America At 1750

America at 1750: A Salad Bowl The American colonies experienced a dramatic boom in population in the first half of the 18th century. The overwhelming inflow of Germans, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, and English was raising the country's populace considerably. However, these new residents did not live as a melting pot community, but rather as a salad bowl: tossed together and dressed with the law.

This wave of immigrants flourished in America, however, they did so in different areas of the northern east coast. The English immigrated to New England, while the German moved to Pennsylvania, the Scotch-Irish to the Carolinas and Georgia, and the Dutch to New York. This dispersion prevented the new Americans from interacting as closely as Americans do today in our melting pot society.

White America during the early 1700's is an example of diversity of its best. The variety of peoples in the colonies was large and in a way spectacular for a country which, in essence, was only a bit more than one century old.

Richard Hofstadter

United States

United States

Richard Hofstadter, in America at 1750: A Social Portrait, describes this diversity concisely and well when he states: "When one counts the various peoples"”the Scots, Welsh and Irish, the Dutch, Swedes, and Finns, the French, Germans, Swiss, and Jews"”the pluralism or white America even at the end of the seventeenth century seems impressive."(Page 16) This American salad bowl society was made so by the disparity in the classes as much as anything else. In American colonial society, the rich stayed at home and directed whilst the middle class, upon whom the country was beginning to be based worked the plebeian jobs, which this country was based on. In a way, the middle class, the working class was the foundation for this great nation. Hofstadter reaffirms this when he writes that...