Weeks 3-6

Week 3

Global Migrations, 1830-1930

How did dramatic political, economic, and social changes during the 19th century transform and encourage migration to and within the United States? What were the consequences of U.S. military, territorial, and economic expansion for indigenous peoples, slaves, immigrants, colonized peoples, and native-born and naturalized Americans?

 

• Ira Berlin, “The Passage to the Interior,” in The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York: Viking Press, 2010), 99-151
• Mark I. Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008)
• Hasia R. Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)
• Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)
• Sarah Gualtieri, “From  Internal to International Migration,” in Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)
• David Gutierrez, “Economic Development and Immigration, 1890-1920,” in Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 39-68
• Karen V. Hansen, Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)
• Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)
• Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001)
• Kevin Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study,” Journal of American History, Vol. 90, No. 1 (2003): 134-162
• Adam McKeown,”Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842 to 1949,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 58, No. 2 (1999): 306-337
• Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985)
• David Montejano, Chapters 2-4, Anglos and Mexicans In the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987)
• Andrés Reséndez,  “National identity on a shifting border: Texas and New Mexico in the age of transition, 1821-1848,” Journal of American History, Vol. 86, No. 2 (1999): 668-688  + Open Access version
• Zaragosa Vargas, Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans From Colonial Times to the Present Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)
• Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)
• Elliott Young, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014)
• Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016)

 

Primary Sources

• Irish Immigrant Letters Home, Historical Society of Pennsylvania
• Walter D. Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Johannes Helbich, and Ulrike Sommer, News From the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)
• Ellis Island Photographs, New York Public Library

 

Multimedia

• “Dakota Conflict,” PBS (documentary film)
• “Foreigners in their Own Land,” Episode 1, The Latino Americans, PBS (documentary film)
• Germans in America, Library of Congress
• Global Boston: A Portal to the Region’s Immigrant Past and Present, Boston College
• “Empire of Dreams,” Episode 2, The Latino Americans, PBS (documentary film)
• Immigration and the California Gold Rush, Harvard University Library
• Immigration, Railroads, and the West, Harvard University Library
• Kerby Miller and Paul Wagner, “Out of Ireland: The Story of Irish Emigration to America,” directed by Paul Wagner (documentary film)
• Scandinavian Immigration, Harvard University Library
• The U.S. Dakota War of 1862, Minnesota Historical Society

 

 

WEEK 4

Historical Origins of Contemporary Nativism and Xenophobia

Why has immigration been a topic of perennial debate in the U.S.? How has the fear of foreigners and the desire to define and protect an “American” identity evolved over time?

 

• Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)   and “Nativism and Prejudice Against Immigrants: An Historiographic Assessment,” in Reed Ueda, ed., A Companion to American Immigration (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006): 177-201
• Moustafa Bayoumi, excerpt from How Does it Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab In America, NY Magazine, 2008
• David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement (New York: Vintage, 1990)
• Max Friedman,  “Donald Trump’s Ban on Muslims Echoes Earliest Days of Nazi Propaganda,” NY Daily News, December 9, 2015
• John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (2nd ed., New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988)
• Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)
• Arsalan Iftikhar, excerpt from Scapegoats: How Islamophobia Helps Our Enemies and Threatens Our Freedoms, Truthout, 2016
• Kevin R. Johnson, The Huddled Masses Myth: Immigration And Civil Rights (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003)
• Dale T. Knobel, America for the Americans: The Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996)
• Deepa Kumar,  Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012)
• Erika Lee, “A Nation of Immigrants / A Gatekeeping Nation: American Immigration Law and Policy, 1875-Present,” A Companion to American Immigration History, Reed Ueda, ed., (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2006): 5-35  ; “The Example of Chinese Exclusion: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882-1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 21:3 (Spring, 2002): 36-62 ; and “A History Lesson for Donald Trump,” New York Daily News, August 18, 2015
• Natalia Molina, “The Myth of the Unassimilable Mexican,” Racism Review, November 28, 2016
• Juan Perea, Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1996)
• David Reimers, Unwelcome Strangers: American Identity and the Turn Against Immigration. The New Nativism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)
• Peter Schrag, Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)

 

Primary Sources

• Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster (New York: Random House, 1995)
• Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/StMartin’s Griffin, 2002)
• Ann Coulter, excerpt from Adios America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (Ragnery, 2016), published in the New York Post, May 31, 2015
• Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc. (Tarrytown, NY: William Abbatt, reprinted 1918)
• Immigration Restriction League Records, 1893-1921, Harvard University Library
• U.S. Immigration Commision, Dillingham Commission, 1907-1911
• Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; Or, The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1918) and Noel Hartman, “The Passing of the Great Race at 100,” Public Books, July 1, 2016
• Political Cartoons about Irish immigration from Harper’s Weekly
• Samuel P. Huntington, “The Hispanic Challenge,” Foreign Policy, October 28, 2009
• Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York, NY: Scribner, 1920)
• Woodrow Wilson’s Veto Message on the 1915 Immigration Bill, The American Presidency Project

 

 

WEEK 5

Mass Migration and the Rise of Federal Immigration Law

How did policy makers increasingly use race, class, political ideology, health and ability, gender, and sexuality to favor the entry of particular groups and restrict others? How did immigrants and their American-born children persevere during an age of restriction?

