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Immigration history

Persecuted as “heretics,” the Puritans emigrated to Massachusetts, where Governor John Winthrop hoped to create a “Citty upon a Hill.”

Editor’s Note: After a distinguished career as a journalist, television commentator, and president and editor-in-chief of Congressional Quarterly, Robert Merry turned to writing history.

The Kennedys, despite their many successes, always remembered the discrimination against Irish immigrants.

My father has a memory of my great-grandmother Rose tha

No war, no national crisis, has left a greater impress on the American psyche than the successive waves of new arrivals that quite literally built the country.

Now that arguments against immigration are rising again, it is well to remember that every single one of them has been heard before. Contents

Vladka Meed joined the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, eventually escaped, and helped hundreds of children survive Nazi roundups. 

Editor’s Note: William Morrow has just published Judy Batalion’s extraordinary new book,

The daughter of a Gaelic-speaking fisherman on a remote Scottish island emigrated to New York, worked as a maid in the Carnegie Mansion, and married Fred Trump. Her son would become President. 

Editor's Note: Nina Burleigh was National Political Correspondent for Newsweek and has written for numerous publications including Time, The New York Times, New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. She is the author of seven books includin

The Statue of Liberty has been glorified, romanticized, trivialized, and over-publicized. But the idea of “Liberty Enlightening the World” endures. 

In a nation of immigrants, picking 10 books about the immigrant experience is no easy task. One could plausibly argue that any book about post-Columbian America concerns the immigrant experience.

It’s a politician’s bromide—and it also happens to be a profound truth. No war, no national crisis, has left a greater impress on the American psyche than the successive waves of new arrivals that quite literally built the country. Now that arguments against immigration are rising again, it is well to remember that every single one of them has been heard before.

The uproar over Zoë Baird has subsided by now, and readers with short memories may profit by a reminder that she was forced to withdraw as President Clinton’s first nominee tor Attorney General because she and her husband had hired two “illegal aliens” for ba

A walk through the old Jewish Lower East Side of New York City recalls the era when that battered, close-packed quarter was a high-pressure machine for the manufacture of Americans

Walking Manhattan’s Lower East Side is like browsing through a family album of American Jewry.

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