American Borders Research Articles

The "Oriental" problem: trachoma and Asian immigrants in the United States, 1897-1910.

This essay examines the period between 1897 and 1910, when trachoma, a contagious eye disease, became an "Oriental" problem that justified exclusionary immigration policy against Asians entering the United States. It also investigates the ways in which the public fear and alleged threat of the eye disease destabilized and undermined the rights of Asian immigrants. Many scholars have explored the link between trachoma and southern and eastern European newcomers, in particular Jews, but they have not paid much attention to Chinese or Japanese immigrants, for whose exclusion trachoma played a significant role. This is primarily because the number of Asian immigrants was much smaller than that of their European counterparts and because the Chinese Exclusion Acts, which had already been in place, functioned as a stronger and more lasting deterrent to Asian immigration than exclusion or deportation through medical inspection. Moreover, into the 1910s, medical and scientific innovations for detecting parasitic diseases (e.g. hookworm) helped American authorities exclude Asians in larger numbers. Still, the analysis of the discourses surrounding trachoma and immigration from Asia, though short-lived, demonstrates the role of medical inspection in controlling and regulating Asian immigrants, in particular Chinese and Japanese, into the United States and in constructing their legal and political rights. In 1906, the fear of trachoma justified an order to segregate Japanese students from white children in San Francisco even at the cost of compromising their rights as citizens. Along with fierce criticisms against immigration officials by the American public, the 1910 investigation of the San Francisco Immigration Office problematized the admission of trachoma-afflicted Asian immigrants. Those critical of the Immigration Office and its implementation of American immigration policy called for exclusionary measures to limit the privileges of exempt classes and domiciled aliens and hinder the exertion of their rights to leave and reenter their adopted country. The two examples show that trachoma was a convenient excuse to condemn inefficient immigration policy and regulate allegedly diseased Asian bodies. In 1910, the federal government made a decision to relegate to steamship companies full responsibility for medical inspection at Asian ports. Since they had to pay a fine for every immigrant excluded at American borders for medical reasons, including trachoma, steamship companies carried out more rigorous examinations. With medical advancements and growing interest in parasitic diseases, trachoma soon lost its appeal to immigration authorities. However, the association of immigration, race, and disease has continued to provide a rationale for immigration control beyond American borders.

The Start of American Accommodation of the Chinese: Afong Moy's Experience from 1834 to 1850

Afong Moy came to the United States in 1834 as a popular attraction, and remained in the public spotlight until 1850. Her very presence as the first recorded Chinese woman on American soil prompted a heated national discussion regarding how to accommodate the Chinese living among Americans. A two-tiered paradigm that emerged from this dialogue disparaged Chinese culture while extending paternalistic care to Moy, pushing her toward acculturation, which was to be realized in a symbolic way after her disappearance from the exhibition stage. The pattern was not exclusive to Moy; rather, it was a general strategy that Americans had adopted to deal with the small but growing number of Chinese present in the United States prior to the widespread and virulent anti-Chinese sentiment that later engulfed American society. This study therefore sheds light on the oft-neglected early stage of Sino-American relations occurring within American borders.

Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, and Power LeelaFernandes. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, and Power Leela Fernandes. New York: New York University Press, 2013.In Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge, Ethics, and Power Leela Fernandes asks the academy to reconsider the concept of feminism, a term has become, according to Fernandes, a catchall phrase for the paradigm within which [f]eminist scholars have increasingly sought to develop transnational perspectives in order to break free from national narratives and decenter US-oriented approaches (2). Her main concern is the way academics in the United States have failed at such a decentering and have instead appropriated the concept of feminism to fit into an American narrative. Using case studies and extensive engagement with current research, Fernandes puts forth a strong call for academics to reevaluate their relationship with the construction of feminism and their study of it.Her main audience is those who work within interdisciplinary fields of study, which she lists as specifically postcolonial, women's, and cultural studies. Those working within those fields, who created the term feminism, Fernandes claims, also have the opportunity to deconstruct the concept and make it servile to an American narrative of liberation and freedom, a challenge that continually arises for feminists who write and teach about women, gender, and sexuality in locations want to move outside of a national American narrative, an idea she thoroughly explicates in her introduction (2).With a clear introduction offers each chapter's argument, this text is simultaneously challenging and approachable. It is accessible for specific purposes, as each essay can stand alone. The arguments are clearly and systematically laid out in this thoroughly researched and articulate text. Transnational Feminism in the United States would be most useful to those who write about and teach within the interdisciplinary disciplines previously mentioned. This text asks those educators to reconsider the framing of courses to align with a Americancentered approach when teaching about women from around the world. Her primary concern for such educators is to show less attention has been paid to such national framings of interdisciplinary knowledge and the ways in which these framings produce 'the world' within the United States, i.e., focusing on female genital circumcision or veiling as a way of teaching about women beyond American borders (9). …

The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America Roxanne DunbarOrtiz, Editor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.

Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Editor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.The revised edition of Great Sioux Nation raises questions about not only the position of this sovereign nation within American borders but also about American political, legal, and cultural policies in contemporary and historical contexts. Clearly a product of the 1970s, a time of activism, anger, and political and cultural upheaval, this text bears witness to that change and contributes a verse that still resonates today for indigenous peoples. vast majority of the documents included are primary sources, such as witness testimony from the 1974 trial transcript in the case of the United States v. Consolidated Wounded Knee Cases on the motion to dismiss for want of jurisdiction, which was a hearing about the meaning of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and whether it gave the United States permission to strip the Sioux Nation of its sovereignty and land. In addition to this testimony, the editor includes the full Fort Laramie excerpts from the court's decision to deny the Sioux Nation their sovereignty, newspaper clippings of trial coverage, brief contextual and historical overviews by well-known Native American scholars, post-trial statements from the defendants' attorney, a glossary of important cultural terms such as treaty, sovereign, tribe, and traditional, a comprehensive bibliography designed to guide further study, and sectional interludes of poetic words by Henry Crow Dog, a traditional Sioux elder and witness. For scholars interested in the activism of the 1970s, Great Sioux Nation contextualizes the broader activist impulse, raises questions about these issues that in many ways remain unresolved, and emphasizes the struggle over land, sovereignty, and terminology.Texts analyzing America focus on broad shifts in culture, economics, and politics, such as America in the Seventies (2004), Seventies: Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (2001), and Stayin' Alive: and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010). Some books spotlight remnants of 1960s activism such as Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (2010), which happily includes three chapters on indigenous movements and decolonization efforts. Philip J. Deloria writes in the foreword to this new edition, The writing seems to cry out with anxieties about form and legitimacy and authority that also say something about the 1970s (v).The Great Sioux Nation starts to become less heated in word choice, calmer and equally assertive, but more positive as it progresses from the writings of Simon Ortiz, Vine Deloria, Jr. …

Some points about ASIS&T global initiatives

AbstractEDITOR'S SUMMARYASIS&T has long been open to members and collaborations beyond North American borders but is intensifying efforts to strengthen and expand its global influence. Special Interest Group/International Information Issues (SIG/III) serves as a foundation for awareness and outreach, and the Association name change is a meaningful reflection and reinforcement of a broader perspective. It is hoped that the European and the newly established Asia Pacific chapters will be the first of many more groups outside the United States and Canada to support international networking. ASIS&T has committed to link membership fees to national ranking on the United Nations Human Development Index, locate the 2016 Annual Meeting in Europe and delete language in websites, honors and policies that implies any national limitations. With ongoing diligence and support, an active international membership and global collaborations will be the norm.

Peacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821–1846 by Samuel J. Watson (review)

