Gilder Lehrman Fellow Spotlight: Hidetaka Hirota

Each year, ten Gilder Lehrman Fellowships are awarded to outstanding scholars of American history to conduct research at archives in New York City. In 2009, City College professor Hidetaka Hirota, then a doctoral candidate at Boston College, received a Gilder Lehrman Fellowship to do research at the New York Public Library for his dissertation on nativism, citizenship, and the deportation of the destitute in nineteenth-century New York.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute is happy to announce that Professor Hirota’s groundbreaking dissertation is now a book, just published by Oxford University Press: Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy. As is noted on the publisher’s website, Expelling the Poor is the "first sustained study of immigration control conducted by states prior to the introduction of federal immigration law in the late nineteenth century." A timely and important study, Expelling the Poor will be of interest not only to historians but also to general readers who wish to learn more about the cultural, economic, and legal impact of immigration in the era of expansion and industrialization.

If you are a doctoral student, university professor, or independent scholar working on a topic in American history, please visit the Gilder Lehrman Fellowships page to apply for a 2017 Gilder Lehrman Fellowship. Applications are due Monday, May 15, 2017.