Speakers Bureau Speaker
Brian Gratton, Tempe
Brian Gratton is Professor in the Department of History at Arizona State University, and has published widely on immigration and immigration policy in the United States, Latin America, and Europe, as well as serving as a Fulbright Fellow in Spain (1996) and Ecuador (2003). He is the Director of the project "Refuge & Rejection," an on-line site for work by humanists on refugees (www.asu.edu/clas/history/proj/refugee/). He also participates extensively in projects with school districts in Arizona, bringing historians into collaboration with teachers and students in public schools (www.asu.edu/clas/history/FundedProjects/).
Presentations may be made in Spanish, and are suitable for high school as well as adult audiences.
Four Hundred Years of Immigration to America: Ethnicity, Public Opinion and Policy, 1607 to 2007
While immigration provides one of the central myths of our national identity, the reaction of the public to newcomers has often been less than welcoming. Using PowerPoint images, audio, and video from a variety of eras and regions including Arizona, Dr. Gratton explores core census and immigration evidence, and records the strident views of supporters and opponents. Ethnicities among immigrants changed sharply, from English and African, to German and Irish, to Italian and Jewish, and to Mexican and Asian. Their successive experience reveals the long, difficult history of immigration, the sharp, often negative reaction to it among the American people, and an official policy that rarely reflected popular will. This engaging presentation concludes with a close review of ethnicity, reaction, and policy in the contemporary period, with the audience concluding whether history has lessons to teach us in the current debate.
• Host organization provides screen for PowerPoint presentation.
Refugees in America, Refugees in Arizona
As the Pilgrims scrambled out onto Plymouth Rock, they thanked God and the new land before them for salvation from religious persecution. In the 1990s, refugees from the ethnic wars of the Balkans offered thanks for the opportunity to begin life anew in Arizona. Using images, film, and audio, Dr. Gratton explores the long chronicle of refugees to America, beginning with colonial settlers and concluding with those who fled the Balkan wars. In addition to an historical account, he reveals the rich influence of displacement on art and literature, on philosophy and religion itself. He demonstrates that Americans not only sheltered refugees but created them: westward expansion made American Indians refugees in their own land. Americans have at times refused to accept persons fleeing persecution, but in other cases they have been among the most generous of peoples. Refugees are now an important component of Arizona history, with Phoenix in particular an established site for refugee resettlement. The presentation will conclude with an examination of refugees from the Balkans and Sudan who have come to live in our state.
• Host organization provides screen for PowerPoint presentation.
