Students who attend Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, have elected to spend their university years in one of America's most distinguished small cosmopolitan cities. Over the last two decades as the world has become rapidly urbanized, Hartford has become a critically contested site where economic poverty, environmental degradation,…

A longing for an idyllic folk culture past has had a notable impact on the American landscape as communities reinvent themselves to cater to these desires. Lindsborg, Kansas, is one such struggling rural community that has projected its ethnic past to the outside world in hopes of drawing tourist dollars.

The author relates the story of her parents' outmigration in 1955 from West Virginia to Chicago and their consequent assimilation experiences. The family's problems with self-identity, group identity, discrimination, hostility, cultural differences, and language differences are described and evaluated against the literature, economic factors, and…

Describes a writing assignment designed to educate students about an ethnic group different than their own. Students first wrote a factual account of how their family arrived at the local region. They then wrote an account from the perspective of a fictional student from a different ethnic group. (MJP)

In European cities, ethnic minorities concentrate in physically and socially dilapidated areas, according to two different patterns. In the traditional pattern, ethnic minorities (who are among the lowest socioeconomic status groups) concentrate in the old and dilapidated buildings in inner city areas. Because inner city areas are becoming…

This report presents data on Asian and Pacific Islander Americans (APIAs), focusing on California. It discusses: who APIAs are; nativity and citizenship; residence (nearly all APIAs reside in metropolitan areas, particularly California); educational attainment (because of the model minority myth about Asians, APIA children are deprived of…