Core Course 1 The Peopling of America: A History of Immigrants

More immigrants from the most diverse set of origins spanning the longest sustained period of time have made America their home than any other nation in the history of the world. This four-session course examines the history of that immigration with particular emphasis on the mass migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Participants will study the role that immigrant groups have played in making and remaking the nation’s multicultural history. The course looks at the “push” and “pull” factors which helped propel newcomers to this country and will situate this migration within the context of a continuing global process. Class members will discuss obstacles that immigrants to the United States have faced in the past and how these challenges have changed or remained the same. Through an exploration of the complexities of assimilation, they will investigate the meaning of American identity and the ways it has been transformed by the inclusion of immigrants.

For more than three centuries, the people of the United States have been preoccupied with their diversity, worried about whether the centrifugal forces of race, religion, language and national origin would eventually split the country apart. The course will address the question of who shall be allowed to become an American, an issue that has dominated the public agenda of the United States for decades and continues to do so today. Americans are continually searching for ways to fulfill their egalitarian ideas without dissolving their community. Thus, participants will consider the widely varying responses Americans have had to large-scale immigration.

Photo credit: Statue of Liberty, New York City. c1898. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

About the Consulting Scholar

Through class discussion, assigned readings, and in-class videos, students in this course will work to answer the following discussion questions, among others:

1. What were some reasons that immigrants gave for coming to America?


2. Was the immigrant experience different for men than women?


3. How did different generations from the same family respond to the change?


4. At the turn of the 20th century, the question of “What is an American?” was asked with increasing urgency as Anglo-Americans and other older stock immigrants publicized their concerns over the increasing number of “aliens” who were flooding the nation’s shores. What were the stereotypes of the generic immigrant and the generic American in the post-Civil War era? Are these stereotypes different today?


5. How did new immigrants mix with other new people from different nationalities in the crowded spaces of urban America? How did they adjust, adapt and change according to new living conditions?


6. What are the differences between the contemporary flow of immigrants and those who came at the turn of the last century?

Barkan, Elliot R. And Still They Come: Immigrants and American Society 1920 to the 1990s. Harlan Davidson, 1996.

Berrol, Selma Cantor. Growing Up American: Immigrant Children in America Then and Now. Twayne Publishers, 1995.

Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Indiana University Press, 1985.

Brown, Wesley and Amy Ling, eds. Visions of America: Personal Narratives from the Promised Land. Persea Books, 1993.

Conolly-Smith, Peter. Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895-1918. Smithsonian Books, 2004.

Daniels, Roger. Coming To America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. Harper Collins, 1990.

Daniels, Roger. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882. Hill and Wang, 2004.

Diner, Hasia. Hungering for America, Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration. Harvard University Press, 2001.

Dinnerstein, Leonard et al. Natives and Strangers: A Multicultural History of Americans. Oxford University Press, 2003.

D’Innocienzo, Michael and Josef Sirefman, eds. Immigration and Ethnicity: American Society – “Melting Pot” Or “Salad Bowl”? Greenwood Press, 1992.

Dublin, Thomas, ed. Immigrant Voices: New Lives in America 1773-1986. University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Ferrante, Joan and Prince Browne, Jr, eds. The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States. Prentice Hall, 2001.

Fields, Barbara. “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds. New Oxford University Press, 1982: 143-177.

Foner, Nancy. From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration. Yale University Press, 2000.

Fuchs, Lawrence. The American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity and the Civic Culture. Wesleyan University Press, 1990.

Gabaccia, Donna. Immigration and American Diversity. Blackwell, 2002.

Gabaccia, Donna. From the Other Side: Women, Gender & Immigrant Life in the U.S. 1820-1990. Indiana University Press, 1994.

Gjerde, Jon. Major Problems in American Immigration and Ethnic History. Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Greenbaum, Susan. More than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa. University Press of Florida, 2002.

Greene, Victor. American Immigrant Leaders, 1800-1910; Marginality and Identity. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Guglielmo, Thomas. White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945. Oxford University Press, 2003

Gutiérrez, David. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. University of California, 1995.

Halter, Marilyn. Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860-1965. University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People. Little, Brown and Co., 1952.

Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925. Rutgers University Press, 1955.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette ed. Gender and U.S. Immigration. University of California Press, 2003.

Hollinger, David. Postethnic America. Basic Books, 1995.

Jacobson, David. The Immigration Reader: America in a Multidisciplinary Perspective. Blackwell, 1998.

Jacobsen, Matthew F. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Harvard University Press, 1998.

Kenny, Kevin. The American Irish: A History. Longman, 2000.

Kraut, Alan M. The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880-1921. Harlan Davidson, 1982.

Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Levitt, Peggy. Transnational Villagers. University of California Press, 2001.

Miller, Kirby. Emigrants and Exiles; Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press, 2004.

Nugent, Walter. Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914. Indiana University Press, 1992.

Overland, Orm. Immigrant Minds, American Identities: Making the United States Home, 18701930. University of Illinois, 2000.

Portes, Alejandro and Rubén Rumbaut. Immigrant America. University of California Press, 1990.

Reimers, David. Other Americans: The Global Origins of the American People. New York University Press, 2005.

Rumbaut, Ruben G. and Alejandro Portes. Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation. University of California Press, 2001.

Rumbaut, Ruben G. and Alejandro Portes. eds. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. University of California Press, 2001.

Sanchez, George. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Schaefer, Richard T. Race and Ethnicity in the United States. Prentice Hall, 2001.

Sollors, Werner, ed. The Invention of Ethnicity. Oxford University Press, 1988.

Stavans, Ilan. The Hispanic Condition: Reflections on Culture and Identity in America. Harper Collins Publishers, 1995.

Steinberg, Stephen. The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America. Beacon Press, 2001.

Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Back Bay Books, 1994.

Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from Different Shores: A History of Asian Americans America. Back Bay Books, rev. edition, 1998.

Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia and Marjorie Lightman. Ellis Island and the Peopling of America. The New Press, 1997.

Waters, Mary. Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. Harvard University Press, 1999.