In Race, Nation, History, Oded Y. Steinberg examines the way a series of nineteenth-century scholars in England and Germany first constructed and then questioned the periodization of history into ancient, medieval, and modern eras, shaping the way we continue to think about the past and present of Western civilization at a fundamental level. Steinberg explores this topic by tracing the deep connections between the idea of epochal periodization and concepts of race and nation that were prevalent at the time—especially the role that Germanic or Teutonic tribes were assumed to play in the unfolding of Western history. Steinberg shows how English scholars such as Thomas Arnold, Williams Stubbs, and John Richard Green; and German scholars such as Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen, Max Müller, and Reinhold Pauli built on the notion of a shared Teutonic kinship to establish a correlation between the division of time and the ascent or descent of races or nations. For example, although they viewed the Germanic tribes' conquest of the Roman Empire in A.D. 476 as a formative event that symbolized the transformation from antiquity to the Middle Ages, they did so by highlighting the injection of a new and dominant ethnoracial character into the decaying empire. But they also rejected the idea that the fifth century A.D. was the most decisive era in historical periodization, advocating instead for a historical continuity that emphasized the significance of the Germanic tribes' influence on the making of the nations of modern Europe. Concluding with character studies of E. A. Freeman, James Bryce, and J. B. Bury, Steinberg demonstrates the ways in which the innovative schemes devised by this community of Victorian historians for the division of historical time relied on the cornerstone of race.

This book presents how Nation and Narrative are bound together through the figure of the "N/native" as it appears in the non-fictional writings of Cornelia Sorabji, Grazia Deledda, Zitkála-Sá, Virginia Woolf, Victoria Ocampo, and Gwendolyn Bennett. It addresses two questions: How did women writers in the early twentieth century tackle the entangled roots of political and cultural citizenship from which crises of belonging arise? How do their narrative negotiations of those crises inform modernist practice and modernity, then and now? The "N/native" moves between "born in" and "first in" in the context of the modern nation-state. In the dominant discourses of post-imperial as well as de-colonizing nations, "Native" is relegated to Time (static or fetishized through nostalgia and romance). History is envisioned as active and contoured, associated with motion and progress, which the "native" inhabits and for whom citizenship is a political as well as a temporal attribute. The six authors' identities as Native, settler, indigenous, immigrant, or native-citizen, are formed from their gendered, racialized, and classed locations in their respective nations. Each author negotiates the intertwined strands of Time and History by mobilizing the "N/native" to reclaim citizenship (cultural-political belonging). This study reveals how their lineage, connections to land, experiences in learning (education), and their labor generate their narratives. The juxtaposition of the six writers keeps in focus the asymmetries in their responses to their times, and illustrates how relevant women's/feminist production were, and are in today's versions of the same urgent debates about heightened nativisms and nationalisms

While public debates over America's current foreign policy often treat American empire as a new phenomenon, this lively collection of essays offers a pointed reminder that visions of national and imperial greatness were a cornerstone of the new country when it was founded. In fact, notions of empire have long framed debates over western expansion, Indian removal, African slavery, Asian immigration, and global economic dominance, and they persist today despite the proliferation of anti-imperialist rhetoric. In fifteen essays, distinguished historians examine the central role of empire in American race relations, nationalism, and foreign policy from the founding of the United States to the twenty-first century. The essays trace the global expansion of American merchant capital, the rise of an evangelical Christian mission movement, the dispossession and historical erasure of indigenous peoples, the birth of new identities, and the continuous struggles over the place of darker-skinned peoples in a settler society that still fundamentally imagines itself as white. Full of transnational connections and cross-pollinations, of people appearing in unexpected places, the essays are also stories of people being put, quite literally, in their place by the bitter struggles over the boundaries of race and nation. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that the seemingly contradictory processes of boundary crossing and boundary making are and always have been intertwined. Contributors: James T. Campbell, Brown University Ruth Feldstein, Rutgers University-Newark Kevin K. Gaines, University of Michigan Matt Garcia, Brown University Matthew Pratt Guterl, Indiana University George Hutchinson, Indiana University Matthew Frye Jacobson, Yale University Prema Kurien, Syracuse University Robert G. Lee, Brown University Eric Love, University of Colorado, Boulder Melani McAlister, George Washington University Joanne Pope Melish, University of Kentucky Louise M. Newman, University of Florida Vernon J. Williams Jr., Indiana University Natasha Zaretsky, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Forty years after the defeat of Nazism, and twenty years after the great wave of decolonization, how is it that racism remains a growing phenomenon? What are the special characteristics of contemporary racism? How can it be related to class divisions and to the contradictions of the nation-state? And how far, in turn, does racism today compel us to rethink the relationship between class struggles and nationalism? This book attempts to answer these fundamental questions through a remarkable dialogue between the French philosopher Etienne Balibar and the American historian and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. Each brings to the debate the fruits of over two decades of analytical work, greatly inspired, respectively, by Louis Althusser and Fernand Braudel. Both authors challenge the commonly held notion of racism as a continuation of, or throwback to, the xenophobias of past societies and communities. They analyze it instead as a social relation indissolubly tied to present social structures-the nation-state, the division of labor, and the division between core and periphery-which are themselves constantly being reconstructed. Despite their productive disagreements, Balibar and Wallerstein both emphasize the modernity of racism and the need to understand its relation to contemporary capitalism and class struggle. Above all, their dialogue reveals the forms of present and future social conflict, in a world where the crisis of the nation-state is accompanied by an alarming rise of nationalism and chauvinism.

