Goals & Reading List

Welcome to the graduate seminar on recent U.S. History. We will focus on a topic of passionate and contemporary public debate, immigration. We will begin with the present, with questions raised by Arizonans and various border state inhabitants regarding legal and illegal immigration. What is going on? What are the assumptions about immigrants and immigration found in this debate? What are the top three contemporary issues concerning immigration, in your opinion, and what do you think should be done/ or not done? Why are we having this heated debate now?

To what extent are our current questions regarding immigration a continuity with the American past? When have there been such conflicts in American history, and to what extent have they ever been resolved? We will look for answers to these questions in the past--along with an understanding of the immigrant experience, and then return to the present on our last seminar meeting.

Reading List as Assigned, with Additions

"The State of the Field Forum," Journal of American Ethnic History (Summer 1999): 40-166

David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness

Mae N. Ngai, "The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law" Journal of American History 86 (June 1999): 67-92

John Bodnar, The Transplanted

Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides

Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter

Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction

Frances Tywoniak and Mario Garcia, Migrant Daughter: Coming of Age as a Mexican Woman

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues

Kiyo Sato, Kiyo's Story (Soho Press, 2007 & 2009)

Eugenics Articles:

1-David Cullen, "Back to the Future: Eugenics--a Bibliographic Essay" from The Public Historian V. 29 No. 3 (Summer 2007)
Read this for an overview of the study of Eugenics, and also for an idea about how to write an historiographic essay. Your essays might not be as dense, but you will have all the books we have been reading--this is an example.

2-James A. Tyner, "The Geopolitics of Eugenics and the Exclusion of Philippine Immigrants from the United States," Geographical Review, Vol 89 No. 1 (Jan 1999), 54-73.

3-Robert De C. Ward, "National Eugenics in Relation to Immigration," The North American Review, Vol. 192 No. 656 (Jul 1910), 56-67.

4. Explore the Image Archive of the Am Eugenics Movement at http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/