Synopses & Reviews
Crosscurrents: Atlantic and Pacific Migration in the Making of a Global America, 1800-Present asks two fundamental questions: When and how did the trajectories of Atlantic history and Pacific history overlap and converge with each other through travel and migration? What historically rooted processes drove people originally separated by immense physical and cultural distances into mutual encounters, close exchanges, and collective creativity in building an inter-hemispheric social and cultural life based on group diversity? Historian Reed Ueda moves beyond regional compartments to uncover transnational inter-linkages of migration, trade, and cross-cultural change. The result is a powerful new synthesis that puts American history in a new light. Impeccably researched, Crosscurrents uses a wide variety of sources--public records, personal writings, quantitative data sets, and visual material--to show the historical developments of these transformations. It is an ideal text for courses in immigration history, history of the Atlantic, history of the Pacific, history of California, and the history of the American West.
Review
"Crosscurrents is a thoroughly researched and beautifully written study of the emergence of the U.S. west coast as a borderland between the Atlantic and Pacific worlds from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Ueda captures the human drama of global migration and the social history of Asian immigrants in the U.S. with skill and sensitivity, and his scholarship crosses new boundaries along with the immigrant groups he is studying. This is Ueda's most ambitious intellectual venture yet, aiming to connect the histories of the Pacific and Atlantic worlds. It is a major contribution to comparative and connective global history. Ueda's work comes ashore and is firmly grounded in a richly textured social history of Asian immigrants to the U.S.; he blends their stories with legal and intellectual history with great finesse. Ueda has done much more than can be expected of one historian writing on a huge subject. "--Sugata Bose, Harvard University
About the Author
Reed Ueda is Professor of History at Tufts University. He has been coeditor, with Mary C. Waters and Helen B. Marrow, of
The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965 (2007). He has authored or co-authored several books, including
Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History (1994) and
Avenues to Adulthood: The Origins of the High School and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (1987).
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Precursors Pacific Borderlands
Bridges Across the Waters
Transatlantic Movements
Labor for the Far West
Out from Asian Enclosures
Restrictionist Admissions Policy
Closing Pacific and Atlantic Gates
Chapter 2: Emergence Between the Hemispheres
Migrations and Regional Development
Asian Frontiers
Economic Activity
Migrant Labor to the Ethnic Economy
Communities in Transition
Pluralism without Democracy
Chapter 3: Transplantation and Transculturaion
Networks for Social Capital
Mutualism and Community Development
Transcultural Spaces
The Civic Community of Schools
Cultural Change and Expression
Generations on the Margins
Chapter 4: A Globalist Era
Social Mobility
The Politics of Global Immigration
Chapter 5: The Pacific Coast as National and Global Hub
A New Political Economy of Diversity
Cultural Production and Innovation
Creativity and Human Capital
Politics and Population
Personhood, Peoplehood, and Nationhood
Conclusion