A Different mirror:

A History of Multicultural America

Ronald Takaki is one of the foremost-recognized scholars of multicultural studies and holds a PhD. in American History from the University of California, Berkeley. As a professor of Ethnic Studies at the same university, he wrote A Different Mirror: a History of Multicultural America as a fantastic new telling of our nation s history. The book narrates the composition of the many different people of the United States of America.

In a lively account filled that is with personal accounts and the voices of people that were in the past left out of the historical armament, Ronald Takaki proffers us a new perspective of America s envisioned past. Mr. Takaki confronts and disputes the Anglo-centric historical point of view. This dispute and confrontation is started in the within the seventeenth-century arrival of the colonists from England as witnessed by the Powhatan Indians of Virginia and the Wamapanoag Indians from the Massachusetts area. From there, Mr. Takaki turns our attention to several different cultures and how they had been affected by North America. The English colonists had brought the African people with force to the Atlantic coasts of America. The Irish women that sought to facilitate their need to work in factory settings and maids for our towns. The Chinese who migrated with ideas of a golden mountain and the Japanese who came and labored in the cane fields of Hawaii and on the farms of California. The Jewish people that fled from shtetls of Russia and created new urban communities here. The Latinos who crossed the border had come in search of the mythic and fabulous life El Norte.

Ronald Takaki closes his book, a Different Mirror: a History of Multicultural America, with the 1992 Los Angeles racial explosion. The novel is a timely exploration of how racism has partitioned our society, destroying inner cities and disrupting our learning experiences. Mr. Takaki tries to explain that our culture needs to comprehend the tangible reality of multicultural society in order to maintain cooperation and peace in the present and near future.