Crosscurrents: Atlantic and Pacific Migration in the Making of a Global America

Crosscurrents: Atlantic and Pacific Migration in the Making of a Global America asks two fundamental questions: When and how did the trajectories of Atlantic history and Pacific history overlap and converge with each other through travel and migration? What historically rooted processes drove people originally separated by immense physical and cultural distances into mutual encounters, close exchanges, and collective creativity in building an inter-hemispheric social and cultural life based on group diversity? Historian Reed Ueda moves beyond regional compartments to uncover transnational inter-linkages of migration, trade, and cross-cultural change. The result is a powerful new synthesis that puts American history in a new light. Impeccably researched, Crosscurrents uses a wide variety of sources--public records, personal writings, quantitative data sets, and visual material--to show the historical developments of these transformations. It is an ideal text for courses in immigration history, history of the Atlantic, history of the Pacific, history of California, and the history of the American West.

Reed Ueda is Professor of History at Tufts University. He has been coeditor, with Mary C. Waters and Helen B. Marrow, of The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965 (2007). He has authored or co-authored several books, including Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History (1994) and Avenues to Adulthood: The Origins of the High School and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (1987).