In 1958, then US senator John F. Kennedy, surely informed by liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., published the influential and best-selling book A Nation of Immigrants, which advanced the notion that the United States should be understood or defined through the diversity of the immigrants it had welcomed since independence.13 This thesis was embraced by US historians and found its way into textbooks and school curriculums. It is neither coincidental nor surprising that Kennedy would introduce this idea as, at the time, he was strategizing how to become the first president born of
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