This innovative multicultural reader gathers together diaries, histories, autobiographies, short stories, and excerpts from novels to bring the many facets of the American experience to life, from sixteenth-century explorations to this century's ongoing saga of immigration and acculturation. Extending the traditional boundaries of the American literary canon, the editors first offer a comprehensive overview of the history of multicultural social and literary patterns in the United States, and then present a wealth of richly diverse stories--construing that term in the broadest possible...