MELTING POT

I. Definition of Melting Pot
+ Literal meaning: A vessel made of material that does not melt easily; used for high temperature chemical reactions
+ referred meaning:
- An environment in which many ideas and races are socially assimilated
- A place where people of different backgrounds become similar in culture.

II. The meaning of Melting Pot in USA
- The melting pot is a metaphor for a heterogeneous society becoming more homogeneous, the different elements "melting together" into a harmonious whole with a common culture. It is particularly used to describe the assimilation of immigrants to the United States; the melting-together metaphor was in use by the 1780s.

' The United States has often been referred to as a melting pot, though the differences in cultures of recently arrived immigrants persist beyond the generation of immigrants.
' The United States of America is a nation of immigrants, a melting pot, and a land of immense diversity. People of all colors, religions, ethnic backgrounds live together peacefully, to a large extent.

1. The origins of the term:
- In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the metaphor of a "crucible" or "(s) melting pot" was used to describe the fusion of different nationalities, ethnicities and cultures
- It was a metaphor for the idealized process of immigration and colonization by which different nationalities, cultures and "races" (a term that could encompass nationality, ethnicity and race) were to blend into a new, virtuous community, and it was connected to utopian visions of the emergence of an American "new ...