Reviewed by: Peacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821–1846 by Samuel J. Watson William S. Belko (bio) Peacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821–1846. By Samuel J. Watson. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. Pp. 688. $49.95 cloth) This is the second volume of a monumental two-volume study of the U.S. Army officer corps along the American frontier, from the Canadian border to the Florida swamps, and from the northern Great Plains to the Texan-Mexican frontier. Watson provides a vivid and detailed accounting of the experiences of the army policing the [End Page 124] borderlands, acting as dutiful and disciplined agents of the national government, controlling both unruly white frontiersmen and pressured Indians, and preserving law and order in spite of aggressive white westward expansion. Despite their frequent frustration, disillusionment, and discontent with state and federal policymakers and potentially erratic and unclear government policies, the army officer corps operated as effective, albeit hesitant, peacekeepers, diplomats, and, ultimately, as the crucial component of a peaceful, efficient, and controlled westward expansion. Conflict with local white citizens and their elected officials, however, proved as taxing as preventing Indian-white warfare, intertribal struggles, and potential filibusters and border violations. Whether dealing with Indians, aggressive white Americans, or British and Mexican troops, army officers exercised remarkable restraint and caution; patience and composure defined army activities at every juncture. Watson portrays the army officer corps as considerably less bellicose than other white citizens, who were often deemed as unscrupulous, partisan, and rapacious by officers. The officers displayed a distinct disdain for white settlers and contempt for populist disregard of law and order, while often demonstrating a deep respect and even empathy for their adversaries, whether Indians or Mexicans. The author depicts army officers as more objective and “morally upright” than frontiersmen and the state and local elected officials with whom they frequently clashed. After 1821, a decline of aggressive expansionistic sentiment dominated the officer corps, as they became increasingly ambivalent toward, even suspicious of, white territorial expansion. Uncertainty and skepticism over federal Indian policy and the pace and process of Indian removal only complicated matters further for the army. Thus, tension, frustration, and dissension defined civil-military relations during Jackson’s presidency, but this uneasy relationship declined substantially during the successive Jackson–era administrations, as the army succeeded in securing its insulation and autonomy from constant civilian intervention. Military subordination and accountability to civilian national [End Page 125] authority, representative government, and the constitution was, according to Watson, the most important dimension of the professional development of the army in the Jacksonian era. As the army officer corps labored to maintain national sovereignty, secure American borders, police the frontier, and prepare for white settlement, they acted as disinterested servants to the national government, always maintaining political neutrality and nonpartisanship, avoiding political entanglements and party battles, and keeping a conservative realism regarding American foreign policy. Army officers were, Watson declares, classical republicans advancing liberal democracy; they were exemplars of classical virtue in an era of increasing acquisitive individualism, rising majoritarian democracy, and adamant state sovereignty. Words such as integrity, reputation, honor, duty, gentility, discipline, service, and responsibility characterize army officers in the Age of Jackson, and the army officer corps usually appears as the unapproachable paragon of virtue which can do little wrong, always an icon of honorable behavior, morality, and humanity. There is an underlying political bias throughout the work, however, as the author clearly supports Hamiltonian centralism, Madisonian nationalism, and Clay Whiggery over Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracy. Watson often displays some derision for a liberal, majoritarian, populist, democratic government, one responsive to and operating solely on the demands of its citizens. The efficacy of a strong federal government and an aversion for the compact theory of the Union, prevails throughout. The harsh criticism, often unwarranted, of Jackson and his contribution to American democracy detracts somewhat from the story; Robert Remini’s masterful three-volume biography of Jackson should accompany a reading of Watson’s book. Still, this is a magisterial study of the American frontier in the Age of Jackson, and it should be required reading for courses in...

The Suffocation of Marriage: Climbing Mount Maslow Without Enough Oxygen

This article distills insights from historical, sociological, and psychological perspectives on marriage to develop the suffocation model of marriage in America. According to this model, contemporary Americans are asking their marriage to help them fulfill different sets of goals than in the past. Whereas they ask their marriage to help them fulfill their physiological and safety needs much less than in the past, they ask it to help them fulfill their esteem and self-actualization needs much more than in the past. Asking the marriage to help them fulfill the latter, higher level needs typically requires sufficient investment of time and psychological resources to ensure that the two spouses develop a deep bond and profound insight into each other's essential qualities. Although some spouses are investing sufficient resources—and reaping the marital and psychological benefits of doing so—most are not. Indeed, they are, on average, investing less than in the past. As a result, mean levels of marital quality and personal well-being are declining over time. According to the suffocation model, spouses who are struggling with an imbalance between what they are asking from their marriage and what they are investing in it have several promising options for corrective action: intervening to optimize their available resources, increasing their investment of resources in the marriage, and asking less of the marriage in terms of facilitating the fulfillment of spouses’ higher needs. Discussion explores the implications of the suffocation model for understanding dating and courtship, sociodemographic variation, and marriage beyond American's borders.

