Major Problems in American Immigration History: Documents and Essays

Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, the MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY series introduces readers to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in American history. The collection of essays and documents in MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN IMMIGRATION HISTORY explores themes such as the political and economic forces that cause immigration; the alienation and uprootedness that often follow relocation; and the difficult questions of citizenship and assimilation. This text presents a carefully selected group of readings organized to allow readers to evaluate primary sources, test the interpretations of distinguished historians, and draw their own conclusions. Each chapter includes introductions, source notes, and suggested readings.

Mae M. Ngai, Professor of History and Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies, is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in questions of immigration, citizenship, and nationalism. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1998 and taught at the University of Chicago before returning to Columbia in 2006. Ngai is author of IMPOSSIBLE SUBJECTS: ILLEGAL ALIENS AND THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA (Princeton, 2004) and THE LUCKY ONES: ONE FAMILY AND THE EXTRAORDINARY INVENTION OF CHINESE AMERICA (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). Professor Ngai has held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, NYU Law School, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and the Boston Review. Before becoming a historian Ngai was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City. She is now working on YELLOW AND GOLD: THE CHINESE MINING DIASPORA, 1848-1908, a study of Chinese goldminers in the nineteenth-century North American West, Australia, and South Africa.

Jon Gjerde died in October 2008. He was Alexander F. and May T. Morrison professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1982. His areas of expertise included nineteenth-century America with particular reference to immigration and religion, and he published some thirty articles on these subjects. He also published FROM PEASANTS TO FARMERS: THE MIGRATION FROM BALESTRAND, NORWAY, TO THE UPPER MIDDLE WEST (1985) and THE MINDS OF THE WEST: THE ETHNOCULTURAL EVOLUTION OF THE RURAL MIDDLE WEST, 1830-1917 (1997), both of which won the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award of the Immigration History Society for the best book in agricultural history.