Columbian Expedition to Be Marginalized Essay

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Yet, according to historians of the era, the exposition also defined American culture -- presenting lectures and discussions by leading activists about religion, science, women's rights, and racial equality. Even Historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave a paper on the significance of the American Frontier. All, despite the tragedy of a smallpox epidemic, attempted to portray to the world that America was on the verge of becoming the predominant country of enlightenment.

In contrast, ethnic historian and Professor of History at Columbia University Mae Ngai, in Transnationalism and the Transformation of the "Other": Response to the Presidential Address, shows that it is the very idea of transnational representation that continues to define the basis of American culture. Using Shelley Fisher Fishkin to show that "figures who have been marginalized precisely because they crosses so many borders that they are hard to categorize," Ngai asks that the contemporary historians and sociologists utilize a transnational approach to ask the important questions of migration, ethnicity, and empire (64).

The value of Ngai's approach is that she finds links between past and current trends, and uses a reasonable multidimensional approach to enlarge the frame of reference within the study of the ways in which marginalized populations were included, excluded, and portrayed within the 300-year experiment that is America.

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One of her seminal points is that it would be impossible to actual have the America as we know it without the numerous marginalized populations that built the infrastructure (industry, transportation, and more) of American society. Using the example of the Chinese village, whose elders and economic investors believed in the "new" America but kept traditional values, architecture, and concepts, really pushed the modernization of America forward (63-4). Thus, instead of a linear approach to the description of populations, it is the continual and active contributions of the marginalized populace that Ngai sees as seminal for a definition of what made America.

REFERENCES

Ngai, Mae. (2005). "Transnationalism and the Transformation of the "Other." American

Quarterly. 57 (1): 59-65.

Rydell, R. (1978). "The World's Columbian….....

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