Books by Matthew Frye Jacobson

America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "e;whiteness studies"e; and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in this nation of immigrants "e;race"e; has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities, in becoming American, were re-racialized to become Caucasian.

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that every immigrant to the U.S. "became American," by choice and with deliberate speed. In this compelling revisionist study, Jacobsen reveals tenacious attachments to the Old World and explores the significance of homeland politics for Irish, Polish, and Jewish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century.

Suitable for readers who are accustomed to the self-congratulatory myth of America as a beacon of liberty to which the 'huddled masses' of the world look with longing.