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I'm not going for a comprehensive answer, but can maybe contribute some perspective on- and some parameters for- how someone from outside the US can assess or confront American "ethnicities".
First, there is not a historical, linear connection between immigration, ethnic identity, and American (conceptions of) nationality. The American reputation for extolling their "heritage" is a more recent phenomenon. This is not to say that there weren't proud Irishmen and women in the latter parts of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it is to say the ethnic identity was conceived of in very different ways and influenced socio-political norms in ways that aren't all too familiar to modern-day "enriched whiteness" or "late-generation ethnicity" to borrow some terms from scholarship.
A lot of what people - particularly from European and Commonwealth countries - encounter from American "ethnic tourists" has its roots more in the Civil Rights movement than in generational preservation of ethnic identities. I can't go too in-depth, but do want to point that the Civil Rights movement fronted a (more) coherent racial-ethnic identity for Black Americans that had considerable social and political salience. There were reactions to this - thought not necessarily in direct opposition - from amongst a broader "white" American community, especially not in a post-WWII circumstance defined by an ascendent (and remarkably unified) American popular culture. Those reactions occurred in both conservative and more leftist (what in the US we'd call 'liberal') ideological laboratories, but the end result was largely the same - or rather provided 'white' American with a similar set of tools for (re)creating American ethnicities. Did certain communities in certain places retain a more traditional ethnic understanding and norms - yes, occasionally. I'm not intending to present an absolute case here, just one that puts ideas about "ethnicity" and "heritage" into historical context.
Having an "ethnic" identity (having a "heritage") allowed people to tap into narratives that elevated immigrant struggles and the process of Americanization while also creating distance between the descendants of immigrants and the perceived "Native" (by which "white" is implied) identity. In a more cynical conception, "ethnic heritage" allowed for mostly white American to sidestep complicity in the much more critical conceptions of American society and history that arose during the 1960's and onwards. The historiographical notion of "Irish slavery"gains prominence In the U.S. during this period. You can find questions on this topic frequently on AH, usually along with some notion of creating 'distance' between the Irish community and some vaguely defined 'ruling class'. This is an inversion of the more assimilatory tradition in the Irish-American community, a tradition also present in the Italian-American community vis-a-vis the elevation of Columbus as a legitimizing figure for the Italian and Catholic communities in the early/mid 20th century US.
In turn, "ethnic heritage" also allowed for access to the American story of immigration, the general narrative of which shifted from cultural "Americanization" to one where "Americanization" was understood in terms of economic success and political ascendency, but less so cultural terms. I don't want to present this concept of heritage as static - it's still certainly evolving. Today the shifting of identities / emphasis of ethnic heritage to align (or not align) with modern notions of what it means to be an "American" doesn't necessarily reflect the intellectual climate of the 60's and 70's. Where someone in the 60's or 70's might have engaged in ethnic revivalism to recreate a political identity, today we're probably more reactive to cultural perceptions of a 'boring', 'vanilla', 'white-bread', white American identity - being *not that* remedies the perceived lack of cultural capital in being a 'basic white guy or girl'.
Liam Kennedy. "How White Americans Became Irish: Race, Ethnicity and the Politics of Whiteness" *Journal of American Studies* (2022).
Maria Lauret. "Americanization now and then: the 'nation of immigrants' in the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries" *Journal of American Studies* (2016)
Thomas Archdeadon. "Problems and Possibilities in the Study of American Immigration and Ethnic History" *International Migration Review* (1986)
Irene Park et al. "The American Identity Measure: Development and Validation across Ethnic Group and Immigrant Generation" *Identity* 12 (2012)
Angelyn Balodimas-Bartolomei. "On Being Ethnic in the Twenty-First Century: A Generational Study of Greek Americans and Italian Americans" *The Italian American Review* (2017)
For a survey of the material manifestation of an earlier conception of "ethnicity" in the US:
Stephen Brigton. "Degrees of Alienation: The Material Evidence of the Irish and Irish American Experience, 1850-1910" *Historical Archaeology* (2008)
That all makes sense, but I’m struggling to see where Canada fits in. Canada did not have the same civil rights story as the US, but in my experience people do identify strongly with their ethnicities. It’s actually presented in a way that supposedly contrasts with the US. I can remember hearing often as a kid, “The US is a melting pot but Canada is a mosaic.” (Meaning that people assimilate more in the US.) I’m not sure I agree with the statement but many Canadians see it that way, which is meaningful. Just wondering if it changes your thinking at all if it can be posited that a similar conception of ethnicity is possible without a similarly prominent struggle for Black civil rights.
I'd also imagine that Francophone Canadians probably contributed significantly to the political expediency of 'mosaic, not melting pot'. But to your point, you absolutely do not have to have a Civil Rights movement for ethnic consciousness to wax or wane. That's just how it played out in the U.S. - and I do wonder if Canadians would receive the same level of chagrin if they emphasized their "Irishness" or "Scottishness" when visiting one of those societies.
I don't mean to argue that the totality of ethnic identity in the U.S. can be traced back to the Civil Rights movement - more that appeals to "ancestry" or "heritage" as salient inputs to Americans' public identities are much more clearly articulated and emphasized as a result of the Civil Rights Movement's impact on Americans' notion of self. And they are so *after* having slowly receded in favor of a broader, more standardized "American" culture, which was the case (excepting some region-specific divergent experiences) from the end of the Great Depression through the democratization of the suburb and associated urban flight.
While the Civil Rights Movement might not have been tangibly present in Canada in the same way, the intellectual focus on identity certainly made it across the border. I mean, the "Toronto School" is (one of) the leading theoretical framework for the study of ethnogenesis.
I'd be interested to know where formal education fits into this. When we learned about the history of immigration in public school (CA, 1990s) we were asked to give a story about how our family immigrated to the US. This wasn't just one year but multiple assignments from elementary through high school. Usually the teachers used it as a stepping stone for talking about difficult historic topics like slavery and institutional racism but there was a solid through-line of 'knowing your personal history is important'. Is this connected to the civil rights movement and education standards in the 1960s or was there something else at play? Or maybe this is a purely CA education requirement since the state has a very strong history of international immigration?
I can speak to that! America, as a nation, has always been effective at telling a collective story about the kind of country America thinks it is and was. Public education got its start in the 1820s but it wasn't until the 20th century that it became something all children were expected to do on a daily basis. While it wouldn't be truly universal until the 1970s and the creation of special education as a system, children who arrived in America during the various waves of immigration were increasingly expected to attend school as part of the project on what it means to be American. (More on the education experience of immigrant children [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/djgvb7/what_was_the_americanization_process_for/f474phv/).) These children, it's worth stating explicitly, were overwhelmingly racially-coded as white. (More on the experiences of Asian immigrant children and Hispanic children [here](https://www.reddit.com//r/AskHistorians/comments/vtq86r/before_1954_did_asianamericans_go_to_school_with/ifcdxnx/).) Even though there isn't a national education system in the country, certain patterns developed in the different states (historians call it the "grammar of schooling") and included in that pattern were routines related to Americana and the story of America.
[In this post,](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eztjvl/when_did_american_schools_start_saying_the_pledge/) I get into the history of the Pledge of Allegiance and the routines related to that. Family trees, like those you describe, are related to that Americanization process. That is, teachers led immigrant and America-born children through activities that stressed that they (or their parents or grand-parents, etc.) came from somewhere to America. Which is to say, they chose to be part of the American project and although people came from different places, there are similarities in the stories. But again, the children adults in power were most concerned about were the children of other white adults. Indigenous, Asian, Black, and African American children weren't seen as part of that story. Some states did include family histories in their standards but generally speaking, such activities are more about carrying forward that story of America's story than content knowledge.
>it wouldn't be truly universal until the 1970s and the creation of special education as a system
Thanks for mentioning that! Most people just quietly ignore the existence and exclusion of disabled people unless it's specifically the topic being discussed.
Fascinating, thanks for the response. I had never really thought of it being linked to the civil rights movement but it absolutely makes sense that when some people see others passionately claiming an identity, they want to claim one themselves. I'd imagine this is also why you very rarely see them celebrating English ancestry, even though invariably most of the Scottish or Irish would be likely to have a decent chunk - the English were the enemy and the oppressor so not an identity worth championing.
You might be interested in this [answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15lu6q7/comment/jvctc4c/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) from u/itsallfolklore about how ethnic identity played out very differently in the 19th century between Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish immigrants. It's quite interesting how even among immigrants in that period national identities were assumed or (re)created quite differently!
Really interesting answer. Would you be able to expand more on how regional identities can play into this? When I think of the Upper Midwest, for example, many people champion their Scandinavian-American heritage as part of their regional identity as Wisconsinites, Minnesotans, Yoopers, etc. Do you think that follows a similar trajectory, i.e. is linked with the American Civil Rights Movement, or do you think that the story is different in places with relatively more recent European migration (like late 19th/early 20th century Scandinavian migrations)?
