Becoming American

Traces the history of American immigration from 1607 to the 1920s and looks at how groups of immigrants have adapted to the United States.

Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago -- and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society -- a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American Revolution. Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of prerevolutionary America; it reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto "dark ages") of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, Becoming America shows us transformations before 1776 among an unusually diverse assortment of peoples. Here is a polyglot population of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, Swedes, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty. Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to Africans or Indians. Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and remade itself many times during the next centuries -- asociety that, for ninety years before 1776, was becoming America.

Now in paperback -- "A compelling collection . . . providing insights into the variety of immigrant experiences." --Publishers Weekly Take part in an extraordinary journey through the lives of 23 first-generation immigrant women as they uncover their own unique experiences in the new world. In this remarkable collection of original essays, these acclaimed writers speak to issues of identity, ethnicity, and race, as well as how the self begins to take on and absorb the label "American." Some of the contributors in Becoming American include: Nina Barragan -- Argentina; Lilianet Brintrup -- Chile; Veronica Chambers -- Panama; Judith Ortiz Cofer -- Puerto Rico; Edwidge Danticat -- Haiti; Gabrielle Donnelly -- England; Lynn Freed -- South Africa; Akuyoe Graham -- Ghana; Lucy Grealy -- Ireland; Suheir Hammad -- Jordan/Palestine; Ginu Kamani -- India; Nola Kambanda -- Burundi/Rwanda; Helen Kim -- Korea; Kyoko Mori -- Japan; Irina Reyn -- Russia; Joyce Zonana -- Egypt

Comprised mostly of memoirs with some fiction, this volume gathers selections from the writings of 85 immigrants from 45 countries that illustrate the changing views of immigrants in the United States.

The author examines the paths South Asian immigrants in Chicago take toward assimilation in the late 20th century United States. She examines two ethnic institutions to show how immigrant activism ironically abets these immigrants' assimilation.

Since the 1960s the number of Indian immigrants and their descendants living in the United States has grown dramatically. During the same period, the make-up of this community has also changed—the highly educated professional elite who came to this country from the subcontinent in the 1960s has given way to a population encompassing many from the working and middle classes. In her fascinating account of Indian immigrants in New York City, Madhulika S. Khandelwal explores the ways in which their world has evolved over four decades.How did this highly diverse ethnic group form an identity and community? Drawing on her extensive interviews with immigrants, Khandelwal examines the transplanting of Indian culture onto the Manhattan and Queens landscapes. She considers festivals and media, food and dress, religious activities of followers of different faiths, work and class, gender and generational differences, and the emergence of a variety of associations.Khandelwal analyzes how this growing ethnic community has gradually become "more Indian," with a stronger religious focus, larger family networks, and increasingly traditional marriage patterns. She discusses as well the ways in which the American experience has altered the lives of her subjects.

After 1776, Americans struggled to gain recognition of their new republic and their rights as citizens. None had to fight harder than the nation’s seamen, whose labor took them deep into the Atlantic world. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal tells the story of how their efforts created the first national, racially inclusive model of U.S. citizenship.

"We wrote Becoming America in and for a new century, inspired by recent shifts in historical scholarship and the interests and learning styles of a new generation of students. Today's students live in a world where cultural, technological, and environmental transformation are palpably experienced and keenly debated. Paralleling this reorientation, the topics of environmental change, religious ritual, mass communications, technological innovation, and popular entertainment have become central and compelling subjects of historians' research and teaching. Becoming America seamlessly weaves these fascinating dimensions of the past into the core narrative of American history to produce an account that we believe students will find exciting, memorable, and relevant"--