Ellen D. Wu. The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press (2015). “Unlike the progeny of turn-of-the-century southern and eastern European immigrants, who melted into unambiguous whiteness in the crucibles of mass consumption, industrial unionism, New Deal ethnic pluralism, and military service, Japanese and Chinese More
William B. Kurtz, Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America. New York, Fordham University Press (2015). For students of Catholics in America and of immigration, this is an essential study of identity and historical memory in the context of nativism and anti-Catholicism. For readers interested in the Civil War, More
Walter Roth, Everyday Heroic Lives: Portraits from Chicago’s Jewish Past. Chicago, Walter Roth (2016). This is a treasure house of writings by Walter Roth, who ended his remarkable twenty-two-year term as president of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society in 2010. At the heart of the book are portraits of fifteen individuals, such as political leader More
In his Author! Author! blog series, Museum president Gary T. Johnson highlights works that draw on our collection. John N. Low. The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago. East Lansing, MI; Michigan State University Press (2016). This is a very unusual and valuable book for those interested in Chicago history or More
Brian Matthew Jordan. Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War. New York, Liveright Publishing Company (2014). This is a very special book. The foundation is the author’s command of archival resources, giving access to rich veins of material both on veterans and their families and on the communities to which they returned. He More