Beyond White Ethnicity

Abstract

At the 1982 meeting of the Organization of American Historians, John Higham, a founder of the new ethnic history, presented a paper titled Pluralism. As Rudolph J. Vecoli reported, Higham cheerfully proclaimed that 'the ethnic revival is over, and an era in ethnic studies has come to an end.' Vecoli the most prominent Italian American historian of his generation was less sanguine than his colleague. He countered that Higham had greatly exaggerated the death of ethnic populism and the scholarship it produced. But Vecoli nonetheless detected what he called the return of the melting pot in Reagan's America even while multiculturalism what, a decade earlier, was called cultural pluralism was ascending within academia.1 Four years after Higham made his Pluralism proclamation, Werner Sollors published his landmark study, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. The significance of Sollors's book which deconstructed racial essentialism (descent) while trumpeting the complexities of ethnic selfinvention (consent) was widely felt among those who study the relation between ethnicity and the so-called American national character. Over the years, Beyond Ethnicity 'has been embraced foremost by academics examining cultural production by and about ethnic whites. It is thus not surprising to see Sollors's influence on the latest titles from a pair of leading white ethnic studies scholars, Matthew Frye Jacobson and Thomas J. Ferraro. According to Jacobson, at the outset of researching Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America, Sollors in an act of exceptional generosity bequeathed to him a treasure trove of archival materials on the white ethnic revival along with his blessing: It's your project now (465). According to Ferraro,