America has, since the late 1800s, been known as a "melting pot" of cultures due to the assimilation and adoptions of customs of the early immigrants. Pizza and St. Patrick's Day are both results of this cultural blending. As new groups of immigrants, particularly non-Europeans, began pouring into the US, America donned a new label: the cultural "fruit salad." This new moniker referred to the resistance of many cultures towards assimilation. Willa Cather's gem of historical fiction, Death Comes for the Archbishop, explores cultural relations in the southwestern United States of the mid-1800s. Cather's novel follows a French Jesuit priest, Father Latour, as he takes on the duties of Bishop in the lands acquired by the US in the Mexican War. This is an area in and around New Mexico. Latour must organize a diocese in which no one seems to get along: the Americans are committing...