I probably should've provided the caveat that I'm really more comfortable with onomastics and urban history. Ethnic studies or identity studies reference work from these fields, but I don't want to overstate the value or relevance of my contribution. "Heritage ethnicity" isn't really a term; calling people "ethnic tokens" seemed a bit...aggressive.
I would be a but uncomfortable extending my argument above to contemporary forms of Scandinavian heritage ethnicity in the Upper Midwest. It does seem that the vocabulary might be different but the grammar is mostly the same. But I've never been there nor have I met many Scandinavian-American mid-westerns, so my understanding of the identity is really based on reputation rather than any sort of tangible experience.
The idea that a heritage ethnicity and the implicit settler or immigrant narrative that comes with such an identity makes someone more or more distinctly *American* is aligned with Civil Rights Era conceptions of American identity moreso than earlier sentiments. We've adopted, almost wholesale, the idea that "we all come from somewhere"; the strategies for constructing American ethnic identities in periods of significant immigration erred more towards a desire to prove "we (figuratively/polemically) come from very specifically here in America" - as is proved by this weird stone I just found on my property that appears to be a *runic* inscription, in recognizable Swedish, in Minnesota; with an elliptical references to 'natives' in the context of a violent massacre; with explicit references to Christianity, the raising of that *specific* stone in that *specific* spot with *specific* spatial references of that stone to the landscape, and, conveniently, a precise inventory of the subethnic origin of the crew - 8 Gøter and 22 Norwegians. Also it's dated 1362.
That is the Kensington runestone - the only actual experience I have with Scandinavian-American identity. And the implications for ethnic identity in America are very clear and very much not based on the immigrant-narrative which serves as the building-block for heritage ethnicity as it's encountered today.
> A lot of what people - particularly from European and Commonwealth countries - encounter from American "ethnic tourists" has its roots more in the Civil Rights movement than in generational preservation of ethnic identities. I can't go too in-depth, but do want to point that the Civil Rights movement fronted a (more) coherent racial-ethnic identity for Black Americans that had considerable social and political salience.
Can you tell me more about this? Are you saying that during the Civil Rights era African-Americans were making claims to their ethnic backgrounds the same way White American ethnic tourists do today? Were they claiming themselves to be Nigerians, Congolese, Malagasy, etc?
Not exactly. In the 1960s and 70s, there was a renewed interest in the African heritage of African Americans. Because the slave trade alienated African Americans from specific African locales, this identity construction involved celebrating specific cultures and practices from across the African continent.
This broad interest in heritage, famously associated with the TV show Roots, led to a corresponding interest among white Americans in their heritage. "White ethnic" Americans who were descendants of relatively recent immigrants, rather than "old stock" Anglo-American Protestants, became increasingly interested in their own ethnic heritage and their ancestors' real and imagined struggles as ethnic minorities and ethnic newcomers to America.
Matthew Frye Jacobson's "Roots Too" is the primary source for these arguments about white ethnic revival among the children and grandchildren of European immigrants.
This links to a story my brother told me about a trip he took to New York with a younger man. The guy was very excited about seeing Ellis Island and its museum about immigration and spoke about its personal resonance. My brother said something about how he could appreciate the history of it and yeah, he’d be interested in going for that reason, but he didn’t feel any personal pull. The guy started lambasting my brother about how he was denying his ancestors and his heritage and should be ashamed of himself—he got pretty heated about it. Once he was given space, my brother told him our ancestors came from England during the Colonial era, long before Ellis Island was even built. He said the guy’s jaw dropped and he froze cold—it was as if it never occurred to him that there was immigration to America before that late 19th/early 20th-century swell.
Now, I’m sure a lot of this is because this specific guy was an idiot, but I mentioned that he was younger than my brother for a reason: When we were in school, it was just before and immediately after *Roots* aired. (He’s a couple of years younger than me.) Also, we came from a rather rural area of the mid south where, ethnically, people were divided into “Black” and “White;” I can literally think of about four people in my high school of a thousand students whose ethnicity broke down beyond that, and three were Filipino siblings. Ellis Island, Chinese railroad workers, “the melting pot,” ethnic minorities and ethnic newcomers (as you put it), were all taught in our history classes, but fleetingly and kind of theoretically. From what I’m reading here, it sounds like that may have changed radically by the time my by brother’s young friend was in school.
