Read Arnie Dashefsky's Interview in UCONN Today, Americans Abroad: Escaping or Enhancing Life?

Dashefsky notes that the long-standing ideological metaphor of the United States as a melting pot of immigrants is not accurate looking through the lens of social science.

“It created a false idea that there was democratization of the country,” he says. “The way I explain it to my students is more to describe it as Anglo conformity. We’re speaking English, and our jurisprudence system is based on the English law with certain modifications that we added. We all read Shakespeare in high school although he’s not an American author, so part of our literature is derived from that. The point is, yes, there is a diversity, but not all of our culture has learned to deal with this diversity; otherwise we wouldn’t have all the social conflicts we have today.”