Immigrants Of The Day: Annie Moore of Ireland, Yoichiro Nambu of Japan, and Ronan Noone of Ireland

by Kevin R. Johnson

Annie Moore (Ireland)

NPR reports that Annie Moore was the first immigrant to be processed at Ellis Island, in 1892.  Today, she'll finally get a marker on her grave. The Irish immigrant made a new life in America but died poor.

Annie Moore is memorialized by bronze statues in New York Harbor and Ireland and cited in story and song as the first of 12 million immigrants to arrive at Ellis Island.

The myth is that Annie Moore went west with her family to fulfill the American dream — eventually reaching Texas, where she married a descendant of the Irish liberator Daniel O’Connell and then died accidentally under the wheels of a streetcar at the age of 46.  The truth: Annie Moore settled on the Lower East Side, married a bakery clerk and had 11 children. She lived a poor immigrant’s life, but her descendants multiplied and many prospered.  For more about Annie, click here.

October 11, 2008 | Permalink

Yoichiro Nambu (born January 18, 1921) is a physicist, currently a professor at the University of Chicago. Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 (click here for the N.Y. Times story on the award) for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.

Nambu was born in Japan in 1921. After graduating from high school, he studied physics at Tokyo Imperial University. He received his B.S. in 1942 and D.Sc. in 1952. In 1949 he was appointed to associate professor at the Osaka City University and promoted to professor the next year. In 1952 he was invited by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey to study. He moved to the University of Chicago and was promoted to professor in 1958. Nambu became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1970.

Nambu is famous for having proposed the "color charge" of quantum chromodynamics, for having done early work on spontaneous symmetry breaking in particle physics, and for having discovered that the dual resonance model could be explained as a quantum mechanical theory of strings. He is accounted as one of the founders of string theory. He has won numerous honors and awards including the J. Robert Oppenheimer Prize, the U.S.'s National Medal of Science, Japan's Order of Culture, the Planck Medal, the Wolf Prize, the Franklin Institute's Franklin Medal, the Dirac Medal and the Sakurai Prize.

After a 50-year career as a physics professor at the University of Chicago, Nambu is now its Henry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at its Department of Physics and Enrico Fermi Institute.

October 8, 2008 | Permalink

Ronan Noone, playwright, was born April 7, 1970, in Newry, County Down, Northern Ireland. Noone, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000, was recently profiled in the N.Y. Times. At 38 he has moved to American subjects after the series of Irish ensemble plays that kicked off his career in Boston. He is taking on New York with a star, Campbell Scott, in his one-man play “The Atheist,” which opens Sunday at the Barrow Street Theater.

October 14, 2008 | Permalink

About The Author

Kevin R. Johnson is currently Dean, Professor of Law and Chicana/o Studies, and the Mabie-Apallas Public Interest Law Chair holder at the University of California at Davis. He is also one of the editors of ImmigrationProf Blog.

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