A âcomprehensiveâĻfascinatingâ (The New York Times Book Review) history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, by one of the nationâs preeminent scholars on the subject, with a new afterword about the recent hate crimes against Asian Americans.
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. âIn her sweeping, powerful new book, Erika Lee considers the rich, complicated, and sometimes invisible histories of Asians in the United Statesâ (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. But as Lee shows, Asian Americans have continued to struggle as both âdespised minoritiesâ and âmodel minorities,â revealing all the ways that racism has persisted in their lives and in the life of the country.
Published fifty years after the passage of the United Statesâ Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, these âpowerful Asian American storiesâĻare inspiring, and Lee herself does them justice in a book that is long overdueâ (Los Angeles Times). But more than that, The Making of Asian America is an âepic and eye-openingâ (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today.