Becoming America

Becoming America
Author: Jon Butler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2001-12-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674006674

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Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago -- and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society -- a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American Revolution. Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of prerevolutionary America; it reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto "dark ages") of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, Becoming America shows us transformations before 1776 among an unusually diverse assortment of peoples. Here is a polyglot population of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, Swedes, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty. Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to Africans or Indians. Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and remade itself many times during the next centuries -- asociety that, for ninety years before 1776, was becoming America.

Becoming American

Becoming American
Author: Thomas J. Archdeacon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 323
Release: 1984-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0029009804

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Traces the history of American immigration from 1607 to the 1920s and looks at how groups of immigrants have adapted to the United States.

Becoming Americans

Becoming Americans
Author: Ilan Stavans
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009
Genre: SOCIAL SCIENCE
ISBN: 9781598530513

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Comprised mostly of memoirs with some fiction, this volume gathers selections from the writings of 85 immigrants from 45 countries that illustrate the changing views of immigrants in the United States.

ISE Becoming America

ISE Becoming America
Author: DAVID M.. MCLENNAN HENKIN (REBECCA M.)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-01-17
Genre:
ISBN: 9781260597967

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Becoming American: A Political Memoir

Becoming American: A Political Memoir
Author: Cary D. Lowe
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2020-04-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1684334624

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Becoming American is the inspiring story of the author’s transformation from a child of Holocaust survivors in post-war Europe to an American lawyer, academic, and activist associated with such famed political leaders as Robert Kennedy, George McGovern, Jerry Brown, and Tom Hayden. Searching for his great-grandparents’ graves in a hidden cemetery outside Prague makes him recall his experiences of becoming American: listening to Army Counterintelligence agents gathered at his home in Austria; a tense encounter with Russian soldiers; seeing Jim Crow racism in the South during his first visit to the United States; becoming an American citizen in his teens; having his citizenship challenged by border guards; fearing for his new country upon witnessing the Watts riots; exhilaration at rising to leadership positions in organizations shaping government policies; and advancing the American dream as a real estate lawyer, helping develop entire new communities.

Becoming American in Creole New Orleans, 1896–1949

Becoming American in Creole New Orleans, 1896–1949
Author: Darryl Barthé, Jr.
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021-07-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807175471

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Extensive scholarship has emerged within the last twenty-five years on the role of Louisiana Creoles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, yet academic work on the history of Creoles in New Orleans after the Civil War and into the twentieth century remains sparse. Darryl Barthé Jr.’s Becoming American in Creole New Orleans moves the history of New Orleans’ Creole community forward, documenting the process of “becoming American” through Creoles’ encounters with Anglo-American modernism. Barthé tracks this ethnic transformation through an interrogation of New Orleans’s voluntary associations and social sodalities, as well as its public and parochial schools, where Creole linguistic distinctiveness faded over the twentieth century because of English-only education and the establishment of Anglo-American economic hegemony. Barthé argues that despite the existence of ethnic repression, the transition from Creole to American identity was largely voluntary as Creoles embraced the economic opportunities afforded to them through learning English. “Becoming American” entailed the adoption of a distinctly American language and a distinctly American racialized caste system. Navigating that caste system was always tricky for Creoles, who had existed in between French and Spanish color lines that recognized them as a group separate from Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians even though they often shared kinship ties with all of these groups. Creoles responded to the pressures associated with the demands of the American caste system by passing as white people (completely or situationally) or, more often, redefining themselves as Blacks. Becoming American in Creole New Orleans offers a critical comparative analysis of “Creolization” and “Americanization,” social processes that often worked in opposition to each another during the nineteenth century and that would continue to frame the limits of Creole identity and cultural expression in New Orleans until the mid-twentieth century. As such, it offers intersectional engagement with subjects that have historically fallen under the purview of sociology, anthropology, and critical theory, including discourses on whiteness, métissage/métisajé, and critical mixed-race theory.

Citizen Sailors

Citizen Sailors
Author: Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2015-10-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674915550

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In the decades after the United States formally declared its independence in 1776, Americans struggled to gain recognition of their new republic and their rights as citizens. None had to fight harder than the nation’s seamen, whose labor took them far from home and deep into the Atlantic world. Citizen Sailors tells the story of how their efforts to become American at sea in the midst of war and revolution created the first national, racially inclusive model of United States citizenship. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal immerses us in sailors’ pursuit of safe passage through the ocean world during the turbulent age of revolution. Challenged by British press-gangs and French privateersmen, who considered them Britons and rejected their citizenship claims, American seamen demanded that the U.S. government take action to protect them. In response, federal leaders created a system of national identification documents for sailors and issued them to tens of thousands of mariners of all races—nearly a century before such credentials came into wider use. Citizenship for American sailors was strikingly ahead of its time: it marked the federal government’s most extensive foray into defining the boundaries of national belonging until the Civil War era, and the government’s most explicit recognition of black Americans’ equal membership as well. This remarkable system succeeded in safeguarding seafarers, but it fell victim to rising racism and nativism after 1815. Not until the twentieth century would the United States again embrace such an inclusive vision of American nationhood.

Becoming American, Being Indian

Becoming American, Being Indian
Author: Madhulika S. Khandelwal
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501722026

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Since the 1960s the number of Indian immigrants and their descendants living in the United States has grown dramatically. During the same period, the make-up of this community has also changed—the highly educated professional elite who came to this country from the subcontinent in the 1960s has given way to a population encompassing many from the working and middle classes. In her fascinating account of Indian immigrants in New York City, Madhulika S. Khandelwal explores the ways in which their world has evolved over four decades.How did this highly diverse ethnic group form an identity and community? Drawing on her extensive interviews with immigrants, Khandelwal examines the transplanting of Indian culture onto the Manhattan and Queens landscapes. She considers festivals and media, food and dress, religious activities of followers of different faiths, work and class, gender and generational differences, and the emergence of a variety of associations.Khandelwal analyzes how this growing ethnic community has gradually become "more Indian," with a stronger religious focus, larger family networks, and increasingly traditional marriage patterns. She discusses as well the ways in which the American experience has altered the lives of her subjects.

Becoming Mexican American

Becoming Mexican American
Author: George J. Sanchez
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 406
Release: 1995-03-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780195096484

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Twentieth century Los Angeles has been the focus of one of the most profound and complex interactions between distinct cultures in U.S. history. In this pioneering study, Sanchez explores how Mexican immigrants "Americanized" themselves in order to fit in, thereby losing part of their own culture.

Becoming Refugee American

Becoming Refugee American
Author: Phuong Tran Nguyen
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2017-10-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780252041358

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Vietnamese refugees fleeing the fall of South Vietnam faced a paradox. The same guilt-ridden America that only reluctantly accepted them expected, and rewarded, expressions of gratitude for their rescue. Meanwhile, their status as refugees ”as opposed to willing immigrants ”profoundly influenced their cultural identity. Phuong Tran Nguyen examines the phenomenon of refugee nationalism among Vietnamese Americans in Southern California. Here, the residents of Little Saigon keep alive nostalgia for the old regime and, by extension, their claim to a lost statehood. Their refugee nationalism is less a refusal to assimilate than a mode of becoming, in essence, a distinct group of refugee Americans. Nguyen examines the factors that encouraged them to adopt this identity. His analysis also moves beyond the familiar rescue narrative to chart the intimate yet contentious relationship these Vietnamese Americans have with their adopted homeland. Nguyen sets their plight within the context of the Cold War, an era when Americans sought to atone for broken promises but also saw themselves as providing a sanctuary for people everywhere fleeing communism.