Anbinder, Tyler

With more than three million foreign-born residents today, New York has been America?s defining port of entry for nearly four centuries, a magnet for transplants from all over the globe. These migrants have brought their hundreds of languages and distinct cultures to the city, and from there to the entire country. More immigrants have come to New York than all other entry points combined.

Traces the history of the nineteenth-century New York neighborhood known as Five Points where poverty, riots, political scams, and alcoholism combined with the rich cultures of arriving immigrants and gave rise to such characters as Boss Tweed and the Bowery B'hoys.