PDF Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture

This book presents three decades of writings by one of America's most distinguished historians. John Higham, renowned for his influential works on immigration, ethnicity, political symbolism, and the writing of history, here traces the changing contours of American culture since its beginnings, focusing on the ways that an extraordinarily mobile society has allowed divergent ethnic, class, and ideological groups to "hang together" as Americans.

The book includes classic essays by Higham and more recent writings, some of which have been substantially revised for this publication. Topics range widely from the evolution of American national symbols and the fate of our national character to new perspectives on the New Deal, on other major turning points, and on changes in race relations after major American wars. Yet they are unified by an underlying theme: Forget Lady Liberty and Uncle Sam: After the war of independence, historian Higham Strangers in the Land explains, this 18th-century European image quickly gave way to others.

Now in his 80s, Higham, a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University and past president of the Organization of American Historians, casts a wide net in this collection of 14 previously published essays the role of mechanical invention in U. Not wanting to ignore multicultural critiques, Higham discusses them but never manages to reconcile them with his more historically orthodox belief in the existence and desirability of a national character and culture, though he makes many insightful and enlightening inquiries along the way. Throughout the collection, Higham exhibits a comprehensive knowledge and a sharp, analytic mind.

Although intended for serious students of history, Higham's work is accessible to the amateur historian and a general readership with a background in U. This collection of classic essays by leading U.

Patterns of American Nativism treats the subject of national character and the mechanisms by which people of divergent ethnic and class backgrounds have come together to identify as Americans throughout the country's history. Higham respectfully objects to aspects of multiculturalism, noting that the movement's emphasis on the differences among racial and ethnic groups has failed to lead to the advancement of a coherent civic vision.

He calls for historians to avoid "provincialism" and take up larger questions of national experience; his plea for a reexamination of the centripetal forces in American culture and society is compelling even while currently unfashionable in academia. Though some of the essays in this volume are over 30 years old, they still feel fresh and vibrant. They are often addressed to an academic audience, but general readers with an interest in history can benefit from them as well. Any library seeking to maintain an adequate collection on the history and culture of the United States should buy this important and timely book.

Thank you for using the catalog. Cultural pluralism -- United States. Group identity -- United States. Historiography -- United States.

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United States -- Race relations. United States -- Ethnic relations. United States -- Civilization. Summary This book presents three decades of writings by one of America's most distinguished historians. Library Journal Review This collection of classic essays by leading U. Excerpts Chapter One Hanging Together Divergent Unities in American History [] For about a decade American historical writing has been characterized by a repudiation of consensus and an invocation of community. Present-day historians seem substantially agreed that many of their predecessors overemphasized unities in American history and society.

Yet perhaps never before have so much interest and effort gone into a search for those times and places in which a high degree of solidarity obtained. On first notice, we have here a curious contradiction. The repudiation of consensus was supposed to permit a rediscovery of profound conflicts in our past. It has done so only to a very limited degree. The exciting advances in contemporary scholarship have more to do with understanding cohesive structures: A moment's reflection dispels the paradox. Historians who are interested in the issues of consensus and community are actually trying to distinguish between true and false communities, between the social arrangements that sustain participants and those that coerce or scatter them.

The term "consensus" is commonly applied to a factitious conformity, arising from manipulation and acquiescence. When we speak of "community" we refer to a more authentic, more truly shared bond. To look at American historiography in this light suggests that for some time historians of quite different persuasions have been asking the same questions, though giving different answers. The so-called consensus historians who came to the fore in the s--Richard Hofstadter, David Potter, Louis Hartz, and Daniel Boorstin--created the conceptual universe their present-day critics and successors inhabit.

Both groups have been studying the possibilities and the limits of social solidarity in our peculiarly amorphous country. A striking feature of this grand enterprise is the high proportion of negative conclusions it has so far produced. At first many historians described an all-embracing community, shaped by a common national character.

Before long this kind of community began to seem too thin, even illusory, to have much significance. Interest in national character has survived only to the extent that it can be treated--as Michael Kammen does--as a bundle of contradictions.

The locus of community has shifted to smaller, presumably more homogeneous entities. The more closely these are examined, however, the more they reveal their own fissures and stultifications. A remarkable number of recent studies focus on the points at which or the ways in which American communities have failed. A small army of historians has been trying to determine how and when the early New England towns came apart. Some say it was during the era of the Great Awakening; but Michael H.

Frisch argues that Springfield, Massachusetts, kept its organic wholeness until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Michael Zuckerman, on the other hand, insists that the cohesiveness of the New England towns was always contrived, that it rested on an intolerance of differences, and that it has never broken down but rather has spread throughout American group life. Survival of "the massive coercion of the monolithic community," Zuckerman sternly remarks, "belies the belief that we are a liberal society.

Bemused with so much failure, a reader must wonder what kind of social integration, what experience of unity, might qualify as successful. By what criteria do our historians distribute praise and blame among different kinds of communities?

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May we call one parochial because it is small and self-sustaining and another weak because it is large and nonexclusive? Under what conditions should we expect a unifying force to bind people more closely together, or to respect their partial autonomy, or release them completely? I ask these questions to suggest that the quality and nature of social cohesion pose fundamental dilemmas for Americans. Historians cannot resolve the dilemmas, but they can ask the past to clarify their shape and duration. America has exhibited not only an enormous variety of communities but also some underlying differences in the forms of unity our peoples have sought.

Much of the confusion in current scholarship seems to arise from a propensity to judge one pattern of social integration by criteria derived from another, and thus to demean the first at the expense of the second. John Higham's apprehensions of wholeness can offer literary scholars the useful trope of a "wholeness" underlying American intellectual history, and nuanced interpretive schemata for apprehending cultural events and energies within literary representation.

Among other things, his imaginative centrism comprises a map for critics engaged in multicultural discourse to avoid the Scylla of separation and the Charybdis of integration. In "Pluralistic Integration," one of several masterful essays focused on the contending discourses surrounding American exceptionalism or American universalism, Higham's precritical grasp of an essential, cultural synthesis leads him to repudiate what he calls the simplifications of opposing platforms.

On this score the melting pot idea—the standard metaphor of assimilation—presents the same weakness that vitiated Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis. Just as Turner underestimated the toughness of the entire social heritage that pioneers carried westward, so the melting-pot theory fails to appreciate the durability of their ethnic allegiances. No ethnic group, once established in the United States, has ever entirely disappeared; none seems about to do so. People are not as pliant as assimilationists have supposed" Higham rejects the absolutization of social identities with similar asperity, since it assumes a rigid group devotion that American life, he notes, continually erodes.

Indeed, ethnic groups do perpetuate themselves, but none escapes change. Its corrosive effect on ethnic difference is amply documented in American history. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem.

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