Now, Roots for Nearly Everybody

A Harvard guide to 106 ethnic groups in America

The inventor of Minute Rice, Ataullah K. Ozai-Durrani, was an immigrant who came to the U.S. from Afghanistan.

The city of St. Petersburg, Fla., was named by Businessman and Railroad Builder Peter Demyanoff-Demens, who came from St. Petersburg, Russia.

One of the proudest family legends, remembered almost as an epic among America's 12,000 Bosnian Muslims, is the digging of Chicago's subway tunnels in the early 1900s.

Such facts and thousands more concerning the clans, tribes and nationalities that made their way to America have now been converted into highly readable scholarship. This week Harvard University Press is bringing out the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, a 1,076-page volume that sells for $60 ($45 until Jan. 1).

The encyclopedia is filled with tales just like those grandfather used to tell. Says Editor and History Professor Stephan Thernstrom: "It's a guide to who the people of the United States are, where they came from, where their ancestors came from. I think we all need it. Nothing like it exists."

The Harvard Press began research for the encyclopedia in 1974, after one of its editors, Ann Orlov, was referred to a new dentist named Vangelzissi. What kind of name was that? she asked. Albanian, the dentist replied. Orlov (a Russian name) was surprised. As she wondered just how many Albanian Americans were in the U.S. (roughly 70,000) and where they lived (mainly New England, New York City), the quest for an encyclopedia was born. Recalls Editor Thernstrom (whose name is Swedish): "We started on the assumption that there were something on the order of 50 or 60 ethnic groups. We ended up with 106--and even that is a somewhat arbitrary figure." Part of the problem was that nobody has an airtight definition of what an ethnic group is. Basic differences of national origin, race and language are clear enough. But sometimes groups are distinguished from one another by other characteristics, such as food preferences or political affiliations in the homeland. As Sociologist Milton Gordon suggests, ethnicity may mean nothing more precise than "a sense of peoplehood."

The encyclopedia includes such little-known ethnic groups as the Manx (immigrants from the Isle of Man) and the Wends, who migrated to Texas during the 19th century from what is now East Germany. Though the Wends are now dispersed, records of their migration survive in their language, known, naturally enough, as Wendish. The book's separate listing for Macedonians is expected to upset both Greeks and Bulgarians because historically Macedonia was part of both southern Bulgaria and northern Greece, and both nationalities view Macedonians as their own. The scholar who wrote the four-page listing on Macedonians asked to remain anonymous to avoid recrimination.

The shortest ethnic-group entry (13 lines) is on Indonesians. The longest (55 pages) is on American Indians. There are copious entries on the origins, motives for migration and traditions of Afro-Americans, Chinese, English, Germans, Irish, Italians and Jews. In addition, the encyclopedia includes 29 essays on such broad topics as intermarriage, assimilation and prejudice. (Popular stereotypes have faded dramatically since the '30s. Far fewer regard Chinese as "sly and superstitious" or the Irish as "witty and pugnacious.") The book obviously will further post-Roots fascination with hereditary origins. Yet Notre Dame Historian Philip Gleason, in his essay "American Identity and Americanization," rejects the view that America is "simply a collection of ethnic groups, one of which--the Wasps--has oppressively dominated all the others."

The encyclopedia's underlying premise, according to the introduction, "is that ethnicity, whether good or bad, has been and remains important in the American social fabric." Even so, Editor Thernstrom notes, "the assimilative powers of this society have been fantastic. The notion of being an American has had a powerful hold."

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