Chapter 9

When reading Chapter nine I became very interested in the topic of paper sons and did some additional research and found out that before the 1920's you could only have American citizenship if your father was an American citizen not your mother. It was assumed that a woman would give up her citizenship in favor of the one her husband took on. To combat all the falsifying of documents the immigration officers of the time began an interview process that essentially questioned the child on their Father or home village and family history. However either the Paper sons and daughter themselves or their parents bought coaching books with background information on their paper family. These interrogations were not simply created because of the high number of paper children coming into the country, but because there were no written records to consult. The would be paper sons and daughters were detained on Angel Island where there examination would take place. I thought it was interesting that so many Paper Children are part of the history of a city I grew up in and know so well.

Chapter 8

For Chapter 8 I was very interested in the stories about  the immigration of Eastern European Jews, because they have such a interesting mis-mash of Old World traditions and American values. This was interesting to me because upon reading the chapter I inferred that the cultural differences arose between the traditional values of the parents who had immigrated and their American born children. This age driven cultural difference is not remarked about in other cultures, I think this is because writing is very much a part of the Jewish culture and have more written  records of this trend. An example is a book titled Bread Givers it is written by a Jewish American immigrant who describes this beautifully and it is one of my favorite books. I wonder if Parents of other cultures have this cultural disconnect with their American born children and why there is not as many stories or written evidence.

Chapter 7

In this chapter I was shocked to learn that by making immigration into a cooperation like business it actually improved the conditions of the people who traveled to other countries. By turning it into a big business I would assume that the shipping industries would be more concerned with profit and not the welfare of the passengers. I was also shocked to learn that people immigrated not only went to America, but some went to Argentina and Brazil, I would like to know what the push and pull factors were to bring people to those places. It could be assumed that it was economic,but why then would only a few groups of immigrants go to those places? why was it not more diverse? in this chapter I was also shocked to  learn about what Arab immigrants went through wen they settled here, it was not a story I had heard or been taught before this class.

Chapter 6

During our class discussion of enclave neighborhoods, I posed the question as to why there weren't so many Australian neighborhoods for my dad when he came here, and I was fully satisfied with the answer but, then I got to thinking about the rate of Australian immigration in the 19th century and I found some information, and it wasn't as dramatic as I had hoped. In the 19th century Australia was just  being colonized it's self, when the American Colonies had won they're independence. This meant that they had lost they're dumping ground for criminals and needed a new one. It became Australia. when the colony was first being established there was 1023 of which a little less then half were convicts. So the reason that there was not a high level of immigration from Australia to the United States is because there were not a lot of people there to begin with.

Chapter Five

My favorite part of this chapter was not only the different stories of the various groups of people who immigrated or were the descendants of immigrants and how they interacted with each other. The fact that it was not always kind does not surprise me in the least because the fear of people who immigrate can be found today with immigrants form Mexico and the treatment of people of Asian descent with the Sedition Acts and other limits on immigration. However what I am surprised about was the sense of English superiority that developed even though they were in most cases a minority and did not feel as connected to their mother country. After reading the chapter I am still confused as to how second generation born Americans developed this notion, as I would assume that they would either be more genetically diverse or feel less attachment to England.

Chapter Three

While reading chapter three, I was very interested in the way African Slaves not only influenced colonial culture and by extension American culture,but how they were able to save aspects of their own culture, when the country they were brought to tried everything to destroy it,and in most cases would not let them speak their own language. Most of early slave history has been lost because it was a primarily oral history and by many scholars was not considered to be worth studying until much later. Personally I find it hard to believe that a group of people who were so foundational in helping to build America, and had the largest population were not historicaly represented or even recgonized as people horrible.

Early Immigration

A few things in this chapter stood out to me the first of which was the sheer number of people who came to North America as Indentured Servants, not because they wanted to but because they were kidnapped or financially had no choice. Considering how they were treated I think it makes sense to say that Indentured servitude helped to set a foundation for how African slaves would later be treated. An example is how both were treated and thought of as someone else's property,and the lengths the owner would resort to in order to find them. I think it would be interesting to compare how many indentured servants went to each colony, I think it would be safe to assume that Virginia would have the highest amount because of their cash crop driven economy (this is the same reason that the South had a higher amount of slaves). It was also interesting to me how that would owner would go about finding their missing servants,putting missing ads in the paper that focus on the clothes and not much else today this would be the most impractical way to find a missing person.