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A Cross-Disciplinary Study Of The European Immigrants Of 1870 To 1925., Loretta Matulich

American Studies ETDs

Both native-born and foreign-born Americans throughout the twen­tieth century have written about the European immigrants who came to American shores between 1870 and 1925. Many of the social science accounts and fiction works about these newcomers centered on one im­plicit question: How could these immigrants become Americans? Two views of assimilation into American society are presented in this study: Henry Pratt Fairchild's static definition of the goal of Ameri­canization and Jane Addams' dynamic definition of American cultural growth. Rejecting Fairchild's view that immigrants must lose all traces of their foreign origin in order to become real Americans, this study adopts …