Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America: A History is a complex work. The book synthesizes several approaches to writing history and a variety of archival information to weave a cohesive narrative. The author relies on social history, the history of immigration law and legal history, the history of foreign policy and international relations, and individual biographies. The purpose of combining these approaches is to enhance the reader’s understanding of an Asian American immigrant experience in a top-down and bottom-up way. Lee’s sources include scholarship, legal documents, statistical information, oral history collections, mass media and popular culture, and even her own family history.

The purpose of social history is to uncover the lives of ordinary people. Social history is a response to traditional history writing, which tends to focus on the lives of political leaders and important historical events while often ignoring ordinary people. In this book, the use of social history helps uncover the experience of Asian immigrants, often of lower socioeconomic status, in the Americas. To understand their lives, Lee relies on the intersectionality of race, sex/gender, and class, discussed in the Asian Immigration in the Framework of Race, Gender, and Class theme.