Objective 4. To identify the United States' “dominant culture” to which immigrants assimilate.

Examples of national migration and dominant culture for objective 4

• Our deep historical model for “national migration” is the ancient Jews who migrated from Egypt to Canaan in the Bible’s Exodus story.
   
• The standard immigrant story concerns families and individuals who strive to adapt to the prevailing culture. In contrast, the Jews moved to the Promised Land as a group and resisted assimilation and intermarriage with the Canaanites. American Jews have followed this pattern until recent generations, when intermarriage has increased.
   
• Our American historical model for “national migration” is the “Great Migration” of English Pilgrims and Puritans to early North America, where they imitated the Jews in Canaan by refusing to intermarry or assimilate with the American Indians. This English culture became the basis for the USA’s dominant culture. In brief, this is the culture to which American immigrants assimilate.
   
• A relatively recent internal example of “national migration” might be that of the Mormons in the 1800s from the Midwest to Utah, where they became the dominant culture.
   
• Some elements of national migration and correspondence to Exodus may also appear in the “great migration” of African Americans from the Old South to the urban North during slavery times, in the early twentieth century, and in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
   
• An alternative dominant culture now receiving attention is the Scots-Irish of the Appalachian region. In contrast to the elite educations and community lifestyles developed by New England Puritans, the Scots-Irish practice a rugged individualism marked by unwritten codes of family honor and armed violence. Lacking a politically correct term, a standard popular name for this group is "rednecks," which has become less an insult than a humorous recognition of a broad social-ethnic category.
   

Proper spelling of a single word won't make or break your semester, but it really helps your instructor-grader's mood if you don't spell "dominant culture" as "dominate culture."

"dominant culture" is right.

"dominate culture" is wrong.