President. aside from the first Americans. whose precedence must be acknowledged. we Americans were travelers from other lands. From the first Europeans who came as explorers and conquerors to the African slaves who endured the middle passage and labored in the fields of our early plantations. from the people of Nuevo Mexico to the French of the Louisiana Territory who became Americans through annexation. from the Irish who fled poverty and famine at home to the Chinese who came in search of Gold Mountainall were once visitors to this great country. America is defined by the grand. entangled progress of its individual peoples to and across the American landscapethrough exploration. the slave trade. immigration. or internal migrationthat gave rise to the rich interactions that make the American experience unique. We embody the cultures and traditions that our forebears brought from other shores. as well as the new traditions and cultures that we adopted on arrival. Whether we settled in the agrarian West. the industrialized North. the small towns of the Midwest. or the genteel cities of the South. our forebears inevitably formed relationships with peoples of other backgrounds and cultures. Our rich heritage as Americans is comprehensible only through the histories of our various constituent cultures. carried with us from other lands and transformed by encounters with other cultures. As one eminent cultural scholar has noted: How can one learn about slavery. holocausts. immigration. ecological adaptation or ways of seeing the world without some type of comparative perspective. without some type of relationship between cultures and peoples. How can we understand the history of any one cultural groupfor example. the Irishwithout reference to other groupsfor example. the British. How can we understand African American culture without placing it in some relationship to its diverse African cultural roots. the creolized cultures of the Caribbean. the Native American bases of Maroon and Black Seminole cultures. the religious. economic and linguistic cultures of the colonial Spanish in Columbia. the French in Haiti. the Dutch in Suriname. and the English in the United States?
Keywords matched
immigration