Here are a few more thoughts on the flavorful gumbo that is American culture. This time I'll introduce a different metaphor: a great river that is formed from numerous streams, each with its own sources, rapids, eddies, and, ultimately, individual droplets of water.
It is, of course, individuals and families who have migrated to America from all over the world since 1600 or so. At some places and times (e.g., New England 1629-1640 and Pennsylvania 1675-1725), immigrants were mostly families; at others (e.g., Virginia 1640-1675), they were mostly single men. Sometimes enough people have migrated from one place to another that we identify them as a major tributary of the American river: Puritans to New England, Quakers to Pennsylvania, Dutch to New Amsterdam, etc. Sometimes a rivulet was sufficiently large to identify (e.g., about 2,000 French Huguenots settled in and around Boston, New York, and Charleston SC in the years 1680-1690) yet too small to have survived for long because of ethnic attrition, even though some members of the group are known to history (e.g., both Faneuil Hall and Bowdoin College are named after successful Huguenots). Sometimes a stream had led to local or regional (but not national) influence, such as the Acadians in Louisiana. And over the last 400 years there has been a steady rain of folks who have trickled into American society without being part of a significantly identifiable group; an example might be Scots before 1700 or immigrants from relatively small countries today (a naturalization ceremony I attended a few years ago included new citizens from places like Bhutan and Belarus).
Historian David Hackett Fischer calls the major tributaries "culture hearths" because they have set the tone for whole regions of American geography and for large swathes of American culture. In his book Albion's Seed (which I finished re-reading the other day) and its sequel African Founders (which I've just started), Fischer identifies five culture hearths: New England settled by Puritans from East Anglia, eastern Pennsylvania settled by Quakers from the English North Midlands, Virginia settled by Anglicans from Wessex and Sussex, Appalachia settled by Presbyterians from around the northern reaches of the Irish Sea, and the whole eastern seaboard sadly settled by enslaved men and women from western and central Africa. He doesn't count Dutch New Netherland as a culture hearth, but Russell Shorto (The Island at the Center of the World, Taking Manhattan) makes a strong case for the centrality of the Hudson Valley to the identity and development of American culture. These days one might identify another emerging hearth: Latin American (especially Mexican) people who are now thickly settled throughout America, but it might be too early for historians to provide their perspective on that phenomenon of high complexity.
One of Fischer's key observations is that these culture hearths have never completely melded: there is no single American river but five or more major streams flowing through the same watershed. The supposed melting pot has never even produced a full amalgamation of the peoples who were here before the Revolution! Indeed, Fischer provides a tantalizingly brief account of the American Revolution as four separate but interlocking revolutions, beginning with the rebellion of New England to start the war and ending with Quaker diplomacy to settle the peace. (For related thoughts, see also my 2004 essay on Ayn Rand and American Culture.)
Here I'll put all my cards on the table: echoing Heraclitus, I'd say that you can't step into the same river twice because "different and different waters flow upon those who step into the same rivers" (Fragment 12). Less cryptically, although we can identify cultural streams and tributaries, fundamentally American culture at any one time is made up of the individual human beings who live here. Or as Walt Whitman put it in Democratic Vistas: "This idea of perfect individualism it is indeed that deepest tinges and gives character to the idea of the aggregate." It is the never-ending interplay of individual and society, droplet and river, that makes the study of history and culture so endlessly fascinating.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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