Immigration VI

Welcome! You are encouraged to register with the site and login (for free). When you register, you support the site and your question history is saved.

     One strain of historical thought that achieved popularity in the 1950s forwarded the notion that immigration - more than the frontier experience, or any other specific event or factor - had been and continued to be the defining element of United States history. In this depiction, the 30 million immigrants who entered the country between 1820 and 1900 had common experiences regardless of their national, religion, or race: namely, in experiencing hardship and alienation, they themselves changed, but they also carried on the development of the nation itself.
     Both casual and formal students of history should, however, be careful in equating the experiences of different groups of immigrants, especially under the somewhat blurring concept of "hardship." The description that all immigrants experienced hardship and immigration fails to account properly for the fact that in the 17th and 18th century millions of Africans were forcibly shipped to the United States and sold into slavery. While this group of people should not be excluded from any full reckoning of the nation's migrants, its alienation and hardship was of a substantially different character from that of the other populations, who migrated more willingly and independently and who arrived under and lived in vastly different conditions. If it is, indeed, the hardship and alienation experienced by the nation's migrants that have above all shaped both them and their nation, then to ignore this distinction would be to distort an important element of what our nation has been shaped to be.

According to the passage, each of the following is a difference between the experience of African immigrants and that of other immigrants EXCEPT:

Review: Immigration VI


Explanation 

In this question, we have another situation in which a detailed question can be answered with our mastery of the main point of the passage. Four of these statements are true, according to the passage. Choice (D) is the author's primary objection to the theory, so that's true. Choices (A) and (B) are the two main reasons the author gives to support the statement in (D). So none of those is the correct answer, and we are left with (C) and (E). Is (C) supported by the passage? Maybe not. How about (E)?This statement is logically connected to the arguments at hand. We can try negating this statement. If the hardship experienced by African immigrants did not shape the nation differently, then the author's objection to the theory would be somewhat irrelevant--and it would no longer be true that the theory would "distort" the historical picture. The author cannot consistently disagree with (E), so we can take the author to agree with (E). Back to (C). Indeed, there is nothing in the passage to indicate this statement; one hint is that there is no discussion of "most" depictions of immigration.

The correct answer is (C). Passage 10














If you believe you have found an error in this question or explanation, please contact us and include the question title or URL in your message.
Continue »