To America Roger Daniels

Getting Your Hands on Roger Daniels' To America

I run into this question every couple of months on the history listservs. Someone is writing a paper on immigration historiography and needs to track down the text, or they want to cite a specific passage from To America by Roger Daniels and can't figure out which edition to use. The book itself isn't the most famous work Daniels produced — that would be Coming to America — but it comes up enough that I figured a quick practical guide was worth writing. To America: Stories of the Immigrant Experience by Roger Daniels is a historical survey written for a broader audience than his academic monographs. It covers the major waves of immigration to the United States from the colonial period through the late twentieth century, with particular attention to the legal and social mechanisms that shaped who got in and who didn't. Daniels is known for being unsparing about the exclusionary policies — the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese internment, the quota system — and he doesn't soften the language to make it more palatable. What makes this book useful in practice is that it's compact enough to assign as a single-volume survey. I've had students use it alongside primary source readers because it gives them the narrative framework before they hit the raw documents. The index alone is worth the price of the book if you're doing research on a specific ethnic group or time period. It's not a replacement for specialized monographs, but it's efficient at pointing you toward the right ones.

How to Access the Book

The original edition came out through University of California Press. Depending on which year you're looking at, the ISBN will shift, so just check the copyright page rather than trusting a cover image on a marketplace listing. The paperback typically runs around 200 to 250 pages depending on the printing. Your options for getting a copy:

• University library interlibrary loan — If you're affiliated with a college or university, this is the fastest route. Most libraries will pull it within two to three business days. Don't skip this just because you want the book in your hands immediately. I've waited six weeks for a hardcopy from Amazon and pulled the same book via ILL in forty-eight hours.
• Amazon or Barnes & Noble — New copies are usually available. Used copies run anywhere from ten to thirty dollars depending on condition and whether it's the first or later printing.
• Project MUSE or JSTOR — Some institutional subscriptions include the text. If you have a university login, check both platforms. It's not always cataloged under the same title, so search by author name as a backup.
• Google Books preview — Useful if you need to verify a specific passage or check a citation before committing to buying the book. The preview usually includes substantial portions of the text, though not the full thing.

A Practical Note on Citation

One thing that trips people up is that To America has been reissued in different formats over the years, and pagination changes between the hardcover and paperback editions. If you're citing a specific page number in an academic paper, make sure you note which edition you used. Otherwise you're asking your reader to do guesswork, and that's not fair to anyone. I once spent an afternoon trying to track down a quote about the Immigration Act of 1924 across three different edition listings on Amazon. The page numbers differed by roughly twelve pages between the 1998 and 2004 printings. I ended up using the paragraph context and the chapter heading instead of page numbers, which is actually the cleaner citation method anyway.

What Daniels Does Better Than Most Survey Authors

Most immigration survey books either get bogged down in demographic statistics or they skim too fast over the legal architecture. Daniels sits somewhere in between. He explains the national origins quota system without turning it into a math problem, and he doesn't treat the excluded groups as footnotes. The section on Chinese exclusion in particular is one of the clearest explanations I've read at the undergraduate level. That said, the book has limitations. It's not exhaustive on any single group. If you're researching Filipino migration or the Bracero program specifically, you'll outgrow this text pretty quickly. Daniels covers them, but he doesn't go deep. I'd pair it with works by authors like Mae Ngai for Asian American legal history or Vicki Lawrence for Latino labor history.

When This Book Won't Help You

To America was published with a certain scope in mind, and it stays inside that scope. If you need recent scholarship on post-1965 immigration, the coverage is necessarily thin because the book predates a lot of the more specialized research that came out in the twenty-first century. The bibliography is also somewhat dated depending on which edition you're reading. I've seen the earlier printings list sources that stop around 1996 or 1997. For current research, you're better off using Daniels' book as a starting point and then following the citations into the secondary literature he references. That's where the actual depth lives in this kind of survey work. The book gives you the map, not the territory.

Bottom Line on To America Roger Daniels

It's a reliable, concise survey that does what it promises. Don't treat it as your only source, but don't skip it either. The narrative arc Daniels builds — from voluntary settlement to forced labor to quota systems to the modern framework — is accurate and useful, especially if you're trying to explain the throughline to someone who hasn't studied the subject before. I assign it in my own teaching because it cuts through the noise faster than most of the alternatives. Just pair it with something more specialized and you'll be in good shape.