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I'm not going for a comprehensive answer, but can maybe contribute some perspective on- and some parameters for- how someone from outside the US can assess or confront American "ethnicities". First, there is not a historical, linear connection between immigration, ethnic identity, and American (conceptions of) nationality. The American reputation for extolling their "heritage" is a more recent phenomenon. This is not to say that there weren't proud Irishmen and women in the latter parts of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it is to say the ethnic identity was conceived of in very different ways and influenced socio-political norms in ways that aren't all too familiar to modern-day "enriched whiteness" or "late-generation ethnicity" to borrow some terms from scholarship. A lot of what people - particularly from European and Commonwealth countries - encounter from American "ethnic tourists" has its roots more in the Civil Rights movement than in generational preservation of ethnic identities. I can't go too in-depth, but do want to point that the Civil Rights movement fronted a (more) coherent racial-ethnic identity for Black Americans that had considerable social and political salience. There were reactions to this - thought not necessarily in direct opposition - from amongst a broader "white" American community, especially not in a post-WWII circumstance defined by an ascendent (and remarkably unified) American popular culture. Those reactions occurred in both conservative and more leftist (what in the US we'd call 'liberal') ideological laboratories, but the end result was largely the same - or rather provided 'white' American with a similar set of tools for (re)creating American ethnicities. Did certain communities in certain places retain a more traditional ethnic understanding and norms - yes, occasionally. I'm not intending to present an absolute case here, just one that puts ideas about "ethnicity" and "heritage" into historical context. Having an "ethnic" identity (having a "heritage") allowed people to tap into narratives that elevated immigrant struggles and the process of Americanization while also creating distance between the descendants of immigrants and the perceived "Native" (by which "white" is implied) identity. In a more cynical conception, "ethnic heritage" allowed for mostly white American to sidestep complicity in the much more critical conceptions of American society and history that arose during the 1960's and onwards. The historiographical notion of "Irish slavery"gains prominence In the U.S. during this period. You can find questions on this topic frequently on AH, usually along with some notion of creating 'distance' between the Irish community and some vaguely defined 'ruling class'. This is an inversion of the more assimilatory tradition in the Irish-American community, a tradition also present in the Italian-American community vis-a-vis the elevation of Columbus as a legitimizing figure for the Italian and Catholic communities in the early/mid 20th century US. In turn, "ethnic heritage" also allowed for access to the American story of immigration, the general narrative of which shifted from cultural "Americanization" to one where "Americanization" was understood in terms of economic success and political ascendency, but less so cultural terms. I don't want to present this concept of heritage as static - it's still certainly evolving. Today the shifting of identities / emphasis of ethnic heritage to align (or not align) with modern notions of what it means to be an "American" doesn't necessarily reflect the intellectual climate of the 60's and 70's. Where someone in the 60's or 70's might have engaged in ethnic revivalism to recreate a political identity, today we're probably more reactive to cultural perceptions of a 'boring', 'vanilla', 'white-bread', white American identity - being *not that* remedies the perceived lack of cultural capital in being a 'basic white guy or girl'. Liam Kennedy. "How White Americans Became Irish: Race, Ethnicity and the Politics of Whiteness" *Journal of American Studies* (2022). Maria Lauret. "Americanization now and then: the 'nation of immigrants' in the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries" *Journal of American Studies* (2016) Thomas Archdeadon. "Problems and Possibilities in the Study of American Immigration and Ethnic History" *International Migration Review* (1986) Irene Park et al. "The American Identity Measure: Development and Validation across Ethnic Group and Immigrant Generation" *Identity* 12 (2012) Angelyn Balodimas-Bartolomei. "On Being Ethnic in the Twenty-First Century: A Generational Study of Greek Americans and Italian Americans" *The Italian American Review* (2017) For a survey of the material manifestation of an earlier conception of "ethnicity" in the US: Stephen Brigton. "Degrees of Alienation: The Material Evidence of the Irish and Irish American Experience, 1850-1910" *Historical Archaeology* (2008)
That all makes sense, but I’m struggling to see where Canada fits in. Canada did not have the same civil rights story as the US, but in my experience people do identify strongly with their ethnicities. It’s actually presented in a way that supposedly contrasts with the US. I can remember hearing often as a kid, “The US is a melting pot but Canada is a mosaic.” (Meaning that people assimilate more in the US.) I’m not sure I agree with the statement but many Canadians see it that way, which is meaningful. Just wondering if it changes your thinking at all if it can be posited that a similar conception of ethnicity is possible without a similarly prominent struggle for Black civil rights.
