Immigration History

Everyone has experienced that fresh baked cookie smell and thought of some cherished family member or friend. The author’s goal in writing about ethnic food is to have the reader experience the same thing. For the author the smell of ethnic dishes like Kapusta (cabbage) Soup or Kugela(is) (potato pudding) isn’t the smell of cabbage or potatoes that is memorable but lunches at his grandmother’s house with his family, a welcome break from work at the family business next door. One problem in accomplishing this goal is that the extinction of ethnic foods in this country has been ongoing ...

The Deportation Machine traces the long and troubling history of the US government's systematic efforts to terrorize and expel immigrants over the past 140 years. This provocative, eye-opening book provides needed historical perspective on one of the most pressing social and political issues of our time. In a sweeping and engaging narrative, Adam Goodman examines how federal, state, and local officials have targeted various groups for expulsion, from Chinese and Europeans at the turn of the 20th century to Central Americans and Muslims today.

It’s 1989 in New York City. Reza is an Iranian boy who has just moved to the city with his mother to live with his stepfather and stepbrother. He’s terrified that someone will guess the truth he can barely acknowledge about himself. Reza knows he’s gay, but all he knows of gay life are the media’s images of men dying of AIDS. Judy is an aspiring fashion designer who worships her uncle Stephen, a gay man with AIDS who devotes his time to activism as a member of ACT UP. Art is Judy’s best friend, their school’s only out and proud teen.

Into the Whirlwind, the third volume of the series Main Street: The History of Buffalo, tells the story of the years leading up to the American Civil War through the point of view of the growing city of Buffalo. Only a mile from Canada across the Niagara River, Buffalo became a destination for fugitive enslaved people trying for freedom. The book tells the story of the small African-American community in Buffalo that helped on the road to Canada. Early White abolitionist George Washington Jonson left a vast diary describing his efforts on behalf of African Americans--efforts often unpopular...

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.

The time has come to acknowledge that America is weathering the worst mass border migration event in the nation's history. Millions of foreign nationals have overrun the southern border, starting on Inauguration Day in 2021, and millions more will cross over by the end of President Joe Biden's term in 2024. This event is historic by all measures, exceeding even the storied chronicles of Ellis Island, and portends the same permanent change for the nation. Unfortunately, a fog of a fierce partisan information war obscures that it is even happening.

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.

Fidel Castro is Dead! A party erupts in Little Havana, in Miami. Michael Tallen’s editor sends him to get to the heart of the story from the people there. Michael wants to be working on his second novel, but he has a bad case of writer’s block. Hoping a change of scenery might get his muse going again, he heads to south Florida on Bonnie, his vintage Triumph motorcycle. After a chance meeting with a local restaurant owner named Abelardo who used to play major league baseball in Cuba, the writer is reenergized. Sparks fly when he starts falling for the man’s gorgeous, fiery, and oh so ...

Most Holocaust survivors who came to the US after WWII settled in big cities, but some chose an alternative way of life on American farms. More of these accidental farmers wound up raising chickens in southern New Jersey than anywhere else. Speaking Yiddish to Chickens is the first book to chronicle this chapter in American Jewish history when these refugees—including the author's grandparents—found an unlikely gateway to new lives in the US on poultry farms.

Between 1846 and 1940, more than 50 million Europeans moved to the Americas, irrevocably changing both their new lands and the ones they left behind. Their immigration fostered an idea of the "land of the free", yet more than a third returned home again. In a groundbreaking study, Tara Zahra brilliantly explores the deeper story of this unprecedented movement of people.

From the end of the Baroque age and the death of Bach in 1750 to the rise of Hitler in 1933, Germany was transformed from a poor relation among Western nations into a dominant intellectual and cultural force more influential than France, Britain, Italy, Holland and the United States. In the early decades of the 20th century, German artists, writers, philosophers, scientists and engineers were leading their freshly unified country to new and undreamed of heights, and by 1933, they had won more Nobel prizes than anyone else and more than the British and Americans combined.

Most classical authors and modern historians depict the ancient Greek world as essentially stable and even static, once the so-called colonization movement came to an end. But Robert Garland argues that the Greeks were highly mobile, that their movement was essential to the survival, success, and sheer sustainability of their society, and that this wandering became a defining characteristic of their culture.

Newspaper headlines and prime-time TV interviews lauded Enrique Peña Nieto after he won Mexico’s 2012 presidential election. Time Magazine front covered him as “The Savior of Mexico.” By the second year of his administration it had become obvious that the savior was a failure. Attempted cover ups failed to conceal an economy based on self-enrichment and the impoverishment of overly 40 percent of the population and the disappearance of forty-three young student protesters. Peña Nieto’s wobbly status became even more fragile when he encountered US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Unintended Consequences reveals how America’s door closed on legal Irish immigration in the 1960s, and how America’s Irish mounted a counterattack when nation-changing political forces were sweeping the country during the era of civil rights, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War. This book looks at the full historical background to Irish migration across the Atlantic, how it helped shape the young republic, and how the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 brought a near total halt to this westward flow. Nevertheless, the Irish would not be denied and continued to make the ...

Pietro D’Arcangelo's journey began in the coal mines of Berwind-White and culminated in the heartwarming atmosphere of his own pizzeria. Born in Abruzzo, Italy, Pietro's dream wasn't just to escape the harsh life of a coal miner but to bring a piece of his homeland to America. "A Story About Pizza" delves into the rich history of Italian immigration and the merging of Italian and American cultures through the beloved dish of pizza. Erica D’Arcangelo weaves a narrative that spans generations, sharing her grandfather Pietro's dream, struggles, and triumphs. From the bustling streets of ...

Elected in 1960 as the 35th President of the USA, John Fitzgerald Kennedy remains to this day the office’s youngest incumbent and he was its first Roman Catholic. His term in office was short, but arguably no US President has inspired more people around the globe than JFK. Even today, for generations born decades after his death, President Kennedy’s legacy has an enduring appeal. This insightful book contains specially commissioned pieces by a range of respected academic and political figures, including former Obama speechwriter, Cody Kennan, the President of the Robert F. Kennedy Human...

Published for the 40th anniversary of the final days of the Vietnam War, this is the suspenseful and moving tale of how John P. Riordan, an assistant manager of Citibank's Saigon branch, devised a daring plan to save 106 Vietnamese from the dangers of the Communist takeover.

The son was born and died, and born and died again. But what of the father? How many lives did he live? And which of his deaths finally laid him to rest? In this second book in the Jane Madden genealogical mystery series, Jane must solve the riddle of a successful surgeon’s ancestry to uncover the root of his family’s success. How could a boy raised by a humble miner’s widow escape his background and climb so high on the social ladder? Is there a missing branch in the tree, or is a darker secret hiding in the shadows of the past? When the trail runs cold Jane has to move from ...

A timely argument for why the US and the West would benefit from accepting more immigrants. Impassioned, rigorous, and richly stocked with memorable stories and characters, This Land Is Our Land is a timely and necessary intervention and a literary polemic of the highest order.