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Reviews in American History 33.1 (2005) 29-40



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Becoming Americans:

Revisiting Identity and Assimilation in the Colonial Period

Philip Otterness. Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. 256 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95.
Nancy Shoemaker. A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xiii + 211 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95.

If the idea that the United States is a nation of immigrants has long been central to popular understandings of American identity, its place in the scholarly imagination has been more contested. This certainly has been true in the historiography of early America, as historians' assessments of the importance of migration in shaping an American identity have changed over the years. In the first half of the twentieth century—in the aftermath of Frederick Jackson Turner's bold claims about the impact of the frontier on American life—historians paid little attention to the history of migration in the colonial period. They assumed, in Ned Landsman's words, "that . . . the details of the Atlantic crossing mattered little," while "its result—the turning of Europeans into Americans—was of paramount importance."1 This meant, in effect, that many historians failed to examine in great detail the cultural values colonists brought with them to America and that historians tended to assume that the transformation of Europeans into Americans was an exclusively Anglo-American story. Thus, Charles and Mary Beard could write in 1927 that the English in North America "found an immense continent of virgin soil and forest, sparsely settled by primitive peoples who chose death rather than bondage" and note approvingly that Anglo-America had managed to "to preserve its racial strains and not fuse with Indians and Negroes, as was the case in large parts of Spanish-America."2 Given the consensus that conditions in North America had, indeed, created a new American identity, it was to some extent beside the point to argue whether that exceptional American identity had been formed through colonists' struggles against Indian foes or as an outgrowth of the Puritan "errand into the wilderness" so celebrated by [End Page 29] Perry Miller.3 Summarizing prevailing interpretations in 1959, Oscar Handlin could confidently declare that the story of seventeenth-century America was the colonists' attempt to craft some kind of deeper meaning—a sense of mission—out of the "abnormality and disorder" that characterized social life among an uprooted people in a howling wilderness.4

Over the last three decades, however, scholars have explored migration in colonial America in much greater depth. In contrast to earlier historians who had seemingly accepted the notion that migration affected a definitive break from European culture, historians of early New England and Virginia argued for a "persistent localism" in seventeenth-century America—the endurance of regional English customs and folkways in colonial settlements.5 Even those emphasizing the fundamental newness of colonial British America acknowledged its deep European roots, with Michael Zuckerman arguing that the colonists' attachment to local English traditions was an exaggerated response to uncertainty and disorder, and thus an American innovation.6 As colonial historians examined Atlantic migration, much of their work focused on English migration and often treated migration to North America as a one-shot deal, not a stage in a longer chain of movements.7 More recent work has complicated this picture, as historians outlined in greater detail the movements of non-English migrants—such as the voluntary migration of German speakers to British America and the forced migration of enslaved Africans—and paid greater attention to the ways in which North America after colonization was a "New World" for Native Americans as well as for Europeans.8 Likewise, Patrick Griffin's outstanding work on the Ulster Scots has shown that Atlantic migration was for some a multi-stage movement in which the intra-European migrations that proceeded the journey to North America were as significant as the trans-Atlantic voyage itself.9 The two books...

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