Guarding The Golden Gate

As a major seaport, San Francisco had for decades struggled to control infectious diseases carried by passengers on ships entering the port. In 1882, a steamer from Hong Kong arrived carrying over 800 Chinese passengers, including one who had smallpox. The steamer was held in quarantine for weeks, during which time more passengers on board the ship contracted the disease. This episode convinced port authorities that better means of quarantining infected ship arrivals were necessary. Guarding the Golden Gate covers not only the creation and operation of the station, which is integral to San Francisco’s history, but also discusses the challenges of life on Angel Island—a small, exposed, and nearly waterless landmass on the north side of the Bay. The book reveals the steps taken to prevent the spread of diseases not only into the United States but also into other ports visited by ships leaving San Francisco; the political struggles over the establishment of a national quarantine station; and the day-to-day life of the immigrants and staff inhabiting the island. With the advancement of the understanding of infectious diseases and the development of treatments, the quarantine station’s activities declined in the 1930s, and the facility ultimately shuttered its doors in 1949. While Angel Island is now a California state park, it remains as a testament to an influential period in the nation’s history that offers rich insights into efforts to maintain the public’s safety during health crises.

Amidst the evolving scientific knowledge of epidemic diseases during the mid-to-late 19th century, Guarding the Golden Gate narrates the development of the Quarantine Station on Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay and illuminates the everyday activities of the station's personnel as they met both political and public health challenges.

Unlike the 1930s, when the United States tragically failed to open its doors to Europeans fleeing Nazism, the country admitted over three million refugees during the Cold War. This dramatic reversal gave rise to intense political and cultural battles, pitting refugee advocates against determined opponents who at times successfully slowed admissions. The first comprehensive historical exploration of American refugee affairs from the midcentury to the present, Americans at the Gate explores the reasons behind the remarkable changes to American refugee policy, laws, and programs. Carl Bon Tempo looks at the Hungarian, Cuban, and Indochinese refugee crises, and he examines major pieces of legislation, including the Refugee Relief Act and the 1980 Refugee Act. He argues that the American commitment to refugees in the post-1945 era occurred not just because of foreign policy imperatives during the Cold War, but also because of particular domestic developments within the United States such as the Red Scare, the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of the Right, and partisan electoral politics. Using a wide variety of sources and documents, Americans at the Gate considers policy and law developments in connection with the organization and administration of refugee programs.

The country’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its interventions around the world, and its global military presence make war, the military, and militarism defining features of contemporary American life. The armed services and the wars they fight shape all aspects of life—from the formation of racial and gendered identities to debates over environmental and immigration policy. Warfare and the military are ubiquitous in popular culture. At War offers short, accessible essays addressing the central issues in the new military history—ranging from diplomacy and the history of imperialism to the environmental issues that war raises and the ways that war shapes and is shaped by discourses of identity, to questions of who serves in the U.S. military and why and how U.S. wars have been represented in the media and in popular culture.

“A powerful model of how to understand the complex array of issues that will shape the political economy of population in the future.”—American Historical Review From the founders’ fears that crowded cities would produce corruption, luxury, and vice to the zero population growth movement of the late 1960s to today’s widespread fears of an aging crisis as the Baby Boomers retire, the American population debate has always concerned much more than racial composition or resource exhaustion, the aspects of the debate usually emphasized by historians. In The State and the Stork, Derek Hoff draws on his extraordinary knowledge of the intersections between population and economic debates throughout American history to explain the many surprising ways that population anxieties have provoked unexpected policies and political developments—including the recent conservative revival. At once a fascinating history and a revelatory look at the deep origins of a crucial national conversation, The State and the Stork could not be timelier. “Hoff has done a real service by bringing to the foreground the economic dimension of U.S. debates over population size and growth, a topic that has been relegated to the shadows for too long.”—Population and Development Review “After decades of failed efforts by the scientific community to alert the public to the environmental dangers of population growth and overpopulation, a first-rate historian has finally detailed both the arguments and their policy implications . . . Everyone interested in population should read The State and the Stork. This is an incredibly timely book.”—Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb

Scholarship on immigration to America is a coin with two sides: it asks both how America changed immigrants, and how they changed America. Were the immigrants uprooted from their ancestral homes, leaving everything behind, or were they transplanted, bringing many aspects of their culture with them? Although historians agree with the transplantation concept, the notion of the melting pot, which suggests a complete loss of the immigrant culture, persists in the public mind. The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity bridges this gap and offers a comprehensive and nuanced survey of American racial and ethnic development, assessing the current status of historical research and simultaneously setting the goals for future investigation. Early immigration historians focused on the European migration model, and the ethnic appeal of politicians such as Fiorello La Guardia and James Michael Curley in cities with strong ethno-political histories like New York and Boston. But the story of American ethnicity goes far beyond Ellis Island. Only after the 1965 Immigration Act and the increasing influx of non-Caucasian immigrants, scholars turned more fully to the study of African, Asian and Latino migrants to America. This Handbook brings together thirty eminent scholars to describe the themes, methodologies, and trends that characterize the history and current debates on American immigration. The Handbook's trenchant chapters provide compelling analyses of cutting-edge issues including identity, whiteness, borders and undocumented migration, immigration legislation, intermarriage, assimilation, bilingualism, new American religions, ethnicity-related crime, and pan-ethnic trends. They also explore the myth of "model minorities" and the contemporary resurgence of anti-immigrant feelings. A unique contribution to the field of immigration studies, this volume considers the full racial and ethnic unfolding of the United States in its historical context.

A sweeping narrative history of American immigration from the colonial period to the present “A masterly historical synthesis, full of wonderful detail and beautifully written, that brings fresh insights to the story of how immigrants were drawn to and settled in America over the centuries.”—Nancy Foner, author of One Quarter of the Nation The history of the United States has been shaped by immigration. Historians Carl J. Bon Tempo and Hasia R. Diner provide a sweeping historical narrative told through the lives and words of the quite ordinary people who did nothing less than make the nation. Drawn from stories spanning the colonial period to the present, Bon Tempo and Diner detail the experiences of people from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. They explore the many themes of American immigration scholarship, including the contexts and motivations for migration, settlement patterns, work, family, racism, and nativism, against the background of immigration law and policy. Taking a global approach that considers economic and personal factors in both the sending and receiving societies, the authors pay close attention to how immigration has been shaped by the state response to its promises and challenges.