Coming to America: Immigrants from the British Isles

By: Shirley Blumenthal and Jerome S. Ozer

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Synopsis: The British subjects who arrived in America in the seventeenth century to settle in Virginia and Massachusetts called themselves colonists. But they were also the first immigrants to a land already peopled by native Americans. Most of these colonists, and the Welsh and Scots who joined them later, left England to escape political and religious persecution or for economic reasons. Some had no choice: they were transported to the colonies as criminals. Together they cleared and farmed the harsh, wild land and gradually built their primitive and isolated settlements into prosperous communities. In the 1840s almost a million Irish, fleeing the disease and poverty of the potato famine, arrived in America. Though they found still more poverty and cruel discrimination in the cities, these men and women became the muscle, the labor that built the railroads and streets and worked in the factories of a young industrial nation. Liberally infused with first-person accounts, this is the absorbing story of how these peoples forged a new nation out of a tiny English colony and extended that nation to the Pacific. It is also about the history that each group left behind in the British Isles--from the Pilgrim's struggle for religious freedom, to the brutal history of English-Irish relations, to the ambitions of the immigrant disembarking from a plane today.