The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879-1924

FAIN: FT-254264-17

Cristina Stanciu
Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA 23284-9005)

Research and writing of a book comparing how Native Americans and immigrant communities understood Americanization at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This NEH summer stipend will be essential to completing and submitting this first book-length study of how Native American and New Immigrant writers and public intellectuals intervened in the debates over Americanization at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book, under contract with Yale University Press, illuminates in fundamental ways the debates over what it meant to be an American at the turn of the twentieth century, debates which continue to resonate in contemporary discourses over national identity. The book builds on previously unexamined or under-examined archives of Indigenous and New Immigrant materials ranging from manuscripts and publications of the Carlisle Indian School to the Society of American Indian papers, from Yiddish newspapers to the Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey. The book charts the intersecting visions of the campaigns to assimilate Native Americans (1879-1924) and to Americanize the New Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (1883-1924).

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