Race and Nation is the first book to compare the racial and ethnic systems that have developed around the world. It is the creation of nineteen scholars who are experts on locations as far-flung as China, Jamaica, Eritrea, Brazil, Germany, Punjab, and South Africa. The contributing historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and scholars of literary and cultural studies have engaged in an ongoing conversation, honing a common set of questions that dig to the heart of racial and ethnic groups and systems. Guided by those questions, they have created the first book that explores the similarities, differences, and the relationships among the ways that race and ethnicity have worked in the modern world. In so doing they have created a model for how to write world history that is detailed in its expertise, yet also manages broad comparisons.

This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

The arrival of immigrants on America's shores has always posed a singular problem: once they are here, how are these diverse peoples to be transformed into Americans? The Americanization movement of the 1910s and 1920s addressed this challenge by seeking to train immigrants for citizenship, representing a key element of the Progressives' "search for order" in a modernizing America. Frank Van Nuys examines for the first time how this movement, in an effort to help integrate an unruly West into the emerging national system, was forced to reconcile the myth of rugged individualism with the demands of a planned society. In an era convulsed by world war and socialist revolution, the Americanization movement was especially concerned about the susceptibility of immigrants to un-American propaganda and union agitation. As Van Nuys convincingly demonstrates, this applied as much to immigrants in the urbanizing and industrializing West as it did to those occupying the ethnic enclaves of cities in the East. In Americanizing the West he tells how hundreds of bureaucrats, educators, employers, and reformers participated in this movement by developing adult immigrant education programs-and how these attempts contributed more toward bureaucratizing the West than it did to turning immigrants into productive citizens. He deftly ties this history to broader national developments and shows how Westerners brought distinctive approaches to Americanization to accommodate and preserve their own sense of history and identity. Van Nuys shows that, although racism and social control agendas permeated Americanization efforts in the West, Americanizers sustained their faith in education as a powerful force in transforming immigrants into productive citizens. He also shows how some westerners-especially in California-believed they faced a "racial frontier" unlike other parts of the country in light of the influx of Hispanics and Asians, so that westerners became major players in the crafting of not only American identity but also immigration policies. The mystique of the white pioneer past still maintains a powerful hold on ideas of American identity, and we still deal with many of these issues through laws and propositions targeting immigrants and alien workers. Americanizing the West makes a clear case for regional distinctiveness in this citizenship program and puts current headlines in perspective by showing how it helped make the West what it is today.

This book analyzes the political experience of a small and unique American ethnic group—American Latvians. This community was constituted by post-World War II political refugees, who fled Communism and arrived in the United States seeking safety and protection. For decades, they insisted on preserving their ethnic identity and therefore did not call themselves Latvian Americans. Instead, they formed a distinctive double identity, that is, they blended into the American society economically and socially, but refused to become assimilated culturally and politically. The book offers a detailed look into the life of this community of political refugees, which also provides a novel perspective on the Cold War as experienced by certain ethnic groups. From a theoretical point of view, the book makes two major contributions. First, it reasserts the need to understand the generalized category of "white Americans" or "white ethnics" with more nuance and attention to differences, and, second, it strengthens the so-called realist claim that refugees are not like other immigrants. In order to achieve these goals, the book provides compelling descriptions and interpretations of the most politically relevant moments in the experience of American Latvians in the period between the 1950s and the 1990s. Concretely, the book deals with topics as the American Latvians’ anti-communist activism, the impact of the hunt for Nazis on Latvian émigrés, the Soviet Union’s anti-émigré propaganda campaigns and the exiled Latvians’ involvement in the politics of national liberation in Latvia. The author strives to reveal the complexity of the refugee experience in the United States during the Cold War and its aftermath. Since such aspects of the life of ethnic groups in the United States have not been sufficiently studied, this book makes a substantial contribution to a fuller understanding of American immigration history and sociology of ethnic groups. It is well written, expertly organized, and will be of interest to a large readership at many levels of academia.

The Making of an Ethnic Middle Class explains how European Jews of diverse cultural and social backgrounds coalesced over four generations into a middle-class community. By utilizing numerous oral histories to complement statistical data from public sources such as the federal manuscript censuses and public school enrollment cards, William Toll has succeeded in tracing in minute detail the contours of change. The study focuses particularly on the role of women to demonstrate how dramatic changes in the size and composition of the family and in sex roles, more than changes in the workplace, eroded European traditions.