The Making of Asian America: A History
By Erika Lee

A comprehensive fascinating (The New York Times Book Review) history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, 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
much of their long history has been forgotten. In her sweeping, powerful
new book, Erika Lee considers the rich, complicated, and sometimes
invisible histories of Asians in the United States (Huffington Post). The Making of Asian America
shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born
descendants have made and remade Asian American life, from sailors who
came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500 to the Japanese
Americans incarcerated 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
fifty years after the passage of the United States Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1965, these powerful Asian American stories are
inspiring, and Lee herself does them justice in a book that is long
overdue (Los Angeles Times). But more than that, The Making of Asian America is an epic and eye-opening (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today."