Download or read book Crossing Borders written by Dorothee Schneider and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-05 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aspiring immigrants to the United States make many separate border crossings in their quest to become Americans—in their home towns, ports of departure, U.S. border stations, and in American neighborhoods, courthouses, and schools. In a book of remarkable breadth, Dorothee Schneider covers both the immigrants’ experience of their passage from an old society to a new one and American policymakers’ debates over admission to the United States and citizenship. Bringing together the separate histories of Irish, English, German, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants, the book opens up a fresh view of immigrant aspirations and government responses. Ingenuity and courage emerge repeatedly from these stories, as immigrants adapted their particular resources, especially social networks, to make migration and citizenship successful on their own terms. While officials argued over immigrants’ fitness for admission and citizenship, immigrant communities forced the government to alter the meaning of race, class, and gender as criteria for admission. Women in particular made a long transition from dependence on men to shapers of their own destinies. Schneider aims to relate the immigrant experience as a totality across many borders. By including immigrant voices as well as U.S. policies and laws, she provides a truly transnational history that offers valuable perspectives on current debates over immigration.

Download or read book I was Dreaming to Come to America written by Veronica Lawlor and published by Viking Juvenile. This book was released on 1995 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In their own words, coupled with hand-painted collage illustrations, immigrants recall their arrival in the United States. Includes brief biographies and facts about the Ellis Island Oral History Project.

Download or read book Journey to a New Land written by Kimberly Weinberger and published by Mondo Pub. This book was released on 2000 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elda Willitts recounts for the Ellis Island Oral History Project her childhood journey to America from Italy in 1916.

Download or read book Passages to America written by Emmy E. Werner and published by Potomac Books, Inc.. This book was released on 2011 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than twelve million immigrants, many of them children, passed through Ellis Island's gates between 1892 and 1954. Children also came through the "Guardian of the Western Gate," the detention center on Angel Island in California that was designed to keep Chinese immigrants out of the United States. Based on the oral histories of fifty children who came to the United States before 1950, this book chronicles their American odyssey against the backdrop of World Wars I and II, the rise and fall of Hitler's Third Reich, and the hardships of the Great Depression. Ranging in age from four to sixteen years old, the children hailed from Northern, Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe; the Middle East; and China. Across ethnic lines, the child immigrants' life stories tell a remarkable tale of human resilience. The sources of family and community support that they relied on, their educational aims and accomplishments, their hard work, and their optimism about the future are just as crucial today for the new immigrants of the twenty-first century. These personal narratives offer unique perspectives on the psychological experience of being an immigrant child and its impact on later development and well-being. They chronicle the joys and sorrows, the aspirations and achievements, and the challenges that these small strangers faced while becoming grown citizens.

Download or read book I Was Dreaming to Come to America written by Veronica Lawlor and published by . This book was released on 1995-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: