You're listening to Civics 101, I'm Hannah McCarthy.

And I'm Nick Capity-J.

And this, my friends, is part two of a two-parter on American myths.

You can listen to it all by its loansome, of course, but I strongly recommend you go back

and give part one a listen.

Get to know our desperately clung to origin stories.

In this episode, we're going to talk about three myths for America's future, for progress,

for transformation, all of which are laid out.

So very beautifully in a book called The Myths That Made America by Haika Paul, a professor

of American studies at Friedrich Alexander University in Bavaria.

So quickly, what are we about to learn today?

That would be the frontier myth, the melting pot myth, and the myth of the self-made man.

Myth number one.

We have various versions of the melting pot.

Today, when we think melting pot, we find it often a faulty model, because it means that

we get rid of difference, and we've been cultivating difference, and we've been respecting

difference, and we think melting means erasure, or means getting rid of, or means pretending

that differences do not exist.

So in this dominant logic, melting pot has become equated with a more oppressive idea of

America and this all of American identity.

And just for those of you out there who haven't heard the term the melting pot of America,

this is the concept that in the United States, all these varied cultures and traditions

...