse experiences of the numerous groups that make up American society, for the loss of a sense of social unity and the fragmentation of national consciousness.

My talk traced this debate back to the nation’s founding era and suggested that there was nothing new in disagreements and worries about American identity. The tension between inclusive and restrictive definitions of the national community has a long history. There has never been a single answer to the question “Who is an American?”

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