All the Nations Under Heaven: An Ethnic and Racial History of New York City

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 1996 by Francesco Cordasco

All the Nations Under Heaven is an important, if overly ambitious, contribution to the Columbia History of Urban Life series. The authors' candor is commendable as they readily admit that "it is not possible in a book of this length to deal with all of the many ethnic and racial groups that have come to New York City.... Nor can we give equal attention to those we discuss." Nonetheless, the book is a remarkable achievement, arguably the best concise available history of New York's ethnic and racial groups. Not a conventional immigrant history, it sees the city as a vast megalopolis whose components interact to provide an authentic urban portrait.

Compressed within nine chapters are portraits of New York's immigrants and racial minorities--some dimensionally rich histories, others more restrictive vignettes--and some intriguing sketches, providing "a narrative and analytical history of ethnic and racial New York, from its beginning as a Dutch trading post until the present, when new Third World migration has made the city's population global in character." If the book has an underlying theme or thesis, "it is concerned with the process by which [ethnic and racial groups] modified their own cultures and transformed that of the city." The authors concede that the establishment of such a climate "was not easy and even today is not fully realized. Now, as in the past, ethnic and racial conflict is ever on the surface of New York City's life."

Beginning with two overarching chapters ("Multi-ethnic from the Beginning" and "Dynamic Growth and Diversity"), the authors provide detailed accounts of the German and Irish communities; attempts to harness a multiplicity of forces which delineate the city's movement to economic and social maturity; a richly variegated history of its major ethnic groups, the Jews and Italians; the struggle with assimilation following immigration restriction, economic depression, and World War II; and patterns of expansion that generally benefited the city's masses. It is in its last chapter ("Truly a Global City: New York, 1970 to the Present") that the results of immigration laws (e.g., 1965, 1986, 1990) bring about a dramatically changing city: "Whereas prior to 1970 the vast majority of the city's immigrants hailed from Europe, subsequent arrivals mostly came from the Caribbean, South and East Asia, and the Middle East."

In an "Afterword," Binder and Reimers close with optimism abput the future: "New York City has been from the earliest times a multi-ethnic, multi-racial city. It has experienced periods of tension and conflict among the several groups, ultimately resolved them, and sometimes stumbling and tripping has gone on to greatness. Those who truly love this great city believe that its future should and can be no less than its past."