The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee

This book's full title is The Making of Asian America: A History. I was attracted to this book as there are lots of Asians in my country of Canada, but I know little of their history in North America. Did you know that the first Asians to America started with Acapulco in 1580? Did you know that the first Chinese to go to the American colonies arrived in 1829? Did you know that the US had Angel Island in the west (like Eilis Island in the east)? However this island was used to exclude people, especially Chinese people.

Erika Lee is a teacher, author and historian. She had her own website . She has also won awards for this book. She is the Director of the Immigration History Research Center and has the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History at the University of Minnesota. She is on the University of Minnesota website.

There is an excellent review of this book by Oliver Wang in theNew York Times. There is another really good review by Viet Thanh Nguyen in the Los Angeles Times. This interesting article by Karan Mahajan called The Two Asian Americas in the New Yorker talks about this book.

In this video, Erika Lee speaks about her. This video starts at around 3:55 and Lee comes in around 6:12. This video is almost 1 hour long.

Also, an index of the books I have reviewed are on my website at Books. Follow me on Twitter.