When Europeans became Americans

More about the book

This book was inspired by the author's desire to counteract - with individual stories and historical facts, rather than polemics - the negative, simplistic caricature of the United States and Americans so prevalent today in Europe. Through research into her own family's diverse European background, she shows in detail how immigrants both influenced America and were influenced by it. The stories she tells about them and the historical facts she relates provide a fascinating, sometimes surprising view of their and their descendants' lives and of the many-sided new country in which they found themselves. The picture that emerges is of a nation indebted in myriad ways to the old countries, but still - inevitably - distinct.