The subtitle is “A Modern Pilgrim’s Journey on the Great Wagon Road”. So this is part travelogue, part history lesson. Personally, I’m more interested in the history, but Dodson does make the journey itself interesting. While he has obviously planned ahead, and set up meetings with various experts along the way, he also serendipitously encounters Read More
Tag: Immigration
American Midnight, by Adam Hochschild
This book discusses the years just before, during, and after The Great War. The subtitle is “The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis”. Hochschild starts with the entry of the United States into the War to End All Wars, and it was a little messier than we probably realize. Many people wanted Read More
Daily Life in Immigrant America, 1870-1920, by June Granatir Alexander
The subtitle of this book is “How the Second Great Wave of Immigrants Made Their Way in America”. The time frame, 1870 to 1920, is when the largest group of immigrants arrived on our shores. This is between the Civil War, until just after World War I, when immigration rules were tightened to exclude numerous Read More
Everyday Life in Early America, by David Freeman Hawke
This is the first book in “The Everyday Life in America Series”, which consists of six books, by as many authors, and which goes through 1945. This book takes us from initial European settlement on the East Coast, up to the beginning of the seventeenth century. It covers pretty much every aspect of what life Read More
The Irish Americans, by Jay P Dolan
This book describes the experiences of Irish emigrants from the 1700’s up to and including the entire 20th century. Not only does Dolan describe what life would have been like for the Irish who did cross the pond, he also discusses, in great detail, the conditions that caused many people to leave Ireland in the Read More
The Guarded Gate, by Daniel Okrent
If you had family that came through Ellis Island in the early 1900’s, but there were other family members who did not emigrate, this book might help explain why they were not able to relocate to the United States. While the focus of this book does not relate directly to genealogy, it explains in depressing Read More
Triangle, The Fire that Changed America, by David Von Drehle
I remember hearing about this fire, which occurred in 1911, in my Social Studies class, which was long enough ago that it obviously made an impression, since I can still remember it now. That was only a paragraph or two, and this is an entire book. Obviously, the story is even more memorable when you Read More
Plentiful Country, by Tyler Anbinder
This book works to disprove the long accepted idea that the Irish who came to America fleeing the Potato Famine arrived as unskilled labor, and remained at the lowest rungs of society for the rest of their lives. Anbinder, with help from a number of assistants, undertook a ten year study, and this book is Read More
Brought Forth on This Continent, by Harold Holzer
This is a Lincoln biography, but with a specific focus. The subtitle of the book is “Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration”. Most of the biographies of Lincoln that I have read, and I certainly have not read them all, focus mainly on his early years, and then the years in the White House in the Read More
A Short History of the Railroad, by Christian Wolmar
I had thought that this book would cover the history of the American railroad system, and it does. However, it also covers the history of railroad systems around the world. So, the level of information is in some cases very broad, but not terribly deep. Having said that, I did learn a couple of things Read More