Crosscurrents Atlantic and Pacific Migration in the Making of a Global America

Crosscurrents: Atlantic and Pacific Migration in the Making of a Global America asks two fundamental questions: When and how did the trajectories of Atlantic history and Pacific history overlap and converge with each other through travel and migration? What historically rooted processes drove people originally separated by immense physical and cultural distances into mutual encounters, close exchanges, and collective creativity in building an inter-hemispheric social and cultural life based on group diversity? Historian Reed Ueda moves beyond regional compartments to uncover transnational inter-linkages of migration, trade, and cross-cultural change. The result is a powerful new synthesis that puts American history in a new light. Impeccably researched, Crosscurrents uses a wide variety of sources--public records, personal writings, quantitative data sets, and visual material--to show the historical developments of these transformations. It is an ideal text for courses in immigration history, history of the Atlantic, history of the Pacific, history of California, and the history of the American West.

Reed Ueda is Professor of History at Tufts University. He has been coeditor, with Mary C. Waters and Helen B. Marrow, of The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965 (2007). He has authored or co-authored several books, including Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History (1994) and Avenues to Adulthood: The Origins of the High School and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (1987).

Chapter 1: Precursors
Pacific Borderlands
Bridges Across the Waters
Transatlantic Movements
Labor for the Far West
Out from Asian Enclosures
Restrictionist Admissions Policy
Closing Pacific and Atlantic Gates

Chapter 2: Emergence Between the Hemispheres
Migrations and Regional Development
Asian Frontiers
Economic Activity
Migrant Labor to the Ethnic Economy
Communities in Transition
Pluralism without Democracy

Chapter 3: Transplantation and Transculturaion
Networks for Social Capital
Mutualism and Community Development
Transcultural Spaces
The Civic Community of Schools
Cultural Change and Expression
Generations on the Margins

Chapter 4: A Globalist Era
Social Mobility
The Politics of Global Immigration

Chapter 5: The Pacific Coast as National and Global Hub
A New Political Economy of Diversity
Cultural Production and Innovation
Creativity and Human Capital
Politics and Population
Personhood, Peoplehood, and Nationhood

Conclusion