Personal reflections on the challenges that face college students coming to understand their ethnicity in contemporary America.

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

The author examines the paths South Asian immigrants in Chicago take toward assimilation in the late 20th century United States. She examines two ethnic institutions to show how immigrant activism ironically abets these immigrants' assimilation.

Jendian provides a snapshot of the oldest Armenian community in the western United States. His work explores the processes of assimilation and ethnicity across four generations and examines forms of ethnic identity and intermarriage. He examines four subprocesses of assimilation[¬"cultural, structural, marital, and identificational[¬"for patterns of change ( assimilation) and persistence ( ethnicity). Findings demonstrate the co-existence of assimilation and ethnicity. He offers assimilation and the retention of ethnicity as two, somewhat independent, processes. Assimilation is not a unilinear or zero-sum phenomenon, but rather multidimensional and multidirectional. Future research must understand the forms ethnicity takes for different generations of different groups while examining patterns of change and persistence for the fourth generation and beyond.

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.

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.

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.