The melting pot is a metaphor for a heterogeneous society becoming more homogeneous, the different elements "melting together" into a harmonious whole with a common culture. It is particularly used to describe the assimilation of immigrants to the United States; the melting-together metaphor was in use by the 1780s.
After 1970 the desirability of assimilation and the melting pot model was challenged by proponents of multiculturalism, who assert that cultural differences within society are valuable and should be preserved, proposing the alternative metaphor of the mosaic, salad bowl or "American Kaleidoscope" – different cultures mix, but remain distinct.
Read more about Melting Pot: Origins of The Term, United States, Melting Pot, Cultural Pluralism, Anglo-conformity, Multiculturalism, Use in Popular Culture, Quotations
Other articles related to "melting pot, melting, pot":
... The idea of the Melting pot is a metaphor that implies that all the immigrant cultures are mixed and amalgamated without state intervention ... The Melting Pot implied that each individual immigrant, and each group of immigrants, assimilated into American society at their own pace which, as defined above, is not multiculturalism as this is opposed to ... The Melting Pot tradition co-exists with a belief in national unity, dating from the American founding fathers ...
... as in the old burning of the Temple at Corinth, by the melting and intermixture of silver and gold and other metals a new compound more precious than any, called Corinthian brass, was ... more solicitude than the failure of the 'melting-pot.' The discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among our great alien population has come to most people as an intense shock ... etcetera, could not melt into the pot ...
... The melting pot is an analogy for the way in which heterogeneous societies become more homogeneous ... Melting pot may also refer to Crucible, a container in which materials can be heated to very high temperatures Melting Pot (film), a 1998 film starring ... The Melting Pot (comics), a 1995 graphic novel by Kevin Eastman, Simon Bisley and Eric Talbot The Melting Pot (restaurant), an American chain of fondue ...
... and these would eventually be collected and published in 1963 as the book Beyond the Melting Pot The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City, arguably Glazer's most ... one retrospective noted 25 years later, Glazer and Moynihan suggested that "the melting pot metaphor didn't hold water." The book argued that the ... class." James Traub has argued that Beyond the Melting Pot was "one of the most popular, and most influential, works of sociology of its time." ...
... The Iroquois are a melting pot ... League traditions allowed for the dead to be symbolically replaced through captives taken in the "Mourning War." Raids were conducted to take vengeance on enemies and to seize captives to replace lost compatriots ...
Famous quotes containing the words melting pot, pot and/or melting:
“Of course I’m a black writer.... I’m not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
“Steam was till the other day the devil which we dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof and carry the house away.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“O ruddier than the cherry,
O sweeter than the berry,
O Nymph more bright
Than moonshine night,
Like kidlings blithe and merry.
Ripe as the melting cluster,
No lily has such lustre,
Yet hard to tame,
As raging flame,
And fierce as storms that bluster.”
—John Gay (1685–1732)