May 172013
Their home now was a country in which they had not been born. Their place in society they had established themselves through the hardships of crossing and settlement. The process had changed them, had altered the most intimate aspect of their lives. Every effort to cling to inherited ways of acting and thinking had led into a subtle adjustment by which those ways were given a new American form. No longer Europeans, could the immigrants then say that they belonged in America? —Oscar Handlin in The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People