The Disuniting of America

A detailed Summary of The Disuniting of America

The Disuniting of America by Arthur A. Schlesinger Jr. Norton. 1998. 208 pages

In The Disuniting of America, Arthur M. Schlesinger tells about the history of "the new race" of Americans. "In the new republic civil commitment replaced bloodlines as the test for citizenship." The peoples of the new land where thrown into a crucible that forced the people to combine their skills and effort to solve their problems. Together different groups of people were able to build communities out of raw land. Wars such as the Civil War helped forge the self-image of Americans. Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "...Americanism is a matter of the mind and the heart; Americanism is not and never was a matter of ancestry."

Schlesinger writes that many people come to America and want to dive into the melting pot society and become an "American." I think that the whole idea of the melting pot is getting rusty. A lot of people come to America to escape the harsh conditions of their home countries. They come to America because we offer a peaceful land with a large amount of freedom. Schlesinger writes, "(Americans should) look forward to their prosteri

An example of racial and ethnic over-emphasis in America is bilingual teaching in schools. Schlesinger says that he believes that parents of non-English speaking children would rather have them in a class that is all English all the time. English only classrooms insure that children are learning English. In bilingual classes they use too much Spanish and end up not teaching enough English. I agree with Schlesinger in this. Monolingual education opens up doors to the larger world. You need to have a large English vocabulary, knowledge of sentence structure and grammar to succeed in America.

People should focus more on similarities and less on differences. If we see ourselves as one people we may be more effective at addressing our differences in constructive and compassionate ways. This will make our society a fully developed melting pot.

Another example of the failure of the melting pot is racial segregation. In school, different parts of the yard are almost like traveling from one country to the next. You have the African Americans in one part, the Asian Americans in another, the Europeans somewhere else, and the rest of the minorities hardly exist. It

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Approximate Word count = 790
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History

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The Disuniting of America

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