One Quarter of the Nation: Immigration and the Transformation of America

An astonishing number of immigrants and their children—nearly 86 million people—now live in the United States.  While many books look at how America has changed contemporary immigrants, One Quarter of the Nation examines how they have transformed America in profound and far-reaching ways that go to the heart of the country’s identity and institutions. Post-1965 immigrants have reconfigured America’s racial order and played a pivotal role in reshaping electoral politics and party alignments; rejuvenated urban centers as well as rural communities; strengthened the economy, fueling the growth of old industries and spurring the formation of new ones; and touched virtually every facet of American culture. 

Nancy Foner is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.  She has written extensively about immigration in the U.S., in the past and in the present, and is the author or editor of 20 books, among them From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration (Yale UP, 2000); In a New Land: A Comparative View of Immigration  (NYU Press, 2005); One out of Three: Immigrant New York in the Twenty-First Century (Columbia University Press, 2013).  

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.