A New World: The History of Immigration to the United States

The famous call of Emma Lazarus to the Old World to "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" led approximately 35 million immigrants to America between 1800 and 1921. Indeed, the unique story of America is that of the interaction of the native peoples with wave upon wave of people emigrating from their homelands, including, of course, the enslavement and forced movement of millions of Africans. Chapter by chapter the book chronicles the influx of whole populations into the United States, form the earliest European settlers of the 17th century to the Asian immigration of the 20th. The tales of Chinese, Italian, Irish, Jewish, African, English, German, and Scandinavian new comers are all made more poignant by the inclusion of evocative archival photographs from the period. A New World charts the extraordinary development of a country built by an unprecedented number of different peoples.