Writing an ethnic and racial history of New York, the city so often taken to represent the American "melting pot," is an ambitious undertaking. In fact, this is the first "general ethnic and racial history of the city" (x). Spanning from 1624 to the 1990s, All the Nations Under Heaven is almost entirely based upon secondary rather than primary sources. But this reliance upon the large body of scholarship on New York's past merely magnifies the potential importance of a racial-ethnic history of the city. A synthesis of that literature could do much to integrate two largely separate bodies of historical scholarship: The research on various ethnic and immigrant groups, on the one hand, and, on the other, studies of African-American experience and of racial conflict and racism. Hence, an integrated ethnic-racial history that explores the nexus between race and ethnicity in New York would deserve wide attention.
Unfortunately, Binder and Reimers have not written such an interpretative synthesis. The exciting issues of racial-ethnic interaction implied by their subtitle are barely touched upon. Ethnic and racial categories are not, in All the Nations Under Heaven, historical subjects whose origins must be explained. Instead they are accepted as fixed categories. Rather than examining race and ethnicity as complex historical problems that are inextricably related to one another, Binder and Reimers simply describe the (mostly well known) highlights of New York's long history of harboring immigrants and their descendants, while also frequently noting (without explaining why) that Black New Yorkers, as a group, almost always had a much rougher time than did immigrants in New York. Yet they regard New York as a characteristically tolerant city.
Taking their title from a visitor's observation in 1776 that New York was "a motley collection of all the nations under heaven" (31), Reimers and Binder's central argument is that ethnic acculturation, shaped by the demands of New York's commercial economy, "climate of interethnic harmony," and "dazzling pluralism," comprised the main force in New York's ethnic and racial history (32, 113). The authors are concerned with "the development of New York's pluralism" and "the experiences of groups as they entered the city, adjusted and accommodated to the ever changing urban environment, and faced tension and hostility." Yet, some groups acculturated faster and with greater ease than did others; African Americans in particular, Binder and Reimers note, "have never been permitted full participation in the life of the city" due to "racism" (x). The pattern of ethnic acculturation was, the authors say, forged early. In the early eighteenth century, young Dutch New Yorkers "balanced" their "allegiance to ethnic culture" with a "mastery of the customs and language of " their English rulers, who had seized the Dutch colony in 1664. Thus these descendants of the Dutch settlers established a "pattern . . . that would be followed down the centuries by other minority groups, first biculturalism, ultimately acculturation" (21 -22).
Acculturation as an explanation for the course of immigrant communities over time derives from a long tradition of ethnic group research; but what can it say about "racial" questions? While Reimers and Binder describe the great gap between white ethnics' experience as "minorities" with that of Black New Yorkers, they say little that helps explain this disparity beyond merely mentioning the existence of a seemingly timeless racism. What's more,