Gráinne McEvoy – Fall 2009
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READING LIST FOR COMPREHENSIVE EXAMS (LYNN JOHNSON)
U.S. Immigration and Ethnicity
I. General Works
Archdeacon, Thomas. Becoming American: An Ethnic History. London: Collier-Macmillan, 1983.
Bodner, John, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1985.
Foner, Nancy. From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Gabaccia, Donna. “‘Is Everywhere No Where?’ Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of
American History.” Journal of American History, 89 (December 1999): 1115-34.
Kenny, Kevin. “Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study,” Journal of
American History, 90 (June 2003): 134-62.
Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American
People. Boston: Brown, Little, 1951.
Lee, Erika. “A Nation of Immigrants and a Gatekeeping Nation: American Immigration Law and
Policy,” in Reed Ueda, ed., A Companion to American Immigration. Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2006.
Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 2004.
_____“The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the
Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History, 86 (June 1999): 67-92.
Ueda, Reed. Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994.
(10 titles)
II. Nativism, Assimilation, Identity
Anbinder, Tyler. Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know-Nothings and the Politics of the
1850s (New York, 1992)
Arnesen, Eric. “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and WorkingClass History, 60 (Fall 2001).
Conzen, Kathleen Neils, David A. Gerber, Ewa Morawska, George E. Pozzetta, and Rudolph J.
Vecoli. “The Invention of Ethnicity in the United States.” In Ueda, ed., A Companion to
American Immigration. .
Fields, Barbara J. “Whiteness, Racism, and Identity,” International Labor and Working-Class
History, 60 (Fall 2001).
Gerstle, Gary. “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” Journal of American History,
84 (September 1997): 524-558.
Gordon, Linda. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1999.
Halter, Mariyn. Shopping for Identity: The Market of Ethnicity (New York, 2000).
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Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (2nd Ed). New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988.
Jacobson, Matthew F. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of
Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Kazal, Russell A. “Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in
American Ethnic History,” American Historical Review, 100 (April 1995): 437-71.
Kettner, James H. “The Creation of Citizenship in the American Colonies and Early U.S.” In Ueda,
ed., A Companion to American Immigration.
Kivisto, Peter. “The Transplanted Then and Now: The Reorientation of Immigration Studies from
the Chicago School to the New Social History,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 13:4 (1990): 45581.
Dale Knobel, America for Americans (a more recent work on nativism to go with Higham)
Mann, Arthur. “Creation of American Identity in the Late Eighteenth Century.” In Ueda, ed., A
Companion to American Immigration.
Roediger, David. “Irish-American Workers and White Racial Formation,” in Roediger, The
Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Rev. ed. New
York: Verso, 1999.
Salyer, Lucy. “Baptism by Fire: Race, Military Service and U.S. Citizenship, 1918-1935,”
Journal of American History, 91 (December, 2004): 847.
Vecoli, Rudoph, “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of the Uprooted,” The Journal of American
History 51:3 (December, 1964): 404-417.
Waters, Mary. Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. New
York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999.
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III. Ethnic Groups
Daniels, Roger. Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. New York: Hill &
Wang, 1993.
Dower, John. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: W.
W. Norton, 1986.
Etulian, Richard W. César Chávez: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St.
Martin’s, 2002.
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women
in Domestic Service. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.
Glenn, Susan. Daughters of the Shetel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Hoerder, Dirk, and Jorg, Nagler. People in Transit: German Migration in Comparative Perspective,
1820-1930.
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and
Jewish Immigrants in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995.
Kwong, Peter. The New Chinatown. 1987; rev. ed., New York: Hill & Wang, 1996.
Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Liu, Mary. The Chinatown Trunk Mystery
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Morawska, Ewa. For Bread with Butter: The Life Worlds of East Central Europeans in
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890-1940 (1985).
Morawska, Ewa. Insecure Prosperity: Small-Town Jews in Industrial America, 1890-1940.
(1996)
Murray, Alice Yang. What did Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? Boston :Bedford/St.
Martin’s, 2000.
Reimers, David. Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America. 1985.
Sánchez, George. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los
Angeles, 1900-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Saxton, Alexander. The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese movement in
California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown
Smith, Judy. Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in
Providence Rhode Island, 1900-1940. Albany: SUNY Press, 1985.
Tchen, John Kuo Wei. New York before Chinatown : Orientalism and the shaping of American
culture, 1776-1882. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Topp, Michael Miller. The Sacco and Vanzetti Case: A Brief History with Documents. Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005.
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IV. Race, Labor and Urban Life
Barrett, James R. and David Roediger. “In between Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the ‘New
Immigrant’ Working Class,” Journal of American Ethnic History 16.3 (Spring, 1997): 344.
Bernstein, Iver. The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and
Politics in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago,1919-1939. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Connolly, James J. The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston,
1900-1925. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Deutsch, Sarah. Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Erie, Stephen P. Rainbow’s End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics,
1840-1985. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Ernst, Robert. Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825-1863. New York: Octagon Books, 1979.
Gamm, Gerald. Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Gerstel, Gary. Working-Class Americanism: the Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960
(New York, 1989).
Gerstel, Gary. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century.
Glazer, Nathan and Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto
Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT University
Press, 1963).
Handlin, Oscar. Boston’s Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation, 1790-1880, 2nd ed. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1959.
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Nadel, Stanley. Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religioun, and Class in New York City, 1945-80.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Rosenzweig, Roy. Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City,
1870-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Thernstrom, Steven. Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (1964)
_____. The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis.
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V. Gender
Mary Waters, Ethnic Notions (intro only)
Marilyn Halter, Between Race and Ethnicity
Chris Sherba, Good Americans
Eve Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom (Introduction)
Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th St.
Donna Gabaccia, From the Other Side
Vicki Ruiz, American Dreaming, global realities (Introduction & selected articles on gender)
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VI. Internal Migration
Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los
Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Baldwin, Davarian L. Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black
Urban Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Gregory, James. The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and white
southerners transformed America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Grossman, James. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Johnson, Marilynn S. The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993.
Lemke Santagelo, Gretchen. Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East
Bay Community. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Self, Robert. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003.
Trotter, Joe William. Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-1945.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.
Wiese, Andrew. Places of their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth
Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
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Total: 79 Titles