Students read and discussed selections from the following readings in class. In order to establish the context and background to their exhibitions displayed here, students used these and other readings to connect their case files to historiographical debates about the significance of immigration restriction and regulation in this era – and in the present.
Baynton, Douglas. “Defectives in the Land: Disability and American Immigration Policy, 1882-1924.” Journal of American Ethnic History 24, no. 3 (Spring, 2005): 31-44.
Brown, Wendy. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.
Cannato, Vincent. American Passage: The History of Ellis Island. New York: Harpers Collins, 2009.
Chomsky, Aviva. Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014.
Fairchild, Amy. Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Gabaccia, Donna. “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and the ‘Chinese of Europe’: Global Perspectives and Race and Labor, 1815–1930,” in Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspective, Edited by Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen. Bern: Peter Lang, 1997.
García, María Cristina. “America Has Never Actually Welcomed the World’s Huddled Masses.” Washington Post, November 20, 2015.
Goodman, Adam. “Nation of Migrants, Historians of Migration.” Journal of American Ethnic History 34, no. 4 (2015): 7-16.
Hester, Torrie. Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
Kang, S. Deborah. The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917-1954. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Lee, Erika, and Judy Yung. Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Moloney, Deirdre M. “Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency in Early U.S. Deportation Policy.” Journal of Women’s History 18, no. 2 (2006): 95-122.
Moya, Jose C., and Adam McKeown. “World Migration in the Long Twentieth Century,” in Essays on Twentieth-Century History, Edited by Michael Adas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Peck, Gunther. “Making Sense of White Slavery and Whiteness,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 1, no. 2 (2004): 41–63.
Pliley, Jessica. “The Petticoat Inspectors: Women Boarding Inspectors and the Gendered Exercise of Federal Authority.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 12, no. 1 (2013): 95–126,
Schrag, Peter. Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Urban, Andrew. Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor During the Long Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2018.