Many Voices One Nation

Many Voices, One Nation explores U.S. history through a powerful collection of artifacts and stories from America’s many peoples. Sixteen essays, composed by Smithsonian curators and affiliated scholars, offer distinctive insight into the peopling of the United States from the Europeans’ North American arrival in 1492 to the near present. Each chapter addresses a different historical era and considers what quintessentially American ideals like freedom, equality, and belonging have meant to Americans of all backgrounds, races, and national origins through the centuries. Much more than just an anthology, this book is a vibrant, cohesive presentation of everyday objects and ideas that connect us to our history and to one another. Using these objects and personal stories as a transmitter, the book invites readers to hear the voices of our many voices, and contemplate the complexity of our one nation. The stories and artifacts included in this volume bring our seemingly disparate pasts together to inspire possibilities for a shared future as we constantly reinterpret our e pluribus unum – our nation of many voices.

Many Voices, One Nation explores U.S. history through a powerful collection of artifacts and stories from America’s many peoples. Sixteen essays, composed by Smithsonian curators and affiliated scholars, offer distinctive insight into the peopling of the United States from the Europeans’ North American arrival in 1492 to the near present. Each chapter addresses a different historical era and considers what quintessentially American ideals like freedom, equality, and belonging have meant to Americans of all backgrounds, races, and national origins through the centuries. Much more than just an anthology, this book is a vibrant, cohesive presentation of everyday objects and ideas that connect us to our history and to one another. Using these objects and personal stories as a transmitter, the book invites readers to hear the voices of our many voices, and contemplate the complexity of our one nation. The stories and artifacts included in this volume bring our seemingly disparate pasts together to inspire possibilities for a shared future as we constantly reinterpret our e pluribus unum – our nation of many voices.

California has always been America's promised land—for American Indians as much as anyone. In the 1950s, Native people from all over the United States moved to the San Francisco Bay Area as part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Relocation Program. Oakland was a major destination of this program, and once there, Indian people arriving from rural and reservation areas had to adjust to urban living. They did it by creating a cooperative, multi-tribal community—not a geographic community, but rather a network of people linked by shared experiences and understandings. The Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland became a sanctuary during times of upheaval in people's lives and the heart of a vibrant American Indian community. As one long-time resident observes, "The Wednesday Night Dinner at the Friendship House was a must if you wanted to know what was happening among Native people." One of the oldest urban Indian organizations in the country, it continues to serve as a gathering place for newcomers as well as for the descendants of families who arrived half a century ago. This album of essays, photographs, stories, and art chronicles some of the people and events that have played—and continue to play—a role in the lives of Native families in the Bay Area Indian community over the past seventy years. Based on years of work by more than ninety individuals who have participated in the Bay Area Indian community and assembled by the Community History Project at the Intertribal Friendship House, it traces the community's changes from before and during the relocation period through the building of community institutions. It then offers insight into American Indian activism of the 1960s and '70s—including the occupation of Alcatraz—and shows how the Indian community continues to be created and re-created for future generations. Together, these perspectives weave a richly textured portrait that offers an extraordinary inside view of American Indian urban life. Through oral histories, written pieces prepared especially for this book, graphic images, and even news clippings, Urban Voices collects a bundle of memories that hold deep and rich meaning for those who are a part of the Bay Area Indian community—accounts that will be familiar to Indian people living in cities throughout the United States. And through this collection, non-Indians can gain a better understanding of Indian people in America today. "If anything this book is expressive of, it is the insistence that Native people will be who they are as Indians living in urban communities, Natives thriving as cultural people strong in Indian ethnicity, and Natives helping each other socially, spiritually, economically, and politically no matter what. I lived in the Bay Area in 1975-79 and 1986-87, and I was always struck by the Native (many people do say 'American Indian' emphatically!) community and its cultural identity that has always insisted on being second to none. Yes, indeed this book is a dynamic, living document and tribute to the Oakland Indian community as well as to the Bay Area Indian community as a whole." —Simon J. Ortiz "When my family arrived in San Francisco in 1957, the people at the original San Francisco Indian Center helped us adjust to urban living. Many years later, I moved to Oakland and the Intertribal Friendship House became my sanctuary during a tumultuous time in my life. The Intertribal Friendship House was more than an organization. It was the heart of a vibrant tribal community. When we returned to our Oklahoma homelands twenty years later, we took incredible memories of the many people in the Bay Area who helped shape our values and beliefs, some of whom are included in this book." —Wilma Mankiller, former Principal Chief, Cherokee Nation

Originally published in 1980 and now back in print, Many Voices, One World came out of hundreds of international studies and proposed reforms for global communication media to ensure a free flow of information. Prepared by the distinguished MacBride Commission--and frequently referred to as the MacBride Report--it criticized corporate control of media flows and suggested ways to make media production accessible in poorer countries. Beginning with the right of individuals and nations to communicate, this report tackled problems related to government controls, censorship, one-way flows of information, cultural dominance, and commercialization of the mass media. It called for more voices, more freedom of expression, and the protection of journalists' rights. Still widely taught and cited, the MacBride Report is a key work in the history of communication that continues to be relevant today.

Monumental in scope and vividly detailed, Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation's capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between America's expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification. But D.C. is more than just a seat of government, and authors Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove also highlight the city's rich history of local activism as Washingtonians of all races have struggled to make their voices heard in an undemocratic city where residents lack full political rights. Tracing D.C.'s massive transformations--from a sparsely inhabited plantation society into a diverse metropolis, from a center of the slave trade to the nation's first black-majority city, from "Chocolate City" to "Latte City--Asch and Musgrove offer an engaging narrative peppered with unforgettable characters, a history of deep racial division but also one of hope, resilience, and interracial cooperation.

McMullan pens a gripping story of ten-year-old Frank Russell, who comes of age too soon during the Civil War--a war that mercilessly robs Frank of a simpler way of life, his boyhood, his family, and his idealistic dreams.

In a book destined to become a classic, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom present important new information about the positive changes that have been achieved and the measurable improvement in the lives of the majority of African-Americans. Supporting their conclusions with statistics on education, earnings, and housing, they argue that the perception of serious racial divisions in this country is outdated -- and dangerous.