Coming to America

Starred Review. Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man’s turkeys and was almost beaten to death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners’ plans to give him a "necktie party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to California in 1953, embittered by "the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn’t operate in his own home town." Anchored to these three stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson’s magnificent, extensively researched study of the "great migration," the exodus of six million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an "uncertain existence" in the North and Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling, and Pershing settling in new lands, building anew, and often finding that they have not left racism behind. The drama, poignancy, and romance of a classic immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp, and resonate long after the reading is done.

Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-82 (Asian American Experience)

Najia Aarim-Heriot, University of Illinois Press

The first detailed examination of the link between the "Chinese question" and the "Negro problem" in nineteenth-century America, this work forcefully and convincingly demonstrates that the anti-Chinese sentiment that led up to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is inseparable from the racial double standards applied by mainstream white society toward white and nonwhite groups during the same period.

This book highlights striking similarities in the ways the Chinese and African American populations were disenfranchised during the mid-1800s, including nearly identical negative stereotypes, shrill rhetoric, and crippling exclusionary laws. Removing Chinese American history from the vacuum in which it has been traditionally studied, this book stands as a holistic examination of the causes and effects of American Sinophobia and the racialization of national immigration policies.

Publication of this book was supported by the Research Foundation and the Division of Arts and Humanities of the State University of New York at Fredonia.

In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience

African American Migration

Each book in Primary Sources of Immigration and Migration in America paints a vivid picture for students of the varied histories of the people that make up the United States of America.

These books take a unique approach on telling the history of the United States from the global perspective of the different immigrant groups that came here. What events were the catalysis for them to come? What impact did they have on the events that were unfolding in America once they got here? All of these questions and more will be answered through primary source imagery, documents, and clear, engaging text.

Tracing the history of black Africans in America, this title is packed with wonderful primary source art and documentation. It starts by outlining the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade and touches upon some of the injustices that black slaves had in endure. Readers can learn about the abolition of slavery, Reconstruction, and black civil rights, and are brought into the predominantly black neighborhoods of New York City and Chicago.

Art in the Lives of Immigrant Communities in the United States

~ ~ ~ ~

Read history on your Kindle Fire. Many of the books herein are available free or at low cost for Kindle, have been republished specifically for mobile devices, and are easy to download.

California Pioneers