Immigration History

In 1999, Munjed Al Muderis was a surgical resident working in Baghdad when the military police marched into the operating theatre and ordered the team to mutilate army deserters. When the head of surgery refused, he was executed. Munjed's choices were stark - comply and breach the medical oath, refuse and face death or flee. That day, Munjed's life changed forever. He escaped to Indonesia and boarded a boat to Australia.

We are in a new era: authoritarian leaders have become a central feature of global politics. Since 2000, self-styled strongmen have risen to power in capitals as diverse as Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, Brasilia, Budapest, Ankara, Riyadh and Washington. These leaders are nationalists and social conservatives, with little tolerance for minorities, dissent or the interests of foreigners. At home, they claim to be standing up for ordinary people against globalist elites; abroad, they posture as the embodiments of their nations.

Fidel Castro is Dead! A party erupts in Little Havana, in Miami. Michael Tallen’s editor sends him to get to the heart of the story from the people there. Michael wants to be working on his second novel, but he has a bad case of writer’s block. Hoping a change of scenery might get his muse going again, he heads to south Florida on Bonnie, his vintage Triumph motorcycle. After a chance meeting with a local restaurant owner named Abelardo who used to play major league baseball in Cuba, the writer is reenergized. Sparks fly when he starts falling for the man’s gorgeous, fiery, and oh so ...

The Constructed Mennonite is a unique account of a life shaped by Stalinism, Nazism, migration, famine, and war. It investigates the tenuous spaces where individual experiences inform and become public history; it studies the ways in which memory shapes identity, and reveals how context and audience shape autobiographical narratives.

Illegal immigration continues to roil American politics. The right-wing media stir up panic over "anchor babies", job stealing, welfare dependence, bilingualism, al-Qaeda terrorists disguised as Latinos, even a conspiracy by Latinos to "retake" the Southwest. State and local governments have passed more than 300 laws that attempt to restrict undocumented immigrants' access to hospitals, schools, food stamps, and driver's licenses.

In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African-American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write.

This book details the movement of people and cultures around the world—from the early migrations of Homo erectus out of Africa 50,000 years ago to modern refugee movements and migrations.

Elected in 1960 as the 35th President of the USA, John Fitzgerald Kennedy remains to this day the office’s youngest incumbent and he was its first Roman Catholic. His term in office was short, but arguably no US President has inspired more people around the globe than JFK. Even today, for generations born decades after his death, President Kennedy’s legacy has an enduring appeal. This insightful book contains specially commissioned pieces by a range of respected academic and political figures, including former Obama speechwriter, Cody Kennan, the President of the Robert F. Kennedy Human...

If you're Irish American or African American or Eastern European Jewish American, there's a rich literature to give you a sense of your family's arrival-in-America story. Until now, that hasn't been the case for Chinese Americans. From noted historian Mae Ngai, The Lucky Ones uncovers the three-generational saga of the Tape family. It's a sweeping story centered on patriarch Jeu Dips' (Joseph Tapes') self-invention as an immigration broker in post-gold rush San Francisco, and the extraordinary rise it enables.

In 2010, the al Rabeeah family left their home in Iraq in hope of a safer life. They moved to Homs, in Syria - just before the Syrian civil war broke out. Abu Bakr, one of eight children, was 10 years old when the violence began on the streets around him: car bombings, attacks on his mosque and school, firebombs late at night. Homes tells of the strange juxtapositions of growing up in a war zone: horrific, unimaginable events punctuated by normalcy - soccer, cousins, video games, friends.

Paris Is Not Dead explores the past, present, and future of the City of Light through the lens of class conflict, highlighting the outsized role of immigrants in shaping the city's progressive, cosmopolitan, and open-minded character--at a time when politics nationwide can feel like they're shifting in the opposite direction. This is the Paris many tourists too often miss: immigrant-heavy districts such as the 18th arrondissement, where crowded street markets still define everyday life. Stangler brings this view of the city to life.

The United States has always been a nation of immigrants---never more so than in 1917 when the nation entered the First World War. Of the 2.5 million soldiers who fought with U.S. armed forces in the trenches of France and Belgium, some half a million---nearly one out of every five men---were immigrants. In The Long Way Home, David Laskin, author of the prizewinning history The Children's Blizzard, tells the stories of 12 of these immigrant heroes.

The history of Russian espionage is soaked in blood, from a spontaneous pistol shot that killed a secret policeman in Romania in 1924 to the attempt to poison an exiled KGB colonel in Salisbury, England, in 2017. Russian émigrés have found themselves continually at the center of the mayhem. Russians began leaving the country in big numbers in the late 19th century, fleeing pogroms, tsarist secret police persecution, and the Revolution, then Stalin and the KGB - and creating the third-largest diaspora in the world.

From 1845 to 1852, the Great Hunger, also referred to as the "Potato Famine", was a period of a lot of starvation and illness in Ireland. The period was known in Irish at the time as a "Drochshaol"—loosely translated as "the hard days", or actually "the bad life"—with the most badly affected districts in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was popular. The year 1847, at times called "Black '47", was the absolute worst year of the period. Around one million people died, and over a million left the nation throughout the Great Famine.

Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear have covered the Trump administration from its earliest days. In Border Wars, they take listeners inside the White House to document how Trump and his allies blocked asylum seekers and refugees, separated families, threatened deportation, and sought to erode the longstanding bipartisan consensus that immigration and immigrants make positive contributions to America. As the authors reveal, Trump has used immigration to stoke fears ("the caravan"), attack Democrats and the courts, and distract from negative news.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, people have increasingly lost trust in institutions and elites, while seizing upon new digital tools to sidestep traditional gatekeepers. As a result, powerful new voices—once regarded as radical, unorthodox, or marginal—are disrupting the status quo in politics, business, and culture. Meanwhile, social and economic inequalities are stoking populist rage across the world, toxic partisanship is undermining democratic ideals, and the internet and AI have become high-speed vectors for the spread of misinformation.

Award-winning author Lisandro Perez tells Cuba's story through the lens of a single family: his own. The House on G Street is a unique depiction of one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century, told through generations of ancestors whose lives were shaped by dramatic historical forces. Perez disentangles the complex history by following his family's thread, imbuing political events with personal meaning. Their story begins with emigration to Cuba and follows the waning years of the colony.

Clarkston, Georgia, was a typical Southern town until it was designated a refugee settlement center in the 1990s, becoming the first American home for scores of families in flight from the world's war zones; from Liberia and Sudan to Iraq and Afghanistan. Suddenly Clarkston's streets were filled with women wearing the hijab, the smells of cumin and curry, and kids of all colors playing soccer in any open space they could find.

Borders can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life. Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place.

In 1948 the former troop ship Windrush made the 30-day journey across the Atlantic from Jamaica. The arrival of its 500 passengers, the first generation of Caribbean migrants in the UK, was the initial step in the formation of a new identity: the black Briton. Fifty years later, Mike and Trevor Phillips spoke to those on the Windrush itself, as well as those who followed, to tell the story of Britain in the second half of the twentieth century through the eyes of the outsiders who became insiders.