This book was written during a year’s sojourn in Germany where I was a Visiting and Fulbright professor at the University of Hamburg. I like to think that residence in one of the greatest ports of emigration and visits to Bremen, Genoa, Liverpool, and London somehow enriched this work. My greatest debts are to my fellow students of immigration and ethnicity, whose work I have quoted and paraphrased throughout. They are acknowledged in the traditional way in the text, notes, and bibliography. My colleagues and friends at the University of Hamburg gave me a light teaching load and provided an atmosphere in which I could write. My sponsor, Professor Dr. Günter Moltmann, a specialist in German emigration and perhaps the Federal Republic’s leading Americanist, was unfailingly generous of his time and resources. The director of the Historisches Seminar that year, Professor Dr. Horst Pietschmann, went out of his way to make me feel welcome, and Dr. Hans-Jürgen Grabbe was an unfailing source of good advice on all things German, from high culture to haircuts. Dr. Andreas Brinck, then in the final stages of writing his Ph.D. thesis, helped me cope with the bewildering array of separate libraries in Hamburg. Frau Renate Daumann provided secretarial and logistical support and much more, including expanding my German vocabulary with such terms as gummibands and super! In addition, the students in my Hamburg seminars often gave me very different European perspectives on immigration matters, as did students in other European universities I visited. In the United States, my editor, Paula McGuire of Visual Education Corporation, emended the text with skill, unfailing good sense, and enthusiasm; and Cynthia Cappa, Picture Research Coordinator, fulfilled the picture specifications with imagination and perseverance. Susan H. Llewellyn, the copyeditor at HarperCollins, contributed substantially to the coherence and clarity of the book. My graduate student and assistant in Cincinnati, Kriste Lindenmeyer, performed a wide range of chores cheerfully and with great discretion. My colleague John K. Alexander saved me from a grievous error.
The picture research was greatly assisted by cooperation and courtesy from Phyllis Montgomery of the Metaform consortium in New York, Barry Moreno of the Ellis Island Archives of the National Park Service, Joachim Frank of the Hamburg Staatsarchiv, and Astrid Knopke.
I must also acknowledge the financial assistance of the American and German Fulbright commissions, which helped support my stay in Germany, and those of Britain, France, Italy, and Austria, which financed travels in those countries. Important support was provided by the University of Cincinnati, which gave me leave and funded some of my year abroad. I particularly wish to thank Dean Joseph Caruso and my chair, Otis C. Mitchell. Last but not at all least, I thank my fellow traveler, Judith M. Daniels, who was constantly interrupted in her own work in American Jewish history to listen, suggest, and counsel, and who put up with, almost without complaint, the various noises of literary creation in very close quarters.