Download or read book Making the Immigrant Soldier written by Cristina-Ioana Dragomir and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-04-18 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immigrants to the United States have long used the armed forces as a shortcut to citizenship. Cristina-Ioana Dragomir profiles Lily, Alexa, and Vikrant, three immigrants of varying nationalities and backgrounds who chose military service as their way of becoming American citizens. Privileging the trio’s own words and experiences, Dragomir crafts a human-focused narrative that moves from their lives in their home countries and decisions to join the military to their fraught naturalization processes within the service. Dragomir illuminates how race, ethnicity, class, and gender impacted their transformation from immigrant to soldier, veteran, and American. She explores how these factors both eased their journeys and created obstacles that complicated their access to healthcare, education, economic resources, and other forms of social justice. A compelling union of analysis and rich storytelling, Making the Immigrant Soldier traces the complexities of serving in the military in order to pursue the American dream.
Download or read book Immigrant Soldier written by Kathryn Lang-Slattery and published by . This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part coming of age story, part immigrant tale, part World War II adventure, Immigrant Soldier, The Story of a Ritchie Boy follows Herman as he evolves from a frightened and frustrated teenager, looking for a place to belong, into a confident U.S. Army Intelligence officer who struggles with the conflicting emotions of hate and forgiveness.
Download or read book 8 Seconds of Courage written by Flo Groberg and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the author's childhood relocation from France to the U.S., where as a naturalized citizen he joined the military and served multiple tours in Afghanistan before he was wounded while protecting his patrol from a suicide bomber.
Download or read book The Tattooed Soldier written by Héctor Tobar and published by Picador. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antonio Bernal is a Guatemalan refugee in Los Angeles haunted by memories of his wife and child, who were murdered at the hands of a man marked with yellow ink. In a park near Antonio's apartment, Guillermo Longoria extends his arm and reveals a sinister tattoo—yellow pelt, black spots, red mouth. It is the sign of the death squad, the Jaguar Battalion of the Guatemalan army. This chance encounter between Antonio and his family's killer ignites a psychological showdown between these two men. Each will discover that the war in Central America has migrated with them as they are engulfed by the quemazones—"the great burning" of the Los Angeles riots. A tragic tale of loss and destiny in the underbelly of an American city, The Tattooed Soldier is Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Héctor Tobar's mesmerizing exploration of violence and the marks it leaves upon us.
Download or read book Immigrant Soldier written by George J Raunam and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-25 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About the Book Immigrant Soldier is the story of one immigrant’s struggle from undergoing Soviet bombings in Tallinn, Estonia, to the devastation of the Dresden, Germany bombing in 1944 by the Allies. Then the uncertain years of living in a displaced persons camp after World War II in Germany. Born in Tartu, Estonia at the start of World War II in 1937, Raunam describes the struggle to understand the reason for all the random death and the fear of the unknown and for losing everything, almost. He finds a new life in America and military service as well as new meaning in friends, love, fun, and the sheer joy of working for a country that he chose. He enlists as a private in the National Guard at age seventeen, then serves in combat, is decorated with a Silver Star and retires as a lieutenant colonel, aide de camp to General of the Army Omar N Bradley. His lifelong desire to find his family takes on a new meaning with the fall of the Iron Curtain. The odyssey takes six trips to Germany, Estonia, and Russia to locate family members who did not know the status of each other’s survival after World War II. He discovers the feeling of unbelievable joy to find out that one has a brother and sister and the celebration of finding each other. About the Author George J Raunam lives in Texas. He has five children, fifteen grandchildren, and two great grandchildren. He sees his family frequently and has hosted European family members in California and Texas to share their love for America. This is his first book about how to find lost family members and the Immigrant Spirit.
Download or read book Americans All written by Nancy Gentile Ford and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the First World War, nearly half a million immigrant draftees from forty-six different nations served in the U.S. Army. This surge of Old World soldiers challenged the American military's cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions and required military leaders to reconsider their training methods for the foreign-born troops. How did the U.S. War Department integrate this diverse group into a united fighting force?The war department drew on the experiences of progressive social welfare reformers, who worked with immigrants in urban settlement houses, and they listened to industrial efficiency experts, who connected combat performance to morale and personnel management. Perhaps most significantly, the military enlisted the help of ethnic community leaders, who assisted in training, socializing, and Americanizing immigrant troops and who pressured the military to recognize and meet the important cultural and religious needs of the ethnic soldiers. These community leaders negotiated the Americanization process by promoting patriotism and loyalty to the United States while retaining key ethnic cultural traditions.Offering an exciting look at an unexplored area of military history, Americans All! Foreign-born Soldiers in World War I constitutes a work of special interest to scholars in the fields of military history, sociology, and ethnic studies. Ford'sresearch illuminates what it meant for the U.S. military to reexamine early twentieth-century nativism; instead of forcing soldiers into a melting pot, war department policies created an atmosphere that made both American and ethnic pride acceptable.During the war, a German officer commented on the ethnic diversity of the American army and noted, with some amazement, that these "semi-Americans" considered themselves to be "true-born sons of their adopted country." The officer was wrong on one count. The immigrant soldiers were not "semi-Americans"; they were "Americans all!"
