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Reviews
| From All Points: America's Immigrant West, 1870s–1952. By Elliott Robert Barkan. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2007. xix + 598 pp. Photos, tables, notes, appendix, bibliography, and index. $39.95 (cloth).
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The first of two planned volumes, From All Points is a sweeping overview of American immigration history from the 1870s to the 1950s and its particular implications for the U.S. West. Emphasizing the diversity of peoples who entered the region during this time period, their mobility, and their critical contributions to western economic development, Barkan seemingly sets out to cover all points in this encyclopedic volume. |
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From All Points is organized into four separate chronological sections. The first part focuses on the period from the mid-1870s to 1903 and includes brief chapters on Chinese exclusion as well as "old" immigrant groups like the Germans, Scandinavians, and Mexicans. Concluding this section is an explication of several large labor strikes involving immigrant workers and the institution of laws barring anarchists from entry or from becoming citizens. The second part covers the next twenty years, though several chapters dip back into the late nineteenth century to lay the groundwork for the multiple immigrant and labor histories Barkan documents. Because the chapters in this segment shift from a focus on different occupational categories to various ethnic group experiences, the section holds together in a loosely chronological way. Two final chapters highlight the important changes made to U.S. immigration laws in the 1910s and 1920s. |
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The final two parts of the volume cover the 1920s through the 1950s. The third part includes a critical discussion of the quota system of 1924, the rural versus the urban West, Filipino immigration, the repatriation of Mexicans and many Mexican Americans, and changing American and immigrant attitudes toward race and immigration policy on the eve of World War II. The fourth part deals with World War II and its aftermath for immigrant communities already in the U.S. as well as would-be refugees from war-torn Europe. Especially welcome here are full chapters on Japanese internment, the experiences of western Italian and German communities, and an overview of how World War II and the onset of the Cold War influenced subsequent U.S. immigration policies in the early 1950s. |
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This book is a clearly written, hefty synthesis of American immigration literature. One complaint is that the chapters tend to overlap in terms of content. As a result, a cover-to-cover read will encounter many redundancies. However, if used as a reference tool, each section would instead come across as quite thorough. In addition, while Barkan admirably includes a large number of compelling vignettes about individual immigrants and their diverse experiences, these could have been more fully analyzed and integrated into larger sectional arguments. |
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Still, these are small concerns for a very extensive book. From All Points covers an impressive wealth of material, and the statistics cited in the text itself and in the appendix's substantial tables will no doubt be of tremendous use to scholars and students alike. Barkan's attention to the wide variety of European ethnic groups that immigrated to the U.S. West is likewise very important, as the distinctions among them are often lost or fade in the face of the more dramatic Asian or Mexican experiences. From All Points will also provide a solid introduction to the field of American immigration history for new graduate students. In sum, Barkan has written a comprehensive reference book on the history of American immigration that will find its way to many shelves in the years to come.
Lissa Wadewitz
Linfield College
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