Author Description

"A Companion to American Immigration" is an authoritative collection of original essays by leading scholars on the major topics and themes underlying American immigration history. The book focuses on the two most important periods in American history when immigration had its greatest impact on American society: the Industrial Revolution and the Globalizing Era from the post-World War II decades to the present. It explores immigration from a global and interdisciplinary perspective to show the variety of methods that scholars have recently used to supply new insights. The volume's structure and approach provide in-depth treatment of central themes, including economic conditions, public policies, demography, social structure, group identity, communal institutions, and cultural life. The book also places a key question in the foreground of the book: how immigrants of the industrializing era and the globalizing era can be studied with respect to a host of collective and common experiences that bridge historical periods. The comparative dimension is a defining feature of this volume, capturing the essence of America, and its rich history of immigration.