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Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 10:32:14 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Pennee Bender
Subject: Start date for the Immigration and Ethnicity Forum
Dear Immigration & Ethnicity Forum Participants --
Gary Gerstle has asked to postpone the start of the forum until November 2nd.
He will be posting his opening statement tomorrow.
Thanks for your patience,
Pennee Bender
History Matters Coordinator
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Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 12:06:46 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Subject: Opening Statement
Dear Colleagues,
I am honored to have been given the opportunity to moderate this
month's forum on immigration and ethnicity.
The biggest challenge in teaching the history of immigration and
ethnicity, I believe, is to help students to understand the relationship
of popular myths about the immigrant experience (America as the promised
land, the rapidity and enthusiasm with which immigrants embraced
America) to the actual experience of immigrants in American society.
Before the 1960s, scholarship tended to be written in accordance with
the myths: immigrants may have had hard times in America but they ended
up making good lives for themselves. Beginning in the 1960s, and
intensifying in the 1970s and 1980s, this approach to immigration
history was attacked by young radical historians who constructed a story
of immigration stressing exploitation, failure, disillusionment, exile,
and repatriation. Or, if they stressed the positive, they focused not
on Americanization but on the retention of ethnic cultures, a
development that they celebrated. This point of view has filtered into
public schools through the approach to American history referred to as
multiculturalism, and it has become a hotly debated issue in the
so-called culture wars. Much of this revisionist scholarship was
excellent, and the skills and passion of its practitioners did much to
invigorate the field. But it was also, at times, too dogmatic, for
those working from this perspective (and I was one of them) tended to
ignore the immigrants who did make it in America, who did become
American patriots, who did shed their traditional identities and eagerly
formed new ones. It is important to acknowledge this experience of
success, hope, and transformation, especially if your classes, like
mine, contain large numbers of students who are either descendants of
the "new immigrants" from southern and eastern Europe who came at the
turn of the last century, or who are part of the current wave of
immigrants; "America," for many of them, does connote opportunity for
economic advancement and cultural freedom. Hence, the importance, when
teaching this subject, to hold the story of America as a land of
emancipation in some kind of balance with the story of America as a land
of exploitation and suffering. Werner Sollors, in his book, *Beyond
Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture* explores the theme
of emancipation in very imaginative ways, while John Bodnar, in *The
Transplanted* offers a marvelous synthesis of the radical scholarship
referrred to earlier. I explore this theme of emancipation vs.
exploitation myself in an article that I published in the September 1997
issue of the *Journal of American History,* called "Liberty and Coercion
and the Making of Americans."
A second important challenge is to include non-European immigrant
groups in the history of American immigration and ethnicity. One only
has to mention the way in which images of the Statue of Liberty dominate
popular and scholarly discourses on immigration to appreciate the
influence of the European immigration experience on our thinking. But
what about the millions of immigrants who came through Angel Island in
San Francisco Bay, across the Rio Grande, and across the Canadian
border? The experiences of these latter groups has to be pushed from the
periphery toward the center. To teach about Mexicans, Chinese,
Japanese, Filipino, and other non-European immigrants groups is to raise
questions about the relevance of imperialism, conquest, and war to the
experience of immigrants in America. It also raises important questions
about the influence of racial attitudes on immigration, both in regard
to Asian and Latin American immigrants who had to cope with stigmas of
racial inferiority and in regard to European immigrants who, in relation
to blacks, Asians, and Latinos, had an opportunity to claim the
privileges of whiteness. David Roediger and Matthew Jacobson are two
scholars who have written important works on European immigrants and the
pursuit of whiteness, while Ronald Takaki, Roger Daniels, David
Gutierrez, Gary Okihiro, David Montejano, and George Sanchez are among
those who have pioneered in writing immigration history from a Asian and
Latino point of view. I would be happy to provide more specific
references for those who might like them.
A third important challenge is to compare the experiences of immigrants
who came in different waves. Rarely do scholars compare those
immigrants who came in the period from 1890 to 1920 to those who have
come since 1965; and how often are either of these two groups compared
to mid-19th or 18th century immigrants? Yet, such comparisons on
matters of motivations for coming to America, on rates of repatriation
to their homelands, on the creation and dissolution of diasporic
imaginations, and on experiences of work, family, gender, and
assimilation would seem to be especially valuable in teaching. The
absence of a strong comparative literature makes it difficult for us to
develop such topics in our classrooms. But we might use this electronic
forum as an opportunity to develop ideas for specific comparisons across
time and space.
On this, and on other matters pertaining to immigration and ethnicity,
I look forward to learning about your views.
Sincerely,
Gary Gerstle
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Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 09:01:51 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Sean Heston
Subject: Re: Opening Statement
I am a few months from my comps. I am looking at the impact of immigration
on a particular 19th century religious group: The German Pastors sent to
America by the Bavarian pastor, Wilhelm Loehe.
I'd be interested to know if the list wants to discuss religious aspects of
immigration. This semester I am writing two papers. One is on the Protestant
Christian Immigrations of the 19th century. The other is on the
non-Christian Immigrations of the 19th century. Any guidance or criticism
from the list on these topics is VERY welcome.
Peace,
Sean Heston
sean@religions.com
Ph.D. Student
Religious Studies and History
University of Missouri--Kansas City
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Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 10:52:53 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Lynda Durfee
Subject: Re: Opening Statement
Dear Sean and listmembers:
One can't really discuss 19th-century religious immigration to the U.S.
without mentioning the Mormons. Thousands of converts from Britain,
Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland and even South Africa and Australia sailed
across the oceans and crossed the plains to Utah between 1847 and the late
1890s. Most of these converts traveled via church-chartered ships, trains,
and steamboats to jumping-off points on the Mississippi (eastern Iowa) or
Missouri River (Florence, Nebraska or Council Bluffs, Iowa). Then they
crossed the plains with church-organized wagon or handcart companies. As
the continental railroad was built, the church sent out wagons and supplies
to meet the emigrants at the railhead. When the railroad was completed in
1869, the emigrants could travel by train all the way from New York to
Ogden, Utah in less than a week.
The above is just an overall view of Mormon immigration/migration in the
Utah pioneer period. If anyone would like to comment, I'd be glad to answer
any questions or suggest resources for further research. I've researched and
written a narrative on a company of 260 Mormons who crossed the plains by
handcart from Nebraska to Salt Lake City in 1860. One-third of these were
British converts who had sailed from Liverpool to New York in the Spring.
Another third were Europeans and their children who had immigrated a few
years earlier, but had remained in Eastern states until they could save
enough money to continue to Utah. The remaining third were American-born
Mormons from mid-Atlantic states.
Of course, I have my own personal interest in this subject, but I think the
signficance (in effort and size) of the Mormon migration to Utah has been
overlooked in "Western" history. The fact that the majority of them were
foreign-born is rarely mentioned, either.
I've expanded my project to include non-Mormons who crossed the plains in
1860 in order to compare and contrast demographics, methods of
transportation, and attitudes about Native Americans, the military (at
forts), traders, and others along the trails.
Lynda Durfee
Cultural Studies PhD program
George Mason Univ.
Fairfax VA
durfee_lynda@tmac.com
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Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 12:15:54 -0600
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Paddy Swiney
Subject: Re: Opening Statement
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The Mormon entry raised an interesting question. Will the Forum address
internal migration movements?
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Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 15:57:26 EST
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Dinahg60@AOL.COM
Subject: Re: Novels
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I am a staff developer and I work with high school humanities teachers. We are always looking for good novels, not to supplement, but as an interdisciplinary content element. We have usedThe Breadgivers, The Jungle, Life in the Iron Mills, Time and Again, etc. Does anyone have any suggestions for other novels and notions about the themes they touch on? I would love to talk about ways that themes in novels connect to immigration history.
For more current immigration we have used Kric Krac, by Edwidge Danticat, The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, among many others.
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Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 16:00:43 EST
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Dinahg60@AOL.COM
Subject: Re: metaphor debate
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I have another question:
Could we talk about the latest scholarship on the salad bowl, melting pot, stew metaphor? I'm interested in the most recent metaphors that have emerged. I am also interested in how each metaphor reflects the time in which it emerged, and how some discussion of that could be used to introduce a unit on immigration.
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Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 18:27:16 EST
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Jennie Fraser
Subject: Re: Novels
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I use a great - and long- short story,"Ellis Island" by Mark Helprin for
immigration,; it's from a collection of short stories by the same name;
modern author, a little fanstasy, a lot of factual backgorund.
Studs Terkel's American Dreams. Lost and Found is good for narratives.
Good story,, "The Silver Bracelet" . Great novel, Joy Luck Club. Others: How
the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, by Julia Alvarez; The Dream of Water, by
Kyoko Mori, about a Japanese/Amrican returning to homeland after immigration.
We do a senior unit on "Cultural Conflict" which deals with issues of racial,
ethnic, and generational conflict based on different subcultures - pretty
good, I think.
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Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 18:44:17 EST
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Jennie Fraser
Subject: Re: metaphor debate
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Sounds like we're on the same spot in curriculum. I just posted a note about
immigration issues/novels in conjunction with the senior topic of "culture
conflict" that I teach. I wrote two choices on two ends of the the board and
asked kids as they came in to sit on the side of the room that expressed
their own attitude about multiculturalism in the schools. The two statements
were:
"In order for Americans to become sensitive to all the cultures that make
up the fabric of America, schools should teach a representative sampling of
novels written by authors of those different cultures."
and
"Trying to teach novels from all cultures is just resulting in the
"Balkanization" of America. Teachers should stick to the traditional
literature that is most often associated with America: Twain, Hemingway,
Thoreau; works which emphasize values common to all Americans."
We then had a brief debate of the issues. (After an explanation of what
"Balkanization" is!) All of this leads to issues of immigration such as - who
are the origianl Americans, and who are the "immigrants?"
The next day I had a latino speaker from our school district who is a
"community liaison" -works with gang conflicts- and had him talk about
assimilation: his own experience coming from Mexico. Kids were interested.
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Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 17:49:57 -0600
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Carl Schulkin
Subject: Re: Novels
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Another novel about immigrants that is worth trying is Thomas Bell's, OUT OF
THIS FURNACE. It is an autobiographical account of three generations of a
Slovak family in the steel mills of Pittsburgh from the late nineteenth
century through the 1930s.
Carl Schulkin
Pembroke Hill School
Kansas City, MO
At 03:57 PM 11/05/1999 EST, you wrote:
>I am a staff developer and I work with high school humanities teachers. We
are always looking for good novels, not to supplement, but as an
interdisciplinary content element. We have usedThe Breadgivers, The Jungle,
Life in the Iron Mills, Time and Again, etc. Does anyone have any
suggestions for other novels and notions about the themes they touch on? I
would love to talk about ways that themes in novels connect to immigration
history.
>
>For more current immigration we have used Kric Krac, by Edwidge Danticat,
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, among many others.
>
>
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Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 19:51:17 -0400
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Dina Heisler
Subject: Re: Novels
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Another book students love is My Antonia by Willa Cather. I teach
immigrant high school students and really relate. It offers a vivid
picture of immigrants and turn of the century life out West.
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Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 18:53:11 -0600
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Jerry Garcia
Subject: Re: Novels
In-Reply-To: <0.d39699aa.25549eb6@aol.com>
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"Rain of Gold" by Victor Villasenor is a novel I have used to examine
Mexican immigration during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Excellent book based on the autobiography of the author's parents.
Provides good insight to the displacement of many Mexican families during
the Mexican Revolution and their experience(s) in the U.S. This book also
examines race relations, Mexican culture, indigeneous beliefs, and the
farmworker experience.
At 03:57 PM 11/5/99 -0500, Dinahg60@AOL.COM wrote:
>I am a staff developer and I work with high school humanities teachers. We
>are always looking for good novels, not to supplement, but as an
>interdisciplinary content element. We have usedThe Breadgivers, The Jungle,
>Life in the Iron Mills, Time and Again, etc. Does anyone have any
>suggestions for other novels and notions about the themes they touch on? I
>would love to talk about ways that themes in novels connect to immigration
>history.
>
>For more current immigration we have used Kric Krac, by Edwidge Danticat,
>The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, among many others.
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Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 12:43:36 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: Immigration and Ethnicity Matters
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Dear Immigration and Ethnicity Subscribers;
Thanks to those of you who have sent responses to my opening
statements. Several of you sent in the names of immigrant novels that
you use in your history courses. This strikes me as an incredibly
useful exchange, for it will allow us to assemble an annotated
bibliography on immigrant novels, a rich resource that those of us who
teach in this area will be able to dip into for years. I hope that this
exchange will continue. I would like to ask those of who contribute to
identify the kinds of courses you're teaching, since there's likely to
be quite a variation and books suitable for one teaching environment may
not be so suitable for another. Also, give us two sentences of
description about the book and what themes it covers well; in this
regard, Jerry Garcia's note on the Victor Villasenor novel can serve us
as a model.
In response to Sean Heston's query about whether we can talk about
religious aspects of the immigrant experience: the answer is yes. Sean,
why not offer us a statement about religion and immigration in which
you discuss matters that seem particularly salient? Then we might be
able to generate discussion about it. To Lynda Durfee's interesting
note on immigrant Mormons: could you say more about how a consideration
of Mormons as an immigrant group affects our understanding of
immigration and ethnicity in the West? To Paddy Swiney's good question
about whether we might consider internal migration movements in our
discussion, I would say that we should probably not, unless those
internal movements involved immigrants or ethnics--Irish heading west,
Mexicans migrating through the Southwest, or urban ethnics in places
like New York heading to the suburbs.
