Gerstle, Gary. “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” Journal of American History 84:2 (1997): 524-58.

== Summary ==
This
article (historiographical essay) challenges the myth of Americanization – that
Europeans came to the American to shed “the old ways” of Europe and embrace the
political virtues of the American republic. This myth has four distinct claims:
European immigrants wanted to shed their old world ways and become American;
Americanization was quick and easy; Americanization “melted” immigrants into a
single race, culture, or nation; and lastly, immigrants experience
Americanization as emancipation from servitude, deference, and poverty (of the
old world). He argues that scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s by Frank
Thistlewaote, Rudolph J. Vecoli, and Herbert Gutman, challenged this myth: “Americanization
was a coercive process forced on the newcomers, who preferred maintaining their
old cultures to becoming ‘new,’ exploited men.” More recently, such scholars as
Lawrence H. Fuchs and Werner Sollors, while rejecting the myth, present a more
complex understanding of Americanization and recognize the varying aspirations
of immigrants. Influenced by the culture/post-modern turn, these scholars
presented the idea that ethnicity and other American identities were unstable
and re-created. Thus, Gerstle contends, “Americanization lost the clean
linearity it had possessed in earlier accounts and became a chaotic,
pluralistic site of postmodern invention.” (527) However, Gerstle also argues
that these scholars ignored historical contingency as part of the immigration
experience. He thus concludes (unsurprisingly echoing his own work as well as
that of Lizabeth Cohen) that class and gender constrained the process of
invention and works by Fuchs and Hollinger fail to take into account these
power hierarchies. 
1880-1920
immigration (23 million)