ON SEA LEVEL ALONG THE BRAZILIAN COAST

ABSTRACT . This is Part II of a contribution on Brazilian sea levels – Part I dealt with the seasonal variability. It examines the sea level changes along the Brazilian coast from series with less than 40 years of measurement, against the background of changes in series of all continents and islands around the world, considering data distributed by the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL). The method of analysis follows the display of the data in a: 1) first plot of relative sea level trends (C), against the length of the series (L) expressed in years and a: 2) second plot showing the relative sea level regression coefficients (C), versus the corresponding correlation values (m). The first plot of all PSMSL data exhibited a cusped like shape of the distribution of (C), having maxima values about 10-20 cm/cty for the longest series (120-137 years), indicating the overall positive value of the global relative sea level trend. Similar first plot, a regional plot of African and South American data adjusted to the same global relative mean level, showed that the Brazilian trends (C), are mostly concentrated in the positive side of the cusped: (ports of Bel´em, Fortaleza. Recife, Canavieiras, Salvador, Ilha Fiscal, Rio de Janeiro, Ubatuba, Cananeia, and Imbituba) which have a mean value within 30 to 40 cm/cty. The second plot, with all set of PSMSL data, was necessary in order to display trend values of non simultaneous series of different continental borders and lengths in the same bin. The plot gave two different linear inclinations for trend values within ± 0.3 cm/y, in the positive and negative sides of the figure. The global ratio obtained for the trends was R = − 1.2, suggesting also, from the linearity of the plot, that the trends and correlation values are statistically dependent variables. The graph produced a different value for global balance of the value C obtained in the first plot. Similar regional second plot of the African Atlantic and South American borders, which include the Brazilian data, also gave rise to two new regression lines with trend C*1 0, with a ratio R = − 2.2, involving bins of m and C values that are also null in the vicinity of zero. This regionally plot confirmed the result of the second plot with PSMSL series that they (C and m), globally, should be dependent statistical variables. These findings, however, do not change the fact that the regional series with trends 0.2 cm/year have correlation values m 0 construidas a partir dos valores das tendencias C das series PSMSL, com inclinacoes dentro da faixa de 0,2 cm/ano na parte positiva e negativa da figura, sugerindo uma nao equivalencia entre essas inclinacoes, em favor de valor global negativo de C* para o Nivel Relativo do Mar. Figura semelhante produzida com as s´eries Africanas e Sul Americanas, que incluiram as series brasileiras, mostrou caracteristica similar, alem de indicar que series com tendencias ± 0,2 cm/ano tem valores de correlacao m < 0,3 qualquer que seja o comprimento da serie. Os resultados interessantes, mas contraditorios, que incluem a dependencia linear global entre correlacao e tendencias das series fornecidas pelo PSMSL, devem ser analisados em continuacao aos presentes estudos, que indicam que o nivel relativo do mar na costa brasileira esta aumentando a razao de 30 a 40 cm/seculo. Palavras-chave: nivel do mar, costa brasileira, series do PSMSL, nivel relativo do mar global, balanco do nivel relativo do mar.

'Rogue States' Within American Borders: Remedying State Noncompliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

'Rogue States' Within American Borders: Remedying State Noncompliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

US Foreign Policy under President Barack Obama and the Promotion of Multilateralism and the Rule of Law

Five years ago, in November 2008, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th US president. Senator Obama’s campaign message had been ‘change’, ‘change we need’, and ‘change we should believe in’. In this post-Cold War era, the US is the only remaining superpower and the American president the world’s most influential leader. Accordingly, despite the fact that non-Americans do not participate in an American presidential election, they are nevertheless interested in its outcome given the leading role that the US plays in shaping international relations, for better or worse. This article does not explore US politics. Nor does it revisit the political economy of imperialism let alone the dependency discourse. It rather reflects on American foreign policy against the background of the promises that Senator Obama made in his book, The Audacity of Hope and later during the campaign. It is based on the hopes that his election raised in the ‘world beyond the American borders’ and aims to pave the way for a critical but fair assessment of US foreign policy under President Obama.

Exhibiting the Frontier: American Borders as Museological Projects

In the twenty-first century, international borders are being rethought and remade after the concept of a 'borderless world' of the 1990s lost its promise. This article looks at some of the ways in which borders have recently been re-conceptualized and framed through case studies of two museological projects: the Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, Texas and the Mauermuseum/Haus am Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. As abstract, conceptual phenomena, geographical borders pose a representational quandary that is addressed not only through state strategies of demarcation and surveillance, but also through soft power and the strategies of architectural and museological display that bolster popular support for, and lend meaning to, the abstraction of a line.

Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley

On the American stages of politics and journalism in the mid-nineteenth century, few men were more influential than Abraham Lincoln and his sometime adversary, sometime ally, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. In this compelling new volume, author Gregory A. Borchard explores the intricate relationship between these two vibrant figures, both titans of the press during one of the most tumultuous political eras in American history. Packed with insightful analysis and painstaking research, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley offers a fresh perspective on these luminaries and their legacies. Borchard begins with an overview of the lives of both Lincoln and Greeley, delving particularly into their mutual belief in Henry Clay's much-debated American System, and investigating the myriad similarities between the two political giants, including their comparable paths to power and their statuses as self-made men, their reputations as committed reformers, and their shared dedication to social order and developing a national infrastructure. Also detailed are Lincoln's and Greeley's personal quests to end slavery in the United States, as well as their staunch support of free-soil homesteads in the West. Yet despite their ability to work together productively, both men periodically found themselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Their by turns harmonious and antagonistic relationship often played out on the front pages of Greeley's influential newspaper, the New York Tribune. Drawing upon historical gems from the Tribune, as well as the personal papers of both Lincoln and Greeley, Borchard explores in depth the impact the two men had on their times and on each other, and how, as Lincoln's and Greeley's paths often crossed--and sometimes diverged--they personified the complexities, virtues, contradictions, and faults of their eras. Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley goes beyond tracing each man's personal and political evolution to offer a new perspective on the history-changing events of the times, including the decline of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republicans, the drive to extend American borders into the West; and the bloody years of the Civil War. Borchard finishes with reflections on the deaths of Lincoln and Greeley and how the two men have been remembered by subsequent generations. Sure to become an essential volume in the annals of political history and journalism, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley is a compelling testament to the indelible mark these men left on both their contemporaries and the face of America's future.

A Fronteira como Ameaça: Geografia, Imaginação e Experiência

O presente artigo retoma debates sobre Geografia, imaginação e experiência nointuito de estudar a qualificação das fronteiras sul-americanas na imprensa brasileira. Por meio de textos e mapas veiculados na imprensa nacional, busca-se estudar reportagens nas quais os jornalistas fazem uma espécie de “trabalho de campo” nas cidades fronteiriças. Ao analisar a cobertura de um evento específico ocorrido na fronteira entre o Brasil e a Colômbia no início da década de 1990, o artigo pretende estimular a discussão sobre as relações entre a difusão de imagens na imprensa e a legitimação de formas específicas de ação sobre os espaços fronteiriços.

Search, Seizure, and Extraterritoriality

This paper analyzes how recent courts have approached the question of if, and how, the Fourth Amendment Warrant Clause operates extraterritorially as applied to U.S. citizens. For example, if the U.S. government seeks to wiretap a suspected U.S. citizen turned al-Qaeda member, must a warrant be obtained? What if the individual is simply a U.S. citizen traveling abroad? Or further, what if it is an American corporation, the assets of which the U.S. government seeks to freeze in another country? In such scenarios, courts have not provided a consistent answer to whether the Fourth Amendment applies, and more importantly, what it requires if its protections do in fact apply outside of American borders. The paper grapples with these issues, bringing together two lines of doctrine which, as of yet, have not been discussed together in the recent decisions. Specifically, domestic Fourth Amendment doctrine has provided little guidance to courts answering the above question, while another line of cases grappling with extraterritoriality more generally has been somewhat misapplied to provide make shift solutions. This paper argues that these two lines of doctrine must be considered together to more closely analyze the question of whether the Warrant Clause operates abroad.

Welcome Mat and Spiked Gate: Two Stories of Immigrants in the United States

The story Sayu Bhojwani tells is one that many South Asian immigrants to America have encountered: that of the unrolled welcome mat and the erection of the spiked gate. While she had proudly just completed her transition from international student to American citizen early in 2001, the terrorist attacks later that year changed the political and social environment in which she was forced to operate. As a consequence of the anti-immigrant backlash and xenophobia she and other South Asian immigrants in New York faced, for two years she served in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration as the city’s first Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs. Continuing her commitment to guaranteeing and protecting the promised liberty and justice for all within American borders, Bhojwani makes a passionate plea for course correction.

Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (review)