Download or read book America Border Culture Dreamer written by Wendy Ewald and published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First- and second-generation immigrants to the US from all around the world collaborate with renowned photographer Wendy Ewald to create a stunning, surprising catalog of their experiences from A to Z. In a unique collaboration with photographer and educator Wendy Ewald, eighteen immigrant teenagers create an alphabet defining their experiences in pictures and words. Wendy helped the teenagers pose for and design the photographs, interviewing them along the way about their own journeys and perspectives. America Border Culture Dreamer presents Wendy and the students' poignant and powerful images and definitions along with their personal stories of change, hardship, and hope. Created in a collaboration with Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, this book casts a new light on the crucial, under-heard voices of teenage immigrants themselves, making a vital contribution to the timely national conversation about immigration in America.
Download or read book Just Like Us written by Helen Thorpe and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Just Like Us" offers a powerful account of four young Mexican women coming of age in Denver--two of whom have legal documentation, two of whom who don't--and the challenges they face as they attempt to pursue the American dream.
Download or read book Create Dangerously written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book A Miami Herald Best Book of the Year In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile. Inspired by Albert Camus and adapted from her own lectures for Princeton University’s Toni Morrison Lecture Series, here Danticat tells stories of artists who create despite (or because of) the horrors that drove them from their homelands. Combining memoir and essay, these moving and eloquent pieces examine what it means to be an artist from a country in crisis. BONUS MATERIAL: This edition includes an excerpt from Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light.
Download or read book Long Road to Liberty written by Donald Allendorf and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They served almost five years, most of that time in daily contact with their Southern adversaries in Tennessee and Georgia. When the war was finally over, more than half of the 904 officers and men who had ever served with the 15th regiment had been wounded or killed, while another 107 died of disease"--Jacket.
Download or read book Weapons of Mass Migration written by Kelly M. Greenhill and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-23 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At first glance, the U.S. decision to escalate the war in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, China's position on North Korea's nuclear program in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the EU resolution to lift what remained of the arms embargo against Libya in the mid-2000s would appear to share little in common. Yet each of these seemingly unconnected and far-reaching foreign policy decisions resulted at least in part from the exercise of a unique kind of coercion, one predicated on the intentional creation, manipulation, and exploitation of real or threatened mass population movements. In Weapons of Mass Migration, Kelly M. Greenhill offers the first systematic examination of this widely deployed but largely unrecognized instrument of state influence. She shows both how often this unorthodox brand of coercion has been attempted (more than fifty times in the last half century) and how successful it has been (well over half the time). She also tackles the questions of who employs this policy tool, to what ends, and how and why it ever works. Coercers aim to affect target states' behavior by exploiting the existence of competing political interests and groups, Greenhill argues, and by manipulating the costs or risks imposed on target state populations. This "coercion by punishment" strategy can be effected in two ways: the first relies on straightforward threats to overwhelm a target's capacity to accommodate a refugee or migrant influx; the second, on a kind of norms-enhanced political blackmail that exploits the existence of legal and normative commitments to those fleeing violence, persecution, or privation. The theory is further illustrated and tested in a variety of case studies from Europe, East Asia, and North America. To help potential targets better respond to—and protect themselves against—this kind of unconventional predation, Weapons of Mass Migration also offers practicable policy recommendations for scholars, government officials, and anyone concerned about the true victims of this kind of coercion—the displaced themselves.
Download or read book Preparation for the Next Life written by Atticus Lish and published by . This book was released on 2016-02 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zou Lei is an illegal immigrant who works at a Chinese restaurant in Queens in search of a better life in the 'Land of the Brave'. Brad Skinner has recently arrived in New York following a tour in Iraq and is determined to party as hard as he can in order to start 'wanting to live again'. When their paths cross, they discover that new starts may be possible for both of them, if they can survive homelessness, lockup and Skinner's post-traumatic stress disorder, which may be more prophecy than madness.
Download or read book Americanization Acculturation and Ethnic Identity written by Eileen Tamura and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The main theme of this book is the interplay of Americanization and acculturation of the Japanese in the Hawaiian Islands. By acculturation the author refers to what the Nisei wanted and actually did achieve-their adaptation to American middle-class life" -- Preface.
