The Nation of Many Nations

Inspired by Whitman

In Song of Myself, Walt Whitman declared himself to be "one of the great nation, the nation of many nations" - claiming identity as a northerner and a southerner, a Yankee, a Kentuckian, a Hoosier, a Badger, a Buckeye, and a habitan of numerous other places in North America. (Whitman contained multitudes, after all!)

Aside from its 50 states and many larger and smaller regions, there is another, greater sense in which America is the nation of many nations: it has become a home for people from all over the world. First of these, of course, were the Native Americans, who were here before everyone else and whose tragedies and triumphs are ongoing. Long millennia later the British showed up, but the British were themselves a people of many cultures, with ancestral streams from the Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Norman French, etc. In his magisterial history Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer described the nature of America's founding cultures in great detail: dissenting Puritans who came from East Anglia to New England; low-church Anglican cavaliers and indentured servants who came from Wessex and Sussex to Virginia and the Carolinas; Quakers who came from the North Midlands to the Delaware Valley; and Presbyterians who came from Ulster and the Scottish-English Borderland to the Appalachian backcountry.

But that was merely the beginning. Fischer has since written a book about America's African founders (which I've not yet read). Russell Shorto has written several books about the influence of the Dutch upon New Amsterdam, which became our greatest city. These early migrations to mainland America have been followed over the centuries by significant influxes from Germany, Sweden, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, French Canada (both Québec and Acadia), China, Poland, Japan, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, the many islands of the Caribbean, Vietnam, Mexico, India, Nigeria - the list goes on. No doubt books have been written about each one of these, and it would be fascinating to explore them all.

This gives me the idea of writing a long, Whitmanesque poem - perhaps entitled "Song of the Nations" - celebrating the contributions of people from all over the world to American history and culture. Yet another of my many projects...