Henry Pratt Fairchild (1880–1956) spent the bulk of his academic career at New York University where he was on the faculty for twenty-six years, serving as Chairman of the Department of Sociology in the Graduate School. He published research on race, nationalism, and ethnic conflict; he also was involved with the founding of Planned Parenthood and served as president of the American Eugenics Society. In his book The Melting-Pot Mistake (1926), Fairchild argued that the melting pot metaphor coined by Israel Zangwill in his 1909 play “The Melting-Pot” was picturesque, but it was a fallacy that failed to account for the apparent disintegration of American society that had been in the making during the past fifty years of unbridled immigration. According to Fairchild, the group unity necessary for national cohesion and well-being was endangered because the differences of ‘groups’ are not ‘meltable,’ as “the primary basis of group unity is racial.”For Fairchild, America represents “truth, beauty, goodness, morality, justice, propriety, efficiency, custom, order, and – home,” and to maintain those stellar qualities, it must remain a white man’s country. Today, it is mainly white nationalists and neo-Nazis who openly and unapologetically express such overtly racist views.

Seen as a path to Americanization, the sweatshop is a cultural trope. From Abraham Cahan’s fictional autobiography, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), to Amy Sherman-Palladino’s comedy-drama, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-), stories set in the sweatshop comprise a subgenre of US immigrant narratives. Melissa Rivero’s The Affairs of the Falcóns (2019) adds to and disrupts that subgenre while challenging dominant conception of assimilation. As a story about undocumented labor and the informal economy, The Affairs of the Falcóns seems to say little about assimilation as it is widely perceived and celebrated. Yet Rivero’s novel offers a fresh take on this concept: Ana is incorporated in the US economy not only as a sweatshop seamstress, but also as a disposable worker. The Affairs of the Falcóns calls attention to the paradox of assimilation – inclusion via marginalization and subordination – and to the elusiveness of the American dream.

This chapter explores a number of key principles and concepts dealt with in the Commonwealth government’s National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. The chapter’s central focus is the impact and continuing effects that past ‘assimilation’ policies have had on the contemporary circumstance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It also explores the Inquiry’s observations regarding the meaning and intent of genocide, the notion of self-determination and the vexed question of Aboriginal ‘identity’.

A national conference on Americanization in April 1918 evidenced how social and political concerns mattered in wartime. Many regarded the global war as an unhoped-for opportunity to patch up the American nation and bring together the various ethnic groups living in the United States. Across the United States, ethnic enclaves existed and hyphenated Americans oscillated between pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes and being loyal to their homelands. Assimilationists seized the opportunity to foster American ideals in children. They consistently rallied politicians in their crusade against the hyphen and eventually defeated progressive integrationalists.

This chapter examines segmental mutations and processes in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM), including assimilation, dissimilation, gemination, syllabic reduction, contraction, and vernacular-literary phonological differences.

Assimilation occurs in place (e.g., homorganic nasal assimilation, optional palatalization) and manner (e.g., nasal harmony). Dissimilation prevents adjacent identical [back] features in diphthongs and avoids co-occurrence of [labial] and [dorsal] features in onset glides and coda consonants.

Gemination lengthens glides, nasals, and stops. Stop codas of checked syllables are voiced and undergo gemination when followed by a vowel-initial function word; otherwise, they undergo final devoicing. Gemination is constrained to the prosodic word domain, and the chapter suggests a gradient interpretation of geminate inalterability in some systems.

Syllable reduction leads to contraction, with nuclear segments potentially undergoing transformations like devocalization, merger, or nasalization. Contraction follows an edge-in paradigm, with sonority-based priority.

Vernacular-literary differences include onset consonants in the literary register undergoing pharyngealization and velarization, and vowels alternating through rounding and derounding, reflecting a trend toward unmarked phonological structures.

This chapter surveys the empirical evidence on the effect of terror on social cohesion. We report on attitudinal changes towards the minority group to which terrorists are perceived to belong and by that group towards integration. We also discuss evidence of increased discrimination in labor and housing markets and reduced assimilation efforts in the wake of major terror attacks.

This chapter explores omniculturalism, a new approach to managing diversity. The first goal of omniculturalism is to manage human relationships within a generally accepted understanding derived from science that all human beings share foundational and important similarities. We humans are very similar to one another, and the contention is that our similarities are – and should be given – far more importance than our differences. The second goal is to acknowledge that in some respects all humans belong to groups that to some degree differ from one another, such as in terms of the languages they speak, the religions they practice, and the colors of their skins. However, these intergroup differences are of minor importance, compared to the foundational similarities all humans share. Omniculturalism involves the active celebration of human similarities (rather than differences). However, attention is given to group distinctiveness at a secondary level.