From 1870 to 1940, racial eligibility for naturalization in the United States was limited to "free white persons" and "aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent," and many interpreted these restrictions to reflect a policy of Asian exclusion based on the conclusion that Asians were neither white nor African. Because the distinction between white and Asian was considerably unstable, however, those charged with the interpretation and implementation of the naturalization act faced difficult racial classification questions. Through archival research and a close reading of the arguments contained in the documents of the US Bureau of Naturalization, especially those documents that discussed challenges to racial eligibility for naturalization, Doug Coulson demonstrates that the strategy of foregrounding shared external threats to the nation as a means of transcending perceived racial divisions was often more important to racial classification than legal doctrine. He argues that this was due to the rapid shifts in the nation's enmities and alliances during the early twentieth century and the close relationship between race, nation, and sovereignty.

Race, Nation, and Capital in the Modern World is a comprehensive yet concise book that traces the history of racism, nationalism and capitalism from their combined origins at the end of the fifteenth century to the present. This book describes the development of legal codes and institutional practices that brought vast wealth and power to their chief beneficiaries, along with great suffering, exploitation and destruction to its victims. Instead of understanding racism as an aberration or dark flaw in the troubled past of a world power like the United States, this synthesis places race and racism in the forefront of the unfolding history of nationalism and capitalism. The work de-emphasizes the uniqueness of each nation’s particular experience by showing the interdependence of capitalist and racist practices. The narrative follows the leading hegemonic national powers as they expanded from mercantile conquests through plantation enslavement, massive displacement of populations, colonialism, global warfare and finally the tenacious contemporary aftermath. There are no comparable surveys for undergraduates or general readers seeking a unified historical understanding of these primary drivers of modernity. It is a provocative introductory guide and not a work of political theory. This volume will appeal to students, scholars and those interested in studies on racism, race, capital, the history of inequality and human and civil rights.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a host of journalists, ministers, medical doctors, businessmen, lawyers, labor leaders, politicians, and others called for an assault on poverty, slums, disreputable boarding houses, alcoholism, prostitution, sweatshop conditions, inadequate educational facilities, and other "social evils." Although they represented an array of political positions and advocated a range of strategies to deal with what they deemed problems, historians have come to term this impulse "urban reform" or the "urban reform movement." This book considers the history of reform ideology in Canada. It does so by considering four leading reformers living in what might be described as the most Canadian of Canadian cities, Winnipeg, Manitoba. While the book engages in discussions/debates surrounding the particular individuals it considers, its more general argument is that to understand the history of reform in Canada requires viewing reformers as simultaneously experiencing and responding to two basic phenomena simultaneously. It requires understanding them as confronting the polarizing tendencies, exploitation, and sometimes grinding poverty that was central to the economic order they (often unwittingly) helped to impose in northern North America. It also, however, requires seeing them as fundamentally shaped by the process and legacy of the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples, and the changing nature of Aboriginal-settler relations that were also central to the development of Canada.

This book examines international post-9/11 policies by connecting them to the US violations of Japanese Americans’ human rights during World War II. Analysing the policies of the United States, Race, Nation, War illustrates how ideas of race and masculinity shaped the indefinite leave policy which the government used to move Japanese Americans out of camps during the war. With attention to recent American and European policies, the author demonstrates that race, gender, and nation also converge in President Trump’s policies on refugees and human rights, the German and European migrant crises, and related German policies and politics. Assayed from a unique city and regional planning perspective, Race, Nation, War will appeal not only to scholars of planning, but also to those with interests in American Studies, gender studies, race and ethnicity, sociology, history, and public policy.