The Harvard-educated, Jewish American philosopher Horace Meyer Kallen (1882–1974) is commonly credited with the concept of cultural pluralism, which envisioned immigrant and minority groups cultivating their distinctive social worlds and interacting to create an inclusive, ever-changing true American culture. Though living and teaching in Madison, Wisconsin, when he developed this influential theory, Kallen’s seven-year sojourn in the Midwest (1911–1918) rarely figures in accounts of the theory’s origins. And yet, Michael C. Steiner suggests, the Midwest, far from being a mere interruption in Kallen’s thought, was in fact the essential catalyst for the theory of cultural pluralism, a concept that continues to shape public debate a century later. The Midwest in the first decades of the twentieth century was a youthful region experiencing massive immigration and the xenophobic fervor of approaching war. In this milieu Steiner locates a pervasive pluralist zeitgeist rife with urban- and rural-based intellectuals and public figures deeply critical of both the all-absorbing melting pot ideology and white racist Anglo-Saxon exclusionism. Early proponents of diversity who interacted with Kallen to forge a pluralist sensibility and ideology as the Midwest was becoming the nation’s dominant region included public figures Hamlin Garland, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Jane Addams; African American activists Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells; Norwegian American writers Ole E. Rølvaag and Waldemar Ager; and intellectuals Randolph Bourne and John Dewey. Tracing how Kallen’s interaction with these figures and his regional experience expanded his vision and added the final touch and crucial spatial dimension to his theory, Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland enhances our understanding of cultural pluralism. The book has direct bearing on the present, as once again denunciation of diversity and mass migration challenge the tenets and advocates of pluralism.

This collection of twenty-two essays, a product of recent revivals of interest in both Midwestern history and intellectual history, argues for the contributions of interior thinkers and ideas in forming an American identity. The Midwest has been characterized as a fertile seedbed for the germination of great thinkers, but a wasteland for their further growth. The Sower and the Seer reveals that representation to be false. In fact, the region has sustained many innovative minds and been the locus of extraordinary intellectualism. It has also been the site of shifting interpretations—to some a frontier, to others a colonized space, a breadbasket, a crossroads, a heartland. As agrarian reformed (and Michigander) Liberty Hyde Bailey expressed in his 1916 poem “Sower and Seer,” the Midwestern landscape has given rise to significant visionaries, just as their knowledge has nourished and shaped the region. The essays gathered for this collection examine individual thinkers, writers, and leaders, as well as movements and ideas that shaped the Midwest, including rural school consolidation, women’s literary societies, Progressive-era urban planning, and Midwestern radical liberalism. While disparate in subject and style, these essays taken together establish the irrefutable significance of the intellectual history of the American Midwest.

This comparative, transatlantic two-volume work covers nearly 120 years of the history of the rights, integration, and security of the Jewish people in both the United States and France, the countries with the largest and third-largest Jewish populations. Religious freedom and secularism have evolved differently in France and the United States, reinforcing their separate national identities. Yet there are parallels to their Jewish history, and in how the security of Jews has repeatedly defined and tested the national interests of France and the United States in world affairs. Drawing on the author’s personal experience as an international civil servant, these volumes explore topics such as tensions and common interests between France and the United States, the memory of the Shoah, social mobility, the tepid commitment of the United States to the rights of French Jews during World War II, trends in antisemitism and tolerance, and global climate change as a threat to largely coastal Jewish communities. They highlight what makes insecurity different in the 21st century and why a paradigm shift in policy is needed. This title is intended both for a general audience and advanced undergraduate and graduate students interested in Jewish history, urban history and international relations.

At the center of American history is a hole—a gap where some scholars’ indifference or disdain has too long stood in for the true story of the American Midwest. A first-ever chronicle of the Midwest’s formative century, The Good Country restores this American heartland to its central place in the nation’s history. Jon K. Lauck, the premier historian of the region, puts midwestern “squares” center stage—an unorthodox approach that leads to surprising conclusions. The American Midwest, in Lauck’s cogent account, was the most democratically advanced place in the world during the nineteenth century. The Good Country describes a rich civic culture that prized education, literature, libraries, and the arts; developed a stable social order grounded in Victorian norms, republican virtue, and Christian teachings; and generally put democratic ideals into practice to a greater extent than any nation to date. The outbreak of the Civil War and the fight against the slaveholding South only deepened the Midwest’s dedication to advancing a democratic culture and solidified its regional identity. The “good country” was, of course, not the “perfect country,” and Lauck devotes a chapter to the question of race in the Midwest, finding early examples of overt racism but also discovering a steady march toward racial progress. He also finds many instances of modest reforms enacted through the democratic process and designed to address particular social problems, as well as significant advances for women, who were active in civic affairs and took advantage of the Midwest’s openness to women in higher education. Lauck reaches his conclusions through a measured analysis that weighs historical achievements and injustices, rejects the acrimonious tones of the culture wars, and seeks a new historical discourse grounded in fair readings of the American past. In a trying time of contested politics and culture, his book locates a middle ground, fittingly, in the center of the country.

This authoritative Handbook features 38 chapters placing Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) in his historical context to offer readers an appreciation of his insights and how he was received by his contemporaries.

In An American Friendship, David Weinfeld presents the biography of an idea, cultural pluralism, the intellectual precursor to modern multiculturalism. He roots its origins in the friendship between two philosophers, Jewish immigrant Horace Kallen and African American Alain Locke, who advanced cultural pluralism in opposition to both racist nativism and the assimilationist "melting pot." It is a simple idea—different ethnic groups can and should coexist in the United States, perpetuating their cultures for the betterment of the country as whole—and it grew out of the lived experience of this friendship between two remarkable individuals. Kallen, a founding faculty member of the New School for Social Research, became a leading American Zionist. Locke, the first Black Rhodes Scholar, taught at Howard University and is best known as the intellectual godfather of the Harlem Renaissance and the editor of The New Negro in 1925. Their friendship began at Harvard and Oxford during the years 1906 through 1908 and was rekindled during the Great Depression, growing stronger until Locke's death in 1954. To Locke and Kallen, friendship itself was a metaphor for cultural pluralism, exemplified by people who found common ground while appreciating each other's differences. Weinfeld demonstrates how this understanding of cultural pluralism offers a new vision for diverse societies across the globe. An American Friendship provides critical background for understanding the conflicts over identity politics that polarize US society today.

This book explores the deterioration of the promise of the American dream, particularly for Black Americans. Cal Jillson traces the source and cause of that decline to race prejudice, first in the stark form of human slavery and later in various forms of racial and ethnic discrimination, that has distorted American progress over the past four centuries and now portends American decline. Employing historical analysis of race and ethnicity in American life from colonial to modern times, the chapters examine the various understandings of race and ethnicity in American public life and politics and ask what those understandings imply for political and policy approaches to addressing injustice and restoring the American dream. Drawing on sources from political science, history, sociology, and economics, this book will supplement a main text in upper division courses on race and ethnicity, political sociology, public opinion, demography, and public policy.