ABSTRACT
Jane Addams respected the differences among the ethnic groups living on the edge ol downtown Chicago and wanted each in the neighborhood around Hull House to maintain pride in its heritage. The immigrants who lived in the cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries inhabited an ethnically diverse world. Yet they could depend upon the kindness of strangers such as Jane Addams and on the aid of institutions that consciously sought to downplay their differences in the interest of establishing a common American identity. In the course of undermining the consensus historians, the neoprogressive historians of the 1970s discovered the issue of gender, which became a new and significant source of division in American history. The held of social-welfare history provides a good example of the general phenomenon, Once concerned with the growth of government programs and public institutions such as hospitals, the field became a subset of women's history in the 1980s.