Download or read book Ritchie Boy Secrets written by Beverley Driver Eddy and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In June 1942, the U.S. Army began recruiting immigrants, the children of immigrants, refugees, and others with language skills and knowledge of enemy lands and cultures for a special military intelligence group being trained in the mountains of northern Maryland and sent into Europe and the Pacific. Ultimately, 15,000 men and some women received this specialized training and went on to make vital contributions to victory in World War II. This is their story, which Beverley Driver Eddy tells thoroughly and colorfully, drawing heavily on interviews with surviving Ritchie Boys. The army recruited not just those fluent in German, French, Italian, and Polish (approximately a fifth were Jewish refugees from Europe), but also Arabic, Japanese, Dutch, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Turkish, and other languages—as well as some 200 Native Americans and 200 WACs. They were trained in photo interpretation, terrain analysis, POW interrogation, counterintelligence, espionage, signal intelligence (including pigeons), mapmaking, intelligence gathering, and close combat. Many landed in France on D-Day. Many more fanned out across Europe and around the world completing their missions, often in cooperation with the OSS and Counterintelligence Corps, sometimes on the front lines, often behind the lines. The Ritchie Boys’ intelligence proved vital during the liberation of Paris and the Battle of the Bulge. They helped craft the print and radio propaganda that wore down German homefront morale. If caught, they could have been executed as spies. After the war they translated and interrogated at the Nuremberg trials. One participated in using war criminal Klaus Barbie as an anti-communist agent. Meanwhile, Ritchie Boys in the Pacific Theater of Operations collected intelligence in Burma and China, directed bombing raids in New Guinea and the Philippines, and fought on Okinawa and Iwo Jima. This is a different kind of World War II story, and Eddy tells it with conviction, supported by years of research and interviews.
Download or read book After the Last Border written by Jessica Goudeau and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Simply brilliant, both in its granular storytelling and its enormous compassion" --The New York Times Book Review The story of two refugee families and their hope and resilience as they fight to survive and belong in America The welcoming and acceptance of immigrants and refugees have been central to America's identity for centuries--yet America has periodically turned its back in times of the greatest humanitarian need. After the Last Border is an intimate look at the lives of two women as they struggle for the twenty-first century American dream, having won the "golden ticket" to settle as refugees in Austin, Texas. Mu Naw, a Christian from Myanmar struggling to put down roots with her family, was accepted after decades in a refugee camp at a time when America was at its most open to displaced families; and Hasna, a Muslim from Syria, agrees to relocate as a last resort for the safety of her family--only to be cruelly separated from her children by a sudden ban on refugees from Muslim countries. Writer and activist Jessica Goudeau tracks the human impacts of America's ever-shifting refugee policy as both women narrowly escape from their home countries and begin the arduous but lifesaving process of resettling in Austin--a city that would show them the best and worst of what America has to offer. After the Last Border situates a dramatic, character-driven story within a larger history--the evolution of modern refugee resettlement in the United States, beginning with World War II and ending with current closed-door policies--revealing not just how America's changing attitudes toward refugees have influenced policies and laws, but also the profound effect on human lives.
Download or read book Enrique s Journey written by Sonia Nazario and published by Delacorte Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of a boy who sets out with absolutely nothing to find his mother who went to the US from Honduras to look for work.
Download or read book Sons and Soldiers written by Bruce Henderson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-07-25 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller The definitive story of the Ritchie Boys, as featured on CBS's 60 Minutes "An irresistible history of the WWII Jewish refugees who returned to Europe to fight the Nazis.” —Newsday They were young Jewish boys who escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe and resettled in America. After the United States entered the war, they returned to fight for their adopted homeland and for the families they had left behind. Their stories tell the tale of one of the U.S. Army’s greatest secret weapons. Sons and Soldiers begins during the menacing rise of Hitler’s Nazi party, as Jewish families were trying desperately to get out of Europe. Bestselling author Bruce Henderson captures the heartbreaking stories of parents choosing to send their young sons away to uncertain futures in America, perhaps never to see them again. As these boys became young men, they were determined to join the fight in Europe. Henderson describes how they were recruited into the U.S. Army and how their unique mastery of the German language and psychology was put to use to interrogate German prisoners of war. These young men—known as the Ritchie Boys, after the Maryland camp where they trained—knew what the Nazis would do to them if they were captured. Yet they leapt at the opportunity to be sent in small, elite teams to join every major combat unit in Europe, where they collected key tactical intelligence on enemy strength, troop and armored movements, and defensive positions that saved American lives and helped win the war. A postwar army report found that nearly 60 percent of the credible intelligence gathered in Europe came from the Ritchie Boys. Sons and Soldiers draws on original interviews and extensive archival research to vividly re-create the stories of six of these men, tracing their journeys from childhood through their escapes from Europe, their feats and sacrifices during the war, and finally their desperate attempts to find their missing loved ones. Sons and Soldiers is an epic story of heroism, courage, and patriotism that will not soon be forgotten.
