Immigrant Fiction: Exploring an American Identity
You’ll find a good online overview at the “American Immigration Literature” website from the University of Houston/Clear Lake:
http://coursesite.cl.uh.edu/HSH
/Whitec/LITR/4333/research/
default.htm
Take a look, too, at this lesson plan for creating a classroom play about immigrants from PBS’s “First Measured Century” website:
http://www.pbs.org/fmc/lessons/lesson2.htm
For immigration from Europe, 1850-1920, go to the Library of Congress’s “Learning Page” on the subject:
http://memory.loc.gov/learn/educators/workshop/european/wover.html
For Jewish immigration, you’ll find excellent teacher resources at Channel Thirteen's “Immigration to the Golden Land” section of their website:
http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/teachingheritage/lessons/lp4/index.php
For novels based on immigrant experience in the Midwest, you might begin with American Memory’s “Pioneering the Upper Midwest” section, which will help students understand Rölvaag's Giants in the Earth:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/umhtml/umhome.html
And don’t neglect this lesson plan for Willa Cather's My Ántonia :
http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=443
In addition, these printed sources will also provide good background for you and your students about topics raised in this essay:
Diner, Hasia R. The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, c2004).
Hertzberg, Arthur. The Jews In America: Four Centuries Of An Uneasy
Encounter (New York: Simon and Schuster, c1989).
Iorizzo, Luciano J., and Salvatore Mondello. The Italian Americans (Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1980).
