About this item
An award-winning historian reframes our continuing debate over immigration with a compelling history of xenophobia in the United States and its devastating impactThe United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era. Benjamin Franklin ridiculed Germans for their "strange and foreign ways." Americans' anxiety over Irish Catholics turned xenophobia into a national political movement. Chinese immigrants were excluded, Japanese incarcerated, and Mexicans deported. Today, Americans fear Muslims, Latinos, and the so-called browning of America.
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
