On the Past and Future of American Immigration and Ethnic History: A Sociologist's Reflections on a Silver Jubilee

RUBEN G. RUMBAUT

"If America was once in any exclusive sense the melting pot of races, it is no longer. The melting pot is the world." Robert Park (1926)

THIS SPECIAL ISSUE MARKS a special accomplishment: the silver jubilee of the Journal of American Ethnic History. Like Janus, the god of gates and passages, with two faces on opposite sides of his head, we are invited to reflect in this interdisciplinary forum on both the past and the future of American immigration and ethnic history. To a historian, twenty five years may not seem like much: a span scarcely the measure of a generation, within the frame of "current affairs," it may not yet qualify as "history"; it might even be said, paraphrasing Gertrude Stein, that there is no long duree there. But to a sociologist, it is a span that packs a wallop.