The United States of America has been called a "nation of immigrants" and a "melting pot" of cultures and people from all over the world, but history tells a far more complicated story. There were already people living on the land when the first Europeans arrived and formed what is now the United States. And over the history of this relatively young country, the people who have been welcomed and who have been rejected at the borders have shifted.
This month, learn not only about policies towards immigrants, migrants and refugees over the centuries, but also about the people who have made this place their home and impacted the cultural fabric of the country.
A physical book display is now available at Hunt Library with the selection rotating weekly. Some of the eBooks listed below also have a physical listing. Please check the availability.
Special thanks to our Materials Processing Coordinator, Leah Zande, for compiling this list. Learn more on the DEI events page. Feature image by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash.
American Intolerance: Our Dark History of Demonizing Immigrants
Bartholomew, Robert; Reumschüssel, Anja (2018)
This historical review of the US treatment of immigrants and minority groups documents the suspicion and persecution that often met newcomers and those perceived to be different.Contrary to popular belief, the poor and huddled masses were never welcome in America. Though the engraving on the base of the Statue of Liberty makes that claim, history reveals a far less-welcoming message.
This comprehensive survey of cultural and racial exclusion in the United States examines the legacy of hostility toward immigrants over two centuries. The authors document abuses against Catholics in the early 19th century in response to the influx of German and Irish immigrants; hostility against Mexicans throughout the Southwest, fears leading to a ban on Chinese immigration for ten years, punitive measures against Native Americans traditions, which became punishable by fines and hard labor; the persecution of German Americans during World War I and Japanese Americans during World War II, the refusal to admit Jewish refugees of the Holocaust, and the ongoing legacy of mistreating African Americans from slavery to the injustices of the present day. Though the authors note that the United States has accepted tens of millions of immigrants during its relatively short existence, its troubling history of persecution is often overlooked. - Publisher's Description
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The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants
Goodman, Adam (2020)
Constant headlines about deportations, detention camps, and border walls drive urgent debates about immigration and what it means to be an American in the twenty-first century. "The Deportation Machine" traces the long and troubling history of the US government's systematic efforts to terrorize and expel immigrants over the past 140 years. This provocative, eye-opening book provides needed historical perspective on one of the most pressing social and political issues of our time.
In a sweeping and engaging narrative, Adam Goodman examines how federal, state, and local officials have targeted various groups for expulsion, from Chinese and Europeans at the turn of the twentieth century to Central Americans and Muslims today. He reveals how authorities have singled out Mexicans, nine out of ten of all deportees, and removed most of them not by orders of immigration judges but through coercive administrative procedures and calculated fear campaigns. Goodman uncovers the machine's three primary mechanisms―formal deportations, "voluntary" departures, and self-deportations―and examines how public officials have used them to purge immigrants from the country and exert control over those who remain. Exposing the pervasive roots of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States, "The Deportation Machine" introduces the politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens who have pushed for and profited from expulsion.
This revelatory book chronicles the devastating human costs of deportation and the innovative strategies people have adopted to fight against the machine and redefine belonging in ways that transcend citizenship. - Publisher's Description
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Here to Stay: Uncovering South Asian American History
Rudra, Geetika (2022)
Today, South Asians are a rapidly growing demographic in the United States, comprising nearly 2 percent of the population. But there was a time in the not-too-distant past when the United States was far less hospitable to South Asian immigrants. In fact, until 1952, only white immigrants could become naturalized American citizens. Yet in the first half of the twentieth century, many states still had thriving communities of South Asians.
In "Here to Stay," Geetika Rudra, a second-generation Indian immigrant and American history buff, takes readers on a journey across the country to unearth the little-known histories of earlier generations of South Asian Americans. She visits storied sites such as Oregon’s “Hindoo Alley,” home to many lumber workers at the turn of the century, and Angel Island, California’s immigration hub. She also introduces readers to such inspiring figures as Bhagat Singh Thind, an immigrant who had enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve his adopted country in World War I, but who was later denied citizenship and took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In turns both serious and joyful, this book vividly reveals how South Asians have always been a vital part of the American tapestry. - Publisher's Description
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Writing Home: A Quaker Immigrant on the Ohio Frontier; the Letters of Emma Botham Alderson
Alderson, Emma; Ulin, Donald Ingram - editor (2020)
"Writing Home" offers readers a firsthand account of the life of Emma Alderson, an otherwise unexceptional English immigrant on the Ohio frontier in mid-nineteenth-century America, who documented the five years preceding her death with astonishing detail and insight. Her convictions as a Quaker offer unique perspectives on racism, slavery, and abolition; the impending war with Mexico; presidential elections; various religious and utopian movements; and the practices of everyday life in a young country.
