Customer Reviews

The Uprooted

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If you want to feel what your ancestors felt after they landed, this is the book for you.
I have read many, many books of this type, and Handlin's is still the best.
He looks at the Great Migration from the point of the impact on the immigrants and their children, rather than the impact on Canadian and United States cultures.
This book goes into areas that the documentaries that we've all seen, do not. This should be the primer for anyone who is going to read about conditions in the countries that their ancestors came to the US and Canada from. Without this piece, what went before won't make as much sense.
Dispells the theory that we were taught in the 60s and 70s, that the immigrants came because they wanted to, and this was to them, the land of rags to riches. Handlin points out that if their very lives had nott been at stake, the vast majority would never have made the move.

The book is OK, writing style more opinion/poetry than straight history, but full of information. The only flaw I would comment on is that the subtitle should have been "The epic story of European peasants who were forced off their land and ended up trapped and hopeless in the slums and factories of New York."

My own ancestors, what little I know of them, passed through New York and Chicago to settle as farmers in Illinois; and on the other side, came by boat to New Orleans then up the Mississippi, to open a small store. Both in the 1850s. "The Uprooted" gives scarcely a mention of people like those, and I don't think they were particulary remarkable or different.

but that's because it's a lucid little book. It reaches a general audience, particularly useful for high school and undergraduate college students.

I am not a history buff, but I have enjoyed this book. I am reading this for an undergraduate history course. While it is an easy read and gives great perspective on the day to day life that immigrants lived, Handlin rarely spells out his stance on immigrant issues.

For personal reading, I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the great migration. For collegate reading, I would pass and go for another source.