In publishing as in politics, timing is everything. Tyler Anbinder’s sweeping “City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York” scores big on both counts. A richly textured guide to the history of our immigrant nation’s pinnacle immigrant city has managed to enter the stage during an election season that has resurrected this historically fraught topic in all its fierceness.
The following is a book review of "City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York" by Tyler Anbinder
In publishing as in politics, timing is everything. Tyler Anbinder’s sweeping “City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York” scores big on both counts. A richly textured guide to the history of our immigrant nation’s pinnacle immigrant city has managed to enter the stage during an election season that has resurrected this historically fraught topic in all its fierceness.
With the exception of a thinly argued final chapter, the writer, a professor of history at George Washington University and the author of two previous books on early American history, rightly avoids drawing explicit lessons for today’s controversies from the past, though readers can find plenty. Support for the ideals of diversity and tolerance on the one hand and fears of tribalism and social fragmentation on the other collide on almost every page, beginning in the chaotic, polyglot trading outpost that was New Amsterdam. At the southern tip of Manhattan, Dutch fur traders, English merchants’ sons, random fortune seekers from Spain or Norway, Welsh tavern keepers, Gaelic blacksmiths, religious dissidents and a smattering of Jews and freed slaves somehow managed to conduct business even while speaking 18 different languages.
Over the next two centuries the arrival of starving, war-ravaged, oppressed or just plain restless huddled masses, almost all of them from Europe, pushed the settlement north, turning New York into the largest and most diverse city in the United States. By 1860, an extraordinary 69 percent of voting-age New Yorkers were foreign-born. Only Vienna and Berlin had more German inhabitants, and they were still considerably outnumbered by the Irish. Fifty years later the flood of foreigners, who began disembarking at the iconic Ellis Island in 1892, showed no signs of receding. As many as a million migrants, an increasing number of them Italians and Russian Jews, arrived annually in the years leading up to World War I. After Congress passed restrictive laws in the 1920s, the city experienced its first and only sustained immigration drought. But in 1965, with the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, Gotham began to return to its original immigrant-rich identity. Today more than a third of the population is foreign-born. “To me this city appeared as a tremendous overstuffed roar, where people just burst with a desire to live,” a Russian immigrant, Morris Shapiro, recalled about his arrival in the 1920s. His description might well strike today’s migrants, now largely from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia, as apt.
Anbinder devotes at least one chapter to each of the major immigrant group...
Read the entire piece here at The New York Times
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Kay S. Hymowitz is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. She is the author of the forthcoming book, The New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back.
