Ivan H. Light

Ivan Light grew up on the lower west side of Manhattan, not far from the Lusitania's berth. His first playmates were the Irish and Italian youngsters who played "stoop ball" in Washington Square Park. He knows the neighborhood as it was. After graduating from Harvard, where he majored in history, he attended the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a doctorate in sociology. He got a job at UCLA and took up permanent residence in Los Angeles. During many years of teaching and research at UCLA, he worked consistently and published frequently on the subjects of immigration, immigrant entrepreneurship, cities, criminology, and historical sociology. A complete bibliography and free downloads of many of his academic publications are available at his university website: https://www.sociology.ucla.edu/faculty/ivan-light. Deadly Secret of the Lusitania brings together all these background experiences plus the family oral history, acquired as a child, of German immigrants in St. Louis MO during the First World War.