Finally, Dinah G.'s query about the metaphors for understanding
immigration: hadn't heard the "stew metaphor," which I'll have to stew
on. The "melting pot" as a popular metaphor dates from the turn of the
20th century (even though ideas of America as a land of melting and
assimilation long predated that), and is most closely associated with
the Israel Zangwill play by that name that debuted in New York City in
1908 or 1909. Its popularity drew on Progressive confidence in the
possibilities of assimilation, and it lasted as long as Progressivism
remained strong. During and after World War I, as Progressivism
collapsed and reform optimism waned, the phrase melting pot was used
less and less; in the immigration debates of the 1920s, restrictionists
alleged that the melting pot was a myth, that the immigrants could not
be assimilated. And from the 1920s through the 1950s, the metaphor was
not extensively used even as, ironically, assimilation among European
groups at least was proceeding at a rapid rate. It came back into
common usage in the 1960s, once again as a term of opprobium, this time
by cultural radicals who rejected the assimilationist premises implicit
in the melting pot metaphor. And it was in the 1960s and 1970s that
alternative metaphors, such as the salad bowl, began to proliferate.
Philip Gleason wrote an excellent article on the history of the melting
pot idea many years ago; I'm not sure whether it was republished in his
collection, Speaking of Diversity, but I'm sure someone on this list,
maybe even Phil himself, can give us that information very quickly.
I look forward to your responses.
Gary Gerstle
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Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 12:19:42 +0000
Reply-To: denise.spooner@csun.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Denise Spooner
Organization: Calfiornia State University, Northridge
Subject: Re: metaphor debate
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Dear Dinah and others,
At California State University, Northridge (the earthquake school) I usually teach immigration as part of U.S. cultural history. The foundation of my course is American core values and I often use the "stew" metaphor in the assimilation/acculturation debate. One reason I prefer "stew" over "salad" is because I see
core values, such as individualism, as the medium that has both aided and reflected exchange between cultures. Core values are the gravy part of the stew. For example, over time individualism has broken down some of the bonds of family and community that have been central to the lives of Asian immigrants, to cite
only one group.
At the same time, while immigrants adopt American core values, they contribute aspects of own culture to the stew in the forms of material culture, foodways, etc. But often people from the dominant culture have taken those contributions and "Americanized" them to some extent. I'm thinking here of examples like those
found in architecture here in southern California, i.e the Spanish neo-colonial houses of the 1920s, elements of Japanese architecture found in the work of some Craftsman-era structures.
One interesting twist on this theme of architecture as evidence of native-born Americans adopting elements of immigrant cultures in their work came to me through a student who did a research paper on the creation of San Francisco's Chinatown after the 1906 earthquake. She discovered that the pagoda and dragaon motifs
built into Chinatown then reflected not the culture of the Chinese who lived there and rebuilt that part of the city after the earthquake and fire, but, instead, the immigrants' recognition of what native-born Americans *expected* Chinatown to look like. Apparently, the leaders of Chinatown hoped to attract a portion
of the American population who were turning from grand trips to Europe to visiting more places in the U.S. instead. Anyone who has been to SF's Chinatown on a Saturday or practially any day during the summer can see how successful the post-earthquake era leaders of Chinatown were!
To summarize, I like the stew metaphor fits because it allows for the exchange between cultures that have taken place while recognizing that there are elements that remained intact. In a salad--perhaps with the exception of gazpacho?--the elements remain more intact than in a stew.
Best to all,
Denise Spooner
Dept. of History
California State University, Northridge
Dinahg60@AOL.COM wrote:
> I have another question:
> Could we talk about the latest scholarship on the salad bowl, melting pot, stew metaphor? I'm interested in the most recent metaphors that have emerged. I am also interested in how each metaphor reflects the time in which it emerged, and how some discussion of that could be used to introduce a unit on immigration.
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Date: Mon, 8 Nov 1999 11:11:35 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: "Jane H. Rothstein"
Subject: comparing immigrant/ethnic groups
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To start out, thank you to the American Social History Project for
sponsoring this forum and to Gary Gerstle for moderating it.
By way of introduction, I am a PhD candidate from New York University in
American Jewish history and the history of women and gender. My research
focuses on Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their children from the
turn of the century through the 1940s. I am not teaching right now, but am
formulating courses on both American Jewish history and on US
immigration/ethnic history.
For those of you who have taught courses on one immigrant/ethnic group in
the US, how have you approached:
1) comparison among groups, and
2) relations between groups, both on a formal, communal level and on more
individual bases?
For those of you teaching survey courses on immigration/ethnic history, how
have you approached these questions? In what ways are these approaches
similar and in what ways different?
thanks,
Jane
Jane Rothstein,
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of History and
Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies
New York University
jr231@is5.nyu.edu
jane_rothstein@mindspring.com
"Racing between mysticism and revolution..."
-- Phil Ochs
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Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1999 09:36:02 -0500
Reply-To: Jim Young
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Jim Young
Subject: Re: Novels
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Thomas Bell's OUT OF THIS FURNACE is a classic still in print (U. of
Pittsburgh) regarding a Slovak family over three generations in steel towns.
It takes up issues around work, labor-management relations, gender
relations, and the immigrant experience.
Joyce Kornblatt's BREAKING BREAD and her recent THE REASON FOR WINGS are
also worth a long look. The latter makes the connection between the
Holocaust and the "Dirty War" in Argentina in a way that hasn't been made
before.
-----Original Message-----
From: Dinahg60@AOL.COM
To: IMMIGRATIONFORUM@ASHP.LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
Date: Friday, November 05, 1999 3:35 PM
Subject: Re: Novels
>I am a staff developer and I work with high school humanities teachers. We
are always looking for good novels, not to supplement, but as an
interdisciplinary content element. We have usedThe Breadgivers, The Jungle,
Life in the Iron Mills, Time and Again, etc. Does anyone have any
suggestions for other novels and notions about the themes they touch on? I
would love to talk about ways that themes in novels connect to immigration
history.
>
>For more current immigration we have used Kric Krac, by Edwidge Danticat,
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, among many others.
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 1999 09:49:24 -0600
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: April Schultz
Subject: Re: comparing immigrant/ethnic groups
In-Reply-To: <199911081614.LAA10117@smtp6.mindspring.com>
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Dear Colleagues, I teach at Illinois Wesleyan University in the History
department. I teach an immigration history survey and (though I have yet
to offer it--next year, I hope) and upper-level course on urban ethnics at
the turn of the century. My other courses include the U.S. survey and two
women's history courses.
In response to the query about comparing immigrant/ethnic groups, I find it
hard to imagine teaching a course on one ethnic group. What a luxury! In
my survey, I tend to organize the course around themes chronologically (
the book Major Problems in U.S. Immigration History is a big help here) and
within each theme we look at the experiences, strategies, etc., of the
ethnic groups most relevant to that theme or time period. Then as a matter
of course we compare and contrast the experiences of the various groups in
an effort to "solidify" the themes we've been discussing.
I have also used Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror, which works just great
on demonstrating the "inter-connectedness" of immigrants and the dominant
society in making the United States. His illustration of the various
groups involved in bringing cotton to the market is a simple and profound
example.
Regarding novels, I've had good luck with Breadgivers, which allows us to
talk about the intersection of gender and ethnicity. Jasmine, by Bharati
Muhkerjee, is probably my favorite to use toward the end of the course.
The story about an illegal Indian refugee woman demonstrates most of the
themes I try to "get at" in my course: the global labor market that
transforms the societies from which people emigrate, the very active
decision-making that goes into emigration, the movement back and forth
between countries of origin and the new country, the commonality between
immigrants and other kinds of displaced people (in this case, farmers in
Iowa displaced by the farm crisis), and the different strategies immigrants
use when the arrive (recreating India in Flushing, New York, or becoming
someone new many times over); and the global connections that tie us all
together (an Indian professor in Flushing readys the hair of Indian
immigrant women for electronics that are then sold to consumers in India
who then need workers trained in the west to come back and fix those
electronics when they break).
Best,
April Schultz
Associate Professor, History
Illinois Wesleyan University
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Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1999 11:17:14 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: Some Additional thoughts
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From Jim Young comes another endorsement of Thomas Bell's "Out of this
Furnace novel"; this is a novel that I have used in a wide variety of
courses and institutions, almost always with terrific success.
Sometimes I teach it all at once, sometimes I divide it into two weeks
(it is long--more than 400 pages), with the the first week focusing on
Parts I and II and the years 1880 to 1915, the period in which the
Slovak family arrives in Braddock, a steeltown near Pittsburgh, and
suffers through two generations of hardship, and the second week
focusing on Parts III and IV, from the 1920s through the late 1930s,
the
period in which the third generation, through mass culture and the
labor
movement, finds its place (and triumphs) in America. The story, thus,
is a fairly conventional story of immigrant suffering--immigrant
triumph, with the passage of generations, Americanization, and the
labor
movement being the mechanisms of triumph. But it is also possible,
with
more advanced students, to turn the novel to other purposes--there's a
great deal of material on gender in the novel, and it is also possible
to use this book to ask questions about the experience of European
immigrants to other immigrants and to people of color. In a course I'm
currently teaching on America 1900 to 1945, I asked students to write a
paper comparing the experiences of immigrants and blacks at the turn of
the century based on their reading of the first half of Thomas Bell and
of selections from Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, and Du Bois,
Souls of Black Folk. The results were quite interesting. Tomorrow we
return to Bell, with a focus on the ethnics, labor, and popular culture
in the Great Depression. We will be discussing Bell in conjunction
with
two movies: the Marx Brothers, Duck Soup and Frank Capra, Mr. Deeds
Goes
to Town. The question of ethnicity comes up indirectly but powerfully
in those films, because of the Marx brothers eastern European Jewish
background, and Capra's Sicilian background. Indeed the relationship
of
immigrants to movies and other forms of American popular culture is a
very important issue that we might want to take up in this forum at
greater length.
In the previous paragraph, I've implicitly suggested ways of comparing
the experiences of different groups, a subject that Jane Rothstein has
encouraged us to take up. I would invite Jane to offer us some of her
thoughts on how to approach and to teach comparisons of and relations
between different ethnic groups.
Finally, a few words on Denise Spooner's very interesting ommunication
on her use of the stew metaphor in her classes. This seems to be
clearly superior to the salad bowl metaphor for it allows for a dynamic
interaction among the different substances in ways that affect them all
without presuming their complete transformation or disintegration. As
a
device for getting students to think about cultural change, this
metaphor is a good, and stimulating, one. Of course, all these
metaphors, arguably, can only get us so far; thus, there is no easy way
to incorporate into the stew metaphor Denise's story about Chinese
immigrants in San Francisco's Chinatown after 1906 building pagodas and
dragons not to express their "traditional" culture but to make
Chinatown, in appearance at least, conform to Anglo conceptions of what
that traditional culture ought to look like. This is a fantastic story
of cultural invention and negotiation, all of it conditioned by the
pursuit among certain groups of Chinese leaders and entrepreneurs of
American tourist dollars. No single metaphor can do justice to that
American tale! Metaphors, then, can probably best be used to get
students' attention, to get them interested in questions of cultural
change, and to prepare them to contemplate the complexities of the sort
revealed in this Chinatown example.
Gary Gerstle
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Message-ID: <382843EB.E7F08309@umail.umd.edu>
Date: Tue, 09 Nov 1999 10:55:23 -0500
From: Gary Gerstle
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Organization: University of Maryland
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To: Immigrationforum@ashp.listerv.cuny.edu, Gary Gerstle
Subject: Some additional thoughts
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>From Jim Young comes another endorsement of Thomas Bell's "Out of this
Furnace novel"; this is a novel that I have used in a wide variety of
courses and institutions, almost always with terrific success.
Sometimes I teach it all at once, sometimes I divide it into two weeks
(it is long--more than 400 pages), with the the first week focusing on
Parts I and II and the years 1880 to 1915, the period in which the
Slovak family arrives in Braddock, a steeltown near Pittsburgh, and
suffers through two generations of hardship, and the second week
focusing on Parts III and IV, from the 1920s through the late 1930s, the
period in which the third generation, through mass culture and the labor
movement, finds its place (and triumphs) in America. The story, thus,
is a fairly conventional story of immigrant suffering--immigrant
triumph, with the passage of generations, Americanization, and the labor
movement being the mechanisms of triumph. But it is also possible, with
more advanced students, to turn the novel to other purposes--there's a
great deal of material on gender in the novel, and it is also possible
to use this book to ask questions about the experience of European
immigrants to other immigrants and to people of color. In a course I'm
currently teaching on America 1900 to 1945, I asked students to write a
paper comparing the experiences of immigrants and blacks at the turn of
the century based on their reading of the first half of Thomas Bell and
of selections from Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, and Du Bois,
Souls of Black Folk. The results were quite interesting. Tomorrow we
return to Bell, with a focus on the ethnics, labor, and popular culture
in the Great Depression. We will be discussing Bell in conjunction with
two movies: the Marx Brothers, Duck Soup and Frank Capra, Mr. Deeds Goes
to Town. The question of ethnicity comes up indirectly but powerfully
in those films, because of the Marx brothers eastern European Jewish
background, and Capra's Sicilian background. Indeed the relationship of
immigrants to movies and other forms of American popular culture is a
very important issue that we might want to take up in this forum at
greater length.
In the previous paragraph, I've implicitly suggested ways of comparing
the experiences of different groups, a subject that Jane Rothstein has
encouraged us to take up. I would invite Jane to offer us some of her
thoughts on how to approach and to teach comparisons of and relations
between different ethnic groups.
Finally, a few words on Denise Spooner's very interesting communication
on her use of the stew metaphor in her classes. This seems to be
clearly superior to the salad bowl metaphor for it allows for a dynamic
interaction among the different substances in ways that affect them all
without presuming their complete transformation or disintegration. As a
device for getting students to think about cultural change, this
metaphor is a good, and stimulating, one. Of course, all these
metaphors, arguably, can only get us so far; thus, there is no easy way
to incorporate into the stew metaphor Denise's story about Chinese
immigrants in San Francisco's Chinatown after 1906 building pagodas and
dragons not to express their "traditional" culture but to make
Chinatown, in appearance at least, conform to Anglo conceptions of what
that traditional culture ought to look like. This is a fantastic story
of cultural invention and negotiation, all of it conditioned by the
pursuit among certain groups of Chinese leaders and entrepreneurs of
American tourist dollars. No single metaphor can do justice to that
American tale! Metaphors, then, can probably best be used to get
students' attention, to get them interested in questions of cultural
change, and to prepare them to contemplate the complexities of the sort
revealed in this Chinatown example.
