Americans All: The Cultural Gifts Movement

Abstract

This timely book takes us back to the interwar origins of contemporary debates in the United States over ethnic studies and multicultural education. It is a welcome antidote given the current rise of anti-immigration sentiment and renewed fears of “strangers in the land.” Others, such as the novelist Philip Roth, revisit the 1930s in a different mood, imagining a fascist outcome of nativist fears resulting in the creation of a government Office of American Absorption, forcibly imposing a hegemonic reading of Americanism on America's immigrant population. As Diana Selig points out, there were such temptations of European fascism at work in the United States, but her focus is on countertrends, those that promoted a vision of tolerance and acceptance of ethnic and cultural diversity in the United States. Most of us think of multiculturalism as a late twentieth-century phenomenon, an outgrowth of 1960s liberalism and the ethnic pride movement of the 1970s. Some scholars have traced it back to the World War II and Cold War years. But Selig pushes the origins of contemporary multiculturalism back to the social and cultural ferment following World War I.