"Makes a formidable contribution to U.S. immigration history by addressing historical and contemporary debates about national identity and the place of immigrants within American society."--Brian Gratton, Arizona State University

"Deepens and clarifies our understanding of this understudied but very important social movement by comparing and contrasting those Americanization efforts aimed at protecting immigrants with those more coercive educational programs which we have previously thought to encompass the entire movement."--John F. McClymer, Assumption College

In the first...

Between 1820 and 1920, more than 33 million Europeans immigrated to the United States seeking the "American Dream." They came in response to an image of America as a land of opportunity and upward mobility sold to them by state governments, railroads, religious and philanthropic groups, and other boosters. But as historian Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson shows in Selling America: Immigration Promotion and the Settlement of the American Continent, 1607-1914, the desire to make and keep America a "white man's country" meant that only Northern Europeans would be recruited as settlers...