No one any longer believes that America is the great melting pot. Ethnicity is the word. We now know that we are not all one, that our diverse origins and backgrounds persist in spite of the best efforts of educators and "Dick and Jane" readers.

This is simply the formal recognition of what has been for some time an unconscious, largely unvoiced assumption: that people remain different, and that our civilization is a pluralistic one. From July 3 through 14 the Smithsonian will celebrate this realization with its eighth consecutive Festival of American Folklife. Begun in 1967 as an effort to remind industrialized urban citizens of the ...