About this item
The definitive history of Asian Americans 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 as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s; indentured "coolies" who worked alongside African slaves in the Caribbean; and Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and South Asian immigrants who were recruited to work in the United States only to face massive racial discrimination, Asian exclusion laws, and for Japanese Americans, incarceration during World War II.
About the Author
Erika Lee is the granddaughter of Chinese immigrants who entered the United States through both Angel Island and Ellis Island. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She teaches American history at the University of Minnesota, where she is also a Regents Professor, the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History, and the Director of the Immigration Recently awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and named Incoming Vice President of the Organization of American Historians, she is a frequent commentator in the media and the author of three award-winning books in U.S. immigration and Asian American history: At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003) , Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (co-authored with Judy Yung, Oxford University Press, 2010) , and The Making of Asian America: A History (Simon & Schuster, 2015, 2nd ed., 2016, Chinese version, 2019) . Lee's new book, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States will be published by Basic Books in November of 2019 and has already received high praise from reviewers, including a starred review from Kirkus. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two sons.For more, visit: www.erikalee.org
