Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Immigration
Stereotyped as the model minority, Asian Americans do not fit easily into the narrative of race in America.
Editor’s Note: Michael Luo is the Executive Editor of The New Yorker and the author of Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, from which portions of this essay was adapted.
Persecuted as “heretics,” the Puritans emigrated to Massachusetts, where Governor John Winthrop hoped to create a “Citty upon a Hill.”
Editor’s Note: After a distinguished career as a journalist, television commentator, and president and editor-in-chief of Congressional Quarterly, Robert Merry turned to writing history.
Fighting for labor rights in California's Central Valley, Dolores Clara Fernandez Huerta took up la causa in the name of children.
The Kennedys, despite their many successes, always remembered the discrimination against Irish immigrants.
My father has a memory of my great-grandmother Rose tha
No war, no national crisis, has left a greater impress on the American psyche than the successive waves of new arrivals that quite literally built the country.
Contents
In the Beginning: 1607–1798
The Young Republic, 1815–60
High Tide and Reaction: 1885–1930
The Third World Comes to the U.S: 1965–90
The daughter of a Gaelic-speaking fisherman on a remote Scottish island emigrated to New York, worked as a maid in the Carnegie Mansion, and married Fred Trump. Her son would become a tycoon like his father and then the president.
Editor's Note: Nina Burleigh was National Political Correspondent for Newsweek and has written for numerous publications including Time, The New York Times, New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. She is the author of seven books includin
The Statue of Liberty has been glorified, romanticized, trivialized, and over-publicized. But the idea of “Liberty Enlightening the World” endures.
In a nation of immigrants, picking ten books about the immigrant experience is no easy task. One could plausibly argue that any book about post-Columbian America concerns the immigrant experience.
A walk with my great-grandfather through the last foreign country in New York City
It’s a politician’s bromide, and it also happens to be a profound truth. No war, no national crisis, has left a greater impress on the American psyche than the successive waves of new arrivals that quite literally built the country. Now that arguments against immigration are rising again, it is well to remember that every single one of them has been heard before.
The uproar over Zoë Baird has subsided by now, and readers with short memories may profit by a reminder that she was forced to withdraw as President Clinton’s first nominee tor Attorney General because she and her husband had hired two “illegal aliens” for ba
Just before the American Revolution, the flight of British subjects to the New World forced a panicky English government to wrestle with this question.
In the early 1770s, it still seemed likely that the struggle between Britain and her American colonies would be peacefully resolved. If it had been, history would have recorded far more clearly a remarkable development that was temporarily cut off by the AmericanRevolution.
The Facts Behind the Current Controversy Over Immigration
For more than a century, Irish-Americans were whipsawed between love for their tormented native land and loyalty to the United States. But no more .
The Honorable Hugh L. Carey, Democratic governor of the state of New York, made a speech in Dublin on April 22, 1977.
A ponderous memorial to a people who refused to vanish
Refugees from the French Revolution, many of them of noble birth, built a unique community in the backwoods of Pennsylvania—and hoped their queen would join them
On October 7, 1798, the streets of Philadelphia were ominously deserted. A yellow-fever epidemic was at its height. Anyone who could had fled the city, and few would enter it voluntarily.
It moved more boys and girls than the Children’s Crusade of the Middle Ages—and to far happier conclusions
Among the thousands of homeless children deposited at the Children’s Aid Society in 1875 by orphan asylums, courts, and other institutions was a four-year-old named Willie, sent by the New York Prison Association.
Featured Authors