Gary Gerstle
--KAA03783.942162806/umailsrv2.umd.edu--
--------------240420A520C321F9D2ACF3DA--
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 1999 14:58:04 -0600
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Lynn Vacca
Subject: Student Assignments
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
I will be teaching an immigration history seminar for the first time during
the upcoming semester. I would be interested to learn what types of
assignments others have used. I am especially interested in suggestions
for assignments using primary documents.
I look forward to your suggestions.
Lynn Vacca
Lynn Vacca
Truman State University
lvacca@truman.edu
(660) 785-6041
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 1999 16:27:27 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Robert Shaffer
Subject: Re: Course Readings
In-Reply-To:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
I've been pleased so far to see on this list mention of a number of books
that I will be using next semester the first time I teach an immigration
and ethnicity course: Gjerde's _Major Problems_, Bell's _Out of This
Furnace_, Daniels's _Coming to America_, and Takaki's _A Different
Mirror_, which I will use parts of. I don't remember if I read about it
on this list, but I will also use the partial autobiography of Yoshiko
Uchida, _Desert Exile_, which I think is one of the more sensitive
first-person accounts of the Japanese-American internment, and which I
believe lends itself to discussion of ways in which this middle-class
family retained some Japanese values, held some "American" values, and how
the two interacted.
I am writing to ask whether anyone has used Mark Wyman's
_Round-Trip to America_ in class, and could report on how students
respond. Wyman surveys the European immigrants (or sojourners) who
returned to Europe, mainly in the period from 1890 to 1930, and describes
their economic, political, and cultural impact on Europe. His emphasis is
in line with the current efforts to replace "immigration" history with a
broader "migration" history.
-- Robert Shaffer
Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 1999 23:20:54 +0100
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Philippe Moreau
Subject: Immigration in France
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Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Hello,
I am looking for american studies on immigration/ethnicity in Fr=
ance. Could anyone help me ? Thank you.
Philippe Moreau (in Paris)
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 1999 11:54:28 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Raymond Williams
Subject: Re: Student Assignments
In-Reply-To:
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Hello,
It is difficult to know if a response to your query will be helpful because
you do not describe the level of your students. Undergraduates, history
majors, graduate students?
Two assignments have worked well for a class of undergraduates on
immigration and religion:
The first, early assignment is a family history that places each branch of
the student's family in the history of American immigration and religious
life. Most of the research is done through oral interviews with family
members and with family documents. Any class of a dozen students will
embody a good portion of American immigration history, so one can use that
personal material throughout the course. The student is expected to do the
family research along with detailed research on the immigrant and religious
groups represented by the family, and relate those to the materials we are
reading in the course. The resources and personal involvement that students
develop enrich the entire semester.
On the first day of class I give a brief account of my family history and
ask students to report on what they know about the history of their
families. That puts a great deal of information before the class about the
diversity of backgrounds of students. Then the assignment is given that
invites them to elaborate that report with more disciplined research.
Undergraduates respond favorably to the activity, in part, I think, because
it gets them into good conversations with members of their own families and
connects serious academic research with their family attachments.
The second assignment is to interview immigrants and their families who are
related to religious groups that serve immigrant communities. My own
research is on the religions of immigrants from India, so the research here
is primarily on new immigrant religious groups.
I will be interested in learning about assignments others give in such courses.
Raymond
>I will be teaching an immigration history seminar for the first time during
>the upcoming semester. I would be interested to learn what types of
>assignments others have used. I am especially interested in suggestions
>for assignments using primary documents.
>
>I look forward to your suggestions.
>
>Lynn Vacca
>
>Lynn Vacca
>Truman State University
>lvacca@truman.edu
>(660) 785-6041
Raymond B. Williams
Professor of Religion
Director, Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion
Tel: 765 361 6336 Direct
765 361 6047 Secretary
765 361 6051 Fax
765 362 2446 Home
Email: williamr@wabash.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 1999 17:29:53 -0600
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: April Schultz
Subject: Re: Student Assignments
In-Reply-To:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Dear Colleagues,
In my undergraduate, lower-level immigration course, most of my
assignments are essays based on the readings, but I have done one
different essay project that's worked pretty well. I had the students go
to the local historical society and look at the exhibit of local McLean
County history. They then analyzed the exhibit for the ways in which it
included immigration history. They couldn't, of course, judge the exhibit
based on a strong knowledge of local history; instead, I asked them to
think about the exhibit in terms of immigration historiography, i.e., what
kind of immigration history is the exhibit "doing." They papers were
generally very good and the students enjoyed the assignment. This came at
the beginning of the course after a unit on historiography.
I also have students at the beginning of the semester do an in-class
assignment based on Mary Waters' book, Ethnic Options, which looked at the
reasons middle-class white suburbanites chose to answer the national
origins question on the 1980 census in the ways that they did. So, why
emphasize German, when you might be English, Scottish and German. The book
is a great read -- lots of fun material from her interviews -- and in the
end she makes a very interesting and cutting argument about the
relationship between the ways whites think about ethnicity and racism.
It's quite accessible to undergraduates. Back to the assignment: on the
first day, students fill out her questionnaire and then students exchange
them. We then discuss the similarities and differences in students'
answers. At the beginning, that just gives us a sense of the variety of
experiences, etc. At the end of the semester, they read all or parts of
Waters' book and come back to the surveys with new eyes.
I like the idea of a family history assignment. I do that in the U.S.
Survey and women's history but I haven't done it in this class. Any other
advice on using that assignment?
Best, April Schultz
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 1999 12:46:08 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: History Matters
Comments: To: nlg@ehess.fr
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Let me respond to various communications that have accumulated these
last few days.
First, let me remind all of you of Jerry Garcia's request for movies
that depict European immigrants in any period [I have never taught the
Godfather I and II movies, but, if one could clear the time it would
take to show them, they would be very interesting texts to work with].
And, Jerry, I'd like to ask you to share with us your list of Latino
films.
Second, Philippe Moreau has sent us a query about American studies on
immigration/ethnicity in France. I want to ask Philippe for a
clarification of his request: are you referring to works done by U.S.
scholars on aspects of immigration/ethnicity in France? I have taken
the liberty of forwarding your request to Nancy Green at the Ecole, who
probably knows more about this matter than anyone else. But if you,
Phillipe, clarify your request for us, perhaps we can be helpful too.
Robert Shaffer has recommended a first-person account, Yoshiko Uchida,
Desert Exile, with which I am not familiar and am glad to know about.
People on this list might want to comment on that book, if they know it,
and compare it, too, to the better known John Okada, No-No Boy. Perhaps
Robert you, yourself, would want to offer a few words of comparison.
About using Mark Wyman's book, Round-Trip America: I think it depends on
the level and quality of your students. Its theme, about return
migration, is certainly important and useful to redirect students away
from "immigration" to "migration" as the frame through which to study
the experiences of (im)migrants. And its analysis is very good. But
it's not a particularly colorful book, in terms of anecdotes and
stories, and thus lower level students might have difficulty with it.
On the other hand, upper level students could certainly handle it.
A very evocative book, not about return migration per se but about the
hold of the Old Country on the imagination of immigrants in America, is
Matthew Jacobson's Special Sorrows. Unfortunately, the book is not in
paperback (perhaps we could change that if we flood Harvard University
Press with demands that it be issued in softcover).
When I lecture on patterns of migration in the early 20th century, I
often focus the students' attention first on the sex ratios of the
migrants which, for virtually all groups from eastern and southern
Europe (with the exception of Jews) were heavily weighted toward males.
These statistics are simple but powerful, and useful for getting
students to think of immigrants not as "the uprooted," but as male
laborers in a transAtlantic labor system. A look at the sex ratios also
permits me to focus students' attention on questions of gender and
sexuality--i.e., what are men in these groups doing about sex and
families in the New World and what are women left behind doing about the
absence of young men in their locales? The first question (about men)
allows me to introduce consideration of prostitution, homosexuality, and
intensely homosocial male immigrant worlds into discussion of the
immigrant experience(George Chauncey, in Gay New York, has some very
interesting material on homosexuality and immigrants in New York in the
early twentieth century.). In regard to the second question (women in
the Old Country), I like to tell the story of a former landlady of mine,
who lived in a Greek community in western Turkey in the World War I
era. The story she tells is of a mother and her daughter appearing on
her doorstep one day, with a picture of their son/brother who had gone
to America and was now looking for a bride. They showed my landlady a
picture of the young man and, very quickly, my landlady decided to join
her future mother-in-law and sister-in-law on a long trek to America to
marry this man. She cried the whole way, and never liked the man she
married, and she could never give me an adequate answer as to why she
went. But the lopside sex ratios help to explain her behavior, for her
village may have been one in which there were no young men left. Thus,
her only option, if she wished to marry, was to accept a marriage
proposal from a future mother-in-law! Students love to hear a story
about a bride going off with a future mother-in-law to the promised
land; and, unlike most of the stories I tell, it's one they never seem
to forget.
This story about my former landlady reveals the importance and uses of
family history in teaching about immigration; both Raymond Williams and
April Schultz make this point in their valuable responses to Lynn
Vacca's query about useful assignments in an immigration history class.
Both draw on the students' family history in intriguing, though in very
different ways, Raymond by having students do oral history with family
members and April by having students fill out Mary Waters'
questionnaire. Both these assignments strike me as particularly rich
and meaningful. I invite others to share their assignments with us as
well.
A completely different assignment, in terms of aims and primary sources,
that teachers about immigration might want to think about is to have
students read from the Supreme Court decisions of 1922 and 1923
upholding the constitutionality of a 1790 law barring nonwhite (and
nonblack) immigrants from naturalizing, and from the 1924 debates on the
House and Senate floor over immigration restriction. The way in which
the Supreme Court judges maintain the appropriateness of drawing racial
distinctions even as they admit that racial categories are historically
constructed is quite fascinating; so, too, the ways in which Senators
and Congressmen in 1924 depict European immigrant groups as racially
inferior and revolting will come as a shock to modern day students,
virtually all of whom, irrespective of their own racial grounds, think
of European-Americans as having always been white and having always had
a lock on racial respect.
A final document of the 1920s that might be interesting to work with:
the 1927 movie, The Jazz Singer, one of the first enormously successul
talkies; its plot focused on the struggles of a second generation Jewish
immigrant to leave behind his ethnic ghetto (and his father's dreams
that he become a cantor) and to become a successful "American" singer.
A controversial part of the movie is when the young man, played by Al
Jolson, blacks up to do a minstrel routine. Michael Rogin, in
Blackface, White Noise, has stressed how the use of blackface allowed
immigrants to take on American racial attitudes and to secure their own
racial status by joining in racist caricatures of black culture. But
Hasia Diner has begun making a different kind of argument, namely that
blacking up marked a far more complicated mechanism of cultural
imitation, emulation, and hydridization. Her work is referred to in the
most recent New York Review of Books, in an article by David Brion David
on Blacks and Jews. I invite comment on this brewing controversy, and
on the appropriateness of using this episode in the classroom.
I look forward to your responses.
Gary Gerstle
=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 1999 13:58:38 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Lisa auslander
Subject: PLANNING AN IMMIGRATION UNIT
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Hi!
I am a first year teacher in East New York, Brooklyn teaching 8th grade
history. I'm looking for a very hands on approach to teaching this unit on
immigration and am wondering if anyone out there has suggestions on a really
engaging focus, project ideas or reading material that might aid me in my
planning. also I am interested in making ties between the wave of
immigration during the turn of the century and the current wave of
immigration. I do have a banner kit of assorted novels that I plan to use
with the kids. Regarding the level of my students: low reading and
writing levels, around 4th or 5th grade level for most students. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Lisa Auslander
lisaaus@mindspring.com
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 01:50:15 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Comments: SoVerNet Verification (on garnet.sover.net) svjcbiti from
arc1a125.burl.sover.net [207.136.201.253] 207.136.201.253 Mon, 15
Nov 1999 01:45:27 -0500 (EST)
From: Stephen Homick
Subject: Re: History Matters/Your Huddled Masses on the Big Screen
In-Reply-To: <382EF560.10252E1C@umail.umd.edu>
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El 14 Nov 99, a las 12:46, Gary Gerstle scripsit:
> First, let me remind all of you of Jerry Garcia's request for
> movies that depict European immigrants in any period [I have never
> taught the Godfather I and II movies, but, if one could clear the
> time it would take to show them, they would be very interesting
> texts to work with]. And, Jerry, I'd like to ask you to share with
> us your list of Latino films.
There's Joan Silver's cult sleeper "Hester Street" (1974); b & w;
hour-and-a-half or so. Can be had through the distributor, First
Run Features, 153 Waverly Pl., NYC (800-229-8575), and Amazon or
Reel (can't recall which right now). Another possibility is Sergio
"fist full o' dollars" Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America"
(1984); color; about two-and-a-half hours for the cut version, and
nearly 4 for the full one. Strong performances by De Niro and
James Woods. Available through Amazon, Reel and several other on-
line distributors.
H T H
Homick
Champlain College
"Movies are better than real life. If you go to enough movies,
movies become real life, and real life becomes a movie."
- --Jules Feiffer.
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=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 09:08:28 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Lynda Durfee
Subject: Re: Your Huddled Masses on the Big Screen
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
I remember going to a move in the early 1960s about Greek immigrants. I think
it was "America, America." I remember that, as the ship approached New York
harbor, an immigrant with tuberculosis jumped overboard, first giving the
central character his papers.
