Societies today are increasingly characterized by their ethnic, racial, and religious diversity. One key question raised by the global migration of people is how they do or do not come to be incorporated into their new social environments. For over a century, assimilation has been the concept used in explaining the processes of immigrant incorporation into a new society. It has also been applied to indigenous peoples, to refugees, and to involuntary migrants caught up in the slave trade. Assimilation has confronted many scholarly challenges which were often intermeshed with particular political agendas.

Part 1 Introduction; Chapter 1 The Revival of Assimilation in Historical Perspective, Peter Kivisto; Part 2 The Classical Formulation; Chapter 2 Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups with Particular Reference to the Negro, Robert E. Park; Chapter 3 The American Ethnic Group, W. Lloyd Warner, Leo Srole; Chapter 4 Assimilation into the Larger Society, Tamotsu Shibutani, Kian M. Kwan; Chapter 5 American Immigrant Groups: Ethnic Identification and the Problem of Generations, Vladimir C. Nahirny, Joshua A. Fishman; Chapter 6 The Nature of Assimilation, Milton M. Gordon; Part 3 Assimilation Revisited; Chapter 7 Is Assimilation Dead?, Nathan Glazer; Chapter 8 In Defense of the Assimilation Model, Ewa Morawska; Chapter 9 Toward a Reconciliation of "Assimilation" and "Pluralism": The Interplay of Acculturation and Ethnic Retention, Herbert J. Gans; Chapter 10 The Melting and the Pot: Assimilation and Variety in American Life 1, Rubén G. Rumbaut; Chapter 11 Assimilation and Dissimilation, J. Milton Yinger; Chapter 12 Race, Religion and Nationality in American Society: Model of Ethnicity-From Contact to Assimilation, Elliott Barkan; Part 4 New Directions; Chapter 13 The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants, Alejandro Portes, Min Zhou; Chapter 14 Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration, Richard Alba, Victor Nee; Chapter 15 Migration and Community Formation under Conditions of Globalization, Stephen Castles; Chapter 16 Social Spaces, Transnational Immigrant Communities, and the Politics of Incorporation, Peter Kivisto; Chapter 17 Theorizing the "Modes of Incorporation": Assimilation, Hyphenation, and Multiculturalism as Varieties of Civil Participation, Jeffrey C. Alexander;