I’m obsessed with the idea of America as a melting pot. We owe the term to Israel Zangwill, who wrote a mostly forgotten play of the same name in 1908. (I remember it like it was yesterday …) The play was forgettable, but the snazzy metaphor was not. “Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame!” How indeed!