Softcover. Chapel Hill NC, The University of North Carolina Press., 1st pbk, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 363 pages, b&w illustrations. Laura Wexler presents an incisive analysis of how the first American female photojournalists contributed to a "domestic vision" that reinforced the imperialism and racism of turn-of-the-century America. These women photographers, white and middle class, constructed images of war disguised as peace through a mechanism Wexler calls the "averted eye," which had its origins in the private domain of family photography.Wexler examines the work of Frances Benjamin Johnston, Gertrude Kasebier, Alice Austen, the Gerhard sisters, and Jessie Tarbox Beals. The book includes more than 150 photographs taken between 1898 and 1904, such as photos Johnston took aboard Admiral Dewey's flagship as it returned home from conquering Manila, Austen's photos of immigrants at Ellis Island, and Beals's images of the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904. In a groundbreaking approach to the study of photography, Wexler raises up these images as "texts" to be analyzed alongside other texts of the period for what they say about the discourses of power. Tender Violence is an important contribution not only to the fields of history of photography and gender studies but also to our growing understanding of U.S. imperialism during this period.
Hardcover. NY, Public Affairs, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 329 pages. When Katharine Greider was told to leave her house or risk it falling down on top of her and her family, it spurred an investigation that began with contractors' diagnoses and lawsuits, then veered into archaeology and urban history, before settling into the saltwater grasses of the marsh that fatefully once sat beneath the site of Number 239 East 7th Street.During the journey, Greider examines how people balance the need for permanence with the urge to migrate, and how the home is the resting place for ancestral ghosts. The land on which Number 239 was built has a history as long as America's own. It provisioned the earliest European settlers who needed fodder for their cattle; it became a spoil of war handed from the king's servant to the revolutionary victor; it was at the heart of nineteenth-century Kleinedeutschland and of the revolutionary Jewish Lower East Side. America's immigrant waves have all passed through 7th Street. In one small house is written the history of a young country and the much longer story of humankind and the places they came to call home.
Hardcover. NY, Hill & Wang , 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 251 pages. Completed in 1825 and enlarged between 1836 and 1862 at the initial cost of $7 million, the Erie Canal not only created an economic revolution in the region but fostered new and unique communities made up of entrepreneurs, canal workers, and farmers. Utilizing a variety of primary resources, but especially the Canal Board Papers, Sheriff (history relates the social history of those who lived, worked, and traveled the Erie Canal before the Civil War. This previously untold story is laced with accounts by businessmen who saw the canal as opportunity, immigrant laborers looking for steady work, and farmers who transported their produce by canal boat. Although all of these groups relayed their complaints, claims, and concerns to the Canal Board, we do not know the responses they received. Still, the issues raised tell a great deal about the local impact of the Erie Canal, and herein lies the strength of the book. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Seattle WA, The Innovation Press , 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Color illustrations by Daniel Rieley. Growing up in a family of immigrants, Ellen dreamed of becoming a professional flutist, but all of that changed when she discovered engineering in college. Though she was told that field of study wasn't for girls, the bright young scientist refused to give up--ultimately becoming a NASA astronaut who shattered barriers and rocketed to success!
Hardcover. Baltimore, Clearfield Company, reprint, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth, gilt lettering on spine, 132 pages. A reprint of a book written by Alexander Jones in 1855. The book explores the role of Welsh immigrants and their descendants during the American Revolution. It provides a detailed account of the Welsh contributions to the war effort, including their participation in battles, their leadership in politics and commerce, and their support for the cause of American independence. The book is divided into several chapters, each focusing on a different aspect of Welsh involvement in the Revolution. It begins by discussing the early settlement of Welsh immigrants in America, their struggles to maintain their language and culture, and their eventual integration into American society. Jones then goes on to describe the various battles and campaigns in which Welsh soldiers fought, including the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Battle of Saratoga, and the Battle of Yorktown. He also highlights the contributions of Welsh leaders such as General Richard Montgomery and Colonel William Davies.In addition to military contributions, the book also explores the role of Welsh Americans in politics and commerce during the Revolution. Jones discusses the involvement of Welshmen in the Continental Congress, as well as their contributions to the development of American industry and trade. Overall, The Cymry of '76 provides a comprehensive and detailed account of the Welsh contribution to the American Revolution. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Printed for I. Riley and Co, 2nd Ed., 1806, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, The First Settlers of Virginia, an Historical Novel, Exhibiting a View of the Rise and Progress of the Colony at James Town, a Picture of Indian Manners, the Countenance of the Country, and its Natural Productions. Hardcover, Second edition, considerably enlarged. Contemporary calf over boards. Octavo. xii, [13]-284 pages. PLEASE NOTE: No frontispiece engraving of Pocahontas rescuing John Smith. No signs of extraction, so probably never bound in. A reproduction of the frontis laid in. This is one of the earliest American romantic novels about Native Americans. Davis was an English immigrant with literary aspirations who lived in Philadelphia at the beginning of the 19th century. He was acquainted with the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. He originally adapted this material from his 1803 "Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America" and published it in 1805 as "Captain Smith and Princess Pocahontas: An Indian Tale." This expanded version includes Davis's autobiography, "A Memoir of the Author" (pp. {275]-284). Includes "Errata" on page [274]. Clean, no markings.
