PRESENTS A FASCINATING AND VERY HUMAN
RECORD OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE,
AS TOLD IN THE DIVERSE VOICES OF
THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE LIVED IT.
A Larger Memory brings together letters, diaries, and
oral histories from Americans of a wide variety of backgrounds,
from the eighteenth century to yesterday's headlines. Ronald
Takaki gathers the diverse voices of workers, shopkeepers, women,
children, and others, and allows them to speak side by side,
across ethnic borders.
The young slave Frederick Douglass tells how he learned to
read; the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the daughter
of Irish immigrants, gives her first speech at a labor rally;
a Native American performs as an "Indian" in a Wild
West show; Seattle teenager Monica Sone spends World War II in
an internment camp for Japanese Americans; a Chinese teenager
struggles with her father's "old world" expectations;
a Mexican immigrant gives up her dream of becoming a singer to
provide a future for her son; a young African-American man escapes
from the inner city to Duke University through affirmative action.
Connected by Takaki's sensitive historical narration, this
multitude of voices becomes a dynamic conversation about the
lives and dreams of diverse Americans.
RONALD TAKAKI, a fellow of the
Society of American Historians, is an internationally recognized
scholar. A third-generation American of Japanese heritage, he
holds a doctorate in history from the University of California,
Berkeley, where he has been a professor of Ethnic Studies for
more than two decades. His books include A Different Mirror:
A History of Multicultural America and Strangers from
a Different Shore.
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Contents
Prologue
The "Varied Carols" of America: A
Democratic History
Part One: A
Larger Memory
The Ties That Bind
Roots: A Multicultural Memory
"The Vast, Surging, Hopeful Army
of Workers"
A Nation That Did "Not Perish
from the Earth":
A Legacy
of Black Men in Blue
Breaking Silences: Brushing Against
the Grain
Part Two:
A City upon a Hill
Introduction
A Horror Remembered: Olaudah Equiano's
Passage to America
Part Three:
A Manifest Destiny
Introduction
The Significance of the Frontier
in American History: An Indian Perspective
The Coming of the Wasichus: Black
Elk's Boyhood Memories
The End of the Frontier for a Winnebago
From Sunup to Sundown: Laboring
in the Cotton Fields
"Don't Give a Nigger an Inch":
Frederick Douglass Learns to Read
The Best Mistress and Master
in the World": Millie Evans
"Git This Nigger to the Cotton Patch":
Jenny Proctor's Complaint
After Slavery: A Personal Account
of the New Bondage
Fleeing English Tyranny: The Irish
Cross the Atlantic
Finding Her Voice for Militant
Labor: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Strangers from a Different Shore:
The Chinese
"How Can I Call This My Home?":
Lee Chew
"Like Country Pretty Much":
Kee Low
"A Chance to Take Care of Myself":
A Chinese-American Daughter
Part Four:
A Multicultural Destiny
Introduction
Beyond the Pale: Jewish Immigrants
in a Promised Land
A Sweatshop Girl: Sadie Frowne
Dear Editor: Letters from Jewish America
--Problems and Advice
Betrayed by Their Country: The World
War II Internment of Japanese Americans
A Birthright Denied: Monica Sone
A Birthright Renounced: Joseph Kurihara
Fighting on the "Frontier"
of the Pacific War: Native Americans
The Indian Hero of Iwo Jima: Letters
from Ira Hayes
Transplanted in Chicago: The Polish
Bilingual Education in Polonia
A Stepchild of America: Thomas Napierkowski
El Norte: Up from Mexico
Searching for a Door to America:
Jesús Garza
A Song of El Norte: Camelia Palafox
Twice a Minority: Maria Jiménez
Joins the Army
Beyond Ellis Island: The Italians
Growing Up Between Two Worlds:
Joanna Dorjo
India in the West: New Passages
Reinventing Herself in America:
Shanti
Puerto Ricans: The Island Is in
the Heart
Growing Up Puerto Rican in New
York: Maria Diaz
The 1992 Los Angeles Riot: Korean-American
Dreams in Flames
"Not Going to Let the Riots
Beat Me": Sun Soon Kim
Blacks in the Cities: No Time to Wait
The "Disappearance" of
Work: Hard Times for Jimmy Morse
A Chance to Act Affirmatively: Bryan
K. Fair
Epilogue
Creating a Community of a Larger
Memory Sources
An Additional Memory: Acknowledgments
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PROLOGUE
The "Varied Carols" of America:
A Democratic History
TWENTY YEARS AGO, my uncle Richard and I were "talking
story" in his backyard. We were enjoying a relaxed conversation
in the warmth of the Hawaiian sunshine when I told him that I
was writing a book about the history of race relations, to be
entitled Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century
America. He listened intently, proud of his nephew who had
left the islands to attend college and was now a university professor
on sabbatical from Berkeley. Suddenly, his eyes lit up, and he
exclaimed in mellifluous pidgin English: "Hey, Ronald, why
you no go write a book about us, huh? Why you only write about
those folks on the mainland? What about us in Hawaii? Your mother
was born on the plantation. And I was born on the plantation.
