Statue of Liberty Ellis Island – serie

This is the first complete account of the epic tale of the Icarians and their dream of creating a perfect society without money or property. Robert P. Sutton analyzes the origins of Icarianism in the milieu of French politics in the 1840s, discusses its founder Etienne Cabet, and traces the eventual creation of six communal societies in Illinois, Iowa, and California between 1848 and 1898. Les Icariens is a fascinating amalgam of biography, a history of French Socialism, and the story of one of the longest-lived secular communal experiments in America.

In this deftly researched ethnographic portrait, Suzanne M. Sinke skillfully adapts the concept of social reproduction to examine the shifting gender roles of tens of thousands of Dutch Protestant women who crossed the Atlantic from 1880 to 1920 to make new homes in the United States.Examining the domain of the home as well as the related realms of education, religion, healthcare, and worldview, Sinke discerns women's contributions to the creation and adaptation of families and communities, pointing out how they differed from those of men.  Through Sinke's articulate and captivating descriptions of real women, the statistical evidence comes to life, providing valuable and heretofore unexamined views on the international marriage market, language shifts, the acquisition of American customs, the church's role in adaptation, and the shifting economies that allowed women to work outside of the home.  A parallel analysis of the United States and the Netherlands as developing welfare states provides a fascinating look at what Dutch immigrant women left behind compared to what they faced in America regarding healthcare, education, and quality-of-life issues.  Lively and absorbing, the stories of these women's lives are told largely in their own words as preserved in personal letters and diaries. Supplemented by photographs and accounts from archived interviews and Dutch American newspapers, each chapter includes an in-depth portrait of one Dutch immigrant woman and multiple examples from the lives of others. Effectively giving voice to the women who shaped Dutch American culture, Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880-1920 is an important and groundbreaking contribution to immigration and women's history.

Challenging long-held patriarchal assumptions about Italian women's work in the United States

An examination of Italian immigrants and their children in the early twentieth century, A New Language, A New World is the first full-length historical case study of one immigrant group's experience with language in America. Incorporating the interdisciplinary literature on language within a historical framework, Nancy C. Carnevale illustrates the complexity of the topic of language in American immigrant life. By looking at language from the perspectives of both immigrants and the dominant culture as well as their interaction, this book reveals the role of language in the formation of ethnic identity and the often coercive context within which immigrants must negotiate this process.

The emergence, maturity, and decline of the southern California citrus industry is seen here through the network of citrus worker villages that dotted part of the state's landscape from 1910 to 1960.  Labor and Community shows how Mexican immigrants shaped a partially independent existence within a fiercely hierarchical framework of economic and political relationships. GonzÁlez relies on a variety of published sources and interviews with longtime residents to detail the education of village children; the Americanization of village adults; unionization and strikes; and the decline of the citrus picker village and rise of the urban barrio. His insightful study of the rural dimensions of Mexican-American life prior to World War II adds balance to a long-standing urban bias in Chicano historiography.

As much of the world tried to return to normal living and working patterns after World War II, some 70,000 British women chose to be uprooted from the homeland they knew and loved. These were British war brides, a uniformly young group who by marrying American servicemen became part of the largest single group of female immigrants to the United States.     Though the women came to the U.S. from all parts of the British Isles, they were an unusually homogeneous group, averaging 23 years of age, from working- or lower-middle-class families and having completed mandatory schooling to the age of fourteen. For the most part they emigrated alone and didn't move into an existing immigrant population.     Jenel Virden draws on records in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the Public Record Office in London, as well as questionnaires and personal interviews, in relating the women's story. Virden finds that the marriages actually took place in spite of, rather than because of, the war.      And, while the women benefited from special nonrestrictive immigration legislation--and found public welcomes and a good deal of favorable publicity when they arrived--they also had much in common with other immigrant groups, including a strong sense of ethnic identity.

