As his title implies, John Bodnar’ s treatment of the European immigrant experience in America's cities focuses on the social and economic matrices in which the immigrants’ lives became embedded once they passed through the portals into their new country. Indeed, the chief value of the work rests on Bodnar's perception that the immigrants were not simply ‘uprooted’ -the term used by Oscar Handlin in his now classic study of the Great Immigration - and pitted against the social machinery of a new society, but that in ‘confront[ing] the imperatives of this new economic and social order … they helped to divide society into divergent classes, cultures and ideologies’. Collectively, then, if not individually, the immigrants transformed urban American society and in fact did much to determine its tone.

In The Transplanted Bodnar attempts to demonstrate this by collating and pointing to the interrelating implications of many specialized studies of villages and regions of immigrant origin in Europe, specific immigrant groups, the immigrant family, fraternal orders, immigrant labour and the industrial economy, immigrant entrepreneurs and social mobility, and churches, schools and politics as both integrative and fragmenting factors in the ethnic American context. It is an experiment at achieving a synoptic view of a great diversity of social phenomena, at ‘transcending older categories of “old” and “new” immigration … [and] moving beyond the restricted field of vision’ of earlier immigration scholarship. The key word in this book, therefore, is not comparison, but synthesis.

Bodnar, who has written in the past on immigrants and industrial relations, understands the process of transplantation chiefly in terms of a response to the development of capitalism. This central explanatory mechanism provides the mortar, the unifying conceptualization, so necessary in this type of work. He asserts the absolute interdependence between capitalism - its dislocating impact on rural society and small manufacture in Europe and its determining influence on the nineteenth century American economy - and push-pull phenomena of mass immigration. Yet, where this type of analysis has in the past led to what Bodnar sees as a too-restrictive focus on class factors in the immigrant experience to the detriment of an appreciation for cultural and other social factors, his own goal is to integrate ‘political history and private history'.