Crossing Borders

Crossing Borders PDF Author: Dorothee Schneider
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674267109
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Aspiring immigrants to the United States make many separate border crossings in their quest to become Americans—in their home towns, ports of departure, U.S. border stations, and in American neighborhoods, courthouses, and schools. In a book of remarkable breadth, Dorothee Schneider covers both the immigrants’ experience of their passage from an old society to a new one and American policymakers’ debates over admission to the United States and citizenship. Bringing together the separate histories of Irish, English, German, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants, the book opens up a fresh view of immigrant aspirations and government responses. Ingenuity and courage emerge repeatedly from these stories, as immigrants adapted their particular resources, especially social networks, to make migration and citizenship successful on their own terms. While officials argued over immigrants’ fitness for admission and citizenship, immigrant communities forced the government to alter the meaning of race, class, and gender as criteria for admission. Women in particular made a long transition from dependence on men to shapers of their own destinies. Schneider aims to relate the immigrant experience as a totality across many borders. By including immigrant voices as well as U.S. policies and laws, she provides a truly transnational history that offers valuable perspectives on current debates over immigration.

Crossing Borders

Crossing Borders PDF Author: Dorothee Schneider
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674267109
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book Here

Book Description
Aspiring immigrants to the United States make many separate border crossings in their quest to become Americans—in their home towns, ports of departure, U.S. border stations, and in American neighborhoods, courthouses, and schools. In a book of remarkable breadth, Dorothee Schneider covers both the immigrants’ experience of their passage from an old society to a new one and American policymakers’ debates over admission to the United States and citizenship. Bringing together the separate histories of Irish, English, German, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants, the book opens up a fresh view of immigrant aspirations and government responses. Ingenuity and courage emerge repeatedly from these stories, as immigrants adapted their particular resources, especially social networks, to make migration and citizenship successful on their own terms. While officials argued over immigrants’ fitness for admission and citizenship, immigrant communities forced the government to alter the meaning of race, class, and gender as criteria for admission. Women in particular made a long transition from dependence on men to shapers of their own destinies. Schneider aims to relate the immigrant experience as a totality across many borders. By including immigrant voices as well as U.S. policies and laws, she provides a truly transnational history that offers valuable perspectives on current debates over immigration.

The Archive Thief

The Archive Thief PDF Author: Lisa Moses Leff
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199380953
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski gathered up tens of thousands of documents from Nazi buildings in Berlin, and later, public archives and private synagogues in France, and moved them all, illicitly, to New York. In The Archive Thief, Lisa Moses Leff reconstructs Szajkowski's story in all its ambiguity.

Testimonies of Transition

Testimonies of Transition PDF Author: Marjory Harper
Publisher: Luath Press Ltd
ISBN: 1912387395
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Marjory Harper explores the motives and experiences of migrants, settlers and returners by focusing on the personal testimonies of the two million men, women and children who left Scotland in the 20th century.

Homesickness

Homesickness PDF Author: Susan J. Matt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199913250
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Homesickness today is dismissed as a sign of immaturity, what children feel at summer camp, but in the nineteenth century it was recognized as a powerful emotion. When gold miners in California heard the tune "Home, Sweet Home," they sobbed. When Civil War soldiers became homesick, army doctors sent them home, lest they die. Such images don't fit with our national mythology, which celebrates the restless individualism of colonists, explorers, pioneers, soldiers, and immigrants who supposedly left home and never looked back. Using letters, diaries, memoirs, medical records, and psychological studies, this wide-ranging book uncovers the profound pain felt by Americans on the move from the country's founding until the present day. Susan Matt shows how colonists in Jamestown longed for and often returned to England, African Americans during the Great Migration yearned for their Southern homes, and immigrants nursed memories of Sicily and Guadalajara and, even after years in America, frequently traveled home. These iconic symbols of the undaunted, forward-looking American spirit were often homesick, hesitant, and reluctant voyagers. National ideology and modern psychology obscure this truth, portraying movement as easy, but in fact Americans had to learn how to leave home, learn to be individualists. Even today, in a global society that prizes movement and that condemns homesickness as a childish emotion, colleges counsel young adults and their families on how to manage the transition away from home, suburbanites pine for their old neighborhoods, and companies take seriously the emotional toll borne by relocated executives and road warriors. In the age of helicopter parents and boomerang kids, and the new social networks that sustain connections across the miles, Americans continue to assert the significance of home ties. By highlighting how Americans reacted to moving farther and farther from their roots, Homesickness: An American History revises long-held assumptions about home, mobility, and our national identity.

The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World

The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World PDF Author: Tara Zahra
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393285596
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
"Zahra handles this immensely complicated and multidimensional history with remarkable clarity and feeling." —Robert Levgold, Foreign Affairs Between 1846 and 1940, more than 50 million Europeans moved to the Americas in one of the largest migrations of human history, emptying out villages and irrevocably changing both their new homes and the ones they left behind. With a keen historical perspective on the most consequential social phenomenon of the twentieth century, Tara Zahra shows how the policies that gave shape to this migration provided the precedent for future events such as the Holocaust, the closing of the Iron Curtain, and the tragedies of ethnic cleansing. In the epilogue, she places the current refugee crisis within the longer history of migration.

