Crosscurrents: Atlantic and Pacific Migration in the Making of a Global America

Crosscurrents: Atlantic and Pacific Migration in the Making of a Global America asks two fundamental questions: When and how did the trajectories of Atlantic history and Pacific history overlap and converge with each other through travel and migration? What historically rooted processes drove people originally separated by immense physical and cultural distances into mutual encounters, close exchanges, and collective creativity in building an inter-hemispheric social and cultural life based on group diversity? Historian Reed Ueda moves beyond regional compartments to uncover transnational inter-linkages of migration, trade, and cross-cultural change. The result is a powerful new synthesis that puts American history in a new light. Impeccably researched, Crosscurrents uses a wide variety of sources–public records, personal writings, quantitative data sets, and visual material–to show the historical developments of these transformations. It is an ideal text for courses in immigration history, history of the Atlantic, history of the Pacific, history of California, and the history of the American West.