NY, Simon & Schuster, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 609 pages, b&w illustrations. They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan's words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom. But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John's father raised like a son in the same household. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court. At first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing. Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South. Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Against this onslaught, the Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate labor protections. So as case after case comes before the court, challenging his core values, John makes a fateful decision: He breaks with his colleagues in fundamental ways, becoming the nation's prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the US. Harlan's dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan's Plessy dissent his "Bible"--and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan's words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras.
Softcover. Honolulu HA, University Press of the Pacific, reprint, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover. First published in 1874, 448 pages with index. Clean, bright copy.
Softcover. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 277 pages. Starting in the 1980s, anti-immigrant discourse shifted away from the "color" of immigrants to their religion and culture. It focused in particular on newcomers from Muslim countries--people feared both as terrorists and as products of tribal societies with values opposed to those of secular Western Europe. Leo Lucassen tackles the question of whether the integration process of these recent immigrants will fundamentally differ in the long run (over multiple generations) from the experiences of similar immigrant groups in the past. For comparison, Lucassen focuses on "large and problematic groups" from Western Europe's past (the Irish in the United Kingdom, the Poles in Germany, and the Italians in France) and demonstrates a number of structural similarities in the way migrants and their descendants integrated into these nation states. Lucassen emphasizes that the geographic sources of the "threat" have changed and that contemporaries tend to overemphasize the threat of each successive wave of immigrants, in part because the successfully incorporated immigrants of the past have become invisible in national histories. Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, American Italian Historical Association, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 244 pages, 35th Conference of the American Italian Historical Association . "'Italian Americans and World War II, ' explores many facets of the dynamic period of the 1940s and the consequences of war and peace. Scholars within AIHA and outside the academy have been slow to recognize the significance of World War II, now recognized as a seminal event in Italian-American life and culture. . . . "This volume is dedicated to all Italian Americans who lived and died, fought and prayed during World War II." Clean copy.
Softcover. NY, Center For Migration Studies, 3rd pr., 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 230 pages. The Italians of San Francisco is the first comprehensive description of the economic and social aspects of the Italian migratory experience in San Francisco to be presented in a side-by-side bilingual edition, providing teachers and students of Italian and English with a linguistically definitive and an historically important learning tool. This text pieces together the fragmented story of one of the largest immigrant groups to come to California charting the history of their economic and social development as it began in San Francisco, and as it was to be found throughout California. The Italians of San Francisco tells the story of a community whose strength was maintained in the vibrancy and perseverance of its members, and whose accomplishments were achieved through the ambition and efforts of each of its members. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 480 pages, b&w illustrations. When Theodore Dreiser first published Sister Carrie in 1900 it was suppressed for its seamy plot, colloquial language, and immortality--for, as one reviewer put it, its depiction of "the godless side of American life." It was a side of life experienced firsthand by Dreiser, whose own circumstances often paralleled those of his characters in the turbulent, turn-of-the-century era of immigrants, black lynchings, ruthless industrialists, violent labor movements, and the New Woman. This masterful critical biography, the first on Dreiser in more than half a century, is the only study to fully weave Dreiser's literary achievement into the context of his life. Jerome Loving gives us a Dreiser for a new generation in a brilliant evocation of a writer who boldly swept away Victorian timidity to open the twentieth century in American literature. INSCRIBED BY LOVING ("Jerry") on the half-title page. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Athens GA, University of Georgia Press, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Set in the 1950s and 1960s, The Line of the Sun moves from a rural Puerto Rican village to a tough immigrant housing project in New Jersey, telling the story of a Hispanic family's struggle to become part of a new culture without relinquishing the old. At the story's center is Guzman, an almost mythic figure whose adventures and exile, salvation and return leave him a broken man but preserve his place in the heart and imagination of his niece, who is his secret biographer. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page and INSCRIBED on half-title. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, New York University Press, 1st, 2011, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 267 pages. A compelling true story of how a maid's daughter moves from a girlhood of rage and resentment to a level of empowerment, as a grown woman. Clean copy.
