American Perspective

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the American experience as a whole, wading through the flow of information, in order to gain an understanding of the entire American experience as one direct theme. The writer believes that the long, difficult push across the American continent, destroying and creating, but always expanding, capitulates the American experience. The paper explores the heedless, headlong advance in geographical terms that was coupled with a limitless faith in the general notion of unending technological and economic progress - that is America today.

From the Paper:

"But while Crvecoeur, one of the first prophets of the melting pot, praised the European immigrants and "that strange mixture of blood which you will find in no other country" as the vital force driving the new nation, he wrote long in advance of the arrival of immigrants other than the "English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes" whose ability to blend into a single nation impressed him so much (40). And he wrote prior to any reasoned consideration of the presence of millions of African slaves and Native Americans in the mix. Nor did those who thought about this frontier spirit in retrospect give much thought to the fact that masses of anonymous, hard-pressed immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia fed the insatiable maw of the Industrial Revolution."

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