Lynda Durfee
durfee_lynda@tmac.com
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 09:37:15 CST
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Carl Schulkin
Subject: Re: Your Huddled Masses on the Big Screen
Comments: cc: carl@schulkin.org
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
Joan Micklin Silver has also done a video aimed at the high school
classroom. It is short, only 30 minutes, easily understood by students and
a good basis for discussion of immigration to the United States at the turn
of the century. It is entitled THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE: The Long, Long
Journey. For many years it was available inexpensively from the Social
Studies School Service, but I noticed in their latest catalogue that they
have increased the price significantly. If you are a Middle School or High
School teacher and are not familiar with this video, you might want to shop
around for it. I show it every year and make good use of it in conjunction
with the reading of several immigrant autobiographies from PLAIN FOLK.
Carl Schulkin
Pembroke Hill School
Kansas City, MO
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 11:23:01 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Lynda Durfee
Subject: Re: Student Assignments
Dear Lynn:
How about challenging your students to find their immigrant ancestors? There
are many genealogical sites on the web. First, the students need to make a
chart
showing parents, grandparents, and so forth as far back as they can go from
information they get from their parents. Then, once they can get back to the
early 20th century, they will be able to find a lot of material on the web.
The
premier gateway to genealogical sites is at Cyndi's List. This is a list of
links.
http://www.cyndislist.com
Students should ask their relatives for stories in addition to the names,
dates
and places.
Then the class could compare immigrant experiences for various groups at
different time periods.
Lynda Durfee
Cultural Studies PhD Program
George Mason Univ.
Fairfax VA
durfee_lynda@tmac.com
____________________Reply Separator____________________
Subject: Student Assignments
Author: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Date: 11/12/99 2:58 PM
I will be teaching an immigration history seminar for the first time during
the upcoming semester. I would be interested to learn what types of
assignments others have used. I am especially interested in suggestions
for assignments using primary documents.
I look forward to your suggestions.
Lynn Vacca
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 11:38:41 EST
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Myriam Zuber
Subject: Re: Immigration in France
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Philippe,
Je travaille sur l'integration des immigres aux USA et plus particulierement
leur participation au niveau local. Notamment, je travaille beaucoup avec la
communaute Algerienne et Marocaine et je suis tres portee sur la question
immigree en France. De quelle information avez-vous besoin plus
particulierement?
Myriam Zuber
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 13:18:03 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Monica Leonards
Subject: Re: Your Huddled Masses on the Big Screen
Some additional ideas for immigration films:
"The Emigrants" and its sequel "The New Land": early 1970s films about mid-
nineteenth century Swedish immigration to Minnesota. They star Liv Ullmann
and Max von Sydow.
"A Thousand Pieces of Gold": early 1990s film about 1880s Chinese
immigration to Idaho.
MLeonards
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 14:17:49 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: "Roy A. Rosenzweig"
Subject: 1923 supreme court decision
In-Reply-To: <382EF560.10252E1C@umail.umd.edu>
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For those who want to follow up on Gary Gerstle's excellent
suggestion of using the Supreme Court's 1920s decisions on
immigration race, I have posted the court's opinion in one of the key
cases (United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind) on the history matters
web site at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/text/thind.html (That
decision and a number of other documents on immigration in the 1920s
will appear in the Who Built America cdrom covering 1914-46 that will
be out early next year, hopefully.)
Many people on this list will know the context of this
bizarre decision, but in case you don't the federal naturalization
law of 1790 had declared that "free white" people could become
citizens, and this was generally interpreted to exclude Asians from
citizenship. Yet Asian Indians, while dark-skinned and from Asia,
were "Caucasian" - that meant, according to the anthropology of that
day, they were of the same "race" as white Americans. On this ground,
the early twentieth-century Supreme Court decreed that they were
"white" and hence eligible for citizenship. In 1923, however, the
Court reversed itself in U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind. The decision
uses tortured arguments to declare Asian Indians ineligible for
citizenship. It concedes that "the phrase 'white persons' and the
word 'Caucasian' are synonymous." But it argues that the words "free
white persons" should be "interpreted in accordance with the
understanding of the common man," who would "instinctively recognize"
the "racial difference" between whites and the people the court
called "Hindus" (although very few of Asian Indian immigrants of that
period were actually adherents of Hinduism). "It may be true that the
blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the
dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well
that there are unmistakable and profound differences today."
Moreover, according to the Court, the Founding Fathers "intended to
include only the type of man whom they knew as white."
By the way, the history matters site has thirty different
first-person documents (e.g., letters, autobiographies, and oral
histories) that could be used in teaching about immigration. You can
find them on our main search page at:
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/search.taf
Roy
===============================================================
Roy Rosenzweig
Dept. of History, MS-3G1 Home:
George Mason University 511 N. Jackson St.
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444 Arlington, VA 22201
W: 703-993-1247 H: 703-522-2334
email: rrosenzw@gmu.edu Fax (home): 425-984-9046; (work): 703-993-1251
Director, Center for History & New Media
http://chnm.gmu.edu
===============================================================
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 12:34:58 -0700
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Ronnie Peacock
Organization: University of Northern Colorado
Subject: Re: Student Assignments
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Lynda Durfee wrote:
> Dear Lynn:
>
> How about challenging your students to find their immigrant ancestors? There
> are many genealogical sites on the web. First, the students need to make a
> chart
> showing parents, grandparents, and so forth as far back as they can go from
> information they get from their parents. Then, once they can get back to the
> early 20th century, they will be able to find a lot of material on the web.
I would suggest, in these days of separated and blended families that this may be
a sensitive request...there are numerous reports of elementary kids put on the
spot because they have no idea who their immediate family is, much less their
ancestral tree. A great idea in theory, once upon a time, but not very practical
in our "modern" age, I believe.
Ronnie Peacock
MA Student, Dept. of History
University of Northern Colorado
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 1999 14:39:35 -0800
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Denise Spooner
Organization: Dept. of History, California State University, Northridge
Subject: Re: Student Assignments
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Dear Lynn and other Immigration Forum participants,
As assignment that I have used in my U.S. Cultural History course should work
equally well in a course more fully focused on immigration. I call it "A Bite of
Cultural History" and in it students explore their family's history through some
family recipe that is special to them. In successive assignments across the
semester they 1) identify the recipe and explain its importance to them in a
brief essay; 2) research some historical aspect of the recipe, i.e. pupusas (part
of Central American culture cuisine) and the history of U.S. involvement in the
affairs of that region; 3) learn to make the recipe from the person who is in
charge of that dish in their family, then report on the experience in another
brief essay; 4) finally, they make the dish for the last week of the class and
prepare an oral report that reflects the research they did on the intersection
between their family's and U.S. history.
Student reactions to this assignment have been fairly uniform. When I introduce
it at the start of the semester, many students look skeptical. However, by the
end, with rare exceptions, they report that it was the most meaningful assignment
they ever completed.
I should add, besides introducing students to foodways as a path to history, my
goal has also been to get people to move away from bringing chips and soda to
potlluck gatherings to contributing a sample of the wealth of their family's
experiences. Chips and soda I can get anywhere, but not home-made tamales!
Best,
Denise Spooner
Dept. of History
Calfornia State University, Northridge
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 09:49:17 -0600
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: April Schultz
Subject: Re: Travel Course to Ireland
In-Reply-To: <003201bf2ed2$442be340$1a2ef7a5@lisa.onepine.com>
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Dear Colleagues,
I'm organizing a travel course for our 3-week May Term (2001) on emigration
from Ireland and the significance of Ireland as a "place" for the emigrants
after they arrive in the U.S. Students will be staying at an Arts and
Language Institute not far from Cork and the director there is making
contacts with scholars in Ireland who will act as guest lecturers.
I know, of course, about Kerby Miller's great book and I'm fine generally
on the literature from the U.S. side, but does anyone have suggestions for
materials I could use from the *Irish* perspective, including monographs,
novels, and films?
Has anyone else taught a course like this? If so, any suggestions or words
of wisdom?
Thanks for any help,
April Schultz
Illinois Wesleyan University
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 17:41:18 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: Immigration History Matters
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Dear Colleagues:
Arthur D. Jacobs has brought to our attention the presidential
proclamations of WWII declaring Japanese, Italian, and German aliens to
be "enemy aliens" and subjecting them to various forms of surveillance
and prohibitions. The Japanese experience will come as no surprise to
most subscribers on this list, but many might be wondering about the
German and Italian alien experience in those years. Some historians,
myself included, would argue that Italian and German immigrants aliens
suffered comparatively little in WWII, especially when their experience
is placed alongside that of the Japanese in WWII or the Germans (aliens,
citizens, and native-born alike) in World War I; I would further suggest
that this relative lack of suffering is evidence of the success of
American society, in the 1930s and 1940s, in assimilating European
immigrants and their children so that they no longer were easily
identified as threats.
In making this argument, I do not wish to deny the way in which the
state has used its coercive powers against immigrants. To the contrary,
those coercive powers were deployed to force European-Americans to
assimilate in the 1920s and the 1930s. It is also true that the
American state, in World War II, augmented its disciplinary powers in
ways that would prove useful in going after communists and other
"subversives" in the Cold War years. But I am not convinced that "state
repression" fell particularly heavily on Italian and German aliens.
Still, I am prepared to be convinced otherwise, and I invite Arthur and
other subscribers to this list to make the case that experiences of
Germans and Italians in America in World War II was considerably harsher
than we have thought.
Thanks to Stephen Homick, Lynda Durfee, Carl Schulkin, and Monica
Leonards for their movie suggestions, and thanks to Roy Rosenzweig for
providing such a good summary of the Supreme Court's decision in the
1920s declaring Asian Indians ineligible for citizenship.
Let me remind you of Lisa Auslander's request for a hands-on approach to
teaching a unit on immigration to 8th grade students in East New York;
indirectly a suggestion has been made by Lynda Durfee to have students
compile a family tree, tracing their own immigrant roots, although
Ronnie Peacock wonders whether this is an appropriate request in an era
of separated and blended families. I would say it still is appropriate,
if handled sensitively, but would be interested in learning more from
those of you who have encountered difficulties in these areas. You
could also construct a project that consisted less of a family tree than
of family immigrant experiences, where the focus would be on the
migration experience of individual family members. Perhaps other middle
school and high school teachers on this list could supply their own
suggestions to Lisa.
April (Schultz), you might wish to contact Tim Meagher at Catholic
University (meagher@cua.edu, I believe), who is an expert on
Irish-American history and just returned from three weeks in Ireland,
visiting universities and Irish Studies programs there.
Gary Gerstle
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 11:15:12 EST
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Dinahg60@AOL.COM
Subject: Re: Student Assignments
MIME-Version: 1.0
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In response to the concern about having students research their family histories I would like to share my experience.
I taught in an alternative high school in the Bronx where we asked the students to complete a booklet about their families' immigration stories. There were some African-AMerican kids whose families had migrated from the South, so we asked them to talk about their migration stories.
We came across two difficulties. One was that the African-AMerican students who's families had migrated from the South were ashamed of this fact. COmpared to others in the class, they felt their history was less interesting. I shared this with my principal, who is African American and from the South, and she said that for African-Americans from the South some felt that this was considered the bottom of the totem pole. Any other background, Jamaican, Haitian, recent African, is considered to be better because of deeply imbedded American racism reaching back to slavery.So this was interesting and new information for us white teachers teaching this seminar and we wished that we had done more preperatory work. If I did it again, perhaps we would do something about the Great Migration and the Harlem Rennaissance before attempting this project in order to instill some consciousness about African-AMerican migration.
The second thing that came up was that it was very difficult for these kids to get information about their ancestry. Sometimes families didn't want to talk about it, more often, they just didn't know, indicative of the attempts of whites to wipe out any knowledge of ancestry of the enslaved Africans.
So some questions I am left with are, how do you help kids who come from scarred backgrounds deal with looking at their histories? Or do you even attempt to do this?
So, I hope this helps.
We based this assignment, by the way, on the videop from the American Social History Project: "Five Points" about Irish immigration in NYC. THis, and their video "Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl" are both excellent resources for immigration studies.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 10:36:46 -0600
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Glenn Wiebe
Subject: Student Assignments
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As a young middle school teacher teaching 8th American History, part =
of my load including working with local and state history. I attempted =
to create a "family tree" assignment similar to the ones described =
earlier. For many students, it was an enjoyable learning experience. =
For others, it became very uncomfortable for reasons already mentioned; =
mom or dad had remarried once, or twice, and in one case, three times. =
Traditional genealogy methods fell apart and a simple chart listing =
parents, uncles & aunts, and grandparents became impossible.
I modified the assignment a bit the following school year by =
limiting research after discussion with each student. While =
time-consuming, this method seem to be working. However, a time bomb =
went off when one student contacted her biological father for =
information. Not a seemingly large problem except the biological mother =
had won a court order stating that the father could not have any contact =
with the child. =20
Needless to say, school and district administration became heavily =
involved! I moved to a project much like the one mentioned by Denise =
Spooner dealing with food. I was able to accomplish many of the same =
objectives without the potential problems. The following year, I went =
back and offered these options plus a few more and allowed students to =
make choices about what type of research they wanted to complete. We =
all live and learn!
The concept of family research is a good one. But asking students =
to complete a "family tree" and to do genealogical research can leave =
some students confused, demoralized, and frustrated about who they are =
and where they belong. If you do plan to do it as a part of your =
curriculum, be aware of the pitfalls!
Glenn Wiebe
Tabor College
Hillsboro, KS 67063
316-947-3121 ext 1373
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charset="iso-8859-1"
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As a young middle school teacher =
teaching=20
8th American History, part of my load including working with local and =
state=20
history. I attempted to create a "family tree" assignment =
similar to=20
the ones described earlier. For many students, it was an enjoyable =
learning experience. For others, it became very uncomfortable for =
reasons=20
already mentioned; mom or dad had remarried once, or twice, and in one =
case,=20
three times. Traditional genealogy methods fell apart and a simple =
chart=20
listing parents, uncles & aunts, and grandparents became=20
impossible.
I modified the assignment a bit =
the=20
following school year by limiting research after discussion with =
each=20
student. While time-consuming, this method seem to be =
working. =20
However, a time bomb went off when one student contacted her =
biological=20
father for information. Not a seemingly large problem except the=20
biological mother had won a court order stating that the father =
could=20
not have any contact with the child.
