- Thu Jul 13, 2023 2:47 pm
#102378
Hi ashpine,
You're not alone in thinking that this passage can be hard to follow!
The complete passage breakdown is forthcoming, but I'll try to give you a quick overview and answer your specific question.
The first paragraph lays out a recent change in historical studies of ethnic groups. Before, historians focused on how ethnic immigrant groups blended (line 6) to form an American national character. This focus emphasized how these groups transformed their old ethnic identity into the new blended identity. Recently, the new trend is for historians to focus on how these groups preserved and transplanted their original ethnic identities/cultures to America. The new book by Fugita and O'Brien discussed in the passage is an example of this new trend.
To answer your specific question about assimilation, in this context, it refers to becoming absorbed or integrated into a society or culture. Normally, one might expect that as an ethnic group assimilates into a new culture, it would likely lose its sense of ethnic community, which would be the idea of transformation. According to the authors Fugita and O'Brien, the interesting thing about the Japanese Americans was that they had a high degree of assimilation, but also maintained their sense of ethnic community (lines 12-17), which is the idea of preservation/transplantation.
Fugita and O'Brien "hypothesize that the Japanese American community persisted in the face of assimilation because of a particularly strong sense of 'peoplehood'" (lines 41-44). Now the author of the passage has a problem with this hypothesis because it is "difficult to prove" (line 54-55).
