At the seventy-ninth annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1964, a panel of scholars enlivened one of the sessions with a heated debate over the effects of ethnic assimilation in American culture. The topic of debate, ‘Beyond the Melting Pot: Irish and Jewish Separateness in American Society’, focused on a recent controversial study of ethnic mixture in New York City by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, both sociologists. Glazer and Moynihan in their bookBeyond the Melting Pottraced the ‘role of ethnicity’ in the seaboard city. The melting pot ‘did not happen’, they concluded, ‘at least not in New York and,mutatis mutandis, in those parts of America which resemble New York’. This frontal assault on the concept of Americanization, long a cherished ideal in the United States, drew a sharp reaction from several panellists, especially William V. Shannon, editorial writer for dieNew York Timesand author ofThe American Irish, and Irving Greenberg, professor of history at Yeshiva University. Both Shannon and Greenberg insisted that Irishmen and Jews had indeed been assimilated in American society, either for better or for worse. At this point, the discussion degenerated into the traditional moralistic debate on the merits and demerits of assimilation. Reflecting the divergent views of their colleagues in the history profession, Shannon praised assimilation and Greenberg condemned it.
"This article analyzes Netherlands government statistics on overseas emigration, 1880-1920, which reveal that the process of industrialization caused a major social structural shift in the 1890s. A system of urban labor migration replaced the traditional rural folk movement and the primary destination shifted away from the United States to Dutch colonies in Asia and South America. The Netherlands belatedly 'caught up' with the rest of Western Europe in the shift from family to industrial overseas emigrants."
This article provides a summary of the collected evidence that supports the thesis that religion was a salient factor in 19th-century voting behavior. It shows that the United States is essentially an immigrant nation, which is populated by peoples with different languages, social values, cultures, religions, and work experiences. This eventually led to a nation that has a relatively high degree of conflicting norms and values, cultural pluralism, and ethnic diversity. Since religion has been a salient factor in American politics since the 1820s, a religious interpretation of voting behavior can help enhance one's understanding of American political culture from the period of Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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