Immigration & Literature: Books

The course of daily life in the United States has been a product of tradition, environment, and circumstance. How did the Civil War alter the lives of women, both white and black, left alone on southern farms? How did the Great Depression change the lives of working class families in eastern cities? How did the discovery of gold in California transform the lives of native American, Hispanic, and white communities in western territories?

Organized by time period as spelled out in the National Standards for U.S. History, these four volumes effectively analyze the diverse whole of American experience, examining the domestic, economic, intellectual, material, political, recreational, and religious life of the American people between 1763 and 2005.

Each volume includes a selection of primary documents, a timeline of important events during the period, images illustrating the text, and extensive bibliography of further information resources--both print and electronic--and a detailed subject index.

We build our lives on essential but seemingly mundane things: Food, Shelter, Families, Neighbors, Work, and Play. The unremembered details of people's everyday struggles and successes have shaped history and continue to drive the world we know.


Organized by time frame (each volume covers a finite period) and then by topic (Historical Overview,then Domestic, Economic,Intellectual, Material, Political, Recreational, and Religious Life, followed by primary sources).

This book includes "A Chinese Businessman"--an oral history--as well as other primary accounts from Central American immigrants and refugees.

This richly illustrated set is the definitive reference on American immigration from both historic and contemporary perspectives. It traces the scope and sweep of U.S. immigration from the earliest colonial settlements to the present, focusing on critical issues as well as the groups of people involved. The set fully documents and examines every major immigrant group and every era through detailed analysis of social, legal, political, economic, and demographic factors. Archival and contemporary photographs, along with hundreds of pages of documents and illustrations, further illuminate the information provided.