Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in America, 1880-1925 (American Childhoods Series) - Hardcover

Melissa R. Klapper

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566637333 ISBN 13: 9781566637336

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee (UK), 2007

Synopsis

Children are the largely neglected players in the great drama of American immigration. In one of history's most remarkable movements of people across national borders, almost twenty-five million immigrants came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—from Mexico, Japan, and Canada as well as the more common embarkation points of southern and eastern Europe. Many of them were children. Together with the American-born children of immigrants, they made up a significant part of turn-of-the-century U.S. society. Small Strangers recounts and interprets their varied experiences to illustrate how immigration, urbanization, and industrialization—all related processes—molded modern America. Growing up in crowded tenements, insular mill towns, rural ethnic enclaves, or middle-class homes, as they came of age they found themselves increasingly caught between Old World expectations and New World demands. The encounters of these children with ethnic heritage, American values, and mass culture helped shape the twentieth century in a United States still known symbolically around the world as a nation of immigrants.

About this title

About the Author

Melissa R. Klapper teaches history at Rowan University in New Jersey and has also written Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860–1920. She lives in the Philadelphia area.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee (UK)
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566637333
• ISBN 13: 9781566637336
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256