From All Points: America's Immigrant West, 1870s-1952(American West in the Twentieth Century)

At a time when immigration policy is the subject of heated debate, this book makes clear that the true wealth of America is in the diversity of its peoples. By the end of the 20th century the American West was home to nearly half of America's immigrant population, including Asians and Armenians, Germans and Greeks, Mexicans, Italians, Swedes, Basques, and others. This book tells their rich and complex story—of adaptation and isolation, maintaining and mixing traditions, and an ongoing ebb and flow of movement, assimilation, and replenishment. These immigrants and their children built communities, added to the region's culture, and contended with discrimination and the lure of Americanization. The mark of the outsider, the alien, the nonwhite passed from group to group, even as the complexion of the region changed. The region welcomed, then excluded, immigrants, in restless waves of need and nativism that continue to this day.

Table of Contents:
Preface Acknowledgments Note on Translation and Transliteration Introduction: Defining Themes—The West, Westerners, and Whiteness Prelude: Western Immigrant Experiences Part 1. Laying the Groundwork: Immigrants and Immigration Laws, Old and New, 1870s - 1903 1. Immigrant Stories from the West 2. The Draw of the Late-Nineteenth-Century West 3. Where in the West Were They? 4. Targets of Racism: Chinese and Others on the Mainland and Hawaii 5. The Scandinavians and Step Migration 6. The German Presence 7. Proximity of Homeland: The Mexicans 8. In the Year 1903 9. Foreshadowing Twentieth-Century Patterns Part 2. Opening and Closing Doors, 1903 - 1923 10. Immigrant Stories and the West in the 1900s 11. Who Came? 12. The Dillingham Commission and the West 13. The Continuing Evolution of Immigration and Naturalization Issues and Policies (Asians) 14. Miners, Merchants, and Entrepreneurs: Europeans Compete with Europeans (Greeks and Others) 15. Land, Labor, and Immigrant Communities: Hawaii and the Mainland (Asians, Portuguese, Armenians, and Scandinavians) 16. Newcomers, Old and New (Italians, Basques, French, and Mexicans) 17. The First World War and Americanization 18. State and Federal Laws and Decisions, 1917 - 1920 19. The Early 1920s: Threshold of Momentous Changes Part 3. "Give me a bug, please": Restriction and Repatriation, Accommodation and Americanization, 1923 - 1941 20. A World of Peoples: The 1920s and 1930s 21. Demographic Trends: A Changing West and Changing Westerners 22. Institutionalizing the Quota System: 1924 23. Divided Yet Interlinked: The Rural West 24. Filipinos: The Newer Immigrant Wave Bridging the Rural and Urban West 25. Divided Yet Interlinked: The Urban West in the Interwar Years 26. Urban Landscapes and Ethnic Encounters 27. From "Reoccupation" to Repatriation: Mexicans in the Southwest between the Wars 28. Darker Turns during the Interwar Years: Workers and Refugees 29. Aliens and Race Issues on the Eve of the Second World War 30. Interwar or Interlude? Twilight and Dawn in the West Part 4. America's Dilemma: Races, Refugees, and Reforms in an Age of World War and Cold War, 1942 - 1952 31. Voices from America on the Eve of War 32. War: Against All Those of Japanese Descent 33. The Second World War's Other Enemy Aliens: Italians and Germans 34. The Homefront in Wartime: Preface to an Era of Change 35. Wartime and Postwar Agricultural Issues: Land, Labor, Growers, and Unions 36. Immigrants and Ethnics in the Postwar Years 37. The Cold War Heats Up: The Politics of Immigration, 1950 - 1952 38. Dora and the Harbinger of Coming Events 39. Looking Back on America's Immigrant West Appendix Notes Select Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Elliott Robert Barkan is Professor Emeritus of History and Ethnic Studies at California State University. He is author of Our Multicultural Heritage: A Guide to America's Principal Ethnic Groups and And Still They Come: The Immigrant in American Society, 1920s–1990s. He lives in Corona, California.

Review :
"This richly detailed history of immigrants in the 20th-century American West rewards the reader with close attention to individual voices of immigrants. Encyclopedic in coverage, loaded with personal stories of real people, this book is unparalleled in its coverage. Finally the West becomes a full part of American immigration history." Walter Nugent, author of Into the West: The Story of Its People "From All Points is a remarkable synthesis of the West as a region of immigrants. It tells the story of how vital immigrants were to economic growth and modernization. This will be the prime reference for 21st century scholars of immigration and ethnicity in the American West." oAnnals of Wyoming, Spring 2010