Immigrant men, sitting in a row, in the Superior Court on the 4th Floor of the County Building at 118 North Clark Street, Chicago.
Photo source: Library of Congress American Memory Collection / Chicago Daily News negatives collection, DN-0003451. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society

Questions to consider
1. Which immigrant groups were not perceived as 'white' and why? Which ones managed to 'claim' whiteness? How did they do this?
2. How successful were immigrant groups in achieving upward social mobility?
3. What was life like for urban workers in the late nineteenth century?

Primary sources
Theodore Roosevelt on assimilation
Francis A. Walker, "Restriction of Immigration," The Atlantic Monthly; June, 1896

Introductory reading
Rudolph J. Vecoli, "The Significance of Immigration in the Formation of an American Identity", History Teacher, 30:1 (1996): 9-27
Leon Fink, ed., Major Problems in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, pp. 132-157Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, introduction
And read relevant chapters in Mark W. Summers, The Gilded Age: The Hazard of New Functions (1997)
Peter Kolchin, "Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America", Journal of American History 88: 1 (2002): 154-173

Further reading
Ethnicity and identity
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, part 3.
Gary Gerstle, "Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans", Journal of American History 84: 2. (1997): 524-558

Immigrants
Rudolph J. Vecoli, "Change and/or Continuity in the Immigrant Experience", Reviews in American History 12: 1 (1984): 109-114.
J ohn Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (1985)
Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (1973)
Rudolph J. Vecoli, "Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted", Journal of American History Vol. 51:3. (1964): 404-417.

Nativism
Leonard Dinnerstein, Natives and Strangers (1996)
David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (1988)
Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (1990)
Erika Lee, "Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882–1924," Journal of American History 88: 1 (2002): 54-86

Case Studies
William D. Jones, Wales in America: Scranton and the Welsh, 1860-1920 (1993)
Abraam J. Karp, Golden Door to America: The Jewish Immigrant Experience (1977)
PJ Drudy, ed., The Irish in America: Emigration, Assimilation and Impact (1985)
John Bodnar, Immigration and Industrialization (1977)
Humbert S. Nelli, Italians in Chicago, 1880-1930; a study in ethnic mobility (1970)
Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970. (1973)
Donna R Gabaccia,. From the other side: women, gender, and immigrant life in the
US, 1820-1990 (1994)
Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door (1977)
Dino Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco: The immigrant experience (1982)
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (1995)
Stephan Thernstrom, ed. Harvard encyclopedia of American ethnic groups (1980)

Literary and journalistic treatments
Eugene O'Neil, The Ice Man Cometh
Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890)
Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902, repr. 1967)