1. A Quilt of a Country
By Anna Quindlen

2. Background Written Sep 26, 2001
Written to show us why all the different people and cultures our needed to make our country
Happened while 9/11 happened

3. Summary
In a "Quilt of a Country” Anna Quindlen explains how most people view our country today, using a quilt as a metaphor. All the different backgrounds, races, and cultures make up the patches of the whole quilt, being America. She tells us how immigrants today are no different than our immigrant ancestors. They both came to America in search of a better life.

4. Relevance
It is important because it shows us that we weren't always Americans ourselves and why we came to America in the first place. It also shows that we should allow others to come too.
It stood the test of time because its how the country was born.

5. What is the main claim here?
“America is an improbable idea. A mongrel nation built of ever-changing disparate parts…”
America is a country that functions well despite the fact that it shouldn’t. It’s unique because the country perseveres even though other countries with similar challenges have dissolved.

6. “Quilt” Metaphor
America is made up of many different cultures that don’t resemble each other, yet are stitched together into a unified whole.
America has ties that bind its people in spite of differences.

7. Counterargument/Rebuttal
Words like “bigotry”, “slavery”, “sweatshops”, and “ostracism” all support the opposing claim.
Opposing claim: America as a nation fails more than it succeeds.

8. Claim, Reason, & Evidence
One example:
Claim: “Historians must have forgotten the past, or have gilded it.”
Reason: “This is a nation founded on a conundrum, what Mario Cuomo has characterized as community added to individualism."
Evidence: “The New York of my children is no more Balkanized…than the Philadelphia of my father…”

9. Use of rhetoric!
“Do the Cambodians and the Mexicans in California coexist less easily today than did the Irish and Italians of Massachusetts a century ago? You know the answer.”
Author uses rhetorical questions here, suggesting readers know the answer.
Where’s the evidence to answer this question?

10. More uses of rhetoric… “What is the point of this splintered whole?”
“What is the point of a nation in which Arab cabbies chauffeur Jewish passengers…?”
“What is the point of a nation in which one part seems to be always…?”
The author can emphasize ideas using rhetoric that doesn’t expect an answer.

11. THE END 