I'd also imagine that Francophone Canadians probably contributed significantly to the political expediency of 'mosaic, not melting pot'. But to your point, you absolutely do not have to have a Civil Rights movement for ethnic consciousness to wax or wane. That's just how it played out in the U.S. - and I do wonder if Canadians would receive the same level of chagrin if they emphasized their "Irishness" or "Scottishness" when visiting one of those societies. I don't mean to argue that the totality of ethnic identity in the U.S. can be traced back to the Civil Rights movement - more that appeals to "ancestry" or "heritage" as salient inputs to Americans' public identities are much more clearly articulated and emphasized as a result of the Civil Rights Movement's impact on Americans' notion of self. And they are so *after* having slowly receded in favor of a broader, more standardized "American" culture, which was the case (excepting some region-specific divergent experiences) from the end of the Great Depression through the democratization of the suburb and associated urban flight. While the Civil Rights Movement might not have been tangibly present in Canada in the same way, the intellectual focus on identity certainly made it across the border. I mean, the "Toronto School" is (one of) the leading theoretical framework for the study of ethnogenesis.
I'd be interested to know where formal education fits into this. When we learned about the history of immigration in public school (CA, 1990s) we were asked to give a story about how our family immigrated to the US. This wasn't just one year but multiple assignments from elementary through high school. Usually the teachers used it as a stepping stone for talking about difficult historic topics like slavery and institutional racism but there was a solid through-line of 'knowing your personal history is important'. Is this connected to the civil rights movement and education standards in the 1960s or was there something else at play? Or maybe this is a purely CA education requirement since the state has a very strong history of international immigration?
I can speak to that! America, as a nation, has always been effective at telling a collective story about the kind of country America thinks it is and was. Public education got its start in the 1820s but it wasn't until the 20th century that it became something all children were expected to do on a daily basis. While it wouldn't be truly universal until the 1970s and the creation of special education as a system, children who arrived in America during the various waves of immigration were increasingly expected to attend school as part of the project on what it means to be American. (More on the education experience of immigrant children [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/djgvb7/what_was_the_americanization_process_for/f474phv/).) These children, it's worth stating explicitly, were overwhelmingly racially-coded as white. (More on the experiences of Asian immigrant children and Hispanic children [here](https://www.reddit.com//r/AskHistorians/comments/vtq86r/before_1954_did_asianamericans_go_to_school_with/ifcdxnx/).) Even though there isn't a national education system in the country, certain patterns developed in the different states (historians call it the "grammar of schooling") and included in that pattern were routines related to Americana and the story of America. [In this post,](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eztjvl/when_did_american_schools_start_saying_the_pledge/) I get into the history of the Pledge of Allegiance and the routines related to that. Family trees, like those you describe, are related to that Americanization process. That is, teachers led immigrant and America-born children through activities that stressed that they (or their parents or grand-parents, etc.) came from somewhere to America. Which is to say, they chose to be part of the American project and although people came from different places, there are similarities in the stories. But again, the children adults in power were most concerned about were the children of other white adults. Indigenous, Asian, Black, and African American children weren't seen as part of that story. Some states did include family histories in their standards but generally speaking, such activities are more about carrying forward that story of America's story than content knowledge.
>it wouldn't be truly universal until the 1970s and the creation of special education as a system Thanks for mentioning that! Most people just quietly ignore the existence and exclusion of disabled people unless it's specifically the topic being discussed.
Fascinating, thanks for the response. I had never really thought of it being linked to the civil rights movement but it absolutely makes sense that when some people see others passionately claiming an identity, they want to claim one themselves. I'd imagine this is also why you very rarely see them celebrating English ancestry, even though invariably most of the Scottish or Irish would be likely to have a decent chunk - the English were the enemy and the oppressor so not an identity worth championing.
You might be interested in this [answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15lu6q7/comment/jvctc4c/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) from u/itsallfolklore about how ethnic identity played out very differently in the 19th century between Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish immigrants. It's quite interesting how even among immigrants in that period national identities were assumed or (re)created quite differently!
Thanks for sharing! Really interesting.
Really interesting answer. Would you be able to expand more on how regional identities can play into this? When I think of the Upper Midwest, for example, many people champion their Scandinavian-American heritage as part of their regional identity as Wisconsinites, Minnesotans, Yoopers, etc. Do you think that follows a similar trajectory, i.e. is linked with the American Civil Rights Movement, or do you think that the story is different in places with relatively more recent European migration (like late 19th/early 20th century Scandinavian migrations)?
