City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

By an acclaimed historian, a sweeping history of the peoples who have come to New York for four centuries: a defining American story of millions of immigrants, hundreds of languages, and one great city.

New York has been America’s city of immigrants for nearly four centuries. Growing from Peter Minuit’s tiny settlement of 1626 to a clamorous metropolis with more than three million immigrants today, the city has always been a magnet for transplants from all over the globe.

City of Dreams is the long-overdue, inspiring, and defining account of New York’s immigrants, both famous and forgotten: the young man from the Caribbean who relocated to New York and became a founding father; Russian-born Emma Goldman, who condoned the murder of American industrialists as a means of aiding downtrodden workers; Dominican immigrant Oscar de la Renta, who dressed first ladies from Jackie Kennedy to Michelle Obama.

Over ten years in the making, Tyler Anbinder’s story is one of innovators and artists, revolutionaries and rioters, staggering deprivation and soaring triumphs. In so many ways, today’s immigrants are just like those who came to America in centuries past-and their stories have never before been told with such breadth of scope, lavish research, and resounding spirit.

Told brilliantly, even unforgettably…An American story, one that belongs to all of us. -Boston Globe

A richly textured guide to the history of our immigrant nation’s pinnacle immigrant city has managed to enter the stage during an election season that has resurrected this historically fraught topic in all its fierceness. -New York Times Book Review