A Different Mirror for Young People:A History of Multicultural America

The groundbreaking multicultural history of America, adapted for younger readers, now in a revised and updated edition with 100 pages of new material.

“An excellent way to include multi-ethnic materials in the classroom as a way to ensure that your students see their unique identities reflected in their coursework.” —Skipping Stones

In Ronald Takaki's multicultural masterwork, the story of America includes the Native, African, Irish, Jewish, Asian, and Latino people—and many more—who made America their home, and who often fought for rights now enjoyed by all. A Different Mirror for Young People is widely hailed as the most important resource to “teach [Americans] to value the nation's inescapable diversity" (New York Times Book Review) and has been adopted into middle and high school curricula around the country.

With a new chapter and revisions throughout, University of Illinois professor A. Naomi Paik brings this “brilliant revisionist history” (Publishers Weekly) into the 21st century. The new material examines growing inequality in the U.S., the intensifying War on Terror that further targets and marginalizes immigrants, and, in the uplifting spirit of the original book, the emergence of social movements including land and water protections and migrant justice movements.

Drawing on Takaki's vast array of primary sources, and staying true to his own words whenever possible, A Different Mirror for Young People brings ethnic history alive through the words of people, including teenagers, who recorded their experiences in letters, diaries, and poems. Like Howard Zinn's A People's History, another title in the For Young People series, Takaki's A Different Mirror offers a rich and rewarding "people's view" perspective on the American story.

"The 'mirror' that Ronald Takaki holds up to the United States reflects a multicultural history of oppression and exploitation, but also struggle, solidarity, and community. In the most profound sense, this is a people's history of our country. Takaki shows what has torn us apart, yet what knits us together." —Bill Bigelow, curriculum editor, Rethinking Schools, and co-director, Zinn Education Project | “[A Different Mirror is] a splendid achievement, a bold and refreshing new approach to our national history. The research is meticulous, the writing powerful and eloquent, with what can only be called an epic sweep across time and cultures.” —Howard Zinn

“This 375-page book would be an excellent way to include multi-ethnic materials in the classroom as a way to ensure that your students see their unique identities reflected in their coursework.” —Skipping Stones

“A Different Mirror advances a truly humane sense of American possibility.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

"The 'mirror' that Ronald Takaki holds up to the United States reflects a multicultural history of oppression and exploitation, but also struggle, solidarity, and community. In the most profound sense, this is a people's history of our country. Takaki shows what has torn us apart, yet what knits us together. This young people's version of A Different Mirror will introduce a new generation to Takaki's pathbreaking scholarship." —Bill Bigelow, curriculum editor, Rethinking Schools, and co-director, Zinn Education Project | RONALD TAKAKI (1939-2009) was recognized as one of the foremost scholars of American ethnic history and diversity. He is the author of the multiple award-winning books Strangers from a Distant Shore: A History of Asian Americans and A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. REBECCA STEFOFF is the author of more than 100 nonfiction books for children and young adults, and she has adapted several best-selling history books for younger readers, including Howard Zinn's masterpiece, published as A Young People's History of the United States by Seven Stories Press.

A. NAOMI PAIK is an associate professor of Criminology, Law, & Justice and Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She published Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (UNC Press, 2016; winner, Best Book in History, AAAS 2018; runner-up, John Hope Franklin prize for best book in American Studies, ASA, 2017). Her book Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the 21st Century (2020, University of California Press), examines the long-developing criminalization of foreign-born people in the United. Her research and teaching interests include comparative ethnic studies; U.S. imperialism; U.S. militarism; social and cultural approaches to legal studies; transnational and women of color feminisms; carceral spaces; and labor, race, and migration. https://naomipaik.com/

REBECCA STEFOFF is the author of more than 100 nonfiction books for children and young adults, and she has adapted several best-selling history books for younger readers. | Introduction
 
My Story, Our Story
 
I was going to be a surfer, not a scholar.
 
I was born and grew up in Hawaii, the son of a Japanese immigrant father and a Japanese-American mother who had been born on a sugarcane plantation. We lived in a working-class neighborhood where my playmates were Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, and Hawaiian. We did not use the word multicultural, but that’s what we were: a community of people from many cultural, national, and racial backgrounds.
 
My father died when I was five, and my mother remarried a Chinese cook. She had gone to school only through the eighth grade, and my stepfather had very little education, but they were determined to give me a chance to go to college. My passion as a teenager, though, was surfing. My nickname was “Ten Toes Takaki,” and when I sat on my board and gazed at rainbows over the mountains and the spectacular sunsets over the Pacific, I wanted to be a surfer forever.
 
Then, during my senior year in high school, a teacher inspired me to think about the problems of the world and of being human and to ask, “How do you know what you know?” In other words, how do you know if something is true? The same teacher inspired me to attend college outside Hawaii, which is how I found myself at the College of Wooster in Ohio in 1957.
 
College was a culture shock for me. The student body was not very diverse, and my fellow students asked me, “How long have you been in this country? Where did you learn to speak English?” To them, I did not look like an American or have an American-sounding name. When I fell in love with one of those students, Carol Rankin, she told me that her parents would never approve of our relationship, because of my race.
 
Carol was right. Her parents were furious. Still, we decided to do what was right for us. When we got married, her parents reluctantly attended. Four years later, when our first child was born, her parents came to visit us in California. After I said, “Let me help you with the luggage, Mr. Rankin,” Carol’s father replied, “You can call me Dad.” His racist attitudes, it turned out, were not frozen. He had changed.
 
By that time I was working on my Ph.D. degree in American history. I became a college professor at the University of California in Los Angeles and taught the school’s first course in African American history. In 1971, I moved to the University of California at Berkeley to teach in a new Department of Ethnic Studies. In the decades that followed, I developed courses and degree programs in comparative ethnic studies, and I wrote several books about America’s multicultural history. My extended family, too, became a multicultural, mixed-race group that now includes people of Japanese, Vietnamese, English, Chinese, Taiwanese, Jewish, and Mexican heritage.
 
I have come to see that my story reflects the story of multicultural America—a story of disappointments and dreams, struggles and triumphs, and identities that are separate but also shared. We must remember the histories of every group, for together they tell the story of a nation peopled by the world. As the time approaches when all Americans will be minorities, we face a challenge: not just to understand the world, but to make it better. A Different Mirror studies the past for the sake of the future.