Why Immigration Matters

You’ll find an embarrassment of riches when it comes to additional resources for all of the aspects of immigration to American covered in this issue. I’ll start with those that give broad coverage to immigration in general.

Here are some good printed sources with reliable bibliographies for further reading:

Cose, Ellis. A Nation Of Strangers: Prejudice, Politics, And The
Populating Of America (New York: Morrow, c1992).

Daniels, Roger. Coming To America: A History Of Immigration And Ethnicity In American Life (New York, NY: Perennial, 2002).

Dublin, Thomas, ed. Immigrant Voices: New Lives In America, 1773-1986
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, c1993).

Jones, Maldwyn Allen. American Immigration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

On the Web, you may want to start with the most obvious website of all, that for Ellis Island:

http://www.ellisisland.org/

Indeed, Ellis Island provides the best (of many) online timeline and graph tracing immigration from all parts of the world in its “Peopling of America” site:

http://www.ellisisland.org/immexp/wseix_4_3.asp?

As usual, some of the best websites for young students of American history have been mounted by television channels. Among those well worth a visit are:

http://school.discovery.com/ [Discovery Channel; search for "immigration"]

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/newamericans/ [PBS]

The ever reliable American Memory initiative at the Library of Congress provides “Immigration … The Changing Face of America." This feature presentation links educators to primary sources from the Library of Congress' online collections:

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/features/ immig/immigration_set2.html

You will also want to investigate the “Americans All” website sponsored by the People of America Foundation. This website is devoted to sources for the study of the hundreds of groups who are now numbered among “Americans.” Click on the “Teachers” link and you’ll find a choice of classroom aids organized by grade level and subject. The site is in the process of construction, and new items are added all the time:

http://www.americansall.com/teachers/teachers.htm

You may be interested, too, in this “American Immigration” page that began as a tenth grade history project:

http://www.bergen.org/AAST/Projects/Immigration/

Here are samples of websites maintained by American universities dealing with the subject:

Fordham’s online Modern History Sourcebook provides useful links to online sources:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/ modsbook28.html#Latin%20American%20Immigration

The “American Women’s History” website maintained by Middle Tennessee State University is an excellent guide, with this section on immigrant women:

http://www.mtsu.edu/~kmiddlet/history/women/wh-immig.html

These books will be of interest if you’d like to explore some of the issues raised in Professor Kessner’s essay:

Brown, Mary Elizabeth. Shapers Of The Great Debate On Immigration: A
Biographical Dictionary (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999).

Daniels, Roger. Guarding The Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004).

Glazer, Nathan. The New Immigration: A Challenge To American Society (San Diego, CA: San Diego State University Press, c1988).

Handlin, Oscar, ed. Children Of The Uprooted (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1968, c1966).

Reimers, David M. Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn
Against Immigration (New York: Columbia University Press, c1998).

Saveth, Edward N. American Historians and European Immigrants, 1875-1925 (New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1948).