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Americans might think their country has always been open to all, but until 1965 people who were not white or did not come from northern or western Europe were not welcomed as immigrants. Only with the passage that year of a new...
“In the Name of America’s Future”: The Fraught Passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act
Senator Patrick McCarran (D−NV) was seething after Congress renewed the 1948 Displaced Persons Act in 1950. Incensed, McCarran wrote to his daughter: “I met the enemy and he took me on the DP bill. It’s tough to beat a million or more...
Reconstructing the West and North
In 1865 the Radicals of the Republican Party regarded the Northern victory in the Civil War as a “golden moment” to remake the Republic. The Republicans controlled Congress, the Supreme Court, and, so they thought until Andrew Johnson...
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Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York
Barely a week after arriving in New York, the young poet wrote to his mother: “One reason I am inclined to remain here is the constant communication there is with Havana; it is where I can easily and frequently receive news of my...
Mexican Farm Labor and the Agricultural Economy of the United States
In July of 1958, a Mexican man in Empalme, Mexico, died outside a recruitment center for Mexican men who wanted to participate in a guest-worker program known as the Bracero Program. The program, designed and agreed upon by both the...
"What We Leave the Earth": The African Burial Ground in New York City
In October 2021, the African Burial Ground National Monument commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the New York City slave cemetery’s rediscovery by the General Services Administration (GSA). In 1991, the GSA started construction...
Pledging Their Fortunes: The Professions of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence
Within the historical literature, the professions of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence has not received nearly the same attention paid to the framers of the US Constitution. In his Economic Interpretation of the...
The Religious Diversity of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence was more than a founding political document of an embryonic American nation. It was also a moral summons to united action written and signed by fifty-six men of diverse religious views. The document...
A Nation of Immigrants from the Outset: The Signers Born Abroad
We are often focused today on the fact that the signers of the Declaration of Independence did not include women, African Americans, or Indigenous people, and how far this deviated from the spirit of “all men are created equal.” And...
파도와 메아리: Waves and Echoes of Korean Migration to the United States
According to the 2020 US Census, 1.9 million Korean Americans reside in the United States. Among Asian Americans, they are the fifth-largest ethnic group and primarily reside in California, New York, Hawaii, and Texas. [1] This essay...
The Repeal of Asian Exclusion
The United States excluded Chinese people beginning in the late nineteenth century and expanded its ban to all Asians in the 1917 and 1924 Immigration Acts. In addition to creating a national origins quota system best known for...
The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority
The United States harvested a bumper crop of good immigrants in 1955. About 1,000 highly educated Chinese gained citizenship, including acclaimed scientists, professionals, and entrepreneurs such as the architect I. M. Pei, the...
Indians in the United States: Movements and Empire
Until the turn of the twentieth century, there were relatively few restrictions on international migration. European imperialism and settler colonialism were sustained by mass migration—both the “free” migration of European settlers...
The Puritans and Dissent: The Cases of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson
Every society constructs what one scholar has called a "perimeter fence," which sets the boundary between actions and beliefs that are acceptable and those that are not. [1] This is as true of the United States in the twentieth...
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Native American Discoveries of Europe
Native Americans discovered Europe at the same time Europeans discovered America. As far as we know, no birch bark canoes caught the gulf stream to Glasgow, and no Native American conquistadores planted flags at Florence, but just as...
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Coming to America: Ellis Island and New York City
New York City is a kind of archipelago, a Philippines on the Hudson River. Only one borough—the Bronx—is actually attached to the American mainland. There are some forty islands in the city beyond Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long...
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Immigrant Fiction: Exploring an American Identity
Strictly speaking, all American novels (with the exception of those written by Native Americans) are in one way or another immigrant fiction. But we usually think of immigrant fiction more narrowly as the encounter of the foreign-born...
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Thomas Jefferson and Deism
Of all the American founders, Thomas Jefferson is most closely associated with deism, the Enlightenment faith in a rational, law-governed world created by a "supreme architect" or cosmic "clockmaker." For many modern Americans, deist...
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Abolition and Religion
One verse of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," the unofficial anthem of the Northern cause, summarized the Civil War’s idealized meaning: In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that...
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San Francisco and the Great Earthquake of 1906
At the beginning of the twentieth century, San Francisco still reigned as the major seaport on the Pacific coast. The city traced its origins to 1776, when a Spanish expedition planted a mission and a military post at the end of the...
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Getting Ready to Lead a World Economy: Enterprise in Nineteenth-Century America
When Jefferson won the presidency in 1801, his victory had an economic impact as great as the political one. The establishment of the new government under the Constitution twelve years earlier had laid the foundation for an integrated...
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Lockean Liberalism and the American Revolution
The town of Boston took an important step toward rebellion on November 20, 1772, by adopting a declaration of "the Rights of the Colonists" drafted by Sam Adams, the firebrand of the Revolution. Adams summarized these "Natural rights"...
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Born Modern: An Overview of the West
The present American West is a creation of history rather than geography. There has never been a single West; American Wests come and go. At various times places now considered as thoroughly eastern as western Pennsylvania, western...
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Unruly Americans in the Revolution
Nearly all of the blockbuster biographies of the Founding Fathers—whether the subject is George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, or John Adams—portray the vast majority of ordinary Americans as mere bystanders. Although the authors of...
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Avast! How the US Built a Navy, Sent In the Marines, and Faced Down the Barbary Pirates
In October 1784, an American merchant vessel, the Betsey , was on a trade run from her home port of Boston to Tenerife in the Canary Islands when she was approached by an un-flagged vessel. Suddenly, "sabers grasped between their...
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