Introductions and notes situate the letters in relation to their critical, biographical, literary, and historical contexts. Editor Donald Ulin discusses the relationship between Alderson’s letters and her sister Mary Howitt’s "Our Cousins in Ohio" (1849), a remarkable instance of transatlantic literary collaboration.
"Writing Home" offers an unparalleled opportunity for studying immigrant correspondence due to Alderson’s unusually well-documented literary and religious affiliations. The notes and introductions provide background on nearly all the places, individuals, and events mentioned in the letters. - Publisher's Description
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Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis: Political Nativism in the Antebellum West
Ritter, Luke (2021)
Why have Americans expressed concern about immigration at some times but not at others? In pursuit of an answer, this book examines America’s first nativist movement, which responded to the rapid influx of 4.2 million immigrants between 1840 and 1860 and culminated in the dramatic rise of the National American Party. As previous studies have focused on the coasts, historians have not yet completely explained why westerners joined the ranks of the National American, or “Know Nothing,” Party or why the nation’s bloodiest anti-immigrant riots erupted in western cities―namely Chicago, Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis. In focusing on the antebellum West, "Inventing America’s First Immigration Crisis" illuminates the cultural, economic, and political issues that originally motivated American nativism and explains how it ultimately shaped the political relationship between church and state.
In six detailed chapters, Ritter explains how unprecedented immigration from Europe and rapid westward expansion re-ignited fears of Catholicism as a corrosive force. He presents new research on the inner sanctums of the secretive Order of Know-Nothings and provides original data on immigration, crime, and poverty in the urban West. Ritter argues that the country’s first bout of political nativism actually renewed Americans’ commitment to church–state separation. Native-born Americans compelled Catholics and immigrants, who might have otherwise shared an affinity for monarchism, to accept American-style democracy. Catholics and immigrants forced Americans to adopt a more inclusive definition of religious freedom. - Publisher's Description
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Voices of African Immigrants in Kentucky: Migration, Identity, and Transnationality
Musoni, Francis (2019)
Following historical and theoretical overview of African immigration, the heart of this book is based on oral history interviews with forty-seven of the more than twenty-two thousand Africa-born immigrants in Kentucky. From a former ambassador from Gambia, a pharmacist from South Africa, a restaurant owner from Guinea, to a certified nursing assistant from the Democratic Republic of Congo―every immigrant has a unique and complex story of their life experiences and the decisions that led them to emigrate to the United States.
The compelling narratives reveal why and how the immigrants came to the Bluegrass state―whether it was coming voluntarily as a student or forced because of war―and how they connect with and contribute to their home countries as well as to the US. The immigrants describe their challenges―language, loneliness, cultural differences, credentials for employment, ignorance towards Africa, and racism―and positive experiences such as education, job opportunities, and helpful people. One chapter focuses on family―including interviews with the second generations―and how the immigrants identify themselves. - Publisher's Description
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Closing the Golden Door: Asian Migration and the Hidden History of Exclusion at Ellis Island
Pegler-Gordon, Anna (2021)
The immigration station at New York's Ellis Island opened in 1892 and remained the largest U.S. port for immigrant entry until World War I. In popular memory, Ellis Island is typically seen as a gateway for Europeans seeking to join the "great American melting pot." But as this fresh examination of Ellis Island's history reveals, it was also a major site of immigrant detention and exclusion, especially for Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian travelers and maritime laborers who reached New York City from Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, and even within the United States. And from 1924 to 1954, the station functioned as a detention camp and deportation center for a range of people deemed undesirable.
Anna Pegler-Gordon draws on immigrants' oral histories and memoirs, government archives, newspapers, and other sources to reorient the history of migration and exclusion in the United States. In chronicling the circumstances of those who passed through or were detained at Ellis Island, she shows that Asian exclusion was both larger in scope and more limited in force than has been previously recognized. - Publisher's Description
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Koreatown, Los Angeles: Immigration, Race, and the American Dream
Lee, Shelley Sang-Hee (2022)
The story of how one ethnic neighborhood came to signify a shared Korean American identity. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Los Angeles County's Korean population stood at about 186,000—the largest concentration of Koreans outside of Asia. Most of this growth took place following the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which dramatically altered US immigration policy and ushered in a new era of mass immigration, particularly from Asia and Latin America.
