"Immigration presented a constitutional and political problem in the nineteenth-century United States. Until the 1870s, the federal government played only a very limited role in regulating immigration. The states controlled mobility within and across their borders and set their own rules for community membership. This book demonstrates how the existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery shaped immigration policy as it moved from the local to the national level. Throughout the antebellum era, defenders of slavery feared that if Congress had power to control immigration, it could also regulate the movement of free black people and perhaps even the interstate slave trade. The Civil War removed the political and constitutional obstacles to a national immigration policy. Admission remained the norm for European immigrants until the 1920s, but Chinese immigrants fell into a different category. Starting in the 1870s, the federal government excluded Chinese laborers, deploying techniques of registration, punishment, and deportation first used against free black people in the antebellum South. To justify these measures, the Supreme Court ruled that authority over immigration was inherent in national sovereignty and required no constitutional justification. The federal government continues to control admissions and exclusions today, while the states play a double-edged role in regulating immigrants' lives, depending on their politics and location. Some monitor and punish immigrants; others offer sanctuary and refuse to act as agents of federal law enforcement. By examining the history of immigration in a slaveholding republic, this book reveals the tangled origins of border control, incarceration, deportation, and ongoing tensions between local and federal authority in the United States"--

This volume gathers over 40 world-class scholars to explore the dynamics that have shaped the Irish experience in America from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. From the early 1600s to the present, over 10 million Irish people emigrated to various points around the globe. Of them, more than six million settled in what we now call the United States of America. Some were emigrants, some were exiles, and some were refugees—but they all brought with them habits, ideas, and beliefs from Ireland, which played a role in shaping their new home. Organized chronologically, the chapters in this volume offer a cogent blend of historical perspectives from the pens of some of the world’s leading scholars. Each section explores multiple themes including gender, race, identity, class, work, religion, and politics. This book also offers essays that examine the literary and/or artistic production of each era. These studies investigate not only how Irish America saw itself or, in turn, was seen, but also how the historical moment influenced cultural representation. It demonstrates the ways in which Irish Americans have connected with other groups, such as African Americans and Native Americans, and sets “Irish America” in the context of the global Irish diaspora. This book will be of value to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as instructors and scholars interested in American History, Immigration History, Irish Studies, and Ethnic Studies more broadly.

If your reaction to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol was to think, 'That’s not us,' think again: in Illiberal America, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian uncovers a powerful illiberalism as deep-seated in the American past as the founding ideals. A storm of illiberalism, building in the United States for years, unleashed its destructive force in the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021. The attack on American democracy and images of mob violence led many to recoil, thinking “That’s not us.” But now we must think again, for Steven Hahn shows in his startling new history that illiberalism has deep roots in our past. To those who believe that the ideals announced in the Declaration of Independence set us apart as a nation, Hahn shows that Americans have long been animated by competing values, equally deep-seated, in which the illiberal will of the community overrides individual rights, and often protects itself by excluding perceived threats, whether on grounds of race, religion, gender, economic status, or ideology. Driven by popular movements and implemented through courts and legislation, illiberalism is part of the American bedrock. The United States was born a republic of loosely connected states and localities that demanded control of their domestic institutions, including slavery. As white settlement expanded west and immigration exploded in eastern cities, the democracy of the 1830s fueled expulsions of Blacks, Native Americans, Catholics, Mormons, and abolitionists. After the Civil War, southern states denied new constitutional guarantees of civil rights and enforced racial exclusions in everyday life. Illiberalism was modernized during the Progressive movement through advocates of eugenics who aimed to reduce the numbers of racial and ethnic minorities as well as the poor. The turmoil of the 1960s enabled George Wallace to tap local fears of unrest and build support outside the South, a politics adopted by Richard Nixon in 1968. Today, with illiberalism shaping elections and policy debates over guns, education, and abortion, it is urgent to understand its long history, and how that history bears on the present crisis.

Shows how domestic identity narratives and political polarization shape the sociopolitical response to refugees The United States once played a major role in global refugee resettlement, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all refugees resettled worldwide. However, in recent years, it has dramatically cut refugee admissions and implemented discriminatory policies on refugee protection. These policies have been justified amid intensifying xenophobic rhetoric against specific groups. In this book, Alise Coen explains why the monumental shift around refugee resettlement occurred, particularly in response to the high-profile conflict in Syria. She shows how refugees—and broader global migration debates—became contentious political issues in the US, revealing the many ways in which refugees have been increasingly weaponized as partisan symbols by Democrats and Republicans. The book calls attention to the power of rhetoric and identity narratives, and shows how the language used to talk about refugees fuels divisive policies. From the years leading up to the Trump administration’s policies targeting Muslim refugees to debates during the Biden administration around who deserves access to asylum, Coen examines how ideas about race, gender, and nativism shape US approaches toward migration. As arguments for “closing the border” continue to gain traction and politicians continue to use global displacement issues to further their agendas, Reconfiguring Refugees explores the ideas, meanings, and policies that undermine and influence US responsibility-sharing.

