"Eliminate the pressure of immigration, and we may be headed for a caste system based on ethnic diversity and mitigated to only a negligible degree by economic differences." --Horace Kallen, in Democracy versus the Melting Pot, 1915 Democracy versus the Melting Pot was published in The Nation magazine by Horace Kallen in 1915, at a time when the United States were receiving the largest influx of immigrants in history. The government tried to enable the assimilation of those diverse peoples into "American" culture through "Americanization" programs, but Kallen saw these programs as being mostly in the interest of Anglo-Saxon business classes and against the spirit of democracy. Kallen rejected the "melting pot" concept, and supported "cultural pluralism," a term he coined. Democracy versus the Melting Pot also strongly influenced Randolph Bourne, another progressive writer. Just as Kallen, Bourne was also against forcing immigrants to assimilate to the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture as he described in his famous article Trans-national America in 1916. Kallen's work is relevant as ever for students of history, political scientists, and others interested in the current discussion about immigration in America.

"...Enlighten me now, o Muses, Tenants of Olympian homes, For you are goddesses, inside on everything, know everything. But we mortals hear only the news, and know nothing at all...." --The Iliad, Book II 484-486 A Test of the News, published as a supplement to The New Republic in 1920, was a study by the journalists Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz into the press coverage by the New York Times of the Bolshevik revolution. They found many inaccuracies and distortions in the Times' coverage and stated that "the news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was, but what men wished to see." In addition, they established that the Times reported ninety-one occasions that the revolutionary regime was near collapse. This study supported Lippmann's belief that "the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis in journalism." Even though his statement applied to the 1920s, the same could be said in 2019 where the reliability of mainstream news and the prevalence of "fake news" is at the forefront of many discussions. A Test of the News is a must-read for journalists, historians, and all who are interested in the importance of the media and current affairs.