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For good or ill, Oscar Handlin has been a foil for a great deal of contemporary scholarship in the field of immigration and ethnic history, as revisionist scholars of a different generation castigated him for his approach to a variety of subjects and for the topics and themes that his work left out. Among the former, scholars have criticized his construction of a male peasant \"ideal type\" that collapsed historical distinctions based upon place, time, and gender and his liberal faith in the American project of mobility and assimilation. Among the latter, scholars have decried the silences in his work regarding the depth and pervasiveness of institutional racism and, like many historians of his generation, his tacit acceptance of an American position in the world that, for all of the benefits it may have produced for Americans at home and for all it may have offered or conferred upon individuals and peoples around the world, nonetheless arguably also was fundamentally imperialist and racist in both its inception and its operation. Here, Bukowczyk talks about the works of Oscar Handlin.

Introduction to journal issue dedicated to the legacy of Oscar Handlin, a pioneer in the study of immigration, ethnic and social history in America. Adapted from the source document.

Of Oscar Handlin's many contributions to American immigration history, arguably one of the most important was his work for the reform of the national origins quota system in the 1950s. In his work for immigration reform, we can see how Handlin crafted a view of American immigration that would be remarkably durable. He wedded a normative theory of immigration as an assimilative, modernizing process, central to the telos of American history (the theme of his famed The Uprooted, 1951), with the substance of immigration reform, achieved finally in 1965 with passage of the Hart-Celler Act. This was a remarkable achievement, which in effect established the historiography of Hart-Celler in the very moment of its making. Adapted from the source document.

In 1869 Yehuda Leib Gordon, a Hebrew poet residing in Russia, published a much quoted work, \"Awake My People.\" In this piece of writing, he offered advice to those Russian Jews who found themselves taking their first faltering steps toward emancipation and integration. This bifurcation of the outside and the inside, of the modern public and the Jewish home, described the pressures felt by Jews not just in Russia but in the US as well, and the historian Oscar Handlin underwent a process not unrelated to that endured by those for whom Gordon wrote as he made his way into the American academy in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Here, Diner talks about Handlin's writing about the American Jewish History.

Kraut talks about Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted. It is no secret that scholars of immigration and ethnicity have found the saga that Handlin spins wanting in ways both substantive and methodological. In his preface to the second edition of The Uprooted, Handlin says that his book tells an \"epic story.\" Of all the criticisms, none is more often quoted by scholars than that by the late Professor Rudolph J. Vecoli, who taught for many years at the University of Minnesota, founding the Immigration History Research Center there. His essay \"Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted\" appeared in the Dec 1964 issue of the Journal of American History. With great care and in great detail, Vecoli relied on the example of the contadini or townsmen of the Mezzogiorno in Southern Italy who had emigrated to Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to demonstrate the inadequacy of Handlin's broad-brush approach to the emigration experience of Europe's peasantry.

Gerber talks about The Uprooted book. Oscar Handlin's poetic rendering of Thomas and Znaniecki's modernization-organizational cycle formed the agenda of what several generations of immigration and ethnic historians wanted not to say. The book is evocative, emotional, and contains enough that is plausible in feeling that people resist dismissing it completely. Perhaps more than anything else, it endures because readers correctly sense, as they do with so little academic history, the insistent personal, existential engagement of the author. If The Uprooted endures as much for its author's engagement as for its subject and, correct or incorrect, its interpretation, the consciousness dawns in those people who are familiar with the latter stages of the author's career that it would never have been written if the younger Handlin had followed the strictures about how to attain knowledge of the past that the author insisted upon when he was a much older man.

Thomas talks about Handlin's 1959 book The Newcomers: Negroes and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis. The Newcomers was not a historical study like Handlin's previous books, his monographs Boston's Immigrants (1941) and The Uprooted, and a collection of essays, Race and Nationality in American Life (1957). The Newcomers did address questions about change over time, and about how its subjects, African Americans and Puerto Ricans, fit into New York's historical landscape and its ever-evolving population. However, the driving questions behind the book focused not so much on the meaning of historical relationships, but on how those relationships became problematic and how to fix them. Handlin's work relied on a sometimes clumsy situating of recent social scientific data within a too-broad historical context of \"newcomers\" in New York City dating back to the early nineteenth century.

It is hard to imagine that Handlin's own childhood in an immigrant household did not influence his choice of topic for his first book or his approach to it. Handlin was born in Brooklyn on Sep 29, 1915, the first child of Russian Jewish immigrants, Joseph and Ida, who had arrived in the US just a few years earlier (his mother in 1903 and his father 1913). Later in life, Handlin denied that there was any linkage between his own life story as the child of immigrants and his choice of thesis topic. Asked if the topic would have appealed to him had he not been the son of immigrants from the Ukraine. Thus, when immigrants appeared in 1941, it was a completely new kind of history book, a study of a single immigrant community. Here, Anbinder examines Handlin's historical writing about American immigration.

As the nation grappled with African American civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s, historian Oscar Handlin, like many scholars of his generation, set out to make sense of the role of race in American democracy and to determine the proper path of black liberation. Handlin, already a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of immigration, viewed both civil rights and the experiences of American blacks through a lens of ethnic pluralism. Like many historians and social scientists following the Second World War, Handlin rejected race as an analytical category, asserting in Race and Nationality in American Life (1957) \"that there is no evidence of any inborn differences of temperament, personality, character, or intelligence among the races.\" Instead, he argued that ethnicity was \"The only meaningful basis on which one can compare social and cultural traits.\" The notion that American society was composed of disparate ethnic groups with their own particular cultural affinities resonated with liberal social scientists and historians of the 1950s and 1960s for a number of reasons. Ethnic pluralism was, of course, consistent with models of interest group politics that had gained primacy following the New Deal. More to the point, in identifying culture as the nexus of group identity, ethnic pluralism constituted a formal rejection of eugenics and other biological metaphors of race. Handlin's identification of African Americans as an ethnic rather than racial group would ultimately lead him to draw fairly optimistic conclusions about the future of American race relations. Adapted from the source document.

Professor Rudolph J Vecoli, though of Italian extraction, was known among my fellow Polish American scholars as a friend of the Poles for, among other things, his promotion of the Polish American Studies Fund at the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC). The Fund helps support the IHRC's extensive Polish American Collection, and in recognition of his work in honoring the heritage and preserving the historical record of Polonia, the Polish American Historical Association presented Vecoli with the Amicus Poloniae Award in 2004. Bukowczyk discusses the life and works of Vecoli and looks into Prof Bruno Ramirez's documentary film Sempre, Rudi, a glimpse at Vecoli's great accomplishments and commitments.