By the 1970s, Korean immigrants were seeking to turn the area around Olympic Boulevard near downtown Los Angeles into a full-fledged "Koreatown," and over the following decades, they continued to build a community in LA. As Korean immigrants seized the opportunity to purchase inexpensive commercial and residential property and transformed the area to serve their community's needs, other minority communities in nearby South LA—notably Black and Latino working-class communities—faced increasing segregation, urban poverty, and displacement. Beginning with the early development of LA's Koreatown and culminating with the 1992 Los Angeles riots and their aftermath, Shelley Sang-Hee Lee demonstrates how Korean Americans' lives were shaped by patterns of racial segregation and urban poverty, and legacies of anti-Asian racism and orientalism. "Koreatown, Los Angeles" tells the story of an American ethnic community often equated with socioeconomic achievement and assimilation, but whose experiences as racial minorities and immigrant outsiders illuminate key economic and cultural developments in the United States since 1965. Lee argues that building Koreatown was an urgent objective for Korean immigrants and US-born Koreans eager to carve out a spatial niche within Los Angeles to serve as an economic and social anchor for their growing community. More than a dot on a map, Koreatown holds profound emotional significance for Korean immigrants across the nation as a symbol of their shared bonds and place in American society. - Publisher's Description
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One Quarter of the Nation: Immigration and the Transformation of America
Foner, Nancy (2022)
The impact of immigrants over the past half century has become so much a part of everyday life in the United States that we sometimes fail to see it. This deeply researched book by one of America’s leading immigration scholars tells the story of how immigrants are fundamentally changing this country. An astonishing number of immigrants and their children―nearly eighty-six million people―now live in the United States. Together, they have transformed the American experience in profound and far-reaching ways that go to the heart of the country’s identity and institutions.
Unprecedented in scope, "One Quarter of the Nation" traces how immigration has reconfigured America’s racial order―and, importantly, how Americans perceive race―and played a pivotal role in reshaping electoral politics and party alignments. It discusses how immigrants have rejuvenated our urban centers as well as some far-flung rural communities, and examines how they have strengthened the economy, fueling the growth of old industries and spurring the formation of new ones. This wide-ranging book demonstrates how immigration has touched virtually every facet of American culture, from the music we dance to and the food we eat to the films we watch and books we read.
"One Quarter of the Nation" opens a new chapter in our understanding of immigration. While many books look at how America changed immigrants, this one examines how they changed America. It reminds us that immigration has long been a part of American society, and shows how immigrants and their families continue to redefine who we are as a nation. - Publisher's Description
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The Succeeders: How Immigrant Youth are Transforming What it Means to Belong in America
Flores, Andrea (2021)
This book challenges dominant representations of the so-called American Dream, those “patriotic” narratives that focus on personal achievement as the way to become an American. This narrative misaligns with the lived experience of many first- and second-generation Latino immigrant youth who thrive because of the nurture of their loved ones. A story of social reproduction and change, "The Succeeders" illustrates how ideological struggles over who belongs in this country, who is valuable, and who is an American are worked out by young people through their ordinary acts of striving in school and caring for friends and family.
In this eye-opening book, Andrea Flores examines how ideological struggles over who belongs in this country, who is valued, and who is considered to be an American are worked out by young people through ordinary acts of striving in school and caring for friends and family. Through examining the experiences of everyday Latino high school students—some undocumented, some citizens, and some from families with mixed immigration status—Flores traces how these youth, in the college-access program Succeeders, leverage educational success toward national belonging for themselves and their families, friends, and communities. These young people come to redefine what it means to belong in the United States by both conforming to and contesting the myth of the American Dream rooted in individual betterment. Their efforts demonstrate that meaningful national belonging can be based in our actions of caring for others. Ultimately, "The Succeeders" emphasizes the vital role that immigrants play in strengthening the social fabric of society, helping communities everywhere to thrive. - Publisher's Description
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Critical Insights: Immigrant Short Fiction
Evans, Robert (2015)
"Critical Insights: Immigrant Short Fiction" provides a real sense of the strength of immigrants' contribution to American literature and culture. Containing four Critical Context essays and ten in-depth Critical readings, this title provides readers with a valuable insight into the texts, authors, and critical perspectives of immigrant short fiction.
The life of an immigrant living in America is a difficult one, as immigrants often find themselves struggling with their families, their sense of identity, and the balance between past and present cultures. Essays in this volume review and analyze contemporary short stories by such authors as Junot Diaz, Sui Sin Far, William Saroyan, Isaac Bashevis, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, Yi-yun Li, Ernesto Quiñonez, and Ha Jin. - Publisher's Description
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Children Crossing Borders: Latin American Migrant Childhoods
Coronado, Irasema; Josiowicz, Alejandra (2023)
The Americas are witnessing an era of unprecedented human mobility. With their families or unaccompanied, children are part of this immense movement of people. Children Crossing Borders explores the different meanings of the lives of borderland children in the Americas. It addresses migrant children’s struggle to build a sense of belonging while they confront racism and estrangement on a daily basis.
