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Multiculturalism essays
Multiculturalism essays
Multiculturalism essays
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A Different mirror: A History of Multicultural America Ronald Takaki is one of the foremost-recognized scholars of multicultural studies and holds a PhD. in American History from the University of California, Berkeley. As a professor of Ethnic Studies at the same university, he wrote A Different Mirror: a History of Multicultural America as a fantastic new telling of our nation’s history. The book narrates the composition of the many different people of the United States of America. In a lively account filled that is with personal accounts and the voices of people that were in the past left out of the historical armament, Ronald Takaki proffers us a new perspective of America’s envisioned past. Mr. Takaki confronts and disputes the Anglo-centric historical point of view. This dispute and confrontation is started in the within the seventeenth-century arrival of the colonists from England as witnessed by the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and the Wamapanoag Indians from the Massachusetts area. From there, Mr. Takaki turns our attention to several different cultures and how they had been affected by North America. The English colonists had brought the African people with force to the Atlantic coasts of America. The Irish women that sought to facilitate their need to work in factory settings and maids for our towns. The Chinese who migrated with ideas of a golden mountain and the Japanese who came and labored in the cane fields of Hawaii and on the farms of California. The Jewish people that fled from shtetls of Russia and created new urban communities here. The Latinos who crossed the border had come in search of the mythic and fabulous life El Norte. Ronald Takaki closes his book, a Different Mirror: a History of Multicultural America, with the 1992 Los Angeles racial explosion.
1. What is the argument of Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America? How does Takaki make that argument?
Takaki, R. T. (1993). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
In Chapter 8 of Major Problems in American Immigration History, the topic of focus shifts from the United States proper to the expansion and creation of the so called American Empire of the late Nineteenth Century. Unlike other contemporary colonial powers, such as Britain and France, expansion beyond the coast to foreign lands was met with mixed responses. While some argued it to be a mere continuation of Manifest Destiny, others saw it as hypocritical of the democratic spirit which had come to the United States. Whatever their reasons, as United States foreign policy shifted in the direction of direct control and acquisition, it brought forth the issue of the native inhabitants of the lands which they owned and their place in American society. Despite its long history of creating states from acquired territory, the United States had no such plans for its colonies, effectively barring its native subjects from citizenship. Chapter 8’s discussion of Colonialism and Migration reveals that this new class of American, the native, was never to be the equal of its ruler, nor would they, in neither physical nor ideological terms, join in the union of states.
Tells a story of the creation and defense of communities, the utilization of the land, the development of markets, and the formation of states. It is filled with unexpected twists and turns. It is a tale of conquest, but also one of survival and persistence, and of the merging of peoples and cultures that gave birth and continuing life to America as we think of and experience it today (page 5).
Throughout the comparatively recent history of the United States, there have been many obstacles that the relatively young nation has had to overcome. Even before the nation had obtained its independence from Britain, there were conflicts with the Natives of the new land. Then wars were fought for other countries benefit, on their own soil. Then, of course, there was the Revolutionary War, fought in the late 1770’s, in which British colonists rose up against their British fathers in order to gain economic, religious and political freedom. After the acquirement of their independence as a nation, there were still many conflicts that the fledgling country had to worry about. The continent of North America was still controlled by other European superpowers, not to mention the multitudes of Native Indians that populated the lands west of the Appalachians. In order to combat other world powers as well as increase their own wealth, trade, and influence, the Americans adopted an attitude of ‘Manifest Destiny’, in which westward expansion was priority and their right. This however, led to more troubles and conflicts with the Natives of the land. The Indians west of the Appalachian m...
Daniel Richter's Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, turns many heads as Richter changes the traditional outlook of the Westward expansion all the way to the American Revolution by viewing certain events through the eyes of the Native Americans who were settled in this land years before the new colonizations started. It was not easy to try and make a complete work about the different perspectives that the Natives had, due to the fact that many sources are works from Europeans or they were filtered by them. Richter explains that Native people sketch out elaborative paintings in their house or on barks of living trees, many of these sources obviously have not lasted long enough for us to examine. This book, however gives great detail and fully analyzes the "aggressively expansionist Euro-American United States" (p. 8-7) that rose from what belonged to Indian Country. Richter challenges you to compose a new framework of the Indian and European encounters reforming the "master narrative" of early American colonization from the Native point of view.
