The most recommended books about ethnicity

Bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a sweeping, transnational history, Alien Nation provides a compelling account of Chinese migration to the Americas from the 1840s through World War II.

In vivid prose, Young tells the story of how Chinese laborers mined gold, built railroads, and harvested sugar cane; how anti-Chinese restrictionists demonized these workers as “coolies”; and how nationalist movements throughout the Americas enflamed anti-Chinese sentiment.

Alien Nation explains how different national governments borrowed from one other in crafting policies regulating and controlling Chinese immigration, but also how these policies clashed and diverged. Within this transnational framework, Elliott Young recovers the agency of Chinese migrants, facing exclusion, deportation, and segregation, who circumvented government policies to form vibrant communities that transcended national borders.

Taking a transnational frame and drawing on English- and Chinese-language sources by and about Eurasians, this book uses juxtaposition to bring different perspectives to bear on each other. People’s lives, the choices they make amid various external limitations, are at the heart. The book takes a unique structural approach, with a prologue before each main chapter that describes a central story and helps ground and guide the larger narrative. In exploring interracial marriages and the lives of couples and children, the work shows how Eurasians have been producers of knowledge. Through highly diverse sources from the era, the author demonstrates that Eurasians have engaged in self-representation in complex ways and a broad range of voices and experiences comprise the category “Eurasian.”

I often reread this marvelous book, the result of the author’s 1990s fieldwork with Hungarian Roms, for its relevance to all seeking to live aslant from mainstream culture’s obsession with economic growth and so-called success in those terms.

Stewart shows how the horse-trading Roms he lived among made the market a heroic arena where the movement of money is key, and where the luck Roms typically live by is given center-stage in consummate acts of bargaining.

Historically, the Rom are our only people living without a dream of homeland, and the centrality of interaction—with Gadje, non-Roms—to their lives, where unbelonging drives exchange, and exchanges become futures, is pertinent to all who will have to disinvest from belief in property, becoming traveling strangers in our increasingly unpredictable world.

This book, published in 2010, focuses on a much-neglected dimension of Marx’s work—his writings in defense of anti-colonial movements in Ireland, India, China, and elsewhere as well as his support for anti-racist movements in the U.S.

In contrast to claims that Marx was a class reductionist whose body of thought was incapable of accounting for issues of race and ethnicity, this work shows how he overcome many of the Eurocentric biases found in his earliest writings as he engaged in a systematic study of the non-Western world in the last decades of his life.

This a book that will change your view of what Marx was about from top to bottom.

This anthology spans a remarkable and surprising range of topics including first-hand accounts by pageant winners—and losers—along with rich historical context. Historian Kimberly Hamlin documents the first Miss America Pageant (launched a year after women won the vote), showing how it both appropriated the format of suffrage pageants and defined itself in opposition to them. Feminist scholar Donelle Ruwe explains why becoming Miss Meridian [Miss.] in 1985 had an unexpectedly positive impact on her life, even though she considers beauty pageants to be “oppressive” and “degrading.” And the African-American scholar Gerald Early’s riveting “Waiting for Miss America” weighs the racial implications of Vanessa Williams’ 1983 crowning as the first Black Miss America. “[S]he was the most loved and most suspect woman in America,” he writes. Suspect, because “some blacks don’t trust her motives and some whites don’t trust her abilities.”  

There is a lot to love about this book. The level of detail about every element of Scottish ethnicity under consideration is extraordinary. Bueltmann seems to leave no stone unturned in her examination of Scottish associations. I am always a big fan of historical databases, so the analysis based on the database compiled for this research of society members, based on extant sources, is a big selling point for me.

Many society membership lists have been lost to history, and the New Zealand census returns were systematically destroyed, so compiling such a database was no mean feat. What has always most strongly stuck with me, though, is how the stories of individual migrants are woven throughout, not just thrown in as examples but integral to understanding the phenomena she is exploring. John Jack and family, for example, turn up at different points in their lives at different points in the… show more.

What Mangan’s work does for the Andes, Velasco Murillo’s scholarship does for Mexico. The book covers an astounding historical range, taking readers through the first silver strikes in Zacatecas under colonial rule until the edge of early nation-statehood. In telling this 250-year history of Zacatecas, Velasco Murillo demonstrates how Indigenous mining communities, their labor, and the capital they generated were critical to shaping – and were shaped by – emerging ideas of mestizo citizenship. It does so, moreover, by centering women and Indigenous miners in ways that other social histories of mining had not yet accomplished. Velasco Murillo shows definitively that the history of silver is not just underground – it is a story of women who prepare food, raise children, and form a political and economic community is life-giving, meaning-making ways across urban geographies and remote mining spaces. Readers looking for new ways to understand mining and revolution in… show more.

Anyone living in the United States copes with racism, the cruel legacy of slavery and the degree to which skin-color prejudice continues to affect our lives through politics, education, health care, law enforcement, and social traditions. This book looks at American racism as a caste system, similar to India’s caste system. An impeccable researcher and brilliant writer, Isabel Wilkerson draws on cultural, social, and personal histories to put America’s racism in a broader world context of prejudices based on physical characteristics. She uses the metaphor of disease to compare skin-color prejudice to pathogens. "“Human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface and back to life,” she writes. Passed on from one generation to the next, skin-color prejudice, with white skin signifying the dominant, “superior” class, is embedded in society’s DNA, boosted by… show more.

For readers interested in undocumented immigration, especially from Mexico, Minian’s book provides important and necessary historical context for present-day issues. In particular, the book explains how undocumented immigrants were caught in the middle of economic and political policies in the United States and Mexico. As the title implies, the lives of these immigrants are at the heart of the story, including how these much broader systems impacted their individual lives.

I value Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education by the Cherokee writer Diane Glancy because it is an empathetic history, one that compels me to understand its subjects from their perspective, Plains Indian prisoners taken captive defending their lands from the U.S. invasion and shipped to Fort Marion Prison in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1875. There, the prisoners were subject to a regime of reeducation in order to “kill the Indian and save the man,” as the head of the prison and founder of the Carlisle Indian School Brigadier General Richard Henry Pratt stated it.

This regime subsequently became the model for the Indian boarding schools. But Glancy brings home that this model of “dislocation” is “at the heart of [all] education,” such as mine:  a Jewish boy educated in an Episcopalian school where the curriculum without a thought erased my own culture.