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A dramatic new retelling of our nation's past. Beginning with the colonization of the New World, it recounts the history of America in the voice of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States--Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and others--groups who helped create this country's rich mosaic culture. Now, Ronald Takaki has revised his landmark work and made it even more relevant and important. Among the new additions to the book are: the role of black soldiers in preserving the Union; the history of Chinese Americans from 1900-1941; an investigation into the hot-button issue of "illegal" immigrants from Mexico; and a look at the sudden visibility of Muslim refugees from Afghanistan. This new edition grapples with the raw truth of American history and examines the ultimate question of what it means to be an American.--From publisher description.… (more)
User reviews
(Carolyn Vance)
The most striking aspect to me was how much of American's immigration waves are due to labor, in a very cyclical way: "oh hey, we need cheap labor so let's import as many of these folks as we can; oh no there's too many of them we don't want to be taken over so let's ban them/send them home; oh wait we need cheap labor where's another place we can exploit", rinse and repeat. I'm a fourth generation Chinese American so it's a familiar story to me (familial, even), and I am quick to remind my social feeds of how the Chinese Exclusion Act set the blueprint for restrictive immigration police in the United States. The frustrating aspect to my more organized-labor minded friends is how often solidarity would've bonded the working class immigrants together, if not for the easy division tactic of xenophobia.
Strongly recommend this to supplement or educate yourself about the history of this country, and certainly for the reading lists y'all made in 2020 that you're definitely going to get around to reading in 2021, right?