ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief review of American racial and ethnic history, and highlights the changes that have occurred since the days of the first settlement that provide a baseline for understanding the contemporary scene. It begins by considering three major cohorts: the natives, the North European conquerors, colonists and settlers, and the African slaves. Greater public awareness of the continued struggles of the natives first encountered by European explorers and adventurers in the fifteenth century will serve to accelerate the move toward equality. The English settlers had their own ways of living: their own norms and values, their own culture—and subcultures, too. In the years between the emancipation of the slaves and the mid 1920s, the land of the Indians—and North Europeans and Africans—was to become a haven for millions of others who participated in the Great Atlantic Migration.
