Review Essay: Out of Many,Many More

For the contours of this debate, see the special edition of the Journal of American Ethnic History and in particular Donna Gabaccia's excellent summation, “ Ins and Outs: Who Is an Immigration Historian ?” Journal of American Ethnic History, 18 ( 1999): 126-135 .

An obvious example of this argument is John Bodnar , The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America ( Bloomington , 1985).

A well-known iteration of this argument appears in Lisa Lowe's Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics ( Durham , 1996). Of course, the hard distinction I have drawn here obscures the scholarship that operates in between these two poles. See, for example, George Sanchez , Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 ( New York , 1993).

Edwin A. Abbott , Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884, rpt. edn., New York , 1992).

Nina Glick Schiller , Linda Basch , and Cristina Szanton Blanc , Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered ( New York , 1992).

David G. Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors : Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity ( Berkeley , 1995).

The term “imagined community” was first coined by Benedict Anderson, although he deployed the concept to imagine the cultural unification of diverse peoples under a common political identity, a process substantially different than described here. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991).

Samuel P. Huntington , Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity ( New York , 2004).

See, for example, Thomas A. Gugliemo , White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 ( New York , 2003); Matthew Frye Jacobson , Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race ( Cambridge , 1999); Noel Ignatiev , How the Irish Became White ( New York , 1996); and Karen Brodkin , How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America ( New Brunswick , 1999).