338 chaPTEr 14 | the throes oF assimiLation | period six 1865 –1898
aPPlyINg aP® historical Thinking Skills
sKill review interpretation and Synthesis
steP 1 Read the excerpt
Read the following excerpt by a historian of migration:Immigration history, in every respect except for the goal of individual opportunity,
the antithesis of pure American and western history, inevitably fell victim to amnesia.
Of course, the very subject of immigration has been central, indeed obsessive, to
western history and has produced some of its most distinguished imaginative and
historical writing. But scholarship and veneration have been limited to the pilgrim
years. The Far West’s Jamestown has been at Donner Pass [where a party of white
migrants spent a winter stranded in the mountains], its Massachusetts Bay in the Salt
Lake Valley [where Mormon migrants eventually settled]. In the study of no other
region of the United States does the term immigration, except when applied to
Asia[ns], almost exclusively denote internal land migration. In no other region...
did the early settler seek so avidly and so desperately to quick-freeze the pioneer
era into a super-American past. Perhaps no other region shifted more abruptly
from heroic epic years to statistical drift years, from manifest destiny to the “Great
Barbecue.” Yet no other region’s total history is so contemporary, falling just below
the horizon of living memory, and so relevant and instructive for an understanding of
the present.
The very rapidity and intensity of change in a region so vast with a population so
new and so elusive, so mobile and so diverse, so contemptuous of antecedents and
yet so hungry for a past, has made it difficult for the historian to find his bearings.
The analytical intelligence, which has been the hallmark of the outstanding histo-
rians in stabler and older regions, has been notably deficient here. Eastern and far
easterners, southwesterners and midwesterners, immigrants and sons of European
immigrants and transmigrants, and those from south of the border as well as north,
have swarmed over this intellectually uncharted land.Moses Rischin, “Beyond the Great Divide: Immigration and the Last Frontier,” Journal of Ameri-
can History 55, no. 1 (1968): 42–53.steP 2 Answer the following questions
•
What is Rischin’s main point in these two paragraphs?•
How does he prove this point?•
In a paragraph, describe three ways that help to resolve the problem in western migration
history noted by Rischin. Be sure to support your arguments with references to at least three
documents from this chapter.ToPIc II | the new Urban environment 33915_STA_2012_ch14_327-342.indd 339 31/03/15 4:20 PM