Foundations
Part I of this book serves as a gateway to an America that usually remains invisible to American students who are exposed only to largely Anglo-centric versions of American history throughout their school years. Unfortunately, while many American history textbooks have become more honest and inclusive over the years, we are currently witnessing cynical efforts by the governors of some states, such as Florida and Arkansas, to return to the sanitized versions of U.S. history from an earlier era that often failed to acknowledge the nation’s moral failures.
This book, and particularly the chapters of Part I, take the opposite approach. Three of the four chapters in this section are centered directly on perspectives derived from the confrontation of Indigenous America, Hispanic America, and African America with the historical hegemony of Anglo America. The argument is that as its earliest inhabitants and influencers, these four elements played a foundational role in shaping the direction and character of the nation’s development. Moreover, I try to highlight the historical injustices that these communities were forced to endure throughout the nation’s history.
Chapter 1 deals with Indigenous America and is positioned as first because of the historical status of Indigenous peoples as First Nations, to use a fitting Canadian term, and because of their moral claims on and historical stewardship of the lands of North America since time immemorial. However, in striving to emphasize that Indigenous peoples are not relics of a bygone era, but instead contemporary participants in the ongoing American drama, I have tried to emphasize aspects of the story most relevant to the social and legal issues that Indigenous Americans grapple with today. For instance, the key to appreciating contemporary Indigenous American legal claims relies on understanding the unique legal status of Native peoples as members of sovereign nations as well as American citizens. The chapter also, therefore, lays out the story of indigenous resistance to U.S. government efforts to dispossess Native peoples of their lands, terminate their legal status as sovereign nations, and assimilate them into White society, particularly throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. It concludes with an account of the increasingly successful movements of Native peoples from the 1960s onwards towards self-determination and revival.
Chapter 2 takes up the story of Hispanic America, specifically that aspect of the story that originates in Mexico. This story is positioned as the second one because the presence of the earliest ancestors of Mexican Americans predated the arrival of English settlers in Jamestown and because a large portion of the southwestern United States was Mexico before it was the United States. This narrative begins with the Conquest of Mexico and the establishment of the Kingdom of New Spain, touching upon the tragic interactions between Spanish colonizers and the Indigenous peoples of Mexico. It then traces the expansion of Spanish influence into the Mexican borderlands (now the American Southwest), chronicling the subsequent challenges and adaptations of Mexican Americans as their homeland was transformed into a U.S. territory and eventually into multiple southwestern states.
In Chapter 3 we turn our attention to Anglo America. Chapter 3 is considerably shorter than many of the other chapters in this book, partly because the Anglo story is woven into so many other chapters. Moreover, traditional histories often center the national story on its Anglo elements, giving short shrift to the experiences of its non-Anglo elements, a tendency we have for the most part reversed in this book. Chapter 3, however, deals with an aspect of the Anglo American story that is often neglected in standard accounts, which sometimes present the English as if they were a culturally homogeneous group. Instead, we summarize a theory suggested by historian David Hackett Fischer who has argued that the foundations of U.S. culture were laid between 1629 to 1775 by four great waves of English-speaking migrants, each from a different region of England, exhibiting different cultural characteristics, settling in a different region of British North America, and shaping the regional cultures in distinctly different ways.
Chapter 4, African America, explores the Black experience in America, beginning with the first Jamestown Africans who arrived in 1619. It highlights their involuntary contributions, as enslaved people, to the building of the country and the accumulation of wealth of which they inherited very little. It also examines the persistent efforts of African Americans to force the United States to live up to its ideals of liberty and justice for all, exemplified in the fight for the abolition of slavery before the Civil War and the various civil rights struggles throughout the century and a half that has followed it, including the ongoing fight for social justice that continues right up until today. In addition, the chapter highlights the diverse cultural contributions of Black Americans, from their innovations in music to their contributions to literature, art, sports, and culinary traditions.
