What Is An American?
Abraham Lincoln and "Multiculturalism"
ISBN 0-87462-326-X; 22 pp.
Responding to the late-twentieth
century debate over multicultural approaches to American history,
Current suggests that Abraham Lincoln's concept of what it meant
to be an American differed radically from the ideas of those modern
scholars and activists who argue against a single version of American
history. Current believes that, to Lincoln, Americanism related
to an individual's commitment to the principles espoused by the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and was not
simply "a matter of racial or cultural inheritance." In fact,
Lincoln believed--and Current still believes--that too much emphasis
on cultural, ethnic, and racial differences fostered disunity
and undermined the unique character of the United States.
Richard Nelson Current, a native of Colorado, received his degrees
from Oberlin, Tufts, and the University of Wisconsin--where he
was a graduate school colleague of Frank Klement. He has been
a member of history departments at the Universities of Illinois,
Wisconsin, and North Carolina-Greensboro, and has lectured extensively
throughout the world, including stints as a Fulbright Professor
at the University of Munich and at the University of Chile and
as Harmsworth Professor at Oxford University. He is the author
or co-author of twenty books, including Daniel Webster and
the Rise of National Conservatism (1955), The Lincoln
Nobody Knows (1958), Those Terrible Carpetbaggers
(1988), Lincoln's Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy
(1992), and Lincoln the President (co-authored
with J. G. Randall), which won the Bancroft Prize in 1956.
