"'The ideological shift to diversity led to a reconception of the very nature of America,' historian Bruce Schulman noted, 'to see the nation not as a melting pot where many different peoples and cultures contributed to one common stew, but as discrete peoples and cultures sharing the same places--a tapestry, salad bowl, or rainbow.' While such changes did much to preserve and protect the individual cultures of different groups, they effectively eroded any sense of national community along the way and established one of the deepest of the new fault lines. Instead of a coherent and cohesive identity, Americans now had diversity and division."