Paul R. Spickard Knihy

Almost All Aliens offers a unique reinterpretation of immigration in the history of the United States. Leaving behind the traditional melting-pot model of immigrant assimilation, Paul Spickard puts forward a fresh and provocative reconceptualization that embraces the multicultural reality of immigration that has always existed in the United States. His astute study illustrates the complex relationship between ethnic identity and race, slavery, and colonial expansion. Examining not only the lives of those who crossed the Atlantic, but also those who crossed the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the North American Borderlands, Almost All Aliens provides a distinct, inclusive analysis of immigration and identity in the United States from 1600 until the present.

This text is a survey of excerpts from the work of some of the major historians since the dawn of written history. The authors have included introductions to each excerpt giving some geographical and historical context, as well as discussing the types of information and ways of thinking that inform each historian’s view of the world. These selections provide the reader the opportunity to contemplate the nature and purposes of history as it has been practiced by people from many different tradition and in many eras. This text can be used in the undergraduate Historical Methods course or as a supplement in the Western and World History courses.