Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hand wringing, American resistance falls far short of the hostility evident in Western Europe. Gangs of racist thugs in Britain engage in "Paki bashing." France has officially declared a target of "zero immigration." Germany insists it is "not a country of immigration," and neo-Nazis have taken the dictum literally enough to set fire to hostels for foreign workers and asylum seekers...
...Arab. Whole parts of the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion are largely Korean. And when the prostitutes of Melbourne distributed some pro-condom pamphlets, one of the languages they used was Macedonian. Even Japan, which prides itself on its centuries-old socially engineered uniculture, swarms with Iranian illegals, Western executives, Pakistani laborers and Filipina hostesses...
...space shrinks, moreover, time accelerates. This hip-hop mishmash is spreading overnight. When my parents were in college, there were all of seven foreigners living in Tibet, a country the size of Western Europe, and in its entire history the country had seen fewer than 2,000 Westerners. Now a Danish student in Lhasa is scarcely more surprising than a Tibetan in Copenhagen. Already a city like Miami is beyond the wildest dreams of 1968; how much more so will its face in 2018 defy our predictions of today...
...Scandinavian immigrant to the United States," wrote historian Wittke, "has been the Viking of the Western prairie country." In the mid-19th century, American newspapers carried accounts of immigrant Swedes disembarking en masse from cargo ships and marching -- often with their country's flag carried aloft -- to railway depots where trains would take them upriver to Buffalo, along the Erie Canal and thence to the prairie country of the upper Mississippi valley. "What a glorious new Scandinavia might not Minnesota become!" wrote Frederika Bremer in 1853, and she was right. Today about 400 place names in Minnesota are of Scandinavian...
Persuasive as Graff can be, his book fights a battle that is largely won. Stanford's acrimonious debate on a compulsory course in Western civilization took place five years ago. Most campuses have long since rejected the idea of an immutable "canon" of indispensable Western classics in favor of recognizing the reality that, long before p.c., curriculum has always evolved in response to the changing marketplace of students. A generation or two ago, it demanded validation of America's cultural maturity. Today it demands diversity. The 1991 Heath anthology of American literature, widely used in colleges, begins with Indian chants...