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benjamin_oc's review
Steven Ujifusa’s The Last Ships From Hamburg uses the biography of Albert Ballin, whose shipping company was responsible for a significant portion of European emigration to the U.S. around the turn of the last century, as a foundation to explore a series of intertwined histories. Ujifusa focuses largely on the Jewish experience, including Jewish-American cultural history, shifting tides of anti-semitism in Germany, Russia, and the U.S., and snapshots of immigrants’ lives from the shtetl to tenement and beyond. But there’s plenty for those with a more general interest in U.S. history, particularly his explorations of American attitudes towards immigration and U.S. immigration laws. It never ceases to amaze me how little the immigration debate has changed in 150 years in some respects.
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