Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (Paperback)

by Paul Spickard (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Placing race at the center of his story, Spickard offers an important corrective to dominant immigrant narratives about European huddled masses and bountiful golden doors. As immigration debates rage, Almost All Aliens provides vital historical perspective.

—Thomas A. Guglielmo, Assistant Professor, American Studies Department, George Washington University

Almost All Aliens is simply stunning. Spickard powerfully connects the study of immigration to the histories of race, slavery, and the displacement of Native peoples. In doing so, he revises both immigration history and American history.

—Erika Lee, author of At Americas Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943

With Almost All Aliens Paul Spickard again demonstrates that he is one of our most skillful and innovative interpreters of race and ethnicity in American life. He challenges most of the assumptions made about the topic since Crèvecoeur asked his fateful question and provides an exciting analytic narrative of our immigrant past.

—Roger Daniels, Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emeritus of History, University of Cincinnati

Almost All Aliens is a stunning achievement! By combining the insights of the massive recent literature on immigration, race, and colonialism, Paul Spickard has produced a masterful new narrative of U.S. immigration history for the 21st century. Immensely readable and thoroughly provocative, it will delight students and scholars of immigration alike.

—George J. Sanchez, University of Southern California, author of Becoming Mexican American

Product Description
Almost All Aliens is a complete reinterpretation of the shape and meaning of immigration in the history of the United States. It leaves the traditional Ellis Island model of immigrant assimilation as it embraces the multicultural reality of immigration that has always existed in the United States. Almost All Aliens operates from the point of view of ethnic studies as much as history and shows that migration to America has always been linked to colonialism, slavery, and racial oppression. This book will change the way American immigration is taught and understood.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 744 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (June 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415935938
• ISBN-13: 978-0415935937
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 6.9 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #707,526 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good for perspective, February 8, 2009

By	Marcello Iaia - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is written rather heavily in the voice of Spickard. His views and perspectives are bold and must be taken into consideration when reading, though he is dedicated and thorough in his work. He uses pie charts throughout to show the changing demographic, which is nice. He also is very picky about the terms he uses, making sure that the ideas behind the words are correctly chosen.
I use it for my race and ethnicity class and find it to be useful, though sometimes in conflict with lectures and other sources. I'm not saying Spickard has his facts wrong, but that history involves multiple angles and his is but one good one.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Common Sense, conveniently packaged, February 2, 2009

By	Katie R. Geskus "KaGe1287" (Grand Rapids, MI USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is pretty much everything you knew about American immigration history, combined into one bulky book. We're using it for a class and I would really have been better off using the reading time as study time for other classes. It's useful for specific cases used as examples of different situations, but most teachers don't require you to know anything that detailed, so that's really more just for personal interest.