Historians will one day try to pinpoint the year when old ideas about assimilation in America succumbed to dry rot. “In earlier times,” they will say, “indigenous populations and immigrants were expected to assimilate into the dominant culture, which was...

Imagine our country as one enormous bolt of cloth. When people refer to the “social fabric” of the country, they have something like this image in mind, an image that says we are much more than links in a chain....

Raise your hands. How many people learned about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address when you were in school? Do you remember how it ends?...