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John Higham's Critique of His Own Work
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 April 2012
Extract
In April 2002, the Immigration and Ethnic History Society (IEHS) made its first lifetime achievement award. It was my honor to be president of the IEHS at that time, and I can recall the pleasure and unanimity of board members in designating John Higham the first recipient of that honor. It was a special pleasure for me to notify John and to present the award to him because over the years John had become both a personal friend and a powerful intellectual influence. When I called him at his home in Baltimore, he accepted with delight but as always with the soft-spoken graciousness that was his way. We chatted about the fact that initially he had not defined himself as an immigration scholar, yet in 1967, more than a decade after the publication of Strangers in the Land had found himself one of the founding members of what was then called the Immigration History Society and later one of its presidents. As we often did, we also talked about our hometown, New York. John had grown up in Queens, while I had grown up in the South Bronx. On many occasions we discussed how our New York roots had lured us into thinking and writing about immigration and ethnicity.
- Type
- Forum: Revisiting John Higham's Strangers in the Land
- Information
- The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 276 - 281
- Copyright
- Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2012
References
1 Higham, John, “Instead of a Sequel, Or How I Lost My Subject,” Reviews in American History 28 (June 2000): 327CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Higham, John, Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York, 1975), 105Google Scholar. This chapter was originally read as a paper at the joint session of the American Catholic Historical Association and the American Historical Association, Dec. 29, 1957.
3 Higham, “Instead of a Sequel,” 329.
4 Many of these criticisms are noted by Dinnerstein, Leonard and Reimers, David, “John Higham and Immigration History,” Journal of American Ethnic History 24 (Fall 2004): 3–25Google Scholar. Some of the criticisms appeared in an earlier version of the article, “Strangers in the Land: Then and Now,” American Jewish History 76 (Dec. 1986): 107–16Google Scholar.
5 Higham, John, Strangers in the Land, Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1988), 344Google Scholar.
6 Higham, John, “The Amplitude of Ethnic History: An American Story” in Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, ed. Foner, Nancy and Frederickson, George M. (New York, 2004), 71Google Scholar.
7 Higham, “Instead of a Sequel,” 329.
8 Ibid., 330.
9 Higham, Send These to Me, 116–73.
10 Ibid., 130.
11 Especially critical of Higham's shortcomings in understanding the religious roots of anti-Semitism are Dinnerstein and Reimers, “John Higham and Immigration History,” 13–14.
12 Higham, Send These to Me, 103.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 111.
15 Ibid., 115.
16 Higham, “Instead of a Sequel,” 330. This essay was initially published in Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, eds. Hirshman, Charles, De Wind, Josh, and Kasinitz, Philip (New York, 1999)Google Scholar, and republished a year later in Reviews in American History (June 2000): 327–39Google Scholar. It appeared posthumously as an epilogue to the 2007 reprint of Strangers in the Land. Among the earliest influential studies of inter-ethnic conflict in the United States: Bayor, Ronald H., Neighbors in Conflict, The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929–1941 (Baltimore, 1978)Google Scholar.
17 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 330.