The Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery in the United States is currently running an exhibition entitled “ATTACHMENTS: Faces and Stories from America’s Gates” between June 15, 2012 and September 4, 2012.
Further details from the press release can be found below:
“I must have cried a bowl full of tears.”
–Chinese immigrant Lee Puey You, recalling her 20 months detained on Angel Island.
“I would also find it impossible to live in a country where all my family have been killed . . . “
–Richard Arvay, a refugee from Austria, describing why he did not want to return to there after World War II.
One came with plenty of money; another carried only a handful of belongings. One was a visitor; another was a citizen returning home. One had her papers in order; another brought false documents hoping to find a new life.
All of these men, women, and children left likenesses and traces of their journeys to America’s entry ways. Entering, leaving, or staying in America—their stories were captured in documents and photographs that were “attached” to government forms. A new National Archives exhibition, Attachments: Faces and Stories from America’s Gates draws from the millions of immigration case files in the Archives to tell a few of these stories from the 1880s through World War II. It also explores the attachment of immigrants to family and community, and the attachment of government organizations to laws that reflected certain beliefs about immigrants and citizenship. These are dramatic tales of joy and disappointment, opportunity and discrimination, deceit and honesty.
Attachments: Faces and Stories from America’s Gates is free and open to the public, and will be on display in the Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, through September 4, 2012.
Further Information: http://www.archives.gov/nae/visit/gallery.html
See also an associated news story entitled “National Archives exhibit on immigration features Cleveland-area Holocaust survivor.”
Reblogged this on Adiek84's Blog and commented:
This sounds like an interesting exhibition about American’s history of immigration!