Bibliography: Bibliography 1. John Majewski, History of the American Peoples: 1840-1920 (Dubuque: Kent/Hunt Publishing, 2001). 2.
Kathleen DuVal, professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, contests long held beliefs about the historiography of native people and their place in America with her work, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. DuVal’s insightful book focuses on the Arkansas River Valley and the diverse group of both native groups and European powers that contented over the physical landscape, its resources, and the perception of control and power. The premise of Native is to show that native groups such as the Quapaws, Osage, and the Cherokee had the upper hand in almost every aspect from their economy, military might, and physical presence up until the 1800s.
When Spaniards colonized California, they invaded the native Indians with foreign worldviews, weapons, and diseases. The distinct regional culture that resulted from this union in turn found itself invaded by Anglo-Americans with their peculiar social, legal, and economic ideals. Claiming that differences among these cultures could not be reconciled, Douglas Monroy traces the historical interaction among them in Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California. Beginning with the missions and ending in the late 1800s, he employs relations of production and labor demands as a framework to explain the domination of some groups and the decay of others and concludes with the notion that ?California would have been, and would be today, a different place indeed if people had done more of their own work.?(276) While this supposition may be true, its economic determinism undermines other important factors on which he eloquently elaborates, such as religion and law. Ironically, in his description of native Californian culture, Monroy becomes victim of the same creation of the ?other? for which he chastises Spanish and Anglo cultures. His unconvincing arguments about Indian life and his reductive adherence to labor analysis ultimately detract from his work; however, he successfully provokes the reader to explore the complexities and contradictions of a particular historical era.
Early American history began in the collision of European, West African, and Native American peoples in North America. Europeans “discovered” America by accident, then created empires out of the conquest of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans. Yet conquest and enslavement were accompanied by centuries of cultural interaction—interaction that spelled disaster for Africans and Native Americans and triumph for Europeans, to be sure, but interaction that transformed all three peoples in the process.
Upon the European’s discovery and colonization of the Americas an irreversible transformation was triggered. The extreme differences in the cultures of the Europeans and Native Americans would prove to be fatal to the way of life that existed before European colonization.
In “Constitutional Democracy and Bureaucratic Power,” Peter Woll states that our system of government, “. . in many ways supported bureaucratic organization and functions independent of the president,” (311). According to Woll, the Framers intended to establish an independent bureaucracy, as they gave Congress substantial power over the administrative “branch.” However, because of the bureaucracy’s independence, Woll asserts that, though he possesses the authority, the president often lacks the power to control the bureaucracy. Naturally, this can lead to the corruption and inefficiency of the administrative process. Also contributing to this inefficiency and corruption, is the very nature of the bureaucracy itself. By definition, a bureaucracy is a “large, complex organization of appointed officials,” (“American Government: Institutions and Politics”); this inherent complexity causes many of the issues of bureaucracy. In discussing bureaucratic agencies’ budgets, James Wilson claims that “. . since measuring the output of a bureau is often difficult. . .the bureau has a great deal of freedom within which to seek the largest possible budget,” (“The Rise of the Bureaucratic State”, Wilson). Essentially, the vastness of each bureaucratic agency makes close scrutiny a time consuming and futile effort. Additionally, Woll contends that “. . the three branches do not always use to the fullest extent their authority to regulate the bureaucracy,” (“Constitutional Democracy and Bureaucratic Power”, 314). This assertion suggests that perhaps the source of the bureaucracy’s problems lie, not within the institution itself, but within the reluctance of the other branches of government to regulate it. Wilson proffers another explanation for the bureaucracy’s inefficiency in his scrutiny of the USPS, arguing that
Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. As Roth states in Strengths Finder 2.0, we as a present day world tend to focus on and try to overcome our weaknesses rather that building up our strengths. Using our natural talents can help us do the best we can and help us be a better asset. After taking the strengths assessment, I found that my top five strengths themes ended up being: relator, discipline, competition, responsibility, and significance.
According the limitations we had, I learn following lessons from this teaching practice session. Firstly, it is better to give instructions as simple and clear as possible. For instance, using more short sentences and one sentence only for one key information. Also, I found it is not necessary to give all instructions that they do not need to know in advance