Uprooted, The

The Uprooted is likely the most influential book ever written on the history of European immigration to the United States. Written by historian Oscar Handlin and first published in 1951, The Uprooted chronicles the migration of the millions of Europeans who came to the United States in the second half of the 19th century and first few decades of the 20th century. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1952. The book's central premise—that alienation and a sense of being uprooted were the defining characteristics of the immigrant experience—led to an outpouring of new scholarship in immigration history, much of which challenged or offered an alternative to Handlin's interpretations. Ultimately, The Uprooted changed the way historians wrote about immigration and forced them to reassess its relationship to U.S. history. As Handlin noted in the book's now famous first lines, “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”

A work of historical synthesis written in accessible prose and narrative style, The Uprooted was meant to appeal to a broad readership. Although based on archival research, newspaper articles, and the firsthand accounts of immigrants, the book contains no footnotes. Its chapters are organized thematically in the hope of capturing various aspects of the prototypical immigrant experience.

The Uprooted was one of the first books to focus on how immigration changed immigrants rather than how immigrants changed their adopted country. As a result, the story starts in peasant villages and bustling European cities where demographic pressures and a lack of food led to large-scale migration to northeastern American cities over the course of the 19th century. Handlin then describes the arduous conditions migrants endured while crossing the Atlantic and the many challenges they faced upon arriving in the United States.

The majority of the book is dedicated to the new social, cultural, political, and economic realities and the many challenges immigrants faced in America. Handlin tells of the dangerous working conditions in urban factories where unskilled immigrant laborers toiled with few opportunities for upward mobility. Chapters on “The Ghettos” and “The Shock of Alienation” probe the physical and emotional hardships immigrants faced. A chapter on “Religion as a Way of Life” describes Christianity's increasing influence over immigrants, and a chapter on “Generations” explores shifting familial relations and the growing differences between the first-generation immigrants and their children.

Tying these chapters together is the pervasive sense of alienation, rather than belonging, that immigrants felt. Indeed, The Uprooted paints a bleak picture of immigrant life, one best characterized by loneliness and despair. According to Handlin, the experience of being uprooted was to blame.

In addition to being widely praised, The Uprooted generated serious debate among immigration historians. Many questioned Handlin's decision to write in generalities about “the immigrants,” “the peasants,” and “the newcomers.” In the 1960s, scholars like Rudolph J. Vecoli challenged Handlin's simplistic depiction of a uniform, static, premodern European peasant culture and argued that the distinct experiences of Italian, Russian, and Irish immigrants could not be clumped together. According to Vecoli, a model immigrant type or single immigrant experience did not exist.

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