Needless to say, school and =
district=20
administration became heavily involved! I moved to a project much =
like the=20
one mentioned by Denise Spooner dealing with food. I was able to=20
accomplish many of the same objectives without the potential=20
problems. The following year, I went back and offered these =
options plus a=20
few more and allowed students to make choices about what type of =
research they=20
wanted to complete. We all live and learn!
The concept of family research is =
a good=20
one. But asking students to complete a "family tree" and to =
do=20
genealogical research can leave some students confused, =
demoralized,=20
and frustrated about who they are and where they belong. If you do =
plan to=20
do it as a part of your curriculum, be aware of the =
pitfalls!
Glenn Wiebe
Tabor College
Hillsboro, KS =20
67063
316-947-3121 ext 1373
------=_NextPart_000_0121_01BF30E7.A595CDA0--
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 15:16:23 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: maria mazzenga
Subject: tolerance and intolerance
This strikes me as a good place to expand on a question posed to h-ethnic
subscribers by Edward O'Donnell. A few days ago he queried that list for
"incidents throughout American history of cooperation and tolerance across
racial and ethnic lines" for a project he is working on. He noted that the
"literature on conflict/hate/violence" is abundant while works on tolerance
in the field are not. Perhaps some of you read the wonderful plethora of
interesting responses to this query; I would like to expand on O'Donnell's
important question on this list focusing on teaching immigrant/ethnic
history.
As Gary Gerstle's 1997 article surveying the historiography of
European-American immigration, "Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of
Americans," suggests, viewing immigration history in "either/or" terms, that
is, as either wholly emancipatory or wholly coercive is less useful (and
less accurate) than viewing the immigrant/ethnic experience as both of
these. The issue thus becomes one of how to look at and teach the immigrant
experience in the U.S. as both liberating and coercive, tolerant and
intolerant, inclusive and exclusionary. The 1923 Thind decision actually
offers an excellent example of how this can be taught through a single
document: Caucasianness effectively connoted whiteness until the members of
the Supreme Court were asked to decide whether Asian Indians, accepted as
Caucasian, were white. Where Caucasianness usually qualified its bearer to
racial inclusion (white privilege) in the contemporary U.S., Hindu status
(which bore cultural and religious elements) caused Asian Indians' racial
exclusion. Here historical inclusions (all Caucasians are in) and
exclusions (in the form of "anti-Hinduism") work to help decide the national
status of the immigrant in question.
As the Thind example suggests, examining the immigrant/ethnic experience as
both coercive and emancipatory is not simply limited to questions of race.
Gender, class, and religion have their inclusive and exclusionary dimensions
as well. Has anyone on the list had success with particular teaching tools
(in undergraduate immigration history or U.S. hist. survey courses) in
imparting the Americanization experience in all of its tolerant and
intolerant complexity? Are there works that do this well in one particular
area or another? Anzia Yezierska's _Bread Givers_ seems like a good example
as far as the gender dimensions of Americanization, relaying the liberating
aspects of being a [Jewish] female immigrant to the U.S. as well as its more
constricting facets. A book like Okada's _No No Boy_ on the other hand,
seems to get at the [Nisei] racial dimensions of Americanization
particularly well, almost counting out the blessings of America for Japanese
Americans yet clearly expressing its coercive elements for those deemed
unwhite (and unCaucasian) in the 1940s and 50s.
Maria Mazzenga
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 14:01:02 -0700
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: "Arthur D. Jacobs"
Subject: Treatment of German Americans and Italian Americans
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
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Dear Subscribers:
On November 16, 1999, Gary Gestle wrote:
"It is also true that the American state, in World War II, augmented
its disciplinary powers in
ways that would prove useful in going after communists and other "subversives"
in the Cold War years. But I am not convinced that "state repression"
fell particularly heavily on Italian and German aliens.
Still, I am prepared to be convinced otherwise, and I invite Arthur
[Arthur D. Jacobs] and other subscribers to this list to make the case
that experiences of Germans and Italians in America in World War II was
considerably harsher than we have thought."
I responded to Gary's message personally with the following message:
"I am most appreciative of your posting.
I must say that I must have miscommunicated, it is not a matter of harsh
or harsher treatment, it is just about the treatment during the period.
I prefer to stand on the sidelines. If you would like you may
announce my website, <http://www.foitimes.com/internment>, a non-commercial,
definitely non-profit. But more important perhaps you would like
to post Senator Torricelli's speech on S.1909. I will include it
below it is from "Thomas".
Thanks again for your excellent post on the matter. But again,
the concern is not harsh treatment, the concern is simply "treatment."
And I just think it is an important part of our history -- that has almost
been lost.
Art"
==
STATEMENTS ON INTRODUCED BILLS AND JOINT RESOLUTIONS (Senate
- November 10, 1999)
WARTIME VIOLATION OF ITALIAN AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES ACT
Mr. TORRICELLI. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce
a bill that is important not only to every American of Italian
descent, but to any American citizen who values our Constitutional freedoms.
This legislation draws attention to the plight of Italian Americans
during World War II. Their story has received little attention until now,
and I am pleased to be able to heighten public awareness about the injustices
they suffered.
Hours after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested 250 Italian Americans
and shipped them to internment camps in Montana and Ellis Island. These
men had done nothing wrong. Their only crime was their Italian
heritage and the suspicion that they could be dangerous during war time.
By 1942, all
Italian immigrants, approximately 600,000 people, were labeled `enemy
aliens' and given photo IDs which they had to carry at all times. They
could travel no further than five miles from their homes and were required
to turn in all cameras, flashlights and weapons.
These violations did not discriminate against class or social status.
In San Francisco, Joe DiMaggio's parents were forbidden to go further than
five miles from their home without a permit. Even Enrico Fermi, a leading
Italian physicist who was instrumental in America's development of the
atomic bomb, could not travel freely along the East Coast. Yet, while
these activities persisted in the United States, Italian Americans
comprised the largest ethnic group in the Armed Forces. During the war,
Italian Americans fought valiantly to defend the freedoms that their loved
ones were being denied at home.
These are the stories we know about and the facts which have
come to light. Yet more than fifty years after the end of World War II,
the American people still do not know the details of the Italian American
internment, and the American government has yet to acknowledge that these
events ever took place. Through this legislation, the Administration will
be required to report on the extent to which civil liberties were violated.
The Justice Department would conduct a comprehensive review of the Italian
American internment, and report its findings, including the name of every
person taken into custody, interned, or arrested. The specific injustices
they suffered in camps and jail cells would also be detailed in the report.
Moreover, federal agencies, from the Department of Education to the National
Endowment for the Humanities, would be encouraged to support projects like
`Una Storia Segreta' that draw attention to this episode of American history.
The United States has rightfully admitted its error in interning
Japanese Americans. However, Americans of Italian descent suffered equal
hardships and this same recognition has been denied to them. I look forward
to working with my colleagues to secure passage of this legislation so
that the United States government will begin to release the facts about
this era. Only then can Italian Americans begin to come to terms with the
treatment they received during World War II.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill
be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the bill was ordered to be printed
in the Record, as follows:
S. 1909
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the
United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Wartime Violation of Italian American
Civil Liberties Act'.
SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
The Congress makes the following findings:
(1) The freedom of more than 600,000 Italian-born immigrants
in the United States and their families was restricted during
World War II by Government measures that branded them `enemy aliens' and
included carrying identification cards, travel restrictions,
and seizure of personal property.
(2) During World War II more than 10,000 Italian Americans living
on the West Coast were forced to leave their homes and prohibited
from entering coastal zones. More than 50,000 were subjected to curfews.
======
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 17:37:08 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Deborah Barnes
Subject: Re: Treatment of German Americans and Italian Americans
In-Reply-To: <3833178D.B976B8AC@netzone.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Please unsubscribe me. I have made this request before and was told I had
been unsubscribed but apparently not.
At 02:01 PM 11/17/99 -0700, you wrote:
> Dear Subscribers: On November 16, 1999, Gary Gestle wrote: "It is also
>true that the American state, in World War II, augmented its disciplinary
>powers in
> But I am not convinced that "state repression" fell particularly heavily
>on Italian and German aliens. Still, I am prepared to be convinced
>otherwise, and I invite Arthur [Arthur D. Jacobs] and other subscribers to
>this list to make the case that experiences of Germans and Italians in
>America in World War II was considerably harsher than we have thought."
>personally with the following message: "I am most appreciative of your
>posting. I must say that I must have miscommunicated, it is not a matter of
>harsh or harsher treatment, it is just about the treatment during the
>period. is from "Thomas". And I just think it is an important part of our
>history -- that has almost been lost. Art" ==
> STATEMENTS ON INTRODUCED BILLS AND JOINT RESOLUTIONS (Senate - November
>10, 1999) WARTIME VIOLATION OF ITALIAN AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES ACT Mr.
>TORRICELLI. of Italian Americans during World War II. Their story has
>received little attention until now, and I am pleased to be able to
>heighten public awareness about the injustices they suffered. Their
>only crime was their Italian heritage and the suspicion that they could be
>dangerous during war time. By 1942, all
>Italian immigrants, approximately 600,000 people, were labeled `enemy
>aliens' and given photo IDs which they had to carry at all times. They
>could travel no further than five miles from their homes and were required
>to turn in all cameras, flashlights and weapons. These violations did not
>discriminate against class or social status. In San Francisco, Joe
>DiMaggio's parents were forbidden to go further than five miles from their
>home without a permit. Even Enrico Fermi, a leading Italian physicist who
>was instrumental in America's development of the atomic bomb, could not
>travel freely along the East Coast. Yet, while
>these activities persisted in the United States, Italian Americans
>comprised the largest ethnic group in the Armed Forces. During the war,
>Italian Americans fought valiantly to defend the freedoms that their loved
>ones were being denied at home. These are the stories we know about and
>the facts which have come to light. Yet more than fifty years after the end
>of World War II, the American people still do not know the details of the
>Italian American internment, and the American government has yet to
>acknowledge that these events ever took place. Through this legislation,
>the Administration will be required to report on the extent to which civil
>liberties were violated. The Justice Department would conduct a
>comprehensive review of the Italian American internment, and report its
>findings, including the name of every person taken into custody, interned,
>or arrested. The specific injustices they suffered in camps and jail cells
>would also be detailed in the report. Moreover, federal agencies, from the
>Department of Education to the National Endowment for the Humanities, would
>be encouraged to support projects like `Una Storia Segreta' that draw
>attention to this episode of American history. The United States has
>rightfully admitted its error in interning Japanese Americans. However,
>Americans of Italian descent suffered equal hardships and this same
>recognition has been denied to them. I look forward to working with my
>colleagues to secure passage of this legislation so that the United States
>government will begin to release the facts about this era. Only then can
>Italian Americans begin to come to terms with the treatment they received
>during World War II. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text
>of the bill be printed in the Record. There being no objection, the bill
>was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
> S. 1909 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of
>Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
>SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
> This Act may be cited as the `Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil
>Liberties Act'. SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
> The Congress makes the following findings: restrictions, and
>seizure of personal property. and prohibited from entering coastal
>zones. More than 50,000 were subjected to curfews.
>======
>
Each one teach one,
Deborah H. Barnes
Associate Professor of English
Gettysburg College
(717) 337-6759
dbarnes@gettysburg.edu
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 20:27:55 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Comments: SoVerNet Verification (on garnet.sover.net) svjcbiti from
arc0a2.burl.sover.net [207.136.201.2] 207.136.201.2 Wed, 17 Nov
1999 20:24:12 -0500 (EST)
From: Stephen Homick
Subject: Re: tolerance and intolerance
In-Reply-To: <000a01bf3138$a06a16a0$54ec0f3f@oemcomputer>
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El 17 Nov 99, a las 15:16, mar=
ia mazzenga scripsit:
> Has anyon=
e on the list had
> success with particular teaching tools (in undergraduat=
e
> immigration history or U.S. hist. survey courses) in imparting the
> Ame=
ricanization experience in all of its tolerant and intolerant
> complexity?=
Are there works that do this well in one particular
> area or another?
D=
on't know if it's exactly what you seek, but I teach a course
that seems a=
t least to be in the same ballpark. Titled somewhat
melodramatically "Bloo=
d and Belonging in America from
Reconstruction to Our Times (part of the t=
itle I've shamelessly
purloined from Ignatieff's acclaimed "Front Line" se=
ries and
subsequent study of nationalism), this course endeavors to examin=
e
the experience in becoming American of several generations of Adam
who'v=
e peopled our country. Its anchor text is Takaki's _A
different mirror_, w=
hich serves as a splash of cold water to
awaken students from the complace=
nt contentedness that the
conventional take on national history has inculc=
ated on them, as
well as a topical, chronological and methodological road =
map of
sorts.
Complementing it are a number of specialized studies, which I=
've
divided into two main categories: people who were brought to or
were s=
ubsumed within the U.S. involuntarily; and those who came
here of their ow=
n volition more or less. African- Mexican- and
Puerto Rican-Americans info=
rm the first, while Chinese and
Europeans from the middle, southern and ea=
stern parts of the Old
World make up the second. To illustrate their respe=
ctive
experiences, I rely generally on memoirs, other first-person
account=
s, family histories and the like. This semester's offerings
include: Du Bo=
is's _The souls of black folk_; Paredes's celebrated
folkloric study, _Wit=
h his pistol in his hand_; See's _On gold
mountain_; Katzman and Tuttle's =
_Plain folk; and Santiago's _When
I was Puerto Rican_.
As a sort of colopho=
n, the course's finale addresses what seems to
be shaping up as a U.S. var=
iant of Vasconcelos's notion of a new-
world "cosmic race": miscegenation a=
nd people of mixed provenance.
Here Williams's _Life on the color line_ se=
rves as the point of
departure. Hence the course begins by examining Du Bo=
is's "problem
of the color line" and ends by meditating on the conundrum o=
f
color lines. What sort of taxonomic tag shall we hang on Tiger
Woods, a=
nyway? Why is it that Sammy Sosa and Kirby Puckett have
similar complexio=
ns, yet Sammy is called Hispanic and Kirby Black
or African American?
