Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Immigration history
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.
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
Vladka Meed joined the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, eventually escaped, and helped hundreds of children survive Nazi roundups.
Editor’s Note: William Morrow has just published Judy Batalion’s extraordinary new book,
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.
THE CASE AGAINST THE CHINAMAN
On December 21, 1901, The Saturday Evening Post published an article about immigration policy titled “The Case Against the Chinaman.” A federal law banning Chinese immits, in effect since 1882, had recently come before Congress for renewa
Are racial tendencies immutable? Almost 90 years ago, the government spent a lot of money to find out.
Late in 1994, The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, made the news in a big-time way, and the controversy still hasn’t died down.
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
A walk through the old Jewish Lower East Side of New York City recalls the era when that battered, close-packed quarter was a high-pressure machine for the manufacture of Americans.
Walking Manhattan’s Lower East Side is like browsing through a family album of American Jewry.
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