The melting pot is an analogy for the way in which heterogeneous societies become more homogeneous, in which the ingredients in the pot (people of different cultures, races and religions) are combined so as to develop a multi-ethnic society. The term, which originates from the United States, is often used to describe societies experiencing large scale immigration from many different countries. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the metaphor of a "crucible" or "(s)melting pot" was used to describe the fusion of different nationalities, ethnicities and cultures.

It was used together with concepts of America as an ideal republic and a "city upon a hill" or new promised land. It was a metaphor for the idealized process of immigration and colonization by which different nationalities, cultures and "races" (a term that could encompass nationality, ethnicity and race) were to blend into a new, virtuous community, and it was connected to utopian visions of the emergence of an American "new man". The exact term "melting pot" came into general usage in 1908, after the premiere of the play The Melting Pot by Israel Zangwill.

Prior to Zangwill, the first use in American literature of the concept of immigrants "melting" into the receiving culture are found in the writings of J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur.

In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782) Crevecoeur writes, in response to his own question, "What then is the American, this new man?" that the American is one who "leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world."

Similar to 0 things you like: