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This chapter discusses the linkage between American liberty and individualism. This linkage has a long and complex set of origins. It includes the autonomous and voluntarist impulses of an immigrant culture; the individualized nature of divine contact and salvation in the Protestant tradition; the geographical dispersal of settlement over remote areas; and the decentralizing forces associated with the oceanic distance between America and centres of European hierarchy and imperial outreach. These and other strands, which stimulated and supported an individualistic outlook, receive their strongest expression in America's signature attachment to natural rights and, in particular, to the political logic of John Locke's theory of the state.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to examine the textual, institutional, and discursive politics of online media that target, speak to, and are shaped by Indian immigrant cultures. The main emphasis is on the idea of home, and its many reconfigurations online through the concept of the homepage. The book critically evaluates how homepages anchor the ideals and ideologies of belonging online in relation to two dominant imaginaries traditionally associated with the time–space of the home, namely the domestic, familial household and the public, national homeland. The book argues that online media play a crucial role in the ongoing struggles over belonging and citizenship for diverse groups within the Indian American community by representing, reconstructing, and reimagining the Indian immigrant household and homeland (which include India and/or the United States). An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter explores the identity of Muslims in the West as both “newcomers” and “outsiders.” It explores the meaning of shari’a—guidelines for living as a good Muslim—for Muslims in non-Muslim states, and addresses some of the most common misapprehensions about its content and significance. Widespread recourse to informal Islamic marriage and divorce processes among North American Muslims, whatever their level of formal religiosity, offers a working example of the development of a North American shari’a. Two recent political debates—in Ontario (2003–2005) and the United Kingdom (2008)—have set the stage for a further examination of how the secular state might respond to the existence of a parallel private ordering system of Muslim family practices.

This concluding chapter revisits the key arguments developed in each of the four chapters and points to key implications of undertaking a study of home in the age of networks. It argues for a reconsideration of the contours of belonging in contemporary contexts of new media and transnationalism through its specific study of Indian immigrant cultures online. It contends that the question of belonging must be applied more thoroughly to the institutional contexts of online media, for not doing so would neglect a very significant alliance between capital and citizenship in the neoliberal, digital age. Furthermore, in the United States, especially since 2001, immigrants, racial and religious minorities, women of color, and the working class have found themselves at the receiving end of the disciplinary practices of neoliberal states and globalization practices. These institutional contexts shape belonging as much as the textual and hypertextual practices that generate categories of exclusion and inclusion in online media.

This book analyzes the interaction of religiosity, national and cultural origin, race, gender, class, and region in the varied and uneasy synthesis of Catholicism and American identity over time. American Catholic studies continues to evince comparatively little attention to region, with the weight of scholarship still focused on the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, with little attention to the varied regions of the United States west of Buffalo. Yet the American Catholic experience diverged significantly among regions, with, for instance, the northeastern pattern of Irish Catholic predominance having less salience in areas of significant Catholic population such as Louisiana, the Upper Midwest, and Southern California. Immigrant Catholic cultures also have hardly been ignored in the literature, yet the lengthy significance of transnational ties for Catholic cultures in the United States has not been extensively pursued, with Americanist scholars evincing a water’s-edge approach after migration that was never actually experienced by Catholics in the United States. Clerical sexual abuse emerges at times in these pages. Like all of the American Catholic history in this book, clerical sexual abuse partakes of a dynamic interaction of particular Catholic cultures and American society and culture.

This chapter surveys the “neighborhood” music of Detroit’s many subcultures in a city based on massive migration for auto industry work: European immigrants (including Polish, Armenian, Greek, Croatian, and others); southern white immigrants, with a focus on country music; and African Americans from the South, bringing jazz, blues, church, and other community musical expressions. Details include the networks and institutions each community built in Detroit, with regional and national connections.

This chapter details the history of the American Branch of the English Folk Dance Society (EFDS), as well as its clashes with the International Folk Dance movement. In the years between 1915 and 1918, Cecil Sharp had come to establish a cultural hegemony that emphasized the American Branch as the leading authority on folk dance. However, the American Branch of EFDS was but one of many ethnic urban folk centers among a wide range of immigrant cultures with folk dance traditions. One person in particular embodied the alternative vision of an International Folk Dance of the peoples of many lands, and she found herself as the center of conflict with the American Branch, and most especially with Sharp: Elizabeth Burchenal.

As we stand at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we face a national challenge in planning and designing learning environments that meet the needs of all learners. Throughout the country, elementary and high school districts are spending unprecedented amounts of money to renovate existing school facilities or build new ones. In 2001 alone roughly $27 billion worth of kindergarten through grade 12 construction projects were approved and funded, a trend that is likely to continue for several years. In 2000 public and private kindergarten through grade 12 school enrollment reached a record 53 million students. The Department of Education projects that 55 million children will enroll in 2020 and 60 million in 2030. By 2100 the pattern of steady growth is expected to result in a total of 94 million school-age children, an increase of 41 million students over the century. It is also projected that diversity will increase, with most of the growth among Hispanic children. They represented about 15% of the public school population in 2000; that proportion is expected to grow to 24% by 2020. This steady increase in the number and diversity of school children, all of whom need and deserve a quality education, suggests that the design of new school facilities and the modernization of old ones will be an ongoing process in communities across the United States. One important component of this challenge is the need to rethink how we plan learning environments to coincide with some new ways of thinking about education. It seems as if such a short time has passed since Howard Gardner introduced the theory of multiple intelligences at a time when other educational strategies, including project-based learning, cooperative learning, primary source learning, real world experiential learning, and their many variations, were enjoying a renaissance or were in the developmental stages. Many of these teaching and learning strategies have found their way into the mainstream as powerful tools that help to create more meaning-centered and personalized learning for students and educators alike. This new group of educational strategies is more diverse, more integrated, and, perhaps, more compelling than their more predictable predecessors.

The Children’s Aid Society (CAS), founded in 1853, is one of the largest and oldest child and family social-welfare agencies in the country. It serves 150,000 children and families through a continuum of services—adoption and foster care; medical, mental health, and dental services; summer and winter camps; respite care for the disabled; group work and recreation in community centers and schools; homemaker services; counseling; and court mediation and conciliation programs. The agency’s budget in 2003 was approximately $75 million, financed almost equally from public and private funds. In 1992, after several years of planning and negotiation, CAS opened its first community school in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. If you visit Intermediate School (IS) 218 or one of the many other community schools in New York City and around the country, it may seem very contemporary, like a “school of the future.” Indeed, we at CAS feel that these schools are one of our most important efforts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet community schools trace their roots back nearly 150 years, as previous generations tried to find ways to respond to children’s and families’ needs. CAS’s own commitment to public education is not new. When the organization was founded in the mid-nineteenth century by Charles Loring Brace, he sought not only to find shelter for homeless street children but to teach practical skills such as cobbling and hand-sewing while also creating free reading rooms for the enlightenment of young minds. Brace was actively involved in the campaign to abolish child labor, and he helped establish the nation’s first compulsory education laws. He and his successors ultimately created New York City’s first vocational schools, the first free kindergartens, and the first medical and dental clinics in public schools (the former to battle the perils of consumption, now known as tuberculosis). Yet this historic commitment to education went only so far. Up until the late 1980s, CAS’s role in the city’s public schools was primarily that of a contracted provider of health, mental health, and dental services.