This book investigates the role immigrant radicals have played in U.S. society from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. A valuable contribution to the history of the American Left, it makes use of a wealth of material from immigrants whose everyday speech and intellectual discourse were not in the English language.

The social-history scholarship that informs the essays is innovative in method and purpose. Articles on Mexican-American, German, Jewish, Polish, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Italian, Ukrainian, Greek, Arab, and Haitian immigrants supply missing conceptual links between the immigration experience, the neighborhood and the workplace, and political, labor, and cultural institutions. Taken together, they offer a model study in transnational history, one of the most important new fields of historical inquiry. Included are essays by Douglas Monroy, Stan Nadel, Michael Topp, Mary E. Cygan, Maria Woroby, Michael W. Suleiman, Robert G. Lee, Carole Charles, Van Gosse, and the editors.