An excellently arranged and compiled text which recounts, again, the tale of European immigrants come to the United States in search of the American Dream. It has excellent sidebars and focused text on individuals or events, and an especially good one detailing Angel Island and the discrimination visited upon Asian immigrants. A solid starter to getting a pretty good picture of this period in American history, though, sadly, it does little to acknowledge the forced migration of Africans or horrors suffered by indigenous peoples as these "new Americans" made their way across the continent. ( )

Sandler revisits territory covered in his Immigrants: A Library of Congress Book (1995) but expands the scope considerably: first, with a detailed station-to-station description of how immigrants were processed through Ellis Island; then with sweeping discussions of tenement life in the cities, the transformation of the midwestern prairie to farmland, and finally, the role played by immigrant laborers in the growth of railroads and heavy industry. He makes abundant use of original source material throughout, drawing hundreds of brief comments from an array of personal interviews, oral histories, and memoirs, all supplemented by dark but consistently relevant period photos. Though references to Yiddish as "the language of the Jews" and to a group of "Mohammedan priests" should not have survived editorial tweaking, this engagingly written, inspirational account will give children, particularly immigrants or descendants of immigrants, some sharp insight into the trials and triumphs of their predecessors.
TCI Lesson 3: The Peopling of the United States
(higher level text)

Great nonfiction. As someone who does have relatives who came through Ellis Island I found this very interesting. The author did a very good job of weaving multiple first hand accounts into flowing narrative. ( )