Opening book details…
Can I read American Passage : The History of Ellis Island on EtoBox?
American Passage : The History of Ellis Island by Vincent J. Cannato is a history book available to read on EtoBox.
What is American Passage : The History of Ellis Island about?
From School Library JournalStarred Review. Using a variety of primary sources, Cannato (_The Ungovernable City_) describes Ellis Island as a place and as an experience for the approximately 12 million immigrants who passed through it from 1892 to 1924. He follows its reincarnation as a detention center for wartime aliens and as a monument and museum, which he admits may celebrate uncritically "ethnic triumphalism" and upward mobility. Cannato writes that understaffing resulted in only perfunctory screening for mental, physical, and moral traits that might have made newcomers public charges, and he disabuses readers of the fallacy that examiners, rather than steamship officials or immigrants bent on assimilation, changed entrants' last names. With a focus on how "actual people created, interpreted, and executed immigration laws," Cannato maintains that regulation, which sometimes degraded into restriction, formed part of Progressive era reform and growing federal involvement to safeguard what was deemed the public interest. This measured book helps to place in perspective discussions—sure to matter to genealogists and those engaged in political discourse—of Ellis Island and the idea
Who reads American Passage : The History of Ellis Island?
It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.
Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.
- Author
- Vincent J. Cannato
- Publisher
- HarperCollins e-books
- Published
- 2010
- Language
- EN
- ISBN
- 9780060742737
- Category
- history
- Subjects
- Political Science, Science, Fiction
- Rating
- 3.71 / 5 (410 ratings)
- Updated
- 2026-03-14