Now available on the Education Next website, a review of Patriotic Pluralism: Americanization Education and European  Immigrants, by Jeff Mirel. The book is reviewed by Nathan Glazer.

Glazer writes that Mirel corrects the traditional picture of Americanization, which has been widely misunderstood and too narrowly interpreted.

The iconic picture of the melting pot which strips immigrants of their customs and national identities was only one version of Americanization, and the most extreme, says Glazer.  Mirel explains in the book that the goal of educating immigrant children was a “civic nationalism” based on loyalty to principles, not “ethnic nationalism” which disparages new immigrants as too ethnically different from other Americans to be good citizens.