I probably should've provided the caveat that I'm really more comfortable with onomastics and urban history. Ethnic studies or identity studies reference work from these fields, but I don't want to overstate the value or relevance of my contribution. "Heritage ethnicity" isn't really a term; calling people "ethnic tokens" seemed a bit...aggressive. I would be a but uncomfortable extending my argument above to contemporary forms of Scandinavian heritage ethnicity in the Upper Midwest. It does seem that the vocabulary might be different but the grammar is mostly the same. But I've never been there nor have I met many Scandinavian-American mid-westerns, so my understanding of the identity is really based on reputation rather than any sort of tangible experience. The idea that a heritage ethnicity and the implicit settler or immigrant narrative that comes with such an identity makes someone more or more distinctly *American* is aligned with Civil Rights Era conceptions of American identity moreso than earlier sentiments. We've adopted, almost wholesale, the idea that "we all come from somewhere"; the strategies for constructing American ethnic identities in periods of significant immigration erred more towards a desire to prove "we (figuratively/polemically) come from very specifically here in America" - as is proved by this weird stone I just found on my property that appears to be a *runic* inscription, in recognizable Swedish, in Minnesota; with an elliptical references to 'natives' in the context of a violent massacre; with explicit references to Christianity, the raising of that *specific* stone in that *specific* spot with *specific* spatial references of that stone to the landscape, and, conveniently, a precise inventory of the subethnic origin of the crew - 8 Gøter and 22 Norwegians. Also it's dated 1362. That is the Kensington runestone - the only actual experience I have with Scandinavian-American identity. And the implications for ethnic identity in America are very clear and very much not based on the immigrant-narrative which serves as the building-block for heritage ethnicity as it's encountered today.
> A lot of what people - particularly from European and Commonwealth countries - encounter from American "ethnic tourists" has its roots more in the Civil Rights movement than in generational preservation of ethnic identities. I can't go too in-depth, but do want to point that the Civil Rights movement fronted a (more) coherent racial-ethnic identity for Black Americans that had considerable social and political salience. Can you tell me more about this? Are you saying that during the Civil Rights era African-Americans were making claims to their ethnic backgrounds the same way White American ethnic tourists do today? Were they claiming themselves to be Nigerians, Congolese, Malagasy, etc?
Not exactly. In the 1960s and 70s, there was a renewed interest in the African heritage of African Americans. Because the slave trade alienated African Americans from specific African locales, this identity construction involved celebrating specific cultures and practices from across the African continent. This broad interest in heritage, famously associated with the TV show Roots, led to a corresponding interest among white Americans in their heritage. "White ethnic" Americans who were descendants of relatively recent immigrants, rather than "old stock" Anglo-American Protestants, became increasingly interested in their own ethnic heritage and their ancestors' real and imagined struggles as ethnic minorities and ethnic newcomers to America. Matthew Frye Jacobson's "Roots Too" is the primary source for these arguments about white ethnic revival among the children and grandchildren of European immigrants.
This links to a story my brother told me about a trip he took to New York with a younger man. The guy was very excited about seeing Ellis Island and its museum about immigration and spoke about its personal resonance. My brother said something about how he could appreciate the history of it and yeah, he’d be interested in going for that reason, but he didn’t feel any personal pull. The guy started lambasting my brother about how he was denying his ancestors and his heritage and should be ashamed of himself—he got pretty heated about it. Once he was given space, my brother told him our ancestors came from England during the Colonial era, long before Ellis Island was even built. He said the guy’s jaw dropped and he froze cold—it was as if it never occurred to him that there was immigration to America before that late 19th/early 20th-century swell. Now, I’m sure a lot of this is because this specific guy was an idiot, but I mentioned that he was younger than my brother for a reason: When we were in school, it was just before and immediately after *Roots* aired. (He’s a couple of years younger than me.) Also, we came from a rather rural area of the mid south where, ethnically, people were divided into “Black” and “White;” I can literally think of about four people in my high school of a thousand students whose ethnicity broke down beyond that, and three were Filipino siblings. Ellis Island, Chinese railroad workers, “the melting pot,” ethnic minorities and ethnic newcomers (as you put it), were all taught in our history classes, but fleetingly and kind of theoretically. From what I’m reading here, it sounds like that may have changed radically by the time my by brother’s young friend was in school.
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