Compl=
ementary feature films add a visual dimension to the course,
and I screen =
them in conjunction with particular readings. The
second part of Griffith'=
s "Birth of A Nation" accompanies _The
souls..._; Esparza and Young's "The=
Ballad of Gregorio Cortez,"
_With his pistol..._; Silver's "Hester Street=
," _Plain folk; and
Robbins, Bernstein and Wise's "West Side Story," _When=
I was..._
For Williams's memoir, I screen two films: Kazan's controversia=
l
1949 film-noir drama, "Pinky," and a recent made-for-tv movie
titled "Th=
e Lovings."
The themes of tolerance and intolerance, of inclusion and
exclu=
sion exist side-by-side, in a state of dynamic tension
throughout the mate=
rial under study. As a final long essay (ca.
3k words) assignment, I ask =
students ask students to assess the
validity of Zangwill's melting-pot and=
the rival "salad-bowl"
theses, in light of the evidence they've examined =
over the
semester's span. Their findings have consistently proven to be a
=
source of refreshing surprise, and in some cases of downright
amazement.
It=
's hard to gauge the course's success. I've had my share of
unhappy campe=
rs, who felt short-changed when they discovered this
course wasn't one of =
those "trivial pursuit" kind of history
courses. Nonetheless, I can say th=
at, in the two years I've
offered it, enrolments have been enough to fill =
two or three
sections on-campus and one over-the-wire.
Incidentally, I'm ne=
ither a historian of the U.S. by training nor
a specialist in immigration =
history. So, I hope there's something
in these ramblings that you might f=
ind useful.
Homick
Champlain College
"...[N]o hay que llegar primero,
Pero hay=
que saber llegar."
- --Jos=E9 Alfredo Jim=E9nez, "El Rey"
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=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 07:56:13 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: maria mazzenga
Subject: Re: tolerance and intolerance
Stephen Homick, your class "Blood and Belonging in America... " sounds
mind-expanding! The idea of examining those who ended up in the U.S.
involuntarily in the same context as those who came voluntarily ("more or
less") seems like an effective strategy for setting up the nation as a place
of both inclusion and exclusion right from the start. I am interested in
your placement of "Chinese and Europeans in the middle" in this dualist
involuntary/voluntary framework, however. If southern and eastern Europeans
fall into the voluntary side (again, more or less: as we know, members of
this group suffered their share of exclusions too) which Europeans are in
the middle?
Perhaps I could ask you (or anyone else who cares to respond) to elaborate
on one point you made in your class description. You note that one of your
first tasks is to "awaken students from the complacent contentedness that
the conventional take on national history has inculcated on them". To do
this you ust Takaki's absorbing and heartbreaking book, _A Different Mirror_
as the core text, "which serves as a splash of cold water" to those bearing
the conventional view. The question is, why do students need the splash of
cold water in the first place? And where, really, does this conventional
take on national history come from? By conventional, I presume you mean the
kind promulgated by political and interest groups who have a power stake in
uncritically positive views of the nation. Does the teacher "correct" these
views by offering books like Takaki's, primarily a history of national
exclusions? How do you teach your students the difference between the
conventional take and genuine stories of national tolerance?
Maria Mazzenga
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 10:04:47 -0600
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Lynn Vacca
Subject: Desert Exile
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Dear Colleagues
The following is in response to Gary Gerstle's request for comments about
Yoshiko Uchida's autobiography, Desert Exile. I have used it several times
with great success in a U.S. history survey course (college level -
primarily freshmen and sophomores) and plan to use it in my upper-division
immigration history course during the upcoming semester. It generates a
tremendous amount of discussion about internment, concepts of citizenship,
and immigrant transformations. Students have often commented on their
evaluations that this was the book that had the most meaning for them. I
do find it helpful to give a short lecture on the various restrictions on
immigration, land-owning, etc. before the students start reading the book,
to help them place Uchida's story in a broader context.
For next semester in the immigration history course, I have assigned two
novels - Ole Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth and Pietro di Donato's Christ in
Concrete. I would be interested in receiving comments from anyone who has
used these books. I anticipate giving an assignment asking students to
compare and contrast the accounts of the immigrant experience in the novels.
Thanks for your ideas.
Lynn Vacca
Lynn Vacca
Truman State University
lvacca@truman.edu
(660) 785-6041
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 13:07:03 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: Italians in WWII, inclusion-exclusion, etc.
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Dear Colleagues--
We have a number of interesting matters cooking about which I'd like to
generate more discussion.
First, I invite subscribers to respond to Arthur Jacobs' communication
that the internment and surveillance of Italian aliens during World War
II was harsher than we (as historians) have often thought. Are any of
you working on the experiences of Italians or Germans in America in
World War II, or have you come across materials or historical work that
illuminates this issue?
Second, we have been treated to fascinating, and sobering, communiques
from Dinah G. and Glenn Wiebe on the perils of doing family history with
students whose own families are fragmented, blended, etc. Dinah's
message also reveals a quite interesting and usually invisible (to
outsiders) internal hierarchy among blacks in New York City, with blacks
from the West Indies and Africa seizing, or being granted, a higher
status than those from the American South. This also reminds me of
research that Mary Waters (a Harvard sociologist) on West Indian youth
in New York City. One of the patterns Water has uncovered is
assimilation among this second generation to African-American urban
youth culture, a tendency that the West Indian immigrant parents of
these youth do not like but feel powerless to stop. We usually think
that assimilation always points immigrants and ethnics toward a white,
middle-class culture; the experience of black immigrants in New York
City reminds us that there are other assimilative paths. Would Dinah or
any other subscribers care to comment on this phenomenon, either in
terms of historical material that illuminates it or on how they have
tried to incorporate it into their teaching?
Finally, Maria Mazzenga and Stephen Homick have begun an extremely
important and useful conversation on how to structure the teaching of
immigration history in ways that allow us to teach students about both
the coercive and liberating, exclusive and inclusive, aspects of that
history. Certainly, the juxtaposition of voluntary and involuntary
immigrants alongside each other is a very provocative point from which
to begin a course. In addition to the questions about Stephen's
contribution that Maria has raised, I'd like to ask Stephen what his
students have to say about the melting-pot and salad-bowl metaphors at
the course's conclusion and, specifically, whether they use either
framework to comprehend the place of mixed-race Americans.
Gary Gerstle
=========================================================================
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 13:09:52 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: Teaching whiteness
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Would anyone like to comment on how they are or are not incorporating
the recent flurry of work on "whiteness" into their teaching?
Gary Gerstle
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 10:14:52 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: Immigrants and Thanksgiving
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This may be a slow week for the forum, as all of us scatter for
Thanksgiving or simply eat so much that we're unable to move to our
computers...
But an interesting idea to contemplate this week is the encounter
between immigrants and Thanksgiving. Does anyone know of historical
work on this subject--how quickly immigrants become involved in
Thanksgiving celebrations, the ways in which immigrants (and their
children) embrace (or refuse to embrace) the Thanksgiving story and the
Puritan fathers as their own, the ways in which immigrants have changed
the character of Thanksgiving celebrations and narratives or changed
themselves in the process of celebrating Thanksgiving? And what about
Thanksgiving food across immigrant cultures and time periods? Is the
turkey really as hegemonic as it seems? A special plea to our immigrant
cuisine experts (Donna Gabaccia, Hasia Diner, are you reading this?) to
start us off.
Gary
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 12:10:52 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: Re: Immigrants and Thanksgiving
Comments: To: Durfee_Lynda@tmac.com
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Thanks for your "nit" Lynda; I realized the error (Pilgrim/Puritan
confusion) as soon as I had sent out the message. And I do feel bad for
the 4 women who had to cook for 100!
The various myths about Thanksgiving are themselves interesting, of
course, but I would like to focus this discussion on immigrant
encounters with those myths. Send in your comments.
Gary
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 12:57:18 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Hasia Diner
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Roy Rozenzweig sent me a query about immigrants and Thanksgiving and I hope
that it is ok if I log on to this list. There is a book about Thanksgiving,
with thqt title, by Diane Applebaum. It has a few references to immigrants
and ethnic adaptations of the holiday, but only limited. It is a tremendous
topic, which I have long thought worth someone's focused attention. There
are Yiddish language memoirs in which immigrants looking back on their first
encounters with America describe their first thanksgiving, how it was
explained to them and so on. There is likewise material (lots) in the
Yiddish press, women's pages and other sections also introducing the
holiday. I have even seen a Yiddish primer, teaching Yiddish to American
children (presumably children of immigrants) which taught a language lesson
on, "Why we eat turkey on Thanksgiving." All in all, there are these many
many references which point to the possibility of studying the phenomenon
historically and asking some very interesting questions about fusions,
acculturation, adaptation, and ethnic specificity wihtin this broad American
cultural rubric.
Hasia Diner
New York University
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 13:59:59 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Robert Shaffer
Subject: Immigration and Thanksgiving
In-Reply-To: <3833178D.B976B8AC@netzone.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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For those interested in this topic, and on food and
immigration/ethnicity more generally, you may want to check the "files" of
the H-Net listserve on ethnicity, H-ETHNIC, which in September and October
1998 had a lot of discussion of immigrants' adaptation to "American" foods
and retention of their "traditional" recipes. Several of the posts
related to immigrant variations on the Thanksgiving meal. You can access
the posts via the Web at http://www.h-net.msu/~ethnic/ and then log on to
September 1998 and october 1998 and search by "thread," or subject.
On a related note, I have long been interested in the association
of Americanization (at least for male immigrants) with baseball. At a
summer institute on immigration some years back, we saw a number of recent
feature films about immigration, and noted that in both "Hester Street"
and "Matewan" learning to play baseball featured prominently as a symbol
of Americanization. Of course, these are recent feature films, so the
question is whether that was simply a metaphor by the filmmakers, or
whether immigrants themselves at the time made this connection. The
importance of baseball as a recreational outlet for interned Japanese
Americans has been noted in some of the social histories of the period,
and has been picked up in some recent profiles in the popular press and in
at least one children's book, the title of which I don't recall but may
have been "Baseball Saved Us." Of course, baseball works in the other
direction as well, exported from the U.S., and there is some discussion of
this in Luis Perez's recent article on the development of Cuban
nationalism in the 20th century, which I believed appeared in the June
1999 _Journal of American History_ (but again I could be wrong about that
citation).
-- Robert Shaffer
Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 13:00:28 -0700
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: "Arthur D. Jacobs"
Subject: Re: Immigration and Thanksgiving
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Robert Shaffer wrote:
> [snip][snip]
> On a related note, I have long been interested in the association
> of Americanization (at least for male immigrants) with baseball. At a
> summer institute on immigration some years back, we saw a number of recent
> feature films about immigration, and noted that in both "Hester Street"
> and "Matewan" learning to play baseball featured prominently as a symbol
> of Americanization. Of course, these are recent feature films, so the
> question is whether that was simply a metaphor by the filmmakers, or
> whether immigrants themselves at the time made this connection. The
> importance of baseball as a recreational outlet for interned Japanese
> Americans has been noted in some of the social histories of the period,
> and has been picked up in some recent profiles in the popular press and in
> at least one children's book, the title of which I don't recall but may
> have been "Baseball Saved Us."
Even more interesting is that in the Crystal City Family Internment Camp,
Crystal City, Texas, the Japanese American internees and German American
internees played baseball against one another. And in the "Bat and Ball"
report of one of these games...in April of 1944...one could read in the report
(written in the German language), such terms as "in der 8. und 9. inning, drei
Runs, Umpires, 'Strike out' mit 'bases loaded,' Coney Island Barkers, und
eines typischen Brooklyn Fan's.."
At the conclusion of his report the reporter from which the foregoing words
were extracted, also wrote in German, "Sorry, but one cannot express the
English terms in the German language."
And for what it is worth my father who came to this country in 1928, at the
age of 20, was a Brooklyn Dodger fan, as are his two American-born sons.
Arthur D. Jacobs
Tempe, Arizona
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 19:08:35 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: Thanksgiving and baseball
Comments: To: hrd1@IS4.NYU.EDU
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My apologies to Lynda and others for mixing up the Puritans and the
Pilgrims, a slip I realized as soon as I had sent the message off.
Thanks to Hasia Diner for giving us a glimpse of the rich materials that
exist for studying Thanksgiving--Hasia, perhaps you can recommend a
document or two that teachers may be able to use in a classroom
setting--and to Robert Shaffer for clueing us into the H-Ethnic
discussion of this theme several months ago. I hope others will
contribute their own thoughts and knowledge.
Baseball, and sports and mass culture more generally, has been a vital
site of Americanization; in this sense, the use that "Matewan" and
"Hester Street" made of baseball was not merely the creation of the
filmmakers but an effort on their part to represent an integral part of
the immigrant experience. Sports is interesting, too, for ethnic sports
stars, unlike their counterparts in the movies, did not feel compelled
to change their names in order to gain acceptance from a broader
public. Anybody want to venture some thoughts as to why?
Robert Shaffer is right to call our attention, too, to the export of
baseball to the Caribbean and to East Asia and the manner in which it
has been integrated into those societies. Does this export represent a
kind of Americanization or something else?
Gary Gerstle
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 23 Nov 1999 19:19:08 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: Thanksgiving
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Thanks to Vince, Arthur, and Peter for their wonderful and illuminating
stories about Thanksgiving and baseball. A Yuppy Stein Gebben to you,
too, Vince!
Keep the stories coming.
Gary
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1999 11:27:40 EST
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Jennie Fraser
Subject: Re: Immigration and Baseball
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I remember teaching The Chosen by Chaim Potok which begins with a group of
Brooklyn Hasidic Jews playing baseball and the author 's discussion of how
baseball allowed the young high school Hasids to gain respect from the
competing New York teams. The film, The Chosen, always surprises teens to
see players with earlocks playing this very "American" game.
