The true connoisseur of monographs knows better than to look first to the book itself. The notes are where to find treasure. Brooks’ Resident Strangers is stupendously rich in that respect—sixty-one pages of citations and lengthy discursions, shrewd and thoughtful, proof positive that her study of immigration in Alabama at the turn of the century will long stand the test of time and challenge.
And what an array of sources! It takes three pages, nearly, to list all the newspapers. Interviews with immigrants and their descendants, custom-house records, correspondence from the United Mine Workers’ archives, wills and probates, immigrant passenger lists, passport applications, and most revealingly, convict records make the most convincing of cases: Hungry for a foreign workforce to supplement or supplant Black labor in factory and field, white officials and employers strove to bring in the huddled masses, who were all too often treated like wretched refuse. Woe...