Shaping Our Nation
How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics
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- ¥710
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- ¥710
発行者による作品情報
It is often said that America has become culturally diverse only in the past quarter century. But from the country’s beginning, cultural variety and conflict have been a centrifugal force in American politics and a crucial reason for our rise to power.
The peopling of the United States is one of the most important stories of the last five hundred years, and in Shaping our Nation, bestselling author and demographics expert Michael Barone illuminates a new angle on America’s rise, using a vast array of political and social data to show America is the product of a series large, unexpected mass movements—both internal and external—which typically lasted only one or two generations but in that time reshaped the nation, and created lasting tensions that were difficult to resolve.
Barone highlights the surprising trends and connections between the America of today and its migrant past, such as how the areas of major Scots-Irish settlement in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War are the same areas where John McCain performed better in the 2008 election than George W. Bush did in 2004, and how in the years following the Civil War, migration across the Mason-Dixon line all but ceased until the annealing effect that the shared struggle of World War II produced. Barone also takes us all the way up to present day, showing what the surge of Hispanic migration between 1970 and 2010 means for the elections and political decisions to be made in the coming decades.
Barone shows how, from the Scots-Irish influxes of the 18th century, to the Ellis Island migrations of the early 20th and the Hispanic and Asian ones of the last four decades, people have moved to America in part in order to make a better living—but more importantly, to create new communities in which they could thrive and live as they wanted. And the founders’ formula of limited government, civic equality, and tolerance of religious and cultural diversity has provided a ready and useful template for not only to coping with these new cultural influences, but for prospering as a nation with cultural variety.
Sweeping, thought-provoking, and ultimately hopeful, Shaping Our Nation is an unprecedented addition to our understanding of America’s cultural past, with deep implications for the immigration, economic, and social policies of the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barone (Our First Revolution) reviews migration to the U.S. and its impact on American politics. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Scotch-Irish and English pioneers fanned across the continent in a "Yankeediaspora" and bestowed on it British laws, language, and religions. Barone catalogues the impact of European immigrants, from Italians to Slavs, Germans and Irish. In contrast to the rest of the nation after the Civil War, black and white Southerners remained relatively immobile and the region was populated mostly by native-born Americans. While Barone transcends clich d Ellis Island narratives, his early chapters rehash textbook political history to a degree. The more impressive chapters deal with the post-1940 period, as Barone outlines black migration to the North and out-migration from Northern cities to the Sunbelt. The flow of Americans of all backgrounds to California, Florida, Texas, and other high-growth states added up to a national political game changer. Barone puts the best face possible on 50 years of substantial, mostly illegal Mexican immigration to the U.S. and explains why it happened. He reveals official cluelessness or dishonesty during the passage of the landmark immigration acts of 1964 and 1965. Barone's sharp political instincts and ability to clearly explain demographic change make for a solid and lively account. 19 b&w maps.
