All the Nations Under Heaven: An Ethnic and Racial History of New York City.

• Author: Cordasco, Francesco

All the Nations Under Heaven is an important, if overly ambitious, contribution to the Columbia History of Urban Life series. The authors' candor is commendable as they readily admit that "it is not possible in a book of this length to deal with all of the many ethnic and racial groups that have come to New York City.... Nor can we give equal attention to those we discuss." Nonetheless, the book is a remarkable achievement, arguably the best concise available history of New York's ethnic and racial groups. Not a conventional immigrant history, it sees the city as a vast megalopolis whose components interact to provide an authentic urban portrait.

Compressed within nine chapters are portraits of New York's immigrants and racial minorities--some dimensionally rich histories, others more restrictive vignettes--and some intriguing sketches, providing "a narrative and analytical history of ethnic and racial New York, from its beginning as a Dutch trading post until the present, when new Third World migration has made the city's population global in character." If the book has an underlying theme or thesis, "it is concerned with the process by which [ethnic and racial groups] modified their own cultures and transformed that of the city." The authors concede that the establishment of such a climate "was not easy and even today is not fully realized. Now, as in the past, ethnic and racial conflict is ever on the surface of New York City's life."

Beginning with two overarching chapters ("Multi-ethnic...