• Honorable Mention, 2008 Gustavus Myers Book Awards, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights

This fascinating and intensively researched monograph moves chronologically and thematically to construct the first major historical study of this movement, which aimed to enhance the American creed by confronting and overcoming the worst prejudicial complications of American diversity. Historians have paid scant attention to the cultural gifts movement because it has been overshadowed by the competing forces and images of the era: rampant racism, nativism, the Red Scare, a domestic "return to normalcy," the apparent demise of progressive reform, the image of the "roaring 1920s" followed by the cataclysm of the depression, and the rise of New Deal politics. Selig, however, persuasively demonstrates how widespread this progressive effort was in enlisting hundreds of thousands of American parents, children, journalists, clergy members, scholars, and educators. The movement was closely linked to "world thinking" and international education, with roots in the growing internationalism of the Progressive Era. As Selig succinctly explains, the movement was one defined by what it opposed—prejudice—and loosely united by what it supported: a "gifts" model of cultural appreciation. The resulting "crusade" sought to teach children and parents that immigrant and minority groups brought significant positive cultural attributes to American society...Americans All adds the essential intellectual and social history of the anti-prejudice crusade of the interwar years to the recent scholarship that has traced pluralism, citizenship, and the often-contradictory forces (liberal as well as conservative) pushing different models of assimilation in the U.S. during the twentieth century.
   --Christopher McKnight Nichols, Reviews in American History

This timely book takes us back to the interwar origins of contemporary debates in the United States over ethnic studies and multicultural education. It is a welcome antidote given the current rise of anti-immigration sentiment and renewed fears of "strangers in the land."...Most of us think of multiculturalism as a late twentieth-century phenomenon, an outgrowth of 1960s liberalism and the ethnic pride movement of the 1970s. Some scholars have traced it back to the World War II and Cold War years. But Selig pushes the origins of contemporary multiculturalism back to the social and cultural ferment following World War I...Aimed at widening the reigning ideas concerning a single, homogeneous American culture, the movement set out to highlight the various contributionsthe cultural giftsthat minority groups had given to the canon of American culture. This effort at reeducating white Americans targeted groups central to the reproduction of American culture, such as parents (in their role of educators of the next generation), school teachers, and church leaders.
   --Rob Kroes, Journal of American History

Selig offers an insightful and well-written study on the wide range of efforts to promote interethnic and multicultural understandings during the interwar period. She historicizes the bomb-scarred terrain of the late twentieth-century culture wars, challenging the idea that multiculturalism grew out of the merger in the 1960s and 1970s of group and individual rights activism and ethnic revivalism. The work also fits in nicely with the most important trends in civil rights literature, as Selig argues that multicultural education has a much longer and more complex history than we have believed. Americans All is a unique and exciting contribution.
   --Jonathan Holloway, Yale University

An excellent and original work--carefully researched, cleverly organized, and, best of all, beautifully written. Diana Selig provides our first sophisticated portrait of a tremendously influential movement in American political culture. She neatly bridges intellectual and social history, showing how new ideas percolated from universities into the broader public realm.
   --Jonathan Zimmerman, New York University

Photo by David K. Johnston

Diana Selig is Associate Professor of History, Claremont McKenna College.