NY, Random House, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. For Stanley Cohen, baseball is the prism through which he views the events of the last seventy years. His narrative spans four generations as he recounts in sparkling prose how, for his immigrant father, sports was a means of assimilation into life in the New World; the warmth of watching his son and, later, his grandson both fall heir to his devotion; and how the game of baseball has provided his life with its truest sense of continuity. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2021, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Color illustrations by Evan Turk. As an observant child growing up in Lithuania, Ben Shahn yearns to draw everything he sees--and, after seeing his father banished by the Czar for demanding workers' rights, he develops a keen sense of justice, too. So when Ben and the rest of his family make their way to America, Ben brings both his sharp artistic eye and his desire to fight for what's right. As he grows, he speaks for justice through his art--by disarming classmates who bully him because he's Jewish, by defying his teachers' insistence that he paint beautiful landscapes rather than true stories, by urging the US government to pass Depression-era laws to help people find food and jobs. In this moving and timely portrait, award-winning author Cynthia Levinson and illustrator Evan Turk honor an artist, immigrant, and activist whose work still resonates today: a true painter for the people.
Hardcover. NY, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 218 pages, b&w illustrations. When gold rush fever gripped the globe in 1849, thousands of Chinese immigrants came through San Francisco on their way to seek their fortunes. They were called sojourners, for they never intended to stay. Polly, a young Chinese concubine, was brought by her owner to a remote mining camp in the highlands of Idaho. There he lost her in a poker game. Polly found her way with her new owner to an isolated ranch on the banks of the Salmon River in central Idaho. As the gold rush receded, it took with it the Chinese miners-or their bones, which were disinterred and shipped back to their homeland in accordance with Chinese custom. But it left behind Polly, who would make headlines. Clean copy.
Softcover. London, Caliban Books, reprint, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 308 pages. The Rat Pit is a novel written by Patrick Macgill and published in 1915. The story is set in the slums of Glasgow, Scotland, during the early 20th century, and follows the life of a young woman named Norah Ryan. Norah is a poor Irish immigrant who has come to Glasgow in search of work and a better life. However, she soon finds herself trapped in a world of poverty, violence, and despair. Norah's struggles are compounded by her relationship with a violent and abusive man named Larry Meath. Larry is a member of a local gang, and his criminal activities often put Norah in danger. Despite her fear and desperation, Norah refuses to give up hope and continues to fight for a better life. The Rat Pit is a powerful and gritty portrayal of life in the slums of Glasgow. Through Norah's story, Macgill explores themes of poverty, violence, and the struggle for survival in a harsh and unforgiving world. The novel is a classic of early 20th-Century literature and remains a powerful and relevant work today. Clean copy.
Softcover. Other Press, reprint, 2021, Softcover, 550 pages, b&w illustrations. The little-known story of screenwriter Salka Viertel, whose salons in 1930s and 40s Hollywood created a refuge for a multitude of famous figures who had escaped the horrors of World War ll. Hollywood was created by its "others"; that is, by women, Jews, and immigrants. Salka Viertel was all three and so much more. She was the screenwriter for five of Greta Garbo's movies and also her most intimate friend. At one point during the Irving Thalberg years, Viertel was the highest-paid writer on the MGM lot. Meanwhile, at her house in Santa Monica she opened her door on Sunday afternoons to scores of European emigres who had fled from Hitler--such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Arnold Schoenberg--along with every kind of Hollywood star, from Charlie Chaplin to Shelley Winters. In Viertel's living room (the only one in town with comfortable armchairs, said one Hollywood insider), countless cinematic, theatrical, and musical partnerships were born. Clean copy.
Hardcover. Middlebury VT, Vermont Folklife Center, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 24 pages illustrated in color by Michael Donato. Award-winning author William Jaspersohn brings American history alive in a moving immigrant tale. The story retells the amazing, true saga of the Eurich brothers from Prussia, who arrive five years apart in America in the 1880s and who miraculously end up on neighboring farms in central Vermont. Clean copy.
Hardcover. NY, Fordham University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 234 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on the half-title page. The writer Giuseppe Prezzolini said that Italian immigrants left behind tears and sweat but not "words," making their lives in America mostly in silence, their memories private and stories untold. In this innovative portrait of the Italian-American experience, these lives are no longer hidden. Ilaria Serra offers the first comprehensive study of a largely ignored legacy-the autobiographies written by immigrants. Here she looks closely at fifty-eight representative works written during the high tide of Italian migration. Scouring archives, discovering diaries, and memoirs in private houses and forgotten drawers, Serra recovers the voices of the first generation-bootblacks and poets, film directors and farmers, miners, anarchists, andseamstresses-compelled to tell their stories. Mostly unpublished, often thickly accented, these tales of ordinary men and women are explored in nuanced detail, organized to reflect how they illuminate the realities ofwork, survival, identity, and change.
Hardcover. NY, Knopf , 1st, 1976, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. The author's first book about growing up in Stockton, California with her immigrant parents from a small peasant village in China.
Hardcover. Boston MA, Boston Globe, 1st, 1977, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 122 pages, b&w plates. A collection of over 100 b&w photographs about various subjects & impressions by a German immigrant who became a staff photographer on 'The Boston Globe'. SIGNED, inscribed & dated in year of publication by the Author on copyright page. Previous owner's name in bold letters on front fly leaf, otherwise clean.