Immigration History

In May of 1945, German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, effectively ending World War II in Europe. But millions of lost and homeless POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and concentration camp survivors overwhelmed Germany, a country in complete disarray. British and American soldiers gathered the malnourished and desperate foreigners, and attempted to repatriate them to Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and the USSR. But after exhaustive efforts, there remained over a million displaced persons who either refused to go home or had no home to which to return.

At the same time that the Civil Rights Movement brought increasing opportunities for blacks, the United States liberalized its immigration policy. While the broadening of the United States's borders to non-European immigrants fits with a black political agenda of social justice, recent waves of immigration have presented a dilemma for blacks, prompting ambivalent or even negative attitudes toward migrants. What has an expanded immigration regime meant for how blacks express national attachment?

Beginning in the summer of 1903, an insidious crime wave filled New York City, and then the entire country, with fear. The children of Italian immigrants were kidnapped, and dozens of innocent victims were gunned down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators, Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths. The perpetrators seemed both omnipresent and invisible. Their only calling card: the symbol of a black hand.

The United States has long been touted as a place where anyone with a little grit and determination could come to pursue the American Dream. But as more walls are erected and borders are closed, is that dream still alive today?

Paris Is Not Dead explores the past, present, and future of the City of Light through the lens of class conflict, highlighting the outsized role of immigrants in shaping the city's progressive, cosmopolitan, and open-minded character--at a time when politics nationwide can feel like they're shifting in the opposite direction. This is the Paris many tourists too often miss: immigrant-heavy districts such as the 18th arrondissement, where crowded street markets still define everyday life. Stangler brings this view of the city to life.

Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized the forced relocation of ethnic Germans from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable: between twelve and fourteen million civilians, most of them women and children. And the losses were horrifying: at least five hundred thousand people, and perhaps many more, died while detained in former concentration camps, locked in trains, or after arriving in Germany malnourished, and homeless.

In 1845, a fungus began to destroy Ireland’s potato crop, triggering a famine that would kill one million Irish men, women, and children—and drive over one million more to flee for America. Ten years later, the United States had been transformed by this stupendous migration, nowhere more than New York: by 1855, roughly a third of all adults living in Manhattan were immigrants who had escaped the hunger in Ireland.

The Constructed Mennonite is a unique account of a life shaped by Stalinism, Nazism, migration, famine, and war. It investigates the tenuous spaces where individual experiences inform and become public history; it studies the ways in which memory shapes identity, and reveals how context and audience shape autobiographical narratives.

A Century of Immigration reviews the century of 1820 through 1920, in which there were two waves of immigration to the United States.

This book discusses the varied motivations and nationalities of these new Americans, as well as the effects of mass immigration on the country as a whole, and the rise of antiforeign sentiments among more recent immigrants.

This monumental work of cultural history was nominated for a National Book Award. It chronicles America's transformation, beginning in 1880, into a nation of consumers, devoted to a cult of comfort, bodily well-being, and endless acquisition.

We begin with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, chanting Hai Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they are drawn together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns and in crowded city apartments.

A new audiobook by the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experience and identity. "Latino" is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of...

The history of the United States has been shaped by immigration. Historians Carl J. Bon Tempo and Hasia R. Diner provide a sweeping historical narrative told through the lives and words of the quite ordinary people who did nothing less than make the nation.

Professor Vincent J. Cannato delivers a definitive history of America's landmark port of entry. From eyewitness accounts, Cannato weaves together a poignant testament to the hopes and fears of "huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

Longlisted for the 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction A New York Times Most Anticipated Book "Henry Goodman is an excellent narrator, in particular due to his ability to give unique voices to figures ranging from Theodore Herzl to Basshe." — AudioFile This dazzling, innovative family...

The history of Russian espionage is soaked in blood, from a spontaneous pistol shot that killed a secret policeman in Romania in 1924 to the attempt to poison an exiled KGB colonel in Salisbury, England, in 2017. Russian émigrés have found themselves continually at the center of the mayhem. Russians began leaving the country in big numbers in the late 19th century, fleeing pogroms, tsarist secret police persecution, and the Revolution, then Stalin and the KGB - and creating the third-largest diaspora in the world.

San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and destructive force. In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, San Francisco and a string of towns to its north-northwest and the south-southeast were overcome by an enormous shaking that was compounded by the violent shocks of an earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter scale.

With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.

When Jason DeParle moved into the Manila slums with Tita Comodas and her family three decades ago, he never imagined his reporting on them would span three generations and turn into the defining chronicle of a new age - the age of global migration. In a monumental book that gives new meaning to "immersion journalism", DeParle paints an intimate portrait of an unforgettable family as they endure years of sacrifice and separation, willing themselves out of shantytown poverty into a new global middle class.

When Ye Pei dreamed of Venice as a girl, she imagined a magical floating city of canals and gondola rides. And she imagined her mother, successful in her new life and eager to embrace the daughter she had never forgotten. But when Ye Pei arrives in Italy, she learns her mother works on a farm far from the city. Her only connection, a mean-spirited Chinese auntie, puts Ye Pei to work in a small-town café. Rather than giving up and returning to China, a determined Ye Pei takes on a grueling schedule.