Abstract
Ethnicity" in the United States defines persons in terms of who they were (or who their parents were), while "residence" defines them in terms of who they are. Ethnic identifications and civic identifications may be in conflict, moreover, creating situations of "divided loyalty" to the disparate cultures, traditions, and histories of people and place.
How Americans have negotiated this dilemma is the issue this book explores, through a series of essays examining aspects of Cincinnati's experience as an ethnically diverse community - from the nineteenth-century arrival of Irish and German "immigrants" to a new city in the American West; from the twentieth-century arrival of American-born "in-migrants" to a regional metropolis. Some of the essays focus on the actions of individuals as they attempted to reconcile their ethnicity and their identity as members of a civic community defined by history, traditions, and culture. Others focus on "the community" as it sought to respond to the presence of newcomers in the city and newcomers to the city, to integrate them into the society, the economy, and the culture of Cincinnati, and to acknowledge the fact of their presence as an element in Cincinnati's changing sense of itself.
Cincinnati provides the contributors with a convenient window into the past. The real concerns of this book are the ways in which Americans have dealt with the matter of ethnic diversity and negotiated their own identities as members of a variety of communities at the same time - ethnic, occupational, residential, religious, civic, regional, and national, all the while attempting to preserve their individual freedoms of choice over what they considered the important questions of the day, in politics but also in manners, morals, and lifestyle.