This chapter examines the psychological foundations of assimilation and multiculturalism. Assimilation is rooted in intergroup contact and similarity-attraction theories, which suggest that increased interaction and perceived commonality between immigrants and host societies foster trust, reduce prejudice, and facilitate integration. However, assimilation faces challenges such as societal resistance, biases, and the tension between maintaining cultural identity and adapting to the dominant society. In contrast, multiculturalism emphasizes the value of cultural diversity. It is grounded in the psychology of cultural identity, intellectual humility, and the belief that embracing one’s culture can promote acceptance of others. Despite its benefits, multiculturalism also faces challenges in balancing diversity with social cohesion and overcoming resistance from dominant groups. This chapter explores how these psychological principles inform both assimilation and multiculturalism, their impact on intergroup relations, and the complexities of integrating immigrants into diverse societies.

Taking its cue from passages in the Mendelssohn family’s correspondence concerning aspects of Jewish tradition and Christian conversion, and drawing on the work of modern scholars, the chapter considers from a variety of angles the sense of Jewishness with which Fanny Hensel’s and Felix Mendelssohn’s lives were imbued. With reference to a range of literature on Jewish history, the question of the siblings’ Jewish identity is explored in the wider context of German Jewish social and religious life at the time, as well as its implications within the Mendelssohn family’s private circle, for example, inter-generational tensions. Attention is given to the reception history of the family’s Jewish identity in the context of anti-Jewish attitudes, reflected in a range of sources including the remarks of the siblings’ composition tutor, Carl Friedrich Zelter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the writings of Richard Wagner, while also identifying echoes in modern Mendelssohn scholarship.

This chapter considers Christian converts from Islam who were converted forcibly in the early sixteenth century and known as moriscos. Once Catholic, the moriscos came under the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition. For more than a century, Spanish authorities worried about Moriscos adhering to their former religion and being Christian in name only; Spanish inquisitors investigated and prosecuted them for practicing Islam. The number of trials reached a high point in the second half of the sixteenth century, and only dropped when the monarchy expelled the Moriscos from the Spanish kingdoms between 1609 and 1614. This essay examines how the Spanish Inquisition constructed a model of Islamic heresy that encompassed Morisco cultural traditions. It surveys the rise in inquisitorial prosecution of this population across multiple Spanish regions. It also considers Morisco responses to the Inquisition, including strategies of petitioning and financial negotiation. This chapter assesses what Inquisition records can reveal about Morisco histories, as well as methods for reading beyond inquisitorial perspectives.

The argument of this chapter is that it was a combination of emulation and assimilation that shaped the logic of Valencian peasants as consumers of food-related objects. In making this case, this chapter provides evidence on emulative attitudes through contemporary moral criticisms and sumptuary laws. It also explores the meanings of food-related objects and how peasants used such notions in their dwellings. The chapter concludes that peasant consumer behaviour was not solely and passively guided by a will to imitate others but by an interest in absorbing what was relevant from others into their lifestyles, and for their own aims. This deliberate, conscious assimilation led peasants to incorporate new objects into their own familial and social needs.

In 2007, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognized their particular historical losses and protected their future as collective entities, including their distinctive claims to land. In a multi-sited genealogy, Miranda Johnson explores how long-term historical identities were reforged – in stages after World War II, and against the prevalence of assimilative ideologies – through the elaboration of common Indigenous claim-making of far-flung groups, coming to regard a parallel historic dispossession and current disempowerment.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the concepts of American culture and anti-Indianism. It begins with a discussion of Thanksgiving, Americans’ favorite holiday, from the perspective of Wamsutta Frank James, an American Indian, activist, and leader of the Wampanoag Tribe. For Wamsutta Frank James, Thanksgiving is not a day of celebration but a day of mourning. The use of celebrations such as Thanksgiving to promote myths about US history shows the importance of American culture for Whiteness. The chapter reviews some characteristics and popular myths about American Indians and Alaska Natives, the challenges of defining culture, and culture as a system of people, places, practices, power, and purpose. It examines incorporation, appropriation, assimilation, and segregation as strategies to enforce White cultural hegemony. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on “cancel culture” and the freedom of speech defense. It ends with a discussion of Wamsutta Frank James and reimagining US culture.

Chapter 6 applies the preceding insights to the problem of inter-cultural and inter-group relations in contemporary societies struggling with multiculturalism. It considers policy implications associated with the integration or assimilation of migrants, that burden migrants with the prospect of learning the ways of life of their host societies. This is known as acculturation. The chapter proceeds to consider the debate between assimilationist or multicultural policy in terms of social capital theory. It makes a case for integration based on social capital terms, whilst noting the challenge this poses to locals concerned about the erosion of their ways of life as a result of accommodating diversity.