Immigration

An American History

By: Carl J. Bon Tempo, Hasia R. Diner

Narrated by: Kathleen Li

A sweeping narrative history of American immigration from the colonial period to the present

The history of the United States has been shaped by immigration. Historians Carl J. Bon Tempo and Hasia R. Diner provide a sweeping historical narrative told through the lives and words of the quite ordinary people who did nothing less than make the nation.

Drawn from stories spanning the colonial period to the present, Bon Tempo and Diner detail the experiences of people from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. They explore the many themes of American immigration scholarship, including the contexts and motivations for migration, settlement patterns, work, family, racism, and nativism, against the background of immigration law and policy. Taking a global approach that considers economic and personal factors in both the sending and receiving societies, the authors pay close attention to how immigration has been shaped by the state response to its promises and challenges.

©2022 Carl J. Bon Tempo and Hasia R. Diner (P)2022 Tantor

Good overview - terrible narrator

This book gives a very good overview of the history of immigration in the US. The timeline seemed to jump around frequently, which may not be an issue for a reader of the print edition, but it can be a bit confusing with the audio version. Overall, I recommend the book - even though the narrator was very annoying. Her monotone was bearable, but she kept inserting commas and periods between words where they clearly didn’t exist. It sounded bizarre, like a beta version of an early generation AI voice generator. Very weird. And annoying.