- The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity
- Contributors
- Introduction: The Making of America
- The Impact of Immigration Legislation: 1875 to the Present
- European Migrations
- Asian Immigration
- Latino Immigration
- African American Migration from the Colonial Era to the Present
- Emancipation and Exploitation in Immigrant Women’s Lives
- Protecting America’s Borders and the Undocumented Immigrant Dilemma
- Inclusion, Exclusion, and the Making of American Nationality
- Race and Citizenship
- Assimilation in the Past and Present
- Whiteness and Race
- Race and U.S. Panethnic Formation
- Intermarriage and the Creation of a New American
- Immigration, Medical Regulation, and Eugenics
- The World of the Immigrant Worker
- Neighborhoods, Immigrants, and Ethnic Americans
- Machine Bosses, Reformers, and the Politics of Ethnic and Minority Incorporation
- Immigration, Ethnicity, Race, and Organized Crime
- The Myth of Ethnic Success: Old Wine in New Bottles
- Immigration and Ethnic Diversity in the South, 1980–2010
- Allegiance, Dual Citizenship, and the Ethnic Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy
- Historians and Sociologists Debate Transnationalism
- Written Forms of Communication from Immigrant Letters to Instant Messaging
- Ethnicity, Race, and Religion beyond Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Whites
- Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in American Film
- Language Retention/Language Shift, “English Only,” and Multilingualism in the United States
- Melting Pots, Salad Bowls, Ethnic Museums, and American Identity
- New Approaches in Teaching Immigration and Ethnic History
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
The essay begins with the “imperial intrusions” into Native Peoples’ cultural spaces and the eighteenth-century (re-)peopling of the American colonies. It discusses the caesura and new patterns from the Revolution to industrialization. It emphasizes migrant agency and decision-making in the frame of Europe’s societies-economies of origin. The arriving, fully socialized men and women form ethnocultural groups with fuzzy borders and acculturate according to gender and class but face racialization, demands for Anglo-conformity, and “melting pot”–discourses. It is argued that they form a “transnational America.” The policy of “closed doors,” the Great Depression, and World War I and II (1917–1945) disrupt the Atlantic migration system. After a brief resurgence of immigration of “displaced persons” from Europe, the system ends in the mid-1950s. Continuing migratory connections do not assume the proportion of a migration system. In conclusion, the scholarship on European immigrants is critically evaluated.
Keywords: European immigrants, atlantic migration system, migrant decision-making, exclusion, acculturation, transnational America
Dirk Hoerder is Professor of History at Arizona State University.
Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.
Please subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.
For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.
- The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity
- Contributors
- Introduction: The Making of America
- The Impact of Immigration Legislation: 1875 to the Present
- European Migrations
- Asian Immigration
- Latino Immigration
- African American Migration from the Colonial Era to the Present
- Emancipation and Exploitation in Immigrant Women’s Lives
- Protecting America’s Borders and the Undocumented Immigrant Dilemma
- Inclusion, Exclusion, and the Making of American Nationality
- Race and Citizenship
- Assimilation in the Past and Present
- Whiteness and Race
- Race and U.S. Panethnic Formation
- Intermarriage and the Creation of a New American
- Immigration, Medical Regulation, and Eugenics
- The World of the Immigrant Worker
- Neighborhoods, Immigrants, and Ethnic Americans
- Machine Bosses, Reformers, and the Politics of Ethnic and Minority Incorporation
- Immigration, Ethnicity, Race, and Organized Crime
- The Myth of Ethnic Success: Old Wine in New Bottles
- Immigration and Ethnic Diversity in the South, 1980–2010
- Allegiance, Dual Citizenship, and the Ethnic Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy
- Historians and Sociologists Debate Transnationalism
- Written Forms of Communication from Immigrant Letters to Instant Messaging
- Ethnicity, Race, and Religion beyond Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Whites
- Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in American Film
- Language Retention/Language Shift, “English Only,” and Multilingualism in the United States
- Melting Pots, Salad Bowls, Ethnic Museums, and American Identity
- New Approaches in Teaching Immigration and Ethnic History
- Index
