Arising out of the context of the re-configuration of Europe, new perspectives are applied by the authors of this volume to the process of nation-building in the United States. By focusing on a variety of public celebrations and festivities from the Revolution to the early twentieth century, the formative period of American national identity, the authors reveal the complex interrelationships between collective identities on the local, regional, and national level which, over time, shaped the peculiar character of American nationalism. This volume combines vivid descriptions of various public celebrations with a sophisticated methodological and theoretical approach.

Toward an Anthropology of Nation Building and Unbuilding in Israel presents twenty-two original essays offering a critical survey of the anthropology of Israel inspired by Alex Weingrod, emeritus professor and pioneering scholar of Israeli anthropology. In the late 1950s Weingrod’s groundbreaking ethnographic research of Israel’s underpopulated south complicated the dominant social science discourse and government policy of the day by focusing on the ironies inherent in the project of Israeli nation building and on the process of migration prompted by social change. Drawing from Weingrod’s perspective, this collection considers the gaps, ruptures, and juxtapositions in Israeli society and the cultural categories undergirding and subverting these divisions. Organized into four parts, the volume examines our understanding of Israel as a place of difference, the disruptions and integrations of diaspora, the various permutations of Judaism, and the role of symbol in the national landscape and in Middle Eastern studies considered from a comparative perspective. These essays illuminate the key issues pervading, motivating, and frustrating Israel’s complex ethnoscape.

Peter B. Morgan's Explanation of Constrained Optimization for Economists is an accessible, user-friendly guide that provides explanations, both written and visual, of the manner in which many constrained optimization problems can be solved.

Sounds of Ethnicity takes us into the linguistic, cultural, and geographical borderlands of German North America in the Great Lakes region between 1850 and 1914. Drawing connections between immigrant groups in Buffalo, New York, and Berlin (now Kitchener), Ontario, Barbara Lorenzkowski examines the interactions of language and music—specifically German-language education, choral groups, and music festivals—and their roles in creating both an ethnic sense of self and opportunities for cultural exchanges at the local, ethnic, and transnational levels. She exposes the tensions between the self-declared ethnic leadership that extolled the virtues of the German mother tongue as preserver of ethnic identity and gateway to scholarship and high culture, and the hybrid realities of German North America where the lives of migrants were shaped by two languages, English and German. Theirs was a song not of cultural purity, but of cultural fusion that gave meaning to the way German migrants made a home for themselves in North America.Written in lively and elegant prose, Sounds of Ethnicity is a new and exciting approach to the history of immigration and identity in North America.

Contrary to the negative assessments of the social order that have become prevalent in the media since 9/11, this collection of essays focuses on the enormous social creativity being invested as collective identities are reconfigured. It emphasizes on the reformulation of ethnic and gender relationships and identities in public life.

Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize (1991) Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Award from the Immigration History Society (1993) Do recent changes in American law and politics mean that our national motto — e pluribus unum — is at last becoming a reality? Lawrence H. Fuchs searches for answers to this question by examining the historical patterns of American ethnicity and the ways in which a national political culture has evolved to accommodate ethnic diversity. Fuchs looks first at white European immigrants, showing how most of them and especially their children became part of a unifying political culture. He also describes the ways in which systems of coercive pluralism kept persons of color from fully participating in the civic culture. He documents the dismantling of those systems and the emergence of a more inclusive and stronger civic culture in which voluntary pluralism flourishes. In comparing past patterns of ethnicity in America with those of today, Fuchs finds reasons for optimism. Diversity itself has become a unifying principle, and Americans now celebrate ethnicity. One encouraging result is the acculturation of recent immigrants from Third World countries. But Fuchs also examines the tough issues of racial and ethnic conflict and the problems of the ethno-underclass, the new outsiders. The American Kaleidoscope ends with a searching analysis of public policies that protect individual rights and enable ethnic diversity to prosper. Because of his lifelong involvement with issues of race relations and ethnicity, Lawrence H. Fuchs is singularly qualified to write on a grand scale about the interdependence in the United States of the unum and the pluribus. His book helps to clarify some difficult issues that policymakers will surely face in the future, such as those dealing with immigration, language, and affirmative action.

Today's world is a world of nation-states; few have survived since the early modern period, some have existed for three hundred years, most came into being during the second part of the last century. Yet the equation between the state and the nation does not go back far in history, despite the prevailing tendency to view the state as closely linked to ethnicity. To challenge the latter this book attempts to examine statehood separately from the concept of ethnicity; it asks what is non-ethnic about statehood by looking at 'statehood before and beyond ethnicity'. A non-ethnic statehood is analysed in two forms: as a historical phenomenon at the time of the emergence of the early modern state (Part One) and as a historical tradition which had been pursued by the nation-builders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Part Two). Instead of looking at great powers as traditional models of statehood, individual chapters focus on minor and less familiar states in Northern and Eastern Europe from the period c. 1600-2000, including Belgium, Bohemia, Greece, the Netherlands, Romania, Poland-Lithuania, Serbia and Montenegro, Sweden, Scotland and Transylvania.