Trusted Writing on History, Travel, Food and Culture Since 1949
Immigration
Only in America: the daughter of a Lebanese peddler grew up to organize more state dinners as Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Protocol than in any other Presidency.
A Gaelic-speaking fisherman’s daughter 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.
The Statue of Liberty has been glorified, romanticized, trivialized, and over-publicized. But the meaning of “Liberty Enlightening the World” is still everything.
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. Read more >>
A walk with my great-grandfather through the last foreign country in New York City
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 Read more >>
Just before the Revolution, newly studied documents reveal, the flight of British subjects to the New World forced a panicky English government to wrestle with this question
In the early 1770s it still seemed likely that the struggle between Britain and her American colonies would be peacefully resolved. If it had been, history would have recorded far more clearly a remarkable development that was temporarily cut off by the Revolution. Read more >>
The Facts Behind the Current Controversy Over Immigration
Im-mi-grate—To enter and settle. … Read more >>
For more than a century, Irish-Americans were whipsawed between love for their tormented native land and loyalty to the United States. But no more .
The Honorable Hugh L. Carey, Democratic governor of the state of New York, made a speech in Dublin on April 22, 1977. Read more >>
A ponderous memorial to a people who refused to vanish
Refugees from the French Revolution, many of them of noble birth, built a unique community in the backwoods of Pennsylvania—and hoped their queen would join them
On October 7, 1798, the streets of Philadelphia were ominously deserted. A yellow-fever epidemic was at its height. Anyone who could had fled the city, and few would enter it voluntarily. Read more >>
It moved more boys and girls than the Children’s Crusade of the Middle Ages—and to far happier conclusions
Among the thousands of homeless children deposited at the Children’s Aid Society in 1875 by orphan asylums, courts, and other institutions was a four-year-old named Willie, sent by the New York Prison Association. Read more >>