Even before the massive European immigrations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Detroit had a tradition of Catholicism. Multiple immigrant groups became part of the city and considered it important to educate their daughters as well as their sons within the Church.     JoEllen McNergney Vinyard's comprehensive examination of parochial education in Detroit within the broader context of that city's urbanization patterns yields a richly detailed addition to our understanding of the European immigrant experience.      For Faith and Fortune will be of interest to historians and scholars of urban studies, particularly immigration, schooling, and the Catholic experience.

In Italian Workers of the World, a distinguished roster of contributors examines how the reception of immigrants in their new countries shaped their sense of national identity and shaped the multiethnic states where they settled. Argentina and Brazil welcomed Italian migrants as a civilizing influence, and these immigrant workers played an instrumental part in establishing and leading movements committed to labor internationalism. In the United States, by contrast, the American Federation of Labor's hostility to socialism, internationalism, and unskilled laborers fueled distrust and xenophobia that steered Italian immigrants into ethnically mixed unions like radical Industrial Workers of the World. Essays also focus on specific topics ranging from the work of republican Garibaldians in South America to antifascist currents among Italian migrants in France and the United States, and from a 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. Contributors: Antonio Bechelloni, Fernando J. Devoto, Pietro Rinaldo Fanesi, Donna R. Gabaccia, Mirta Zaida Lobato, Fraser M. Ottanelli, Carina Frid de Silberstein, Michael Miller Topp, Angelo Trento, Nadia Venturini, and Elisabetta Vezzosi

Presenting a nuanced story of women, migration, community, industry, and civic life at the turn of the twentieth century, Carol Lynn McKibben's Beyond Cannery Row analyzes the processes of migration and settlement of Sicilian fishers from three villages in Western Sicily to Monterey, California--and sometimes back again. McKibben's analysis of gender and gender roles shows that it was the women in this community who had the insight, the power, and the purpose to respond and even prosper amid changing economic conditions. Vividly evoking the immigrants' everyday experiences through first-person accounts and detailed description, McKibben demonstrates that the cannery work done by Sicilian immigrant women was crucial in terms of the identity formation and community development. These changes allowed their families to survive the challenges of political conflicts over citizenship in World War II and intermarriage with outsiders throughout the migration experience. The women formed voluntary associations and celebrated festas that effectively linked them with each other and with their home villages in Sicily. Continuous migration created a strong sense of transnationalism among Sicilians in Monterey, which has enabled them to continue as a viable ethnic community today.

An introduction to the best from the new directions in U.S. immigration historyRepresenting a selection of the finest new research on immigration, American Dreaming, Global Realities explores the ways in which immigrant lives and those of their children are shaped by transnational bonds, globalization, family ties, and personal choice, and the ways in which they engender a sense of belonging and a sense of themselves as “Americans.” American Dreaming, Global Realities considers a plurality of very specific historical, economic, regional, familial, and cultural contexts. This history reveals resistance and accommodation, both persistent older traditions and Americanization, plus the creation of new cultural forms blending old and new. The twenty-two interdisciplinary essays included in this collection explore the intricate overlapping of race, class, and gender on ethnic identity and on American citizenship.

Mexican Chicago builds on previous studies of Mexicans in the United States while challenging static definitions of “American” and underlying assumptions of assimilation. Gabriela F. Arredondo contends that because of the revolutionary context from which they came, Mexicans in Chicago between 1916 and 1939 were not just another ethnic group working to be assimilated into a city that has a long history of incorporating newcomers. Suggesting a new understanding of identity formation, she argues that Mexicans wielded tools of identification forged in revolutionary Mexico to collectively battle the prejudices of ethnic groups that included Poles, Italians, and the Irish, as well as African Americans. By turning inward, however, Mexicans also highlighted tremendous differences among themselves, such as gender and class. In discussing this distinctive process of becoming “Mexican” in Chicago during the early twentieth century, Arredondo not only explores how that identity was constructed but also provides telling insight into the repercussions of that identity formation process.