Notes on the Trapp Family in Austria

Notes on the Trapp Family in Austria PDF Author: Frederick S. Litten
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3752835079
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
This study is about the real Austrian Trapp family until 1939. Using scores of contemporaneous sources, this fully referenced book for the first time presents Maria Trapp's own family: the Kutscheras, the Reiners, and her foster family, the Kramers. Moreover, the first chapter critically analyzes Maria's tales about her childhood and youth up to her wedding with Georg (von) Trapp. The second chapter covers Georg, his family, his activities in war and business, as well as the family choir started in 1934. Several misconceptions, from Georg having been a baron to his alleged anti-fascism, get corrected here, too. The third chapter overturns the central myth of the Trapp family story: there is no evidence that the Trapps ever received offers by the Nazis or resisted them; on the contrary, Georg unsuccessfully tried to solicit business in Germany. Nor were the Trapps in danger of persecution, or fled from Austria. Filled with details as well as context, this book is different from everything you have ever seen, heard, or read about the Trapp family. But please note that this book is not about the adaptations of the family's stories, such as "The Sound of Music", nor does it contain illustrations.

Encountering Ellis Island

Encountering Ellis Island PDF Author: Ronald H. Bayor
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421413671
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
What happened along the journey? How did the processing of so many people work? What were the reactions of the newly arrived to the process (and threats) of inspection, delays, hospitalization, detention, and deportation? How did immigration officials attempt to protect the country from diseased or "unfit" newcomers, and how did these definitions take shape and change? What happened to people who failed screening? And how, at the journey's end, did immigrants respond to admission to their new homeland? Ronald H. Bayor, a senior scholar in immigrant and urban studies, gives voice to both immigrants and Island workers to offer perspectives on the human experience and institutional imperatives associated with the arrival experience. Drawing on firsthand accounts from, and interviews with, immigrants, doctors, inspectors, aid workers, and interpreters, Bayor paints a vivid and sometimes troubling portrait of the immigration procedure.

Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars

Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars PDF Author: Tara Zahra
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393651975
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
A brilliant, eye-opening work of history that speaks volumes about today’s battles over international trade, immigration, public health and global inequality. Before the First World War, enthusiasm for a borderless world reached its height. International travel, migration, trade, and progressive projects on matters ranging from women’s rights to world peace reached a crescendo. Yet in the same breath, an undercurrent of reaction was growing, one that would surge ahead with the outbreak of war and its aftermath. In Against the World, a sweeping and ambitious work of history, acclaimed scholar Tara Zahra examines how nationalism, rather than internationalism, came to ensnare world politics in the early twentieth century. The air went out of the globalist balloon with the First World War as quotas were put on immigration and tariffs on trade, not only in the United States but across Europe, where war and disease led to mass societal upheaval. The “Spanish flu” heightened anxieties about porous national boundaries. The global impact of the 1929 economic crash and the Great Depression amplified a quest for food security in Europe and economic autonomy worldwide. Demands for relief from the instability and inequality linked to globalization forged democracies and dictatorships alike, from Gandhi’s India to America’s New Deal and Hitler’s Third Reich. Immigration restrictions, racially constituted notions of citizenship, anti-Semitism, and violent outbursts of hatred of the “other” became the norm—coming to genocidal fruition in the Second World War. Millions across the political spectrum sought refuge from the imagined and real threats of the global economy in ways strikingly reminiscent of our contemporary political moment: new movements emerged focused on homegrown and local foods, domestically produced clothing and other goods, and back-to-the-land communities. Rich with astonishing detail gleaned from Zahra’s unparalleled archival research in five languages, Against the World is a poignant and thorough exhumation of the popular sources of resistance to globalization. With anti-globalism a major tenet of today’s extremist agendas, Zahra's arrestingly clearsighted and wide-angled account is essential reading to grapple with our divided present.

Sport and the Shaping of Italian-American Identity

Sport and the Shaping of Italian-American Identity PDF Author: Gerald R. Gems
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815652542
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Gems traces the experience of the Italian immigrant and illustrates the ways in which sports helped Italian-Americans adapt to a new culture, assert pride in an ethnic identity, and even achieve social advancement. Employing historical, sociological, and anthropological studies, Gems explores how sports were instrumental in helping notions of identity evolve from the individual to the community, from the racial to the ethnic. In doing so, Sport and the Shaping of Italian-American Identity transcends the study of a particular ethnic group to speak to foundational values and characteristics of the American ethos.

Emigration from Scotland Between the Wars

Emigration from Scotland Between the Wars PDF Author: Marjory Harper
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719049279
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Emigration from Scotland has always been very high. However, emigration from Scotland between the wars surpassed all records; more people emigrated than were born, leading to an overall population decline. Why was it so many people left?Marjory Harper, whose knowledge is grounded in a deep understanding of the local records, maps out the many factors which worked together to cause this massive diaspora. After an opening section where the author sets the Scottish experience within the context of the rest of the British Isles, the book then divides the country geographically, starting with the Highlands, then coastal Scotland, and the urban Lowland highlighting in turn the factors that particularly influenced each of these areas. Harper then discusses the organised religious and political movements that encouraged emigration. By interweaving personal stories with statistical evidence Harper brings to life the reality behind the dramatic historical migration.