Immigration History Research Center
The Immigration History Research Center promotes interdisciplinary research on international migration, develops archives documenting immigrant and refugee life, especially in the U.S., and makes specialized scholarship accessible to students, teachers, and the public.
Perspectives
Immigration. It's a hot topic. And a focus of scholarship, teaching and debate at the University of Minnesota since the 1920s. Thoughtful and provocative perspectives are offered by University faculty and graduate students on migration news. We challenge you to read and to think. This week's topic:
Collections
IHRC has created a vast archive of newspapers, oral histories, and personal papers, along with the organizational records of immigrants and refugees and the agencies created to serve them. Holdings are particularly rich on the labor migrants who came to the U.S. between 1880 and 1930s, on the displaced persons who arrived in the U.S. after World War II, and on the refugees resettled in the United States after 1975. Holdings include archives, books, periodicals and digital sources.
Scholar Events
IHRC seminars, lectures and workshops bring a highly specialized and multi-disciplinary group of University of Minnesota researchers into dialogue with their national and international peers, with university and high school students and their teachers, with journalists, photographers and filmmakers, and with communities of immigrants and ethnic Americans. The IHRC collaborates with the Institute for Global Studies to offer a special series of events called Global REM (Race, Ethnicity, and Migration). Videotapes of the seminars are available on the Global REM Website.
Community
The IHRC engages with many communities in the Twin Cities, and in Minnesota and beyond. It is especially qualified to bring into dialogue the many scholar-specialists from the University of Minnesota with high school students and their teachers, with print and non-print media workers, and with individuals from local immigrant and ethnic communities. The IHRC also works with a community support group, the Friends of the IHRC, to offer special lectures and events. These provide an opportunity for conversation and socializing as well as a way to highlight the place of the IHRC collections in preserving the heritage and promoting the study of immigrant history.
Notices
Recently Published
From All Points: America's Immigrant West, 1870s-1952 by Elliott Robert Barkan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. 598 pp. ISBN 978-0-253-34851-7.
Reviewer Walter D. Kamphoefner (Texas A&M University) writes "...Barkan provides a view of immigration to the West that is both panoramic and analytical, above all highlighting the difference in reception that immigrants encountered depending on whether or not they were "visible minorities." The relatively low profile of Germans, both in the book and in the society of the American West, can be taken as an index of their relatively easy acculturation."
Citation: Walter D. Kamphoefner. Review of Barkan, Elliott Robert, From All Points: America's Immigrant West, 1870s-1952. H-GAGCS, H-Net Reviews. October, 2009.
URLs: complete review or to order this book
October 30th, 2009 Return to