Unified in their common interest in the well-being of children, the contributors bring an unrivaled breadth of experience and research to offer a transnational, multidimensional, and multilayered look at migrant childhoods in Latin America. Organized around three main themes—educational experiences; literature, art and culture, and media depictions; and the principle of the “best interest of the child”—this work offers both theoretical and practical approaches to the complexity of migrant childhood. The essays discuss family and school lives, children’s experience as wage laborers, and the legislation and policies that affect migrants. - Publisher's Description
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Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the "Illegal" Immigrant
Flores, Lisa (2021)
In the 1920s, the US government passed legislation against undocumented entry into the country, and as a result the figure of the “illegal alien” took form in the national discourse. In this book, Lisa A. Flores explores the history of our language about Mexican immigrants and exposes how our words made these migrants “illegal.”
"Deportable and Disposable" brings a rhetorical lens to a question that has predominantly concerned historians: how do differently situated immigrant populations come to belong within the national space of whiteness, and thus of American-ness? Flores presents a genealogy of our immigration discourse through four stereotypes. By showing how these figures were constructed, Flores provides insight into the ways in which we racialize language and how we can transform our political rhetoric to ensure immigrant populations come to belong as part of the country, as Americans.
Timely, thoughtful, and eye-opening, "Deportable and Disposable" initiates a necessary conversation about the relationship between racial rhetoric and the literal and figurative borders of the nation. This powerful book will inform policy makers, scholars, activists, and anyone else interested in race, rhetoric, and immigration in the United States. - Publisher's Description
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Musicians' Migratory Patterns: American-Mexican Border Lands
Rodriguez, Mauricio (2020)
"Musicians' Migratory Patterns: American-Mexican Border Lands" approaches the work and ideology of a large array of immigrant Mexican composers based in different regions of the US.
It analyzes the extent that their immigrant status is a key factor to nourish, inform, and propel their musical and artistic concerns. The book uncovers pure and fresh forms of musical expression that broaden the multicultural map of Mexico. It helps the reader to appreciate the aesthetics and technical achievements of original music works and their innovative performances, with artistic and pedagogical implications that frame a vivid picture of the contemporary Mexican as immigrant creator in the USA.
The ongoing massive displacement of Mexicans into the USA not only affects the economic constitution of America but continuously shapes the social, cultural, and intellectual configurations of this country, in which numerous Mexican artists contribute their artistic and academic work, thereby enriching American society. Immigrant Mexican composers and their reflective musical expressions, as this research will describe, are instrumental to the forming of a self-critical society impelled to value and embrace its own diversity, despite conflicting political reactions on the complex subject of legal and illegal immigration. - Publisher's Description
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Well Worth Saving: American Universities' Life-and-Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe
Leff, Laurel (2019)
The United States’ role in saving Europe’s intellectual elite from the Nazis is often told as a tale of triumph, which in many ways it was. America welcomed Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Carnap and Richard Courant, among hundreds of other physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, chemists, and linguists who transformed the American academy. Yet for every scholar who survived and thrived, many, many more did not.
To be hired by an American university, a refugee scholar had to be world-class and well connected, not too old and not too young, not too right and not too left, and, most important, not too Jewish. Those who were unable to flee were left to face the horrors of the Holocaust. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholars who were deemed “not worth saving” and tells the riveting, full story of the hiring decisions universities made during the Nazi era. - Publisher's Description
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African Refugees
Falola, Toyin; Yacob-Haliso, Olajumoke (2023)
"African Refugees" is a comprehensive overview of the context, causes, and consequences of refugee lives, discussing issues, policies, and solutions for African refugees around the world. It covers overarching topics such as human rights, policy frameworks, refugee protection, and durable solutions, as well as less-studied topics such as refugee youths, refugee camps, LGBTQ refugees, urban refugees, and refugee women. It also takes on rare but emergent topics such as citizenship and the creativity of African refugees.
Toyin Falola and Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso showcase the voices and experiences of individual refugees through the sweep of history to tell the African refugee story from the historical past through current developments, covering the full range of experience from the causes of flight to living in exile, all while maintaining a persistent focus on the complicated search for solutions.
