Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland
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A01=Michael C. Steiner
Alain Locke
anglo saxon conformity
assimilation
Author_Michael C. Steiner
Boston
Carey McWilliams
Category=DNBH
Category=JPA
Category=NHK
Category=QDTS
Charles Van Hise
Chicago
civil rights
cold war
cultural diversity
cultural pluralism
Edward Alsworth Ross
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Frederick Jackson Turner
Hamlin Garland
Harvard
hebraism
Ida B. Wells
immigration
isolationism
Israel Zangwill
Jane Addams
Jewish-African American relations
John Dewey
Josiah Royce
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Louis Adamic
Louis Brandeis
Madison
Max Eastman
melton pot
Milton Konvitz
multiculturalism
nativism
Ole Rolvaag
Oxford
pragmatism
Randolph Bourne
Reverdy Ransom
Richard Rorty
T.S. Eliot
the midwest
the New School
unitarianism
University of Wisconsin
W.E.B. Du Bois
Waldemar Ager
white racism
William James
World War I
World War II
xenophobia
Product details
- ISBN 9780700629541
- Weight: 535g
- Dimensions: 160 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 2020
- Publisher: University Press of Kansas
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The Harvard-educated, Jewish American philosopher Horace Meyer Kallen (1882-1974) is commonly credited with the concept of cultural pluralism, which envisioned immigrant and minority groups cultivating their distinctive social worlds and interacting to create an inclusive, ever-changing true American culture. Though living and teaching in Madison, Wisconsin, when he developed this influential theory, Kallen's seven-year sojourn in the Midwest (1911-1918) rarely figures in accounts of the theory's origins. And yet, Michael C. Steiner suggests, the Midwest, far from being a mere interruption in Kallen's thought, was in fact the essential catalyst for the theory of cultural pluralism, a concept that continues to shape public debate a century later.
The Midwest in the first decades of the twentieth century was a youthful region experiencing massive immigration and the xenophobic fervor of approaching war. In this milieu Steiner locates a pervasive pluralist zeitgeist rife with urban- and rural-based intellectuals and public figures deeply critical of both the all-absorbing melting pot ideology and white racist Anglo-Saxon exclusionism. Early proponents of diversity who interacted with Kallen to forge a pluralist sensibility and ideology as the Midwest was becoming the nation's dominant region included public figures Hamlin Garland, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Jane Addams; African American activists Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells; Norwegian American writers Ole E. RØlvaag and Waldemar Ager; and intellectuals Randolph Bourne and John Dewey. Tracing how Kallen's interaction with these figures and his regional experience expanded his vision and added the final touch and crucial spatial dimension to his theory, Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland enhances our understanding of cultural pluralism. The book has direct bearing on the present, as once again denunciation of diversity and mass migration challenge the tenets and advocates of pluralism.
The Midwest in the first decades of the twentieth century was a youthful region experiencing massive immigration and the xenophobic fervor of approaching war. In this milieu Steiner locates a pervasive pluralist zeitgeist rife with urban- and rural-based intellectuals and public figures deeply critical of both the all-absorbing melting pot ideology and white racist Anglo-Saxon exclusionism. Early proponents of diversity who interacted with Kallen to forge a pluralist sensibility and ideology as the Midwest was becoming the nation's dominant region included public figures Hamlin Garland, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Jane Addams; African American activists Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells; Norwegian American writers Ole E. RØlvaag and Waldemar Ager; and intellectuals Randolph Bourne and John Dewey. Tracing how Kallen's interaction with these figures and his regional experience expanded his vision and added the final touch and crucial spatial dimension to his theory, Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland enhances our understanding of cultural pluralism. The book has direct bearing on the present, as once again denunciation of diversity and mass migration challenge the tenets and advocates of pluralism.
Michael C. Steiner is professor emeritus of American studies at California State University, Fullerton. He is editor most recently of Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West and coeditor of, among other books, Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity, also from Kansas.
