Silent Travelers

Traces the American tradition of suspicion of the unassimilated from the cholera outbreak of the 1830s through the great waves of immigration that began in the 1890s to the recent past when the erroneous association of Haitians with the AIDS virus brought widespread panic and discrimination. Kraut (history American U.) found that new immigrant populations made up of impoverished laborers living in urban America''s least sanitary conditions have been victims of illness rather than its progenitors yet the medical establishment has often blamed epidemics on immigrants'' traditions ethnic habits or genetic heritage. Originally published in hardcover by Basic Books in 1994. Annotation copyright Book News Inc. Portland Or.