The Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) is an interdisciplinary research center in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota.[1]
Founded in 1965,[2] the IHRC promotes research on migration with a special emphasis on immigration to the U.S. It sponsors seminars, lectures and workshops that bring highly specialized researchers from the academic world into dialogue with each other and with university and high school students and their teachers, with journalists, photographers and filmmakers, and with communities of immigrants and ethnic Americans. The IHRC especially seeks to enrich contemporary debates about international migration—so often heated, emotional, and unrelated to facts—from historical and scholarly perspectives.
The Immigration History Research Center supports efforts to archive immigrant historical records. For example, the center supports Collections Online: A Digital Library of American Immigration & Ethnic History (COLLAGE), a database of images and narratives.[3] Starting in 2013, the center began a comprehensive, publicly-accessible digital archive to preserve and share the stories of immigrants and their families, especially through videos with multilingual translations.[4]
The IHRC is proud to have built one of the largest and most important collections of materials documenting U.S. immigration and refugee life to be found anywhere in the world. It yearly welcomes not only student and faculty researchers from the University and from Minnesota communities but researchers from a wide variety of disciplines from North America and the wider world.
^Gabaccia, Donna R. (2006). "The Immigration History Research Center: Out of the Past, a Promising Future". Journal of American Ethnic History. 25 (4). University of Illinois Press: 60. Tracing their origins to 1965, the University of Minnesota's Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) and the Immigration History Society (IHS—later IEHS, Immigration and Ethnic History Society) emerged almost simultaneously.
