Crosscurrents: Atlantic and Pacific Migration in the Making of a Global America

Crosscurrents: Atlantic and Pacific Migration in the Making of a Global America asks two fundamental questions: When and how did the trajectories of Atlantic history and Pacific history overlap and converge with each other through travel and migration? What historically rooted processes drove people originally separated by immense physical and cultural distances into mutual encounters, close exchanges, and collective creativity in building an inter-hemispheric social and cultural life based on group diversity? Historian Reed Ueda moves beyond regional compartments to uncover transnational inter-linkages of migration, trade, and cross-cultural change. The result is a powerful new synthesis that puts American history in a new light. Impeccably researched, Crosscurrents uses a wide variety of sources--public records, personal writings, quantitative data sets, and visual material--to show the historical developments of these transformations. It is an ideal text for courses in immigration history, history of the Atlantic, history of the Pacific, history of California, and the history of the American West.

About the Author :
Reed Ueda is Professor of History at Tufts University. He has been coeditor, with Mary C. Waters and Helen B. Marrow, of The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965 (2007). He has authored or co-authored several books, including Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History (1994) and Avenues to Adulthood: The Origins of the High School and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (1987).

Review :
"Crosscurrents is a thoroughly researched and beautifully written study of the emergence of the U.S. west coast as a borderland between the Atlantic and Pacific worlds from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Ueda captures the human drama of global migration and the social history of Asian immigrants in the U.S. with skill and sensitivity, and his scholarship crosses new boundaries along with the immigrant groups he is studying. This is Ueda's most ambitious intellectual venture yet, aiming to connect the histories of the Pacific and Atlantic worlds. It is a major contribution to comparative and connective global history. Ueda's work comes ashore and is firmly grounded in a richly textured social history of Asian immigrants to the U.S.; he blends their stories with legal and intellectual history with great finesse. Ueda has done much more than can be expected of one historian writing on a huge subject. "--Sugata Bose, Harvard University "[A] highly palatable pitch for diverse Americans to learn to work and live together."--Madeline Y. Hsu, New Mexico Historical Review