Other Immigrants: The Global Origins of the American People

Introduction

Introduction Thirty-five years ago this book, which is a history of the first generation of blacks, Asians, and Hispanics coming to America, could not have been written. The essential scholarship was uneven, and in many cases historians and other scholars had no knowledge of particular immigrant and ethnic groups. The history of African Americans was studied largely by looking at slavery. Before Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution, the most important book on the subject was Ulrich Phillips’s American Negro Slavery, published in 1918, which painted a benign picture of slavery.1 Since the publication of Stampp’s book, a stream of new scholarship has vastly changed our view of slavery. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (1976), and John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1979), are only a few of the books that stand out. Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998) summarizes much of the scholarship, as does his Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (2003).2 While historians have examined the slave trade, most works on slavery deal not with the first generation but with subsequent ones. Walter Johnson’s fine Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999) explores the interstate and intrastate slave trade, not the international one.3 At the same time, scholars have probed the history of free blacks not only in the South but throughout the entire nation. In the last three decades a flood of studies has examined the history of African Americans extensively, looking at urbanization, civil rights protests, family life, women, individual leaders, and racial segregation and disfranchisement. One of the most recent works, for example, is Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, published in 2003.4 Some of the same story was 1 discussed by Leon Litwack in Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998).5 In spite of the huge outpouring of books and articles on African Americans , gaps in the literature remain. Especially missing is the history of African immigrants after the Civil War, whose children became African Americans. Marilyn Halter’s Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860–1965 (1993) is a pioneering book, for few historians have looked at African immigration to the United States.6 Within the last few years, scholars (though not historians) have begun to explore the new immigration from Africa. John Arthur’s Invisible Sojourners : African Immigrant Diaspora in the United States (2000) is one such work; others are Jon Holtzman, Nuer Journeys, Nuer Lives: Sudanese Refugees in Minnesota (2000); Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Wanderings : Sudanese Migrants and Exiles in North America (2002); and Paul Stoller, Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City (2002).7 By contrast, the literature on black Caribbean immigration to the United States is greater than the literature on twentieth-century African migration. The oldest, most useful study was by Ira De A. Reid, The Negro Immigrant, published in 1939.8 The best newer studies are authored by Winston James (1998), Philip Kasinitz (1992), Milton Vickerman (1999), Irma Watkins-Owens (1996), and Mary Waters (1999).9 Nancy Foner has published a number of articles on Caribbeans in New York and has edited several important books about this migration.10 Overall, however, the few attempts to pull the literature together are brief and lacking in historical depth.11 When one turns to Asians and Hispanics, it is only in recent years that historians have begun to examine these groups in detail. While a general history of immigration was published by George M. Stephenson in 1926, it concentrated on immigrants from northern and western Europe.12 During the 1930s and 1940s important scholars such as Marcus Hansen, Carl Wittke, and others studied European immigration. Wittke specialized on the Irish and Germans, and Hansen’s major work, The Atlantic Migration , 1607–1860 (1940), dealt with northern and western European migration to the United States.13 Carl Wittke’s summary of immigration, first published in 1939, neglected southern and eastern Europeans and gave “people of color” little notice. Scholarship after 1940 about immigrants (mainly Europeans) prompted Wittke to revise We Who Built 2 | Introduction America and publish a...