White Culture In The 19th Century

As a little girl, I remember my father, whose primarily Northern European and minorly Cherokee heritage marked him as other, telling me that the old Swiss men, the cultural norm of the small California town where he was raised, would not even nod to him until after he had returned from active military duty overseas. That cultural pattern saw its origin in the late 19th century where “ethnic identities proved to be a part of ... (white European foreign immigrants) self-identity and affected the way that they related to others.” The data presented in the reading reflects a rise in the white population and a corresponding drop in all non-white groups over the time period from 1860-1900. American Indians, for example, dropped from nearly 5% of