During the last several years, the study of American history has turned a new direction.

Previously, it emphasized how the various immigrant groups in America shed their divergent heritages and amalgamated into a new nationality.

More recently, scholars and laymen alike have become more sensitive to the ways in which these newcomers have kept aspects from their past alive, and there is a new awareness of the degree to which ethnicity continues as a force within America.
Most of the original settlers were British, Protestant, and white.

Many of the later arrivals differed from them, in one or more ways.

History books usually depicted these new waves of immigrants as assimilating almost fully into American society.