an etching of the Statue of Liberty with the phrase 'americans all, immigrants all'

Week 1: Foundations

The United States is home to the world’s largest population of foreign-born people—more than 50 million immigrants, comprising over 15% of the total number of Americans. The nation’s immigration history is a 500-year tale of human decisionmaking, economic development, social transformation, political conflict, and globalization; it is also a story of dispossession, discrimination, xenophobia, and mass deportations.Making sense of immigration history means studying its key aspects and how these aspects changed over time: why people migrated and how they understood their journeys; whom they displaced or exploited; what kinds of labor they performed and whether they prospered; how they were scrutinized, restricted, or welcomed by those already here; which traditions they maintained, abandoned, or adapted; and ultimately how they shaped the long arc of the national history. This section offers broad overviews and theoretical underpinnings for studying US immigration history.

Scholarship

  • Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-year Epic History of Immigrant New York (2016)
  • Alexander T. Aleinikoff and Alexandra Délano, ed. New Narratives on the Peopling of America: Immigration, Race, and Dispossession (2024)
  • Llana Barber, “Anti-Black Racism and the Nativist State,” Journal of American Ethnic History 42, no. 4 (2023): 5–59
  • Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (2010)
  • Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023)
  • Carl J. Bon Tempo and Hasia R. Diner, Immigration: An American History (2022)
  • Gary Gerstle, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” Journal of American History 84, no. 2 (September 1997): 524-558
  • Adam Goodman, “Nation of Migrants, Historians of Migration,” Journal of American Ethnic History 34, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 7-16
  • Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder, with Donna Gabaccia, “Migration in Human History—the Long View,” in What is Migration History? (2013), 8-52
  • Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (2002)
  • Kelly Lytle Hernández, “The Whites-Only Immigration Regime,” Western Historical Quarterly 56, no.1 (Spring 2025):1-19
  • Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America (2015)
  • Mae M. Ngai, “Immigration and Ethnic History,” in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (2011), 358-375
  • A. Naomi Paik, Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century (2020)
  • Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (2008)
  • Zaragosa Vargas, Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from Colonial Times to the Present Era (2017)
  • David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (2009)

Resources

Week 2: Expansion

From the colonial period through the nineteenth century, North America received immigrants from multiple parts of the world. Europeans remained the numerical majority, but immigrants also came from Asia and Latin America, contributing to the racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity of American society. The growing diversity of people in the United States led to questions of who should be considered US citizens and members in American society. These questions were complicated by the United States’ territorial expansion, which was accompanied by the dispossession of Native Americans and the incorporation of Mexicans into the American polity as a conquered population. The debate over slavery also shaped the ways white Americans viewed Chinese immigrants, who were considered comparable to slaves as unfree “coolie” workers. The status and perception of immigrants in the United States were deeply intertwined with territorial expansion, settler colonialism, and slavery, and these histories are thus essential to understanding US immigration history.

Scholarship

  • Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (2013)
  • Alice L. Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (2020)
  • David Chang, The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (2016)
  • Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (2014)
  • Rita Shelton Deverell, American Refugees: Turning to Canada for Freedom (2019)
  • Hasia R. Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (2015)
  • Elizabeth N. Ellis, The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South (2023)
  • Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (2001)
  • Laura E. Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (2018)
  • Kevin Kenny, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2023)
  • Lila Teeters Knolle, “Indians Now Taxed: Citizenship and Taxation in Settler-Colonial South Dakota,” Journal of American Ethnic History 44, no. 4 (Summer 2025): 44–72
  • Anna O. Law, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants (2026)
  • Rosina Lozano, American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (2018)
  • Cian T. McMahon, The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea During the Great Irish Famine (2021)
  • Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846–1940,” Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (June 2004): 155–189
  • Mae Ngai, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021)
  • Brenden W. Rensink, Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands (2018).
  • Samantha Seeley, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States (2021)
  • Evan Taparata, “‘Refugees as You Call Them’: The Politics of Refugee Recognition in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Journal of American Ethnic History 38, no. 2 (Winter 2019): 9–35
  • Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
  • Elliott Young, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII (2014)

Resources