Immigrant Voices

Immigrant Voices: New Lives in America 1773-1986
edited by Thomas Dublin

Dublin here offers a collection of first-person immigrant accounts of life in the United States. This book grew out of Dublin's desire to provide his undergraduates (he teaches history at SUNY-Binghamton) with a reader showing how immigrants saw and understood their own experiences. Dublin draws from a wide range of already published classic immigrant recollections, ranging from "The Diary of John Harrower" to "The Nguyen Family: From Vietnam to Chicago." There is a balance between accounts by men and women; two of the ten chapters are written by the children of immigrants. The selected bibliography is a particularly useful list of book-length first-person accounts. Although all the readings are available elsewhere, the editing of this work warrants its inclusion in most undergraduate collections.