Imagine that this page is a blank sheet of paper, that Chicago, New York, and San Francisco never existed, that the United States is a country of trees, desert, and prairie crisscrossed only by the trails of animals. Then you will realize the contribution of America's immigrants—Our National Heritage.
Into this setting Dr. Pei has introduced the Indians who, in prehistory, crossed the Bering Straight from Siberia; the Spanish who established the first European colony at St. Augustine; the Dutch and British who founded the well-known settlements at Plymouth, Jamestown, and New Amsterdam; the Negroes, brought in chains to this country to be sold as slaves; the wave after wave of immigration to America.
Dr. Pei pictures not only the famine, politics, warfare, and religious persecution which originally brought immigrants to this country but their colorful American settlements as well. He strolls down the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown, enjoys the brilliance of the Holland, Michigan tulip festival, the picturesque Pennsylvania Dutch farmland, and the flaming blast furnaces of Gary and Pittsburgh.
Mario Pei traces the gifts of each nation's people to American culture. He tells us that it is common in New York City to see Mohawk Indians, originally from the upper part of the state, now as construction workers, laboring at dizzying heights on bare steel girders. He reminds us of the tremendous achievements of the American Negrounder the most adverse circumstances, of York, a slave who served so faithfully on the Lewis and Clark expeditions, of Booker T. Washington and, of course, of the many Negro athletes and entertainers — Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Roy Campanella, to name a few from a star-filled list. Then he traces part of our lingual heritage showing how such words as amen and hallelujah have come to us from Hebrew, credit and cash from Italian, and army, cattle, and taste from French. He illustrates how each immigrant group has benefited from fellow immigrant groups, has intermingled, intermarried, and has adopted new American customs. Indeed, they have combined to become Americans all!
—from the dust jacket
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