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7 Int'l Migration Rev. 4 (1973)

handle is hein.journals/imgratv7 and id is 1 raw text is: How Historians Have Looked at Immigrants to the United States by Robert D. Cross* If the world of historical scholarship was well-ordered, the first chapters of the history of immigration to the New World would have been written by the first human being who, some 20,000 or 30,000 years ago, would almost certainly have looked back across the icy ocean (what was later called Bering Strait), and uttered some remarks about those human beings who followed him on to the as yet uninhabited continents of what were to be called North and South America. It is impossible, of course, to know whether the first immigrant did look back; even if he did, it is plausible to suppose that he could not write down his thoughts; but it is plausible to surmise that if he did look back, and if he was able to write, only part of his thoughts would have been what today we regard as printable. The history of immigration to the New World, like the history of immigration elsewhere - like, indeed, the history of anybody by somebody else - has been ethnocentric, a more or less uneven balance between curiosity about, affection for, fear of, and antipathy towards someone new, and so almost in- variably different in some respects. Mr. Dooley, that supremely American Irish- American, was in the great tradition of immigration history when he inveighed in rich brogue against the uncouthness of recent immigrants, at the same time that he let it be known that he resented the patronizing airs put on by those who had arrived, as he put it, a few boat lengths ahead of him, beaching at the mouth of the James River, or at Plymouth Rock. His own view, he asserted with the kind of feeling we associate with immigration history, was the only truly American one - the only one informed with clarity and dispassion. (I have no doubt that although I write a few years after Mr. Dooley spoke up, and have tried to guard against his amusing ethnocentrism, by thinking about what he and other conscious or unconscious historians have said, and why they said it, and by picking up whatever clues I could to what other participants, such as the first ar- rival, the last, and those in between have thought, but not written down, my brief history, which follows, of what historians have thought about immigration to the United States is a biassed one.) Richard Saveth, in American Historians and European Immigrants, and John Higham, in Strangers in the Land, have documented all too persuasively how narrow have been the perspectives, how straitened have been the outlooks, of those good men and rascals who have writ- ten on this theme. I can plead only good intentions, plus a more recent perspective, plus the possibly longer view of the dwarf who sits on the shoulders *Professor of History and Dean of Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Virginia. 4

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