Adams, Rachel. Continental Divides: Remapping Cultures of North America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. 310 pp.More than half century after La invencion de America, Edmundo O'Gorman's insistence that we attend ideological consequences of geographical categories continues be salient. Rachel Adams contributes discourse O'Gorman founded by exploring genealogy of narrower imagined contruct of North America. Continental Divides complements recent works like Walter Mignolo's The Idea of America, though its agenda - to introduce continent as heuristic frame for comparative cultural (23) - is considerably less prescriptive than Mignolo's.Adams argues in her cogent introduction that unlike its equally fictive Latin counterpart, of unitary North America emerged in early 1940s and gained traction as reigning metageographic concept (12) of US diplomacy during Cold War, in some ways superseding worn-out hemispheric ideal. Slippery from outset, term sometimes gestured at presumed AngloAmerican solidarity between US and Canada, though extent which this cloaks US-centric worldview is tellingly revealed by virtual synonymity of norteamericano and estadounidense in American usage, as she notes. A selection of alternatives that dominant geopolitical mapping is also reproduced here, ranging from Chicano Movement's reclaimed Aztlan Utopian, alarmist, and satirical visions of continental order. The passage of North American Free Trade Agreement was obviously watershed in genealogy of concept, and Adams carefully separates herself from any celebratory notion of cultural and political unity between Canada, Mexico, and US that is inevitably projected by that regional imaginary. Instead, she takes pains show the implausibility ofthat project (17). Yet when critically applied, she argues, this continental optic can reveal unequal economic and political relations that NAFTA elides, and thus can be revealing than more geographically inchoate rubrics such as globalization or diaspora (7). For her, frame of North America becomes device bring into view alternate histories and cultural formations that might be obscured by an exclusive emphasis on nation-state, or by too-close attention any one region (246).Continental Divides takes aim at less balanced comparative studies built around spatial constructs like border or hemisphere, contending that U.S.-based Americanists have shown considerable in Mexico, but typically ignore Canada or treat it as an extension of United States, while those scholars of Mexico and Canada who have written comparatively about United States rarely take one another as objects of critical interest (6-7). She challenges American and Latina/o studies scholars assume, instead, a genuinely comparative view of North American borders that locates them in relation one another and borders in other parts of world (21). Her archive, while clearly tipped toward English-language materials, achieves that sense of relation.Because of its refusal impose false sense of coherence upon fictive construct of continent, Adams's study wisely does not pretend historical or regional completeness. Its coherence derives instead from total effect of loosely connected case studies that make up book's six chapters. While main focus is on works of fiction, each chapter also offers adroit readings of other forms of cultural expression: plays, photographs, documentary films, and conceptual art, nodding toward Diana Taylor's enlarged notion of what might comprise archive of Americas. This amplitude of selection risks seeming diffuse, yet many of chapters are so lively and thoughtfully conceived that one wishes they had grown into separate book-length studies of their own. …

The passport in America: the history of a document

In today's world of constant identification checks, it's difficult to recall that there was ever a time when proof of was not a part of everyday life. And as anyone knows who has ever lost a passport, or let one expire on the eve of international travel, the has become an indispensable document. But how and why did this form of identification take on such a crucial role? In the first history of the in the United States, Craig Robertson offers an illuminating account of how this document, above all others, came to be considered a reliable answer to the question: who are you? Historically, the originated as an official letter of introduction addressed to foreign governments on behalf of American travelers, but as Robertson shows, it became entangled in contemporary negotiations over citizenship and other forms of identity documentation. Prior to World War I, passports were not required to cross American borders, and while some people struggled to understand how a could accurately identify a person, others took advantage of this new document to advance claims for citizenship. From the strategic use of applications by freed slaves and a campaign to allow married women to get passports in their maiden names, to the passport nuisance of the 1920s and the contested addition of photographs and other identification technologies on the passport, Robertson sheds new light on issues of individual and national identity in modern U.S. history. In this age of heightened security, especially at international borders, Robertson's The Passport in America provides anyone interested in questions of identification and surveillance with a richly detailed, and often surprising, history of this uniquely important document.

Transnational American Studies in the Digital Age

Transnational American Studies in the Digital Age YANOULA K. ATHANASSAKIS and ERIC LARS MARTINSEN Technology is moving at lightning speed, and as editors of an online journal we find ourselves trying to keep up with the pace and scope of both life and work, all of which hold so much more than we had imagined. Near the end of a talk on robotics and warfare at the University of California at Santa Barbara in January 2010, international relations scholar Peter W. Singer motioned to the stream of images behind him that displayed machines and robots resembling those of the Star Wars movies (old and new). 1 Cognizant of the audience’s awestruck reaction, he commented that, while we might assume he was speaking of the future, he was actually referencing the past. We, too, seek to use the past, and the ever‐changing present, to illuminate the future. The second issue of the Journal of Transnational American Studies, or JTAS, comes in the wake of worldwide outbreaks of natural and manmade devastation and economic depression. These events are global in scope, yet hit close to home, thereby crystallizing what the editors of JTAS are working hard to illuminate: the multivalent entangled connections between and among events and cultural phenomena across the world—or what Shelley Fisher Fishkin points to as the “transnational turn” in American Studies. 2 We write this at a critical time in American Studies, when warring ideologies seem to be drowning out reasoned public policy, and purveyors of divisive rhetoric from around the world are outshouting voices of reason and compromise. We write this at a time when it has become increasingly obvious that American bodies, American borders, and American policy are all being submerged in acts of violence both