Melting pot
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The melting pot is a metaphor for the way in which homogeneous societies develop, in which the ingredients in the pot (people of different cultures and religions) are combined so as to lose their discrete identities to some degree, yielding a final product which has a more uniform consistency and flavor, and which is quite different from the original inputs. The term gained popularity in describing ethnicity in the United States after the metaphor was used in the 1908 play of the same name that modernized Romeo and Juliet<ref>http://www.pbs.org/destinationamerica/usim_qz1b.html</ref> where the protagonist declared "Understand that America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming! A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American."
This process is sometimes equated with cultural assimilation, but the two are not necessarily the same; the "melting pot" metaphor implies both a melting of cultures and intermarriage of ethnicities, while cultural assimilation often occurs without intermarriage. For example, many groups in the United States such as US-born Japanese-Americans and Armenian-Americans tend to be fully culturally integrated into American culture and institutions, yet have not, for the most part, intermarried with other ethnicities. [1] [May 2007]