A global history of how Thomas Jefferson’s descendants navigated the legacy of the Declaration of Independence on both sides of the color line The Declaration of Independence identified two core principles—independence and equality—that defined the American Revolution and the nation forged in 1776. Jefferson believed that each new generation of Americans would have to look to the “experience of the present” rather than the “wisdom” of the past to interpret and apply these principles in new and progressive ways. Historian Christa Dierksheide examines the lives and experiences of a rising generation of Jefferson’s descendants, Black and white, illuminating how they redefined equality and independence in a world that was half a century removed from the American Revolution. The Hemingses and Randolphs moved beyond Jefferson and his eighteenth-century world, leveraging their own ideas and experiences in nineteenth-century Britain, China, Cuba, Mexico, and the American West to claim independence and equal rights in an imperial and slaveholding republic.

Many leading historians have argued that the Constitution of the United States was a proslavery document. But in The Slaveholding Republic, one of America's most eminent historians refutes this claim in a landmark history that stretches from the Continental Congress to the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Fehrenbacher shows that the Constitution itself was more or less neutral on the issue of slavery and that, in the antebellum period, the idea that the Constitution protected slavery was hotly debated (many Northerners would concede only that slavery was protected by state law, not by federal law). Nevertheless, he also reveals that U.S. policy abroad and in the territories was consistently proslavery. Fehrenbacher makes clear why Lincoln's election was such a shock to the South and shows how Lincoln's approach to emancipation, which seems exceedingly cautious by modern standards, quickly evolved into a "Republican revolution" that ended the anomaly of the United States as a "slaveholding republic."

How state constitutional reform guides and stabilizes American constitutional and political development State constitution reform guides and stabilizes American constitutional and political development. Using data sets and historical case studies, Robinson Woodward-Burns shows how the federal government has repeatedly deferred to state constitutional reform to manage or address difficult national constitutional controversies, including conflicts over the regulation of slavery, banking and taxation, women's suffrage, labor and welfare rights, voting and civil rights, and gender discrimination.

Encountering Revolution looks afresh at the profound impact of the Haitian Revolution on the early United States. The first book on the subject in more than two decades, it redefines our understanding of the relationship between republicanism and slavery at a foundational moment in American history. For postrevolutionary Americans, the Haitian uprising laid bare the contradiction between democratic principles and the practice of slavery. For thirteen years, between 1791 and 1804, slaves and free people of color in Saint-Domingue battled for equal rights in the manner of the French Revolution. As white and mixed-race refugees escaped to the safety of U.S. cities, Americans were forced to confront the paradox of being a slaveholding republic, recognizing their own possible destiny in the predicament of the Haitian slaveholders. Historian Ashli White examines the ways Americans—black and white, northern and southern, Federalist and Democratic Republican, pro- and antislavery—pondered the implications of the Haitian Revolution. Encountering Revolution convincingly situates the formation of the United States in a broader Atlantic context. It shows how the very presence of Saint-Dominguan refugees stirred in Americans as many questions about themselves as about the future of slaveholding, stimulating some of the earliest debates about nationalism in the early republic.

From the colonial period through the early nineteenth century, Father Thomas J. Murphy writes a compelling chronology and in depth analysis of Jesuit slaveholding in the state of Maryland.

Why have Americans expressed concern about immigration at some times but not at others? In pursuit of an answer, this book examines America’s first nativist movement, which responded to the rapid influx of 4.2 million immigrants between 1840 and 1860 and culminated in the dramatic rise of the National American Party. As previous studies have focused on the coasts, historians have not yet completely explained why westerners joined the ranks of the National American, or “Know Nothing,” Party or why the nation’s bloodiest anti-immigrant riots erupted in western cities—namely Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis. In focusing on the antebellum West, Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis illuminates the cultural, economic, and political issues that originally motivated American nativism and explains how it ultimately shaped the political relationship between church and state. In six detailed chapters, Ritter explains how unprecedented immigration from Europe and rapid westward expansion re-ignited fears of Catholicism as a corrosive force. He presents new research on the inner sanctums of the secretive Order of Know-Nothings and provides original data on immigration, crime, and poverty in the urban West. Ritter argues that the country’s first bout of political nativism actually renewed Americans’ commitment to church–state separation. Native-born Americans compelled Catholics and immigrants, who might have otherwise shared an affinity for monarchism, to accept American-style democracy. Catholics and immigrants forced Americans to adopt a more inclusive definition of religious freedom. This study offers valuable insight into the history of nativism in U.S. politics and sheds light on present-day concerns about immigration, particularly the role of anti-Islamic appeals in recent elections.