"African Refugees" recognizes African agency and contributions in pursuit of solutions for African refugees over time but avoids the pitfalls of the colonial gaze―where refugees are perpetually pathologized and Africa is always the sole cause of its own problems―seeking to complicate these narratives by recognizing African refugee issues within exploitative global, colonial, and neo-colonial systems of power. - Publisher's Description
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Women Refugee Voices from Asia and Africa: Travelling for Safety
ActionAid Association (2022)
This book presents experiences of women refugees in a variety of contexts across Asia and Africa and builds a framework to ensure robust and effective mechanisms to safeguard refugees’ rights. It highlights the structural challenges that women who are forcibly displaced face and the inadequacies of the response of governments and other stakeholders, irrespective of the country of origin, ethnicity, and religion of the refugee community.
Bringing together first-hand accounts from women refugees and interventions by activists, academics, journalists, filmmakers, humanitarian workers, and international law experts, this book will be a must read for scholars and researchers of migration and diaspora studies, development studies, sociology and social anthropology, and politics and public policy. It will be of special interest to NGOs, policymakers, and think tanks. - Publisher's Description
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In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy
Pegler-Gordon, Anna (2023)
When restrictive immigration laws were introduced in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, they involved new requirements for photographing and documenting immigrants--regulations for visually inspecting race and health.
This work is the first to take a comprehensive look at the history of immigration policy in the United States through the prism of visual culture. Including many previously unpublished images, and taking a new look at Lewis Hine's photographs, Anna Pegler-Gordon considers the role and uses of visual documentation at Angel Island for Chinese immigrants, at Ellis Island for European immigrants, and on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Including fascinating close visual analysis and detailed histories of immigrants in addition to the perspectives of officials, this richly illustrated book traces how visual regulations became central in the early development of U.S. immigration policy and in the introduction of racial immigration restrictions. In so doing, it provides the historical context for understanding more recent developments in immigration policy and, at the same time, sheds new light on the cultural history of American photography. - Publisher's Description
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Becoming Irish American: The Making and Remaking of a People from Roanoke to JFK
Meagher, Timothy (2023)
As millions of Irish immigrants and their descendants created community in the United States over the centuries, they neither remained Irish nor simply became American. Instead, they created a culture and defined an identity that was unique to their circumstances, a new people that they would continually reinvent: Irish Americans.
Historian Timothy J. Meagher traces the Irish American experience from the first Irishman to step ashore at Roanoke in 1585 to John F. Kennedy’s election as president in 1960. As he chronicles how Irish American culture evolved, Meagher looks at how various groups adapted and thrived—Protestants and Catholics, immigrants and American born, those located in different geographic corners of the country. He describes how Irish Americans made a living, where they worshiped, and when they married, and how Irish American politicians found particular success, from ward bosses on the streets of New York, Boston, and Chicago to the presidency.
In this sweeping history, Meagher reveals how the Irish American identity was forged, how it has transformed, and how it has held lasting influence on American culture. - Publisher's Description
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Bootlegged Aliens: Immigration Politics on America's Northern Border
Bavery, Ashley Johnson (2020)
In contemporary discourse, much of the discussion of U.S. border politics focuses on the Southwest. In "Bootlegged Aliens," however, Ashley Johnson Bavery considers the North as a borderlands region, demonstrating how this often-overlooked border influenced government policies toward illegal immigration, business and labor union practices around migrant labor, and the experience of being an illegal immigrant in early twentieth-century industrial America. Bavery examines how immigrants, politicians, and employers helped shape national policies toward noncitizen laborers. In the process, she uncovers the northern industrial origins of an exploitative system that emerged on America's border with Canada, whose legacy remains central to debates about America's borders today.
Bavery begins in the 1920s to explore how that decade's immigration restrictions launched an era of policing and profiling that excluded America's foreign born from the benefits of citizenship. On the border between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, this process turned certain Europeans into undocumented immigrants, a group the press and policymakers referred to as bootlegged aliens. Over the next decade, deportation and policing practices stigmatized entire communities of ethnic Europeans regardless of their legal status. Moreover, restrictive laws allowed manufacturers to exploit workers in new ways. By the Great Depression, citizenship had become an invisible boundary that excluded hundreds of thousands of laborers from New Deal entitlements. Accepted wisdom suggests that the 1924 Immigration Act had allowed ethnic Europeans to shed ties to their homelands and assimilate into the "melting pot" of American culture by the 1930s. Bavery challenges this perspective, finding that, instead of forging a common culture with their fellow workers, European immigrants coming through Canada to Detroit faced statewide registration drives, exclusion from key labor unions, and disqualification from the Works Progress Administration, the cornerstone of America's nascent welfare state. In the heart of industrial America, "Bootlegged Aliens" reveals, citizenship was highly contingent. - Publisher's Description
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