 

• Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)
• Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014)
• Ronald Bayor, Encountering Ellis Island: How European Immigrants Entered America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)
• Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)
• Kornel Chang, “Enforcing Transnational White Solidarity: Asian Migration and the Formation of the US-Canadian Boundary,” American Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 3 (2008): 671-696
• Roger Daniels, “The Beginnings of Immigration Restriction, 1882-1917,” in Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004)
• Grace Peña Delgado, “Border Control and Sexual Policing: White Slavery and Prostitution along the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1903–1910,” Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 2 (2012): 157-178
• Jennifer Guglielmo  and Salvatore Salerno, Are Italians White?: How Race Is Made In America (New York: Routledge, 2003)
• Torrie Hester, “Protection, not Punishment”: Legislative and Judicial Formation of U.S. Deportation Policy, 1882-1904” The Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Fall 2010): 11-36
• Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)
• Alan M. Kraut,  Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York: Basic Books, 1994)
• Eithne Luibheid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002)
• Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)
• Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)
• Deirdre M. Moloney, “Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency in Early U.S. Deportation Policy,” Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2006): 95-122
• Kunal M. Parker, Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600-2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
• Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)
• Seema Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)
• Kenyon Zimmer, “Positively Stateless: Marcus Graham, the Ferrero-Sallito Case, and Anarchist Challenges to Race and Deportation,” in Moon-Ho Jung, ed., The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements Across the Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014): 128-158
• Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006)

 

Primary Sources

• Asiatic Exclusion League, “Proceedings,” 1908, University of Minnesota Law Library
• Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” The Atlantic, 1916
• Chae Chan Ping v. United States (The Chinese Exclusion Case), 1889
• Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882
• Frederick Douglass “Our Composite Nationality,” 1869, Teaching American History
• Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: A Racial History of Europe (Charles Scribner & Sons, 4th ed., 1922)
• Political Cartoons about the “Chinese Question,” Harper’s Weekly
• Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (Dover Publications reprint, 1901)
• Theodore Roosevelt, “True Americanism,” 1894, Teaching American History
• United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 1897, Densho Encyclopedia

 

Multimedia

• Interviews and Other Primary Sources from the Ellis Island Collection, National Park Service
• Ellis Island (documentary film)
• Carved in Silence (documentary film)

 

 

WEEK 6

The Closed Gate (1924-1965)? Migration, Immigration, and Citizenship

Who settled in the United States during the ‘era of exclusion’? How did the ‘era of exclusion’ change Americans’ ideas about belonging, citizenship, and labor?

 

• Emily Abel, “‘Only the Best Class of Immigration:’ Public Health Policy Towards Mexicans and Filipinos in Los Angeles, 1910-1940,” American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 94, No. 6 (2004): 932-939  + Open Access Version
• Kornel Chang, “Enforcing Transnational White Solidarity: Asian Migration and the Formation of the US-Canadian Boundary,” American Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 3 (2008): 671-96
• Lilia Fernández, “Of Migrants and Immigrants: Mexican and Puerto Rican Labor Migration in Comparative Perspective, 1942-1964,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2010): 6-39
• Juan Gonzalez, “Mexicans: Pioneers of a Different Type,” in Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (New York: Penguin Books, 2011): 96-107
• Sarah Gualtieri, “Claiming Whiteness: Syrians and Naturalization Law,” in Between Arab and White (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)
• Ian Haney Lopez, “Ozawa and Thind,” in White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2006): 56-77
• Hiroshi Motomura, “The Lost Story of Americans in Waiting,” in Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007): 115-135
• Mae M. Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History, Vol. 86, No. 1 (1999): 67-92
• Barbara Posadas and Roland Guyotte, “Unintentional Immigrants: Chicago’s Filipino Foreign Students Become Settlers, 1900-1941,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring 1990): 26-48
• David Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2006)
• George Sánchez, “Where is Home? The Dilemma of Repatriation,” in Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 209-226
• Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth Century New York City (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010)
• Elliott Young, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014)

 

Primary Sources

• “An Un-American Bill:” A Congressman Denounces Immigration Quotas, History Matters
• Immigration Quotas, 1925-1927, History Matters
• “Shut the Door:” A Senator Speaks for Immigration Restriction, History Matters
• “The Senate’s Declaration of War:” Japan Responds to Japanese Exclusion, History Matters
• U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), History Matters
• Repatriation and Deportation of Mexicans 1932-1936, Boulder County Latino History

 

Multimedia

• “14: Dred Scott, Wong Kim Ark, and Vanessa Lopez,” Graham Street Productions (documentary film)
• “A Class Apart,” PBS (documentary film)
• “Chicano!” (documentary film)
• “Dollar a Day, Ten Cents a Dance” (documentary film)
• “Race: The Power of an Illusion,” episode 3 (documentary film)
• “The Jazz Singer” (film)
• “The New Latinos,” Episode 4, The Latino Americans (documentary film)