Focusing on several generations of families who were products of two or more social worlds - Afro-Brazilian, West African Creole, Austrian-Jewish - this book compares the social ascent "up from slavery" and "out of the ghetto" in the Century of Emancipation beginning with the French Revolution. It also explores the "predicament of marginality" in which assimilating individuals often find themselves as a consequence of barriers impeding their social integration and blocking their share of dominant privileges and powers. It studies the connections between individual consciousness of this predicament and the variety of responses to exclusion and subordination -- responses ranging from collaboration to revolt, from adaptation to exile, from resignation, to "passing," to suicide. By probing the connection between individual actions and perceptions of self and social reality, this book illuminates the complexity of the relationship between what Erik Erikson identified as that between life history and the historical moment.