Viet Thanh Nguyen fled Vietnam as a child, escaping Saigon with his family the day before the capital city fell. They went to military bases in the Philippines and Guam, then lived in Pennsylvania for a few years before finally settling in San Jose, California, where he discovered the American dream was complicated. His literary work, most notably his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,

"The definitive history of Asian Americans by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject. In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as award-winning historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s; indentured "coolies" who worked alongside African slaves in the Caribbean; and Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and South Asian immigrants who were recruited to work in the United States only to face massive racial discrimination, Asian exclusion laws, and for Japanese Americans, incarceration during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a "despised minority," Asian Americans are now held up as America's "model minorities" in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States. Published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the United States' Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that has remade our "nation of immigrants," this is a new and definitive history of Asian Americans. But more than that, it is a new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today."--Publisher information.

"Beginning with the Alien Friends Act of 1798, the United States passed laws in the name of national security to bar or expel foreigners based on their beliefs and associations-although these laws sometimes conflict with First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and association or contradict America's self-image as a nation of immigrants. The government has continually used ideological exclusions and deportations of noncitizens to suppress dissent and radicalism throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the War on Anarchy to the Cold War to the War on Terror. In Threat of Dissent-the first social, political, and legal history of ideological exclusion and deportation in the United States-Julia Rose Kraut delves into the intricacies of major court decisions and legislation without losing sight of the people involved. We follow the cases of immigrants and foreign-born visitors, including activists, scholars, and artists such as Emma Goldman, Ernest Mandel, Carlos Fuentes, Charlie Chaplin, and John Lennon. Kraut also highlights lawyers, including Clarence Darrow and Carol Weiss King, as well as organizations, like the ACLU and PEN America, who challenged the constitutionality of ideological exclusions and deportations under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court, however, frequently interpreted restrictions under immigration law and upheld the government's authority. By reminding us of the legal vulnerability foreigners face on the basis of their beliefs, expressions, and associations, Kraut calls our attention to the ways that ideological exclusion and deportation reflect fears of subversion and serve as tools of political repression in the United States"--

"Many of us like to think of the United States as a nation of immigrants. We pride ourselves on our history of welcoming foreigners and believe this sets our nation apart from every other. But the phrase 'a nation of immigrants' only dates from the mid-twentieth century, and has served to paper over a much darker history of hatred of -- and violence against -- foreigners arriving on our shores. As the acclaimed historian Erika Lee shows in America for Americans, the recent spasm of xenophobic policy and treatment of immigrants -- from the abuses of ICE to the Muslim ban to the proposed border wall -- is only the latest manifestation of another, less known but even more influential American creed. As Lee argues, an intense fear of strangers based on their race, religion, ethnicity, or national origin has always been at the heart of the American project. From Benjamin Franklin calling German immigrants 'swarthy' aliens to the anti-Chinese exclusion movement in 1876 San Francisco to modern paranoia over Mexican immigration and the 'browning of America, ' xenophobia has been an ideological force working hand-in-hand with American nationalism, capitalism, and racism. Offering a new framework and theory of xenophobia to explain what it is, what it does, and how it works, Lee shows that more often than not in our nation's history, xenophobia has been the rule -- not the exception. At the same time, she reveals why we cannot understand institutionalized racism, sexism, classism without first examining the role of xenophobia in creating these related problems. Forcing us to reckon with the less palatable side of American history and beliefs, America for Americans is a necessary corrective and ultimately a spur to action for any concerned citizen"--