Eric Zuelow interviewed by BBC Magazine on the secessionist petitions in the U.S.

Eric Zuelow, Ph.D., 91AV assistant professor of European history, was interviewed for a Dec. 9, 2012 BBC News Magazine story on "Secession petitions: Why Americans don't really want to break up."

The story looks at why secessionists who started petitions in their states to withdraw from the United States after the November elections don't stand a chance.

Zuelow told the magazine that it is significant that America is a place where waves of incomers have aspired to settle and assimilate.  "That immigrant experience is built into the national mythology. It's about the mythology of the melting pot," he says.

He added that minority and ethnic groups tend to have spread out and intermixed sufficiently to prevent any linguistic or cultural equivalents of Quebec emerging. "Certainly the US has different regional cultures but they are not framed as national cultures - they are all under the heading 'America'," Zuelow said.

Zuelow is co-editor of Nationalism in a Global Era: The Persistence of Nations, editor of Touring Beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History, and is author of Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War.

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