Can we all get along?
—Rodney King

For many years now we have been usefully instructed by a steady stream of volumes in what has come to be called “American ethnic history”—narrative accounts, that is, of the experience of immigrant groups who have come to (or been forcibly brought to) this country for varying personal and political reasons. Among such books, Albert Camarillo’s Chicanos in a Changing Society, Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers: The Journey of East European Jews to America, and Yuji Ichioka’s The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants are exemplary. But many others—like Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, Kerby A. Miller’s Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, and Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness—have also usefully enlarged our sense of what was alike and what was dissimilar in the ethnic or migrational experience of our immigrant groups. Today, however, in this “post-Rodney King era,” such narrowly focused studies of individual ethnic groups will not do any longer.

That, at least, is the viewpoint of Ronald Takaki, professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of several well-known studies of immigrant experience, including Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii and Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Professor Takaki’s new work, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America,¹ is