Cultural Gifts: American Liberals and the Origins of Multiculturalism, 1924-1945

Diana Selig

This book project reconstructs the little-known crusade against prejudice that flourished in the United States after World War I. It argues that as early as the 1920s, pluralist thinking made its way into schools, homes, and churches across the country. Drawing on new developments in social science, progressive educators taught children about the “cultural gifts” that various ethnic, racial, and religious groups brought to the United States. They countered the nativist and racist trends of the era to propose that immigrants made important contributions to the nation. These educators rejected the melting-pot theory of assimilation to suggest that ethnic identity could be compatible with Americanism.The project analyzes the strategies, strengths, and limitations of cultural gifts education. It argues that while cultural gifts succeeded in promoting an inclusive American identity, it was marked by important oversights. In particular, its inability to account for the experience of African Americans, who suffered entrenched forms of discrimination and disfranchisement, limited its effectiveness. By the post-World War II years, cultural gifts had fallen from favor, replaced by new educational approaches to addressing difference and unity in American life. Even so, its legacy has persisted, informing more recent movements for multicultural education and ethnic studies.

About Diana Selig

Diana Selig is a historian of the modern United States with particular interests in social science, education, ethnoracial identity, and gender. Her research projects, including the book that emerges from her dissertation, explore how twentieth-century intellectual and social trends have shaped new ways of understanding American identity and nationhood. She did her undergraduate work at Yale and earned her PhD in History from UC Berkeley. She is currently Assistant Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College, where she teaches the modern U.S. history survey and courses on American schools, social reform, history of the family, the Great Depression and World War II, and the history of women and politics.