Our Foreigners: A Chronicle of Americans in the Making in Bloomington, MN

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt addressed the American Historical Association to call for American history to be written as compelling stories of literary quality. Editor Allen Johnson of Yale University responded by publishing the Chronicles of America series: 50 succinct volumes on regional and thematic American history. These books, intended for secondary schools and college students, are expository works of American history composed by competent historians in the 1920's, well before the special pleading and upending of social norms typical of histories after 1970. This series is focused on the mainstream of American political life and leadership from its initial volumes on Native Americans and European colonists to its final volumes on Woodrow Wilson, Canada, and the Hispanic Republics to our South.
Samuel Orth's
Our Foreigners
is an account of the racial demographics of the United States in 1920, at the cusp of the dramatic Congressional limitation on immigration in the landmark Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. Orth narrates the history of the English settlers of Colonial America, the African-American element in America, utopian migrations and movements into America with their unique visions of American possibilities, and the more recent and mostly European cohorts of the turn-of-the-century. This valuable narrative of settlers and migrants makes valuable comparisons and commentary on American identity and the mystery of durable human groupings in the United States.
Included in this work is an edited collection of Congressional debates in the House and the Senate concerning the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which concern the same themes in relation to Federal policy. Orth's bibliography of suggested topical readings, an editorial bibliography of contemporary sources, and editorial remarks on the modern historiography of American immigration policy are also included.
This work has been formatted and reprinted for Tall Men Books. It is not a facsimile reprint.