Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, language: English, abstract: But then I came to the conclusion that no, while there may be an immigration problem, it isn't really a serious problem. The really serious problem is assimilation. - Samuel P. HuntingtonFrom its very beginnings, the United States has been an immigrant nation. It has been built on the shoulders of immigrants from every imaginable part of the world and, up to this day, is being sustained by the ancestors of these immigrants. I therefore agree with Samuel Huntington that immigration itself cannot be America's problem. However, Huntington's claim remains thatassimilation is the really serious problem. What exactly is wrong with assimilation? Does the kind of assimilation that we observe today work at all? Should ethnic minorities and immigrants assimilate more into mainstream American culture or would that be detrimental for them in a way that is not tolerable? The latter will be the central question I will be posing in this paper. On the one hand, one's immediate reaction to this central question might be a definite 'no, they should not assimilate'. 'No'because the term 'assimilation' somehow carries negative connotations of small-mindednessand nationalistic fervor, that one might be hesitant to support, 'no' because it seems impossible to streamline human beings to fit a certain image, and 'no' because it seems illogical that immigrants should have to assimilate to something that is so diverse as the American culture. On the other hand, today's American society surely is not fully integrated. In so many instances, socioeconomic, cultural, political, and linguistic gaps stretch all the way across the continent and disunite America. Considering these dangerous gaps and continuing immigration, assimilation might well be a necessity to ensure the survival of American society and peaceful co-existence of all its members. To solve the

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, , language: English, abstract: But then I came to the conclusion that no, while there may be an immigration problem, it isn't really a serious problem. The really serious problem is assimilation. – Samuel P. HuntingtonFrom its very beginnings, the United States has been an immigrant nation. It has been built on the shoulders of immigrants from every imaginable part of the world and, up to this day, is being sustained by the ancestors of these immigrants. I therefore agree with Samuel Huntington that immigration itself cannot be America’s problem. However, Huntington’s claim remains thatassimilation is the really serious problem. What exactly is wrong with assimilation? Does the kind of assimilation that we observe today work at all? Should ethnic minorities and immigrants assimilate more into mainstream American culture or would that be detrimental for them in a way that is not tolerable? The latter will be the central question I will be posing in this paper. On the one hand, one’s immediate reaction to this central question might be a definite ‘no, they should not assimilate’. ‘No’because the term ‘assimilation’ somehow carries negative connotations of small-mindednessand nationalistic fervor, that one might be hesitant to support, ‘no’ because it seems impossible to streamline human beings to fit a certain image, and ‘no’ because it seems illogical that immigrants should have to assimilate to something that is so diverse as the American culture. On the other hand, today’s American society surely is not fully integrated. In so many instances, socioeconomic, cultural, political, and linguistic gaps stretch all the way across the continent and disunite America. Considering these dangerous gaps and continuing immigration, assimilation might well be a necessity to ensure the survival of American society and peaceful co-existence of all its members. To solve the puzzle of assimilation, it is first advisable to clarify the term in a way that further discussion can be based on the established definition. I then attempt to shed light on the advantages and disadvantages of assimilation and, finally, come to a conclusion about whether assimilation is the ‘final victory’ or the ‘road to nowhere’ for America and its immigrants. [...]

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

. Renewal of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing. As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

A young college grad buys a house in Detroit for $500 and attempts to restore it—and his new neighborhood—to its original glory in this “deeply felt, sharply observed personal quest to create meaning and community out of the fallen…A standout” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, decides to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp buys a ramshackle house for five hundred dollars in the east side neighborhood known as Poletown. The roomy Queen Anne he now owns is little more than a clapboard shell on a crumbling brick foundation, missing windows, heat, water, electricity, and a functional roof. A $500 House in Detroit is Philp’s raw and earnest account of rebuilding everything but the frame of his house, nail by nail and room by room. “Philp is a great storyteller…[and his] engrossing” (Booklist) tale is also of a young man finding his footing in the city, the country, and his own generation. We witness his concept of Detroit shift, expand, and evolve as his plan to save the city gives way to a life forged from political meaning, personal connection, and collective purpose. As he assimilates into the community of Detroiters around him, Philp guides readers through the city’s vibrant history and engages in urgent conversations about gentrification, racial tensions, and class warfare. Part social history, part brash generational statement, part comeback story, A $500 House in Detroit “shines [in its depiction of] the ‘radical neighborliness’ of ordinary people in desperate circumstances” (Publishers Weekly). This is an unforgettable, intimate account of the tentative revival of an American city and a glimpse at a new way forward for generations to come.