The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People

By Oscar Handlin

Book Overview

Awarded the 1952 Pulitzer Prize in history, The Uprooted chronicles the common experiences of the millions of European immigrants who came to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--their fears, their hopes, their expectations. The New Yorker called it "strong stuff, handled in a masterly and quite moving way," while the New York Times suggested that "The Uprooted is history with a difference--the difference being its concerns with hearts and souls no less than an event."

The book inspired a generation of research in the history of American immigration, but because it emphasizes the depressing conditions faced by immigrants, focuses almost entirely on European peasants, and does not claim to provide a definitive answer to the causes of American immigration, its great value as a well-researched and readable description of the emotional experiences of immigrants, and its ability to evoke the time and place of America at the turn of a century, have sometimes been overlooked. Recognized today as a foundational text in immigration studies, this edition contains a new preface by the author.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812217888
• ISBN13: 9780812217889
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

This one has been around for a long time

but that's because it's a lucid little book. It reaches a general audience, particularly useful for high school and undergraduate college students.

The #1 'Must Read' For Any Serious U.S. Genealogist

If you want to feel what your ancestors felt after they landed, this is the book for you.I have read many, many books of this type, and Handlin's is still the best.He looks at the Great Migration from the point of the impact on the immigrants and their children, rather than the impact on Canadian and United States cultures.This book goes into areas that the documentaries that we've all seen, do not. This should be the primer for anyone who is going to read about conditions in the countries that their ancestors came to the US and Canada from. Without this piece, what went before won't make as much sense.Dispells the theory that we were taught in the 60s and 70s, that the immigrants came because they wanted to, and this was to them, the land of rags to riches. Handlin points out that if their very lives had nott been at stake, the vast majority would never have made the move.