Oscar Handlin

The Uprooted is a rare book, combining powerful feeling and long-time study to give us the shape and the feel of the immigrant experience rather than just the facts. It elucidates the hopes and the yearnings of the immigrants that propelled them out of their native environments to chance the hazards of the New World. It traces the profound imprint they made upon this world and how they, in turn, were changed by it.

Second Edition

The Uprooted

Harold C. Livesay

In this biography, author and scholar Harold C. Livesay examines the life and legacy of Andrew Carnegie, one of the greatest captains of industry and philanthropists in the history of the United States. Paperback, brief, and inexpensive, each of the titles in the "Library of American Biography Series" focuses on a figure whose actions and ideas significantly influenced the course of American history and national life. In addition, each biography relates the life of its subject to the broader themes and developments of the times. This best-selling biography offers students a lively and compelling portrait of one of the twentieth century' s greatest businessmen, while providing an avenue for exploring industrialism, capitalism, and the foundations of big business. Andrew Carnegie, The Gilded Age, Industrialism, Capitalism, American Steel, Carnegie Steel Company, Pennsylvania Railroad, Pittsburgh, Readers interested in Andrew Carnegie and American Industrialism.

Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business

TRACES THE HISTORY OF IMMIGRANTS DESCRIBING PROBLEMS OF ADJUSTMENT AND HIS INDISPENSABLE ROLE IN THE INDUSTRY, AGRICULTURE, POLITICS, AND CULTURAL LIFE OF AMERICA.

Immigration as a Factor in American History

John William Theodore Youngs

Covers Eleanor Roosevelt's life as a professional woman, a wife and mother, and, finally, a woman who illuminated her times and exemplified the complexities of womanhood in the twentieth century

A Personal and Public Life

Eleanor Roosevelt

The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People

Traces the course of immigration to America and discusses its impact on the nation's historical and cultural development.

A Pictorial History of Immigration

Bernard Bailyn

Stephan Thernstrom

Donald Fleming

Adams University Professor Emeritus and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History Bernard Bailyn

Essays on Harvard's history provide sample glimpses of a part still significant in the twentieth century.

Glimpses of the Harvard Past

“The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People, which won the 1952 Pulitzer for history, was aimed at an audience of general readers in making his case that immigration — more than the frontier experience, or any other episode in its past — was the continuing, defining event of American history. Dispensing with footnotes and writing in a lyrical style, Dr. Handlin emphasized the common threads in the experiences of the 30 million immigrants who poured into American cities between 1820 and the turn of the century. Regardless of nationality, religion, race or ethnicity, he wrote, the common experience was wrenching hardship, alienation and a gradual Americanization that changed America as much as it changed the newcomers. The book used a form of historical scholarship considered unorthodox at the time, employing newspaper accounts, personal letters and diaries as well as archives.” — Paul Vitello, The New York Times “[Oscar Handlin] has charged his pages with poetry and feeling... The Uprooted is history with a difference — the difference being its concern with men’s hearts and souls no less than an event.” — Milton Rugoff, The New York Times “Seldom in our historical literature have we been offered such detailed, realistic pictures of what it meant to come to the New World. The crossing itself, the struggle to make a living in the New World, the problems of housing, social fellowship, religion, adjustment to democracy — a chapter is devoted to each of these. The social and political pressures, the friction and misunderstanding between generations, the awful realization that the adjustment was too great — this reviewer knows of no book that captures these moods and situations with such sympathy and understanding... This is not, in either style or format, conventional or scholarly history... The style is not pedantic or heavy. The author is imaginative, sensitive, understanding. A tremendous amount of research and real depth of understanding lies behind the book.” — Ralph Adams Brown, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science “[S]trong stuff, handled in a masterly and quite moving way.” — The New Yorker “This is a book of fundamental importance. For the first time it attempts to get at the inner meaning of an experience crucial in the development of the United States. It makes the attempt with a back- ground of imaginative research, a perceptiveness, and a literary skill rare in the modern writing of history... no one should attempt serious work in modern American history without fully reckoning with The Uprooted.” — Eric F. Goldman, The Journal of Southern History “Dr. Handlin’s The Uprooted deserves every bit of the praise and honors that have been heaped upon it. Dealing with an important area of American history without deviating from scholarly standards, the author succeeded in penetrating the façade of historical data to reach the drama of the historical process. The book is not only beautifully written and alive with human interest, but also highly pertinent to current social and political events in the United States... [Dr. Handlin] has handled his material magnificently, and every immigrant and descendant of an immigrant — that is, every American — ought to read this book in order the better to understand himself and his ancestors.” — Solomon Grayzel, Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society “[T]he best historical interpretation of the inner meaning of migration.” — John Higham, Pacific Historical Review “Dr. Handlin has discharged his responsibility admirably. An able scholar of immigration history, Dr. Handlin, in the present work... reveals a mastery of historical data and rare insight and understanding of the manifold problems of the immigrant. The book is beautifully written, and many passages are truly moving... Americans would understand their country better if they would read this book and benefit from the humane spirit in which it is written.” — Carl Wittke, The New England Quarterly

Oscar Handlin

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