U.S. Immigration

Catalog description

This intensive reading course will examine the main themes in the history of US immigration from the American Revolution to the present. Topics include the origins of migration; forced migration and slavery; naturalization and citizenship; anti-immigrant sentiment (nativism); ethnicity and race; and the evolution of government policy. We will consider these topics in the context of historiographical debates concerning the foundation of the US and the three great waves of immigration that followed: largely Irish, British, German, and Chinese before the 1870s; predominantly Eastern and Southern European from the 1880s through the 1920s; and genuinely global from 1965 to the present.