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1999 12:34:14 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: maria mazzenga
Subject: sports and Americanization...
On the issue of baseball, sports, and Americanization raised by Robert
Shaffer.... It seems that the very nature of sport as an intersection of the
competitive values many Americans hold dear with their entertainment value
are what make them so attractive to newcomers. Sports can introduce
newcomers with little more than their bodies to invest to entrepreneurial
national values. Yet talent in a sport could bring an athlete fame and
prosperity. Many sports thus epitomize two seemingly contradictory ideas
about America: anyone can succeed through hard work/the talented make it
big. And those who didn't make it big could live vicariously through those
that did.
More specifically, in some research I've done on youth culture in the 1930s
and 40s, I've found that sports like boxing could be more inclusive of
individuals of different ethnic and class backgrounds because fans can, were
expected to, pick and choose who to love and who to hate. In other words,
if a young white boxing fan held anti-black beliefs, he did not necessarily
cease to enjoy boxing when Joe Louis became a national champ. Rather, he'd
hope that Louis's white rivals would succeed in defeating the champ. And,
by the way, Louis's appeal within the African-American community crossed
gender and
class boundaries: a once-impoverished black man who had made it big in white
America, Louis was a hero to African Americans of all backgrounds.
Sports heroes like Louis, however, sought to create an image that conformed
to white Anglo-American ideals. For example, Louis adhered to a list of
"career commandments" that conformed to white middle-class notions of
respectability in order to please a mass audience. It would be interesting
to compare, through newspapers perhaps, the ways Louis constructed his image
to the ways his Italian-American contemporaries, the DiMaggios for example,
did.
Where sports like boxing seem to encourage inclusiveness by their
profferment of choice in an arena of competition, other forms of pop culture
disseminated nationally sometimes give consumers the idea that they
represent something bigger than, say a local ["local"] team or particular
athlete. In some work I've done on the nationally disseminated comic strip
Little Orphan Annie in the early 1940s, for example, the inclusion of an
African-American character in Annie's band of homefront pals deeply angered
white segregationists, and caused the strip's creator, Harold Gray, to
remove the character. Gray justified the exclusion of "the Negro boy" in
terms of maintaining wartime unity. Thus national unity takes precedent in
this form of popular culture, whereas many sports did not seem to threaten
national unity allowing the entry of outsiders. Joe Louis (who enlisted in
the US army during WWII), in fact, became an important symbol of AA
inclusion in the war effort (On this latter point see Lawrence Samuel,
_Pledging Allegiance, American Identity and the Bond Drive of World War
II_).
To Gary Gerstle's question of why movie stars anglicized their names and
sports stars did not, maybe movie stars were encouraged by agents, etc. (at
least until very recently) to change their names because an "ethnic" or
"foreign sounding" name might make the stars' pictures seem unAmerican....
and popular movies may require more consensus to generate profits (perhaps
because of their ephemerality in the marketplace) than popular sports, which
depend for their success on competition between teams or individuals. This,
of course, would also depend on the kind of picture and the period in which
the picture was disseminated. Rudolph Valentino's "foreign-sounding" name,
as well as his "Latin" image helped sell pictures!
Maria Mazzenga
=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1999 14:52:05 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Vince DiGirolamo
Subject: Immigrants and Thanksgiving
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
> Dear Friends,
>
> This discussion of immigrants and Thanksgiving reminds me of my old
> friend Ephraim "Don" Doner in Carmel, California. He was a gifted artist
> and storyteller who died about fifteen years ago. Henry Miller wrote a
> nice profile of him in his Book of Friends. Anyway, Don emigrated from
> Eastern Europe in the early 1900s, and one story he used to tell about his
> journey to America concerned a man on board the ship who fancied himself
> an old hand. He had been to America before and he was full of advice
> which he shared freely with the immigrants. One day -- it must have been
> November -- he decided to help them with their English and teach them an
> important American greeting. He had all the greenhorns in steerage repeat
> after him: "Yuppy Stein Gebben. Yuppy Stein Gebben." That, of course,
> was his way of saying "Happy Thanksgiving." To this day friends of Don
> near and far honor his memory on Thanksgiving Day by greeting each other
> with the same words. So "Yuppy Stein Gebben" to Gary, Liz, Hasia, Steve,
> Roy, Debra, Robert, Lynda, and everyone else on the list.
>
> -- Vince DiGirolamo
>
>
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Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1999 15:59:27 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: [Fwd: Immigrants and Thanksgiving]
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Dear Colleagues,
I am forwarding this marvelous communication from Peter Dajevskis on his
own immigrant encounter with Thanksgiving.
Gary
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Subject: Immigrants and Thanksgiving
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Here is a brief "oral history" account of an immigrant's early encounter with
Thanksgiving and its symbols.
As a post-WWII immigrant to the United States in 1951, my first exposure to
Thanksgiving started at age 5 as I entered the New York City public school
system. The Pilgrim myths were offered in class, Pilgrim hats were
manufactured and turkeys were produced from cardboard and construction paper
at PS 79. I very quickly accepted and adopted the Mayflower and its
imagery. These after all were ordinary immigrants who came across on a ship
very much like I had. As I found this tradition quite exciting and
entertaining I requested that my mother provide a turkey on our dinner table.
The story of the pilgrims was to be discussed at the table.
Some conflicts and debate arose in the household when an uncle could not
understand how "those dry turkeys could possibly be consumed." It reminded
him of other American dietary habits such as eating corn. In the DP camps of
Germany care packages of corn were sent to the refugees - a food that in
Europe is only fed to farm animals. This just added to the incomprehensible
ways of the Americans...
My mother, the ultimate diplomat, created two dinner tables for Thanksgiving
- the new American dishes that her son yearned were served -- including
turkey, corn and all the related trimmings. On the other table sat a goose
accompanied by deeply browned traditional sauerkraut. Later in my childhood
years both birds and associated dishes would democratically occupy the same
Thanksgiving dinner table.
Our feasts were very much permeated with the shaping of very clear ethnic
boundaries in the household - symbolically dividing the younger and older
generations - very much like the processes described by the Norwegian
anthroplogist Frederic Barth. Over the years the Turkey won out. This
holiday has proved to have more significance for us than any other holiday
celebrated during the year.
Peter Dajevskis
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=========================================================================
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1999 16:21:22 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
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From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: Sports and Americanization
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Dear Colleagues,
Maria Mazzenga's communication reminds us how complicated a site of
Americanization sports can be. Joe Dimaggio was, in fact, a figure much
like Joe Louis. I don't know whether Dimaggio abided by a code of
"white conduct" as clearly delineated as the one shaping Joe Louis's
public self, but he certainly had one. He was the "model ethnic"--an
Italian who was outwardly calm, Anglo-smooth (the "Yankee clipper"),
discreet, and incorruptible (no mobsters where he hung out). This
demeanor facilitated his emergence as a national ethnic-American even as
it set up clear expectations for how Italians would have to behave if
"America" was going to embrace them. One wonders whether the pain and
isolation that was so much a part of Dimaggio's life was connected to
the pressures he felt to conform.
And then there was Frank Sinatra...
gary gerstle
=========================================================================
Date: Thu, 25 Nov 1999 01:06:00 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
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From: Stephen Homick
Subject: Re: Italians in WWII, inclusion-exclusion, etc.
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El 19 Nov 99, a las 13:07, Gary Gerstle scripsit:
> In addition to the questions about Stephen's
> contribution that Maria has raised, I'd like to ask Stephen what
> his students have to say about the melting-pot and salad-bowl
> metaphors at the course's conclusion and, specifically, whether
> they use either framework to comprehend the place of mixed-race
> Americans.
Let me begin by making amends to Prof. Gerstle for my tardiness in
replying. As I mentioned in my last, computer problems and the
backlog of traffic they occasioned have conspired to put me far
behind the eight-ball.
At any rate, in response to his question, I must say that despite
my best efforts to make available evidence sufficient to make
either utensil an attractive choice, the majority of my students
have over the years chosen the pot over the bowl. One reason for
this outcome is, I suspect, that most if not all the reading
selections--even Takaki, who ends by joining Whitman in a
celebration of American diversity--are at bottom inclined toward
inclusion. I certainly didn't intend to convey that theme in
selecting these works; but that's the way it seems to have turned
out. Could it be that, in middle age, I've become an unwitting
pupil of the good parson? Who knows?
Happy Turkey Day to one and all!
Homick
Champlain College
"Some notions deserve nothing so much as a healthy
application of Occam's machete."
- -- Unknown
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Date: Thu, 25 Nov 1999 00:33:11 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
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From: Stephen Homick
Subject: Re: tolerance and intolerance
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El 19 Nov 99, a las 7:56, maria mazzenga scripsit:
> I am interested in
> your placement of "Chinese and Europeans in the middle" in this
> dualist involuntary/voluntary framework, however. If southern and
> eastern Europeans fall into the voluntary side (again, more or
> less: as we know, members of this group suffered their share of
> exclusions too) which Europeans are in the middle?
>
> Perhaps I could ask you (or anyone else who cares to respond) to
> elaborate on one point you made in your class description. You
> note that one of your first tasks is to "awaken students from the
> complacent contentedness that the conventional take on national
> history has inculcated on them". To do this you ust Takaki's
> absorbing and heartbreaking book, _A Different Mirror_ as the core
> text, "which serves as a splash of cold water" to those bearing the
> conventional view. The question is, why do students need the
> splash of cold water in the first place? And where, really, does
> this conventional take on national history come from? By
> conventional, I presume you mean the kind promulgated by political
> and interest groups who have a power stake in uncritically positive
> views of the nation. Does the teacher "correct" these views by
> offering books like Takaki's, primarily a history of national
> exclusions? How do you teach your students the difference between
> the conventional take and genuine stories of national tolerance?
My sincere thanks to Prof. Mazzenga for her thoughtful queries,
along with my humble apologies for not responding sooner. A
software conflict fried my computer a few days back, and the
consequent backlog of work that built up--I've been saddled with
five over-the-wire courses this fall--has kept me playing catch-up
most of the week. But Prof. Mazzenga's very apt questions are of
far greater interest than my quibbles; so, I'll cut to the chase
and answer them best I can.
The arrangement of subject matter in the course results from
chronological as well as political and social considerations.
Roughly speaking, the order in which each group is examined
corresponds to its appearance in our country's history; hence, as
advertised in the title, the course moves from Reconstruction to
our times. Of course, it's in order to raise the objection that
Americans of mixed provenance have been around since the Republic
was but mote in the Founders' eyes, and for that reason seem out
of place as the last topic. While that's a fair criticism, it's
nonetheless worth noting that those foul "anti-miscegenation" laws
which soiled the statutes of more than one state, as well as the
so-called "one-drop rule" that underpinned them, didn't reach the
fullness of their ugly bloom till the first part of this century.
The social and political consideration stems from that extended
period of global aftershocks egged on by the French and industrial
revolutions, whose recurrent eruptions belied the moniker "La
Belle Epoque" and other such appellations historians are wont to
tack on post-revolutionary and -Napoleonic Europe. To a greater or
lesser extent, I think it's reasonable to say that they a hand in
the making of Mexican-, Chinese, eastern and southern European-
and Puerto Rican-Americans. For these last and Mexicans, coming to
the U.S. was coercive and involuntary; whereas, it was a mixed
experience for Chinese and Europeans, irrespective of their
geographic origins in the Old World. I regret any confusion my
singling out of immigrants from the South and East of Europe may
have caused.
Apropos of my "splash-of-cold-water" metaphor for Takaki's
multicultural history, I said it precisely because many of
students come to the course with a stock "Parson Weems"
understanding of our nation's history stamped on their young
minds. And in light of smoldering political tinder box that
primary and secondary education has always been, and will likely
always be, in this country, it only stands to reason their view of
our history should be so one-dimensional and myopic. As its title
suggests, Takaki's book gives them another optic through which to
examine it; and many acknowledge that it's a real "eye-opener",
sometimes of downright epiphanic proportions, in their evaluations.
I offer _A different mirror_ simply as an alternative
interpretation of national history, and not as a corrective to the
errors of conventional wisdom. For it's my belief that the
students should make their own reasoned judgments about the work's
validity. Incidentally, I must confess that I don't share Prof.
Mazzenga's appraisal of _A different mirror_ as "heartbreaking"
and "primarily a history of national exclusions." On the contrary,
I find it a positive, heartwarming testimonial to the will,
determination and spirit of the many peoples who've made our
country what it has become, at times in spite of itself. And I
think that's the message Takaki seeks to get across in the book.
Homick
Champlain College
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful
tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean, -neither more
nor less.'
- --Lewis Carroll, _Through the Looking-Glass_
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=========================================================================
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 1999 10:47:40 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Elizabeth Pleck
Subject: Thanksgiving and Immigration
My article, "Thanksgiving: The Making of a Domestic Occasion," Journal of
Social History (June, 1999) contains information about Americanization
efforts toward immigrants at Thanksgiving, culinary fusions of cuisine at
Thanksgiving and the Fantastic parade as a mainly working class and
immigrant event in New York City on Thanksgiving. Also see Donna Gabaccia,
We Are What we Eat, pp. 178-179.
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1999 09:10:00 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: Comparing European and Asian Immigrants
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Dear Colleagues:
Our Thanksgiving discussion was a good one, and thanks to Elizabeth
Pleck for sending in a reference to her recent article on the history of
Thanksgiving in the Journal of Social History (June 1999). Perhaps Liz
could share with us a bit more of her analysis of New York City's
"Fantastic" parade. Is this the same as the current Macy's Thanksgiving
parade, or a predecessor or alternative to it?
We also had begun an interesting discussion on black and ethnic sports
figures, the meaning of their celebrity, and the pressures on them to,
on the one hand, represent their group and, on the other, conform to
prevailing notions of decorum. Too much time may have passed to
rekindle that discussion, but I invite comment nevertheless.
