Natives and Strangers: A Multicultural History of Americans.

By Leonard Dinnerstein, Roger L. Nichols, David M. Reimers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. xiv plus 370pp. $25.00).

More migrants from the most diverse set of origins spanning the longest sustained period of time have made America their home than any other nation in the history of the world. Natives and Strangers offers a narrative of these unique and defining features of American society. It covers nearly four-hundred years of cultural clashes and socioeconomic convergence among those already resident and those waves of newly arrived in its description of the process of making and remaking our multiethnic nation. The focus of this work is on social perspectives and economic developments rather than political analysis or a chronicling of the spectrum of cultural contributions to the fabric of American life.

This is the third edition of this classic text and perhaps nothing points to the rapidity with which America's racial and ethnic landscape has metamorphasized during the first half of the 1990s than the fact that the authors felt it necessary to revise their text once again only six years after their last edition. They had waited more than a decade to do that first revision but the whirlwind pace of recent demographic change, the kaleidoscopic cultural variations and the escalating shifts in attitude toward such levels of diversity in this country has been extraordinary and warranted fresh treatment. The 9.5 million newcomers who came in the 1980s surpassed the previous peak decade of United States immigration from 1901 to 1910 when 9 million arrived. In the mid-1990s more than a million legal and illegal immigrants are entering every year. Each edition of Natives and Strangers has born a new subtitle from the original Ethnic Groups and the Building of America published in 1979 to Blacks, Indians, and Immigrants in America in the 1990 second edition, to the more fashionable latest version, A Multicultural History of Americans. No matter what the title, the book begins with a comprehensive exploration of historical encounters between native Indians, colonial Europeans and Africans and proceeds to examine the increasingly complicated dynamics of interethnic relations as, over the course of American history, immigrants continued to stream in from virtually every continent and country on earth.

The primary difference between this third edition and the second is the addition of a new chapter, Chapter 10, devoted to immigrants arriving since the end of World War II. This volume also includes a few more photographs as well as new and updated population tables and graphs, most of which can be found in Chapter 10, with a sprinkling added to the last chapter, "The Struggle for Equality." Of particular interest is the section of Chapter 10 that deals with renewed European immigration. Because the 1965 immigration reform legislation so changed the ethnic composition of the majority of newcomers, the tendency has been to focus exclusively on these primarily Latin American, Asian and Caribbean flows while the experience of new waves of "old" immigrant groups, such as the Italians, Portuguese and Greeks, are typically overlooked. But the authors enrich our understanding of the contemporary cultural mosaic by giving attention to these European populations who also benefited from the liberalized laws and who were actually the principal targets of the movement to overturn the old quota system in the first place. This new chapter also includes material on the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, the most destructive riots in United States history and a series of events critical to a comprehensive grasp of the parameters of multicultural coexistence in contemporary urban America.

One dimension of change, however, that is highly relevant to the subject of this volume but which is not addressed is what some demographers have called a silent explosion in the number of mixed-race people in the United States. According to census figures, between 1960 and 1990, the number of interracial married couples went from 150,000 to more than 1.1 million and, of course, concurrently the number of interfacial children has seen a similar leap. For example, among Japanese who marry in America, 60 percent wed someone of another race. Advocacy groups such as those who seek a new multiracial census category demonstrate that increasing rates of intermarriage and the greater visibility of mixed-race people are challenging the status quo.

In their conclusion, the authors assert that the celebrations of ethnic pride characteristic of the 1970s had waned by the 1980s, dismissing the phenomenon as a passing fad. This assessment is premature, however. Energetic quests to reclaim roots and movements of heritage retention across a broad spectrum of the population, but especially among white, middle-class ethnics, are only accelerating as the century draws to a close.

Marilyn Halter Boston University