Immigration History

From the acclaimed cultural critic and New York Times best-selling author of This Will Be My Undoing - a writer whom Roxane Gay has hailed as “a force to be reckoned with” - comes this powerful story of her journey to understand her Northern and Southern roots, the Great Migration, and the displacement of black people across America.

Dawit Gebremichael Habte fled his homeland of Eritrea as a teenager. In the midst of the ongoing Eritrean-Ethiopian war, Dawit and his sisters crossed illegally into Kenya. Without their parents or documents to help their passage, they experienced the abuse and neglect known by so many refugees around the world. But he refused to give up. He stayed resilient and positive. Journeying to the United States under asylum - and still a boy - he found a new purpose in an unfamiliar land.

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.

In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African-American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write.

Reprint of the classic textbook: 10th Anniversary 2021 Edition. Chicago history/culture with an Italian flair! There is something for everybody in this eclectic volume. Every reader will find a topic or a writer that s/he wants to know more about. Publication of Reconstructing Italians in Chicago is a major step toward making Chicago's Italians the best documented (and best understood) in the nation. It is a gateway to both the academic and the personal exploration of Italians in Chicago, loaded with references that lead the reader to just about every source of information on the subject. ...

Who are the Minutemen? Patriots? Racists? Vigilantes? Harel Shapira lived with the Minutemen and patrolled the border with them, seeking neither to condemn nor praise them, but to understand who they are and what they do. Challenging simplistic depictions of these men as right-wing fanatics with loose triggers, Shapira discovers a group of men who long for community and embrace the principles of civic engagement. Yet these desires and convictions have led them to a troubling place.

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 ...

The Scots are one of the world's greatest nations of emigrants. For centuries, untold numbers of men, women, and children sought their fortunes in every part of the globe, from the British Empire to the United States, in cities and on prairie farms, as traders, bankers, missionaries, soldiers, politicians, and engineers.

Before there was Coronavirus, before there was the contentious 2020 election or the entire Trump presidency, there was a turning-point year that proved momentous and transformative for American politics and the fate of the nation.

This is a love story of great beauty and great tenderness, the kind of love story that entangles the listener in the lives of the characters, so that after the story is over, one continues to live with those characters. And fortunately, the listener will not have to say farewell to these characters, since it is the first in a series that will tell the story of three Californian families over the course of the 20th century.

Becoming German tells the intriguing story of the largest and earliest mass movement of German-speaking immigrants to America. The so-called Palatine migration of 1709 began in the western part of the Holy Roman Empire, where perhaps as many as 30,000 people left their homes, lured by rumors that Britain's Queen Anne would give them free passage overseas and land in America.

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.

Throughout his presidency, John F. Kennedy was passionate about the issue of immigration reform. He believed that America is a nation of people who value both tradition and the exploration of new frontiers, deserving the freedom to build better lives for themselves in their adopted homeland.

By the middle of the 19th century, New York City's population surpassed the unfathomable number of one million people.This was mostly due to the fact that so many immigrants heading to America naturally landed in New York Harbor, well before the federal government set up an official immigration system on Ellis Island. Many of these immigrants, who were arriving with little more than the clothes on their back, didn't travel far and thus remained in New York.

There's no public policy issue that divides Americans more stridently than immigration. The principal arguments have remained consistent for more than two centuries, without a common ground ever being reached. Now, in Immigration Wars, Jeb Bush and leading constitutional litigator Clint Bolick deliver a comprehensive solution based on two core principles: Immigration is vital to America's future, fueling its growth, vibrancy, and creativity; but any enduring solution must follow America's laws.

Author Stephen Birmingham, who chronicled the rise of Jewish immigrants to extraordinary wealth and success in Our Crowd, now turns his attention to the Irish. Real Lace tells the colorful and fascinating true stories of America’s most renowned Irish-Catholic families. Scions of courageous, driven, and resilient men and women who escaped starvation during Ireland’s terrible potato famine in the mid-19th century, they battled their way out of the slums of Boston and New York, overcoming prejudice and poverty to achieve great wealth, fame, and political power.

This book details the movement of people and cultures around the world—from the early migrations of Homo erectus out of Africa 50,000 years ago to modern refugee movements and migrations.

The great author Robert Louis Stevenson received a fateful telegram from his friend Fanny Osbourne in 1879, urging him to leave Edinburgh and join her in San Francisco. The penniless young writer packed his bags and boarded a ship for a long, difficult voyage across the Atlantic, taking detailed notes of the appalling conditions and struggles of his fellow emigrants.

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.

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.