Finally, I would like to invite some additional commentary on Stephen
Homick's typology of immigrant groups, which divides those who came into
those whose presence here was coerced and involuntary (African slaves,
Puerto Ricans, some Mexicans) and those whose presence was due to a
mixture of liberty and coercion (Asians, southern and eastern
Europeans). Stephen may also use a third group in this typology,
Europeans (from northwest Europe) whose presence here was largely the
result of voluntary actions undertaken by the immigrants themselves.
One of the interesting features of this typology is the grouping
together of Asian and European immigrants, two groups whose experiences
in recent literature are often depicted as fundamentally different, for
the reason that Asians suffered from a kind of racial discrimination
here that did not affect European immigrants. I wanted to ask Stephen
to comment on how he incorporates "race" into his typology and analysis;
inserting race into an Asian-European comparison also gives us the
opportunity to address a a point that Art Jacobs has been making in
this forum, namely, that the Japanese were not the only group to suffer
government repression in World War II, for Italian and German aliens
experienced it as well. Here, from another angle, we see an attempt to
align the experience of European immigrants with that of immigrants from
Asia. What do the subscribers to this forum think? How do you handle
this comparison in your courses?
Gary Gerstle
=========================================================================
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1999 11:04:20 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: [Fwd: Comparing European and Asian Immigrants]
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Cindy Hahamovitch has written an interesting communication on the
problem of incorporating race into the teaching of immigrant history,
which I fear was sent only to me and not to the entire forum. So, I'm
taking the liberty of forwarding it to all of you.
Gary Gerstle
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Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1999 10:38:54 -0500
To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
From: Cindy Hahamovitch
Subject: Re: Comparing European and Asian Immigrants
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Hi, Cindy Hahamovitch here. I found Stephen's forced-free-immigration
continuum to be a useful one. But I too have tried to integrate free and
forced immigration into my immigration course, and I found students very
resistant. They couldn't seem to understand why, in a course they
apparently expected to be a romantic survey of immigrant success stories, I
kept talking about the slave trade, Chinese contract laborers, nativism,
racism, etc. I start my course in the revolutionary era, and discuss the
banning of the slave trade as the first major federal immigration
act. That really threw them, and I don't think they ever quite recovered.
Later in the course, the students read WHITE BY LAW by Haney-Lopez, which
talks about the 52 "prerequisite" cases in which immigrants from various
parts of the world argued that they were white in order to be eligible for
naturalization in the US. Haney-Lopez looks at the logic of the Supreme
Court justices, who used "scientific" definitions of the races until they
were faced with South Asian immigrants who were clearly "white" by all
contemporary scientific definitions of Caucasian. The justices then
switched to a "common sense" definition. Haney-Lopez shows (I think,
persuasively) how racism defined law and how law defined race (since the
prerequisite cases resulted in the whitening of the American
population). Though the students seemed to enjoy reading the justices'
opinions, which are reproduced in the appendix, they were outraged by the
book. I never did quite figure out what pissed them off, but I gather it
was the idea that the American legal system--the future livelihood of many
of my students--was tainted by race. On top of that, I think they were
furious to have to talk about race in an immigration course. Underneath
those surface explanations, I suspect, was their anger at my willingness to
associate nativism with racism. This suggests to me that many of them
identified with nativism, but refused to admit it. A couple actually
did. They took my emphasis on racism and nativism in the past as an
indictment of themselves in the present, so by the time we got to talk
about current immigration issues at the end of the semester, they were
seething.
None of this happened the first time I taught the course, but I have to
confess that I'm loath to venture into an immigration history classroom any
time soon.
Could some of you talk about how you deal with these issues and how your
students react? My students at William & Mary tend to be white southerners
or white ethnics with only a few students of color in the mix, but that was
true the first time I taught the course too.
Best,
Cindy Hahamovitch
The College of William & Mary
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=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 1999 10:48:16 -0500
Reply-To: gg74@umail.umd.edu
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: Gary Gerstle
Organization: University of Maryland
Subject: Race, Whiteness, and Immigration
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Dear Colleagues:
Today is the last official day of our forum on "immigration and
ethnicity" but it would be shame to end without generating some
discussion about the very interesting communications from Cindy
Hahamovitch and William Forbath. Cindy's course sounds fascinating (I
would take it) and too interesting and important to pack away because
students found it to be too radical and offensive. So, is there a way
of repackaging it so as to make your students more open to the ideas
that you want them to contemplate? My thoughts on this may not be very
helpful, or matters you already have thought about, Cindy, but I'll
offer them to you anyway.
If I sensed my students were full of romantic notions of immigration, I
might start my course right there, with romantic stories of immigrants
coming to America and beginning life anew. There certainly have been
plenty of stories among immigrants of success, transformation,
reinvigoration, and invention, some of which may have come to students
through their own family histories. Even if they haven't, they are
likely to be familiar to students for they form a constitutive part of
the myth of America, a matter that Stephen Homick and Maria Mazzenga
have already referred to. In either case, I would argue that these
stories do form an important part of the immigrant experience in America
and ought to be acknowledged as such. Then I might begin to complicate
the story of romance by introducing issues of coercion, discrimination,
and race into the reading and discussion. Willy Forbath's communication
shows how that might be done, say, as one example, by looking carefully
(as Andrew Gyory has done) at the efforts of labor and government
officials to yoke together the contrary impulses--liberal and
racist--shaping their attitudes toward Chinese immigrants in the late
19th century. One can think of many other examples of this sort. I
guess I'm suggesting that a radical perspective be developed slowly and
organically out of the material, and in a way that does not compel the
students, immediately, to discard everything they think they already
know about immigration at the door.
I'm not surprised that your students, Cindy, had such a negative
reaction to the Ian Haney-Lopez (White By Law) book. I regard it as an
important work, and it has certainly influenced my own thinking; but
Haney-Lopez sometimes allows his strong political sentiments to
interfere with his historical analysis. Students pick this up and don't
like it, making the book a difficult one to work with in the classroom.
Friends who have used this book in graduate courses have encountered
similar difficulties.
Willy Forbath wonders whether the burgeoning literature on whiteness
hasn't stripped away some of the nuance and complexity present in the
thinking of those, such as labor leaders and government officials, who
stand accused of promulgating whiteness doctrines and policies. This is
an important matter to consider, and I hope that the subscribers to this
list will share with us their thoughts. I have an article coming out in
the December issue of the JAH that tries to get at some of these issues
through examining the contradictory character of Theodore Roosevelt's
nationalism.
In re readings on immigration regulation/policy/politics during the
1880s-1920s period: Desmond King of Oxford University has finished a
book on immigration restriction in the 1920s (I'm not sure if it's out
yet). Mae Ngai of Univ. of Chicago is working on a book (a revision of
her Columbia dissertation) that takes the immigration restriction of the
1920s as a starting off point for studying immigration, alienage, and
racial formation in the U.S. from the 1920s through the 1960s (the JAH
published a preview of her work recently); and Howard Markell of the
University of Michigan has collected some fascinating material on the
actual experiences of Jewish immigrants encountering officials at Ellis
Island. I expect, Willy, that you already know Lucy Salyer's book, Laws
as Harsh as Tigers. These are some of the newer works that leap
immediately to mind. Perhaps others can chip in with their own
suggestions.
Gary Gerstle
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 1999 17:07:38 -0600
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
From: April Schultz
Subject: Re: Race, Whiteness, and Immigration
Comments: To: Gary Gerstle
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Hi all,
First I want to say how much I've enjoyed this forum and hope there is
some way we can keep up the conversation.
Like Stephen Homick and Maria Mazzenga, I incorporate into my immigration
course both voluntary and involuntary immigration, which of course hinges
on issues of race. My students -- mostly midwestern and white -- were
resistant the first few times I taught it but my reputation now precedes
me, I guess. I also include the concept in my course description, which
maybe helps a bit. At the beginning of the course I have a discussion
about an advertisement for a Franklin Mint Commemorative Ellis Island
plate (I happened upon it in Parade magazine one Sunday morning). The
plate depicts a very well-fed looking, rosy-cheeked Northern European
family gazing with equal parts resolve and trepidation toward Ellis
Island. As we analyze the image, we talk about what story it tells and
what might be missing. From there, I lecture on immigration
historiography and the challenges to the popular myths of immigration.
But I also like Gary's suggestion about starting with the upbeat version
and then complicating the picture.
On the issue of using the new scholarship on whiteness in the classroom, I
have used both Noel Ignatiev's book on the Irish and anthropologist Karen
Brodkin's new book, "How the Jews Became White and What that Says about
race in America." The first was difficult for students to follow and the
second was quite long, though better-written, I think. I like it
particularly for its synthesis of the literature and race and ethnicity in
the U.S. For my students, just understanding that "white" is not a
natural state is a major revelation. Are we losing some of the
complications? Maybe. I'd appreciate hearing about any other experiences
with this topic.
By the way, last year I used the documentary, "My America, Or Honk if you
Love Buddha." It is just terrific and touches on the complicated problem
of being Asian in the U.S. and the touching, funny, heartwrenching ways
that immigrants and the descendants have negotiated their identities.
"Double Happiness" is a feature film that deals with the same issues,
though it is set in Canada. Students love both films.
Thanks again for a great conversation. It's made the impending end of my
sabbatical easier to bear (sort of!).
April Schultz
Illinois Wesleyan University
=========================================================================
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 1999 23:24:22 -0500
Reply-To: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
Sender: Forum on Immigration & Ethnicity
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From: Stephen Homick
Subject: Re: Comparing European and Asian Immigrants
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El 29 Nov 99, a las 9:10, Gary Gerstle scripsit:
> Finally, I would like to invite some additional commentary on
> Stephen Homick's typology of immigrant groups, which divides those
> who came into those whose presence here was coerced and involuntary
> (African slaves, Puerto Ricans, some Mexicans) and those whose
> presence was due to a mixture of liberty and coercion (Asians,
> southern and eastern Europeans). Stephen may also use a third group
> in this typology, Europeans (from northwest Europe) whose presence
> here was largely the result of voluntary actions undertaken by the
> immigrants themselves.
>
> One of the interesting features of this typology is the grouping
> together of Asian and European immigrants, two groups whose
> experiences in recent literature are often depicted as
> fundamentally different, for the reason that Asians suffered from a
> kind of racial discrimination here that did not affect European
> immigrants. I wanted to ask Stephen to comment on how he
> incorporates "race" into his typology and analysis; inserting race
> into an Asian-European comparison also gives us the opportunity to
> address a a point that Art Jacobs has been making in this forum,
> namely, that the Japanese were not the only group to suffer
> government repression in World War II, for Italian and German
> aliens experienced it as well. Here, from another angle, we see an
> attempt to align the experience of European immigrants with that of
> immigrants from Asia. What do the subscribers to this forum think?
> How do you handle this comparison in your courses?
First off, sincere thanks to Gary Gerstle and all the other
discussants for a lively, enlightening and most rewarding forum.
This has been one of the more memorable History Matters fora, and
it's been a privilege and a pleasure for me to take part in it.
Gary's comment about northwestern European immigrants is well
taken, and they certainly fit comfortably in the rubric of "more
or less" voluntary. I make passing mention of them in a lecture,
dwelling mainly on those who hailed from Ireland and the so-called
"48ers" from Germany; and students who read either _My Antonia_ or
_Giants in the earth_ during their high school years will usually
square the circle by commenting on Scandinavian immigrants. Since
these folk fall outside the course's chronological bounds, I must
limit my discussion of them to a sort of long footnote, rather
than a full-blown analysis.
Apropos of race, like Cindy Hahamovitch's students down there in
the "Neck," mine are by and large "palefaces." Accordingly, it
should come as no surprise that the course is, with an occasional
exception, their first exposure to a critical, academic analysis
of racial matters. The reasons for this circumstance are in part
environmental and in part curricular. I teach in Vermont, a state
which has never had more than a handful of small, diffuse enclaves
of African Americans in its population, and therefore concerns
itself with color mainly during leaf-peeping season: As much as
pigment makes the state's flora distinctive, the lack of it is the
distinguishing characteristic of its people. Not surprisingly,
this environmental idiosyncrasy works to consign race to the back
burner of public and a fair number of private school curricula
here. Hence, aside from the odd exception, most students enter
college in the Green Mountain State with only vaguest awareness of
race; and a few of them even conceive of it as something one does
with cars at Johnson Mud Flats and other tracks on Sunday
afternoons.
All this makes for a rather steep learning curve that they must
negotiate. To aid my students, I introduce race at the course's
outset by means of Du Bois's _Souls... in the realm of the written
word, Griffith's "Birth..." in the visual media, along with
considerable "interactive" lecturing, complemented by a few
handouts of pertinent documents, excerpts of articles, news
reports and so forth. To accomplish these ends, I set aside the
first three weeks of the course.
Over their span, inter alia I address in particular the ugly
flowering of the American variant of pseudo--scientific racism, as
well as all-American social darwinism, during the Gilded Age.
Hence, Sumner, Strong, Grant and "the whole sick crew" (apologies
to Thos. Pynchon) get their due, not to mention that Vermont
native son and pioneer eugenicist, Henry "Harry" Perkins. Odd as
it may seem, he and John Dewey were Burlingtonians and
contemporaries who grew up in the "Queen City"; the grocer's son
Dewey in its seedy North End and the faculty brat Perkins in its
posh Hill Section.
At any rate, this prep. suffices to give the students a fair
handle on the matter of race. Thereafter, they engage in an
examination of its diverse manifestations in the rest of the
readings. By the time we take up the case of mixed-race Americans
at course's end, they're sufficiently versed to analyze it
intelligently and discerningly.
As I mentioned in an earlier posting, I've intentionally contrived
the course to begin with Du Bois's "problem of the color line" and
to end with the "problem of color lines." In the final class
meeting, I tell the students that just as my generation for better
or worse has had to grapple with the color line, theirs will face
the chore of grappling with color lines. My hope is that the
course will in some small way aid them in their labors.
Thanks again to one and all for a most interesting and satisfying
forum.
Homick
Champlain College
Doscendo discimus . . . primum est non nocere
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