The Ideas Of American Identity : American And National Identity

Diversity and the American National Identity Greed is good, get get get, I want what you have, don't touch mine." This is what a friend of mine said when I asked for his conception of the American national identity is.1 Although this statement seems informal and absurd, it accurately reflects the dog-eat-dog world many people believe to be the American capitalist culture.2 Whether my friend said this with the intent of comic relief is inconsequential. Whether he knew it, the informant reflects

controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” This idea is the fundamental basis under which lies various identity surrounded disputes within modern communities. The influence of the Spanish conquest on Native Americans and their struggle to reconstruct their identity today, and the Ayodhya dispute between the Hindu and Muslim people depicts the consequences of the Western idea of White Man’s burden and the importance of a nation-state’s interpretation of the past

Britain, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the USA were distinguished as a political type. Ideas of nation and the corresponding type of nationalism, according to Kohn (1961), arose and were created within earlier existing government institutions promoting distribution of the process of cultural homogenization (that is relative uniformity of society). The Western model of nationalism borrowed ideas of freedom and equality, fight against dynastic board, equating of nationality with nation accessory

Scholars no longer believe identity as an organic coherent phenomenon; rather, they are discursive constructions taking form within rich material, economic, and social contexts, and are multi-layered, fluid, and oft-changing, and sometimes contradictory, largely dependent on where and in relation to whom they are constituted. Further, identity is constructed by drawing boundaries: One boundary that is the same as others and one that is different from everyone else. Self-categorization is the

political type. Ideas of nation and the

“Rip Van Winkle” and the Dangers of American Innocence Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” is a staple of early American literature that has lived through the ages as a fable that as Americans we tell our children to entertain and illicit a message or moral that they will be able to take away from this slice of American literature. Irving’s story does in fact have a lot to say about America as a young and naive nation that has bred a national identity, but in the process has forgotten about the

consistent with American identity. Specifically, the reframing Asians as model minorities, the immigration reform policies that happened, and the allowance of Mexican immigration into the U.S shifted American identity, from as an all-white country to a multicultural society, from restrictive on immigration to expansive on immigration and finally from a restrictive country to a more democratic country. The immigration reform policies that happened during the 1920s-1960s shifted American identity for several

to the United States of America. While both call upon shared national values and the unity of the nation under difficult circumstances, they differ in terms of inclusion and diversity within America. Both presidents deliver compelling arguments that encourage the American people to serve their country in diverse ways. Speaking to a record audience of 1.8 million Americans packed in the National Mall, along with over 300 million Americans watching on television, President Barack Obama shouldered the

in the United States. Without assimilating enough to at least learn English, the predominant language of the United States, immigrants cannot communicate with Americans and will be confined to their ethnic group. Studies show that immigrants that learn and adopt English as their first language are more likely to self identify as being American (Renshon, 2009). Acquiring language skills is a means that helps immigrants become more attached to America’s institutions, to its way of life and its communities

work. In Eve Kornfeld’s “Creating an American Culture 1775-1800,” many different areas of national identity are discussed, including the beginnings of documenting the history of America as an independent nation. This was especially hard for Americans to create a singular national identity because there was bias in the early works, the different colonies or states were extremely diverse, and many intellectuals had different perspectives on the American identity. At the beginning of the historical