In The Other One Percent, Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur, and Nirvikar Singh provide the first authoritative and systematic overview of South Asians living in the United States.

From agrarian economies to the booming technology industry, Indian immigrants have been a fueling force to the development of today's world. Throughout the intense years of the early 1900s to present day America, they bore the duty of hard labor, political activism against colonizers who have held power in their original home country for 200 years, and the role of pioneers in unfamiliar lands. Readers will discover the journey of the toiling Indian immigrant, the intense political twists, the dark days, and the eventual rise of America's most financially successful and well-educated ethnic group, as told by an Indian immigrant.

At some point during the 1990s the size of the Asian Indian population in the United States surpassed the one million mark. Today&’s Indians in America are a diverse group. They come from every state in India as well as from around the globe: England, Canada, South Africa, Tanzania, Fiji, Guyana, and Trinidad. They also belong to many religious faiths, including Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. Many have high professional skills and are fluent in English and familiar with Western culture. They have settled throughout the United States, largely in metropolitan areas. Namast&é America tells this story of Indian immigrants in America, focusing on one of the largest communities, Chicago.

This unique culinary history of America offers a fascinating look at our past and uses long-forgotten recipes to explain how eight flavors changed how we eat. The United States boasts a culturally and ethnically diverse population which makes for a continually changing culinary landscape. But a young historical gastronomist named Sarah Lohman discovered that American food is united by eight flavors: black pepper, vanilla, curry powder, chili powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG, and Sriracha. In Eight Flavors, Lohman sets out to explore how these influential ingredients made their way to the American table. She begins in the archives, searching through economic, scientific, political, religious, and culinary records. She pores over cookbooks and manuscripts, dating back to the eighteenth century, through modern standards like How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. Lohman discovers when each of these eight flavors first appear in American kitchens—then she asks why. Eight Flavors introduces the explorers, merchants, botanists, farmers, writers, and chefs whose choices came to define the American palate. Lohman takes you on a journey through the past to tell us something about our present, and our future. We meet John Crowninshield a New England merchant who traveled to Sumatra in the 1790s in search of black pepper. And Edmond Albius, a twelve-year-old slave who lived on an island off the coast of Madagascar, who discovered the technique still used to pollinate vanilla orchids today. Weaving together original research, historical recipes, gorgeous illustrations and Lohman’s own adventures both in the kitchen and in the field, Eight Flavors is a delicious treat—ready to be devoured.

Written by a descendent of Irish immigrants, this book tells the tale of how Irish-born immigrants functioned as the largest immigrant group during the first two hundred years of the British Colonies. Readers will discover how they forged frontier societies and expanded the geographic boundaries of colonial settlements. Irish Americans served at all levels in U.S. government, including twenty-two presidents, and they contributed to canals, roads, and railroads during the nineteenth century. This volume will divulge how Irish immigrants suffered severe prejudice and lost much of their original culture and language, though their eventual assimilation provided a blueprint for the acceptance of other immigrant groups.

Written by a descendent of Greek immigrants, this book explores the stories behind leaving the mountains and islands of Greece throughout its recent tumultuous history. Many of those emigrants came to the sprawling cities and countryside of the United States. This book explores how Greek Americans did much to overcome war, family conflicts, exploitative labor practices, restrictive xenophobic quotas, and generational identity differences to become part of the American experiment. The history of how Greeks became Americans through these contemplations of the problems that immigration poses will activate the reader's critical thinking skills. They will recognize that these problems are relevant today.

The Italian mass migration from Italy happened during a period of political and economic upheaval. Many Italian immigrants faced isolation, discrimination, and fear as they worked to learn English and assimilate to their new home. Despite such obstacles, they also created neighborhoods that continued their cultural traditions as they worked to adapt. Readers will learn why Italian immigrants left Italy, where they settled in America once they arrived, and how they became one of the most influential cultures on American society. The story of Italian immigration comes alive in this volume written by someone whose family endured it.

Chinese immigrants first reached the shores of California in the mid 1800s. Since then, they have made significant contributions to the American economy through their work in mines, on railroads, and on farms as they earned money to send home. However, many saw them as job-stealing freeloaders. They contributed to American culture too, even as discrimination forced them to build their own communities from the ground up. The Chinese American community had no choice but to take on these stereotypes in order to survive. Written by a Chinese immigrant, readers will discover that even the xenophobia that exists today can be defeated and one's culture celebrated in the United States.

As the demographics of the United States shift, Mexican American issues and values are gaining traction. Written by someone whose family immigrated to the United States after leaving Mexico, this book explores the generations of Mexican immigrants and their American descendants who struggled for civil rights, whose lands have been colonized, and who have been the backbone of American industry and agriculture since the nineteenth century. This book exposes a fickle culture surrounding work relations in a country that treated Mexican Americans not only like disposable labor, but also like non-citizens or nonpersons, even with the Mexican government's complicity.

The internet has transformed the idea of home for Indians and Indian Americans. In Virtual Homelands: Indian Immigrants and Online Cultures in the United States, Madhavi Mallapragada analyzes home pages and other online communities organized by diasporic and immigrant Indians from the late 1990s through the social media period. Engaging the shifting aspects of belonging, immigrant politics, and cultural citizenship by linking the home page, household, and homeland as key sites, Mallapragada illuminates the contours of belonging and reveals how Indian American struggles over it trace back to the web's active mediation in representing, negotiating, and reimagining "home." As Mallapragada shows, ideologies around family and citizenship shift to fit the transnational contexts of the online world and immigration. At the same time, the tactical use of the home page to make gender, racial, and class struggles visible and create new modes for belonging implicates the web within complex political and cultural terrain. On e-commerce, community, and activist sites, the recasting of home and homeland online points to intrusion by public agents such as the state, the law, and immigration systems in the domestic, the private, and the familial. Mallapragada reveals that the home page may mobilize to reproduce conservative narratives of Indian immigrants' familial and citizenship cultures, but the reach of a website extends beyond the textual and discursive to encompass the institutions shaping it, as the web unmakes and remakes ideas of "India" and "America."