INTRODUCTION

Until recently, with one historical exception, America was able to take for granted a coherent national culture and identity. Successive waves of immigrants entered a country that assumed that their ultimate assimilation was a desirable, not an oppressive, outcome. The United States did not prove equally hospitable to everyone: some groups endured enormous hardships on their way to a fuller realization of America's great promise of opportunity and freedom. Yet, throughout U.S. history, the dream of common purpose and community propelled the collective desire to live up to this promise and provided the framework within which progress was understood and made.

Only the Civil War really tested the cultural and civic bonds that united America's disparate interests. Now, however, for the second time in its history, the United States faces a real question of how to fulfill its motto, E pluribus unum, that is, “Out of many, one.” Specifically, the U.S. faces the challenge of how to maintain a stable and effective relationship between this unum (the single American polity) and pluribus (the plurality of racial, ethnic, and religious groups that constitute America's citizenry). Unlike the first, the “Second Civil War” does not pit commerce against agriculture, urban centers against rural traditions, or North against South. Rather, the new danger lies in conflicts among people of different racial, cultural, and ethnic heritages, and between those who view America's cultural and political traditions as impediments to liberal democracy and those who think that preserving these traditions, while reforming them, is the best route to an improved society.