What about us?"
My uncle Richard's request led me to undertake a study of the
immigrant laborers of Hawaii's sugar plantations. As I was working
on that book, I found myself rethinking the way I wrote history.
Until then, my scholarship had focused on elite policymakers like
Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, and had employed the theoretical
language and complex concepts of intellectuals like Max Weber
and Antonio Gramsci. I was writing highly analytical work, with
my fellow academics in mind. For my uncle Richard, however, I
wanted to write a democratic history --- a history "of the
people, by the people, for the people."
My aim this time was to offer a history that would still be
scholarly but that my uncle and the people of Hawaii would find
interesting and readable. This desire opened the door for me to
write narrative history, with the inclusion of stories and voices.
Let the workers themselves give us their eye-level view of the
cane fields. Let them tell, in their own words, what it was like
to be rudely awakened by the shrieking five A.M. whistle, sweat
as they cut the stalks towering over them, relax as they soaked
in the steaming bath of a furo after work, raise children
in crowded camps, and shout for higher wages in strike demonstrations.
This would be history "by" the people.
My study of the past from "the bottom up" led to
the writing of Pau Hana Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii,
then Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans,
and most recently, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural
America.
A Larger Memory reflects my continued practice of presenting
history through "voices." In the earlier studies, I
wove pieces of recollections into my historical narrative; here
the people become their own narrators. To connect their stories
to our country's history and to place them within a conceptual
chronology, I have written chapters that study the debate under
way from the founding of Jamestown to the current "culture
wars" over who is an American and what America stands for
--- a clash of different visions of our nation presented by John
Winthrop and Mary Rowlandson, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln,
and Frederick Jackson Turner and Bill Clinton.
In their stories, the men and women of multicultural America
convey a special expressiveness and elusive complexity as well
as intonations and emotions that cannot be felicitously re-presented
when paraphrased or quoted in fragments by scholars. The narrators
also vividly describe the criss-crossings between their personal
lives and the events of history. As I read and selected these
documents, I often found myself stirred by the ways people responded
to circumstances not of their choosing. Always, I was reminded
that people are history: their experiences, feelings, adjustments,
imaginings, hopes, uncertainties, dreams, fears, regrets, tragedies,
and triumphs compose our past. Everywhere, I found their stories
bursting in the telling.
This is a view of history I have been sharing with my students.
Our parents and grandparents, I have been telling them, are worthy
of scholarly attention: they have been actors in history, making
choices as they left their homelands and settled in America. They
helped to transform their adopted country, and, in turn, were
themselves changed as they became Americans. The memories gathered
in this study come from autobiographies, interviews, oral histories,
letters, and solitary ruminations. Although the inclusion of all
of our racial and ethnic diversity would be impossible in any
single volume, I selected stories from a broad range of peoples
with roots reaching to Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
History is usually "his story," and I made certain to
present also "her story."
The coming century will be a time when we will all be minorities
in the United States. More than ever before, we find ourselves
urged to reexamine our past and re-remember more inclusively who
we have been as Americans. The "voices" of multicultural
America represent what Walt Whitman called the "varied carols"
of America. The people in this study challenge the master narrative
of American history --- the widely held but inaccurate view that
Americans originally came just from Europe and that "American"
means white or European in ancestry. They present discrete memories
of individuals as members of different ethnic and racial communities,
but together they carry a common message. They affirm what Herman
Melville observed over a hundred years ago: "You cannot spill
a drop of American blood, without spilling the blood of the whole
world. We are not a narrow tribe." These tellers of memories
also assure us that we have always been both culturally diverse
and bound together in a nation dedicated to the "proposition"
of equality. Finally, when broadly shared in the retelling, their
varied stories enable us as Americans to create a community of
a larger memory.
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