A “comprehensive…fascinating” (The New York Times Book
Review) history of Asian Americans and their role in American life,
by one of the nation’s preeminent scholars on the subject.
In the past fifty
years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are
now the fastest growing group in the United States. But much of their
long history has been forgotten. “In her sweeping, powerful new
book, Erika Lee considers the rich, complicated, and sometimes
invisible histories of Asians in the United States” (Huffington
Post).
The Making of
Asian America shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their
American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life,
from sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500 to
the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the
past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community
activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a
“despised minority,” Asian Americans are now held up as America’s
“model minorities” in ways that reveal the complicated role that
race still plays in the United States.
Published fifty
years after the passage of the United States’ Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1965, these “powerful Asian American stories…are
inspiring, and Lee herself does them justice in a book that is long
overdue” (Los Angeles Times). But more than that, The Making of
Asian America is an “epic and eye-opening” (Minneapolis
Star-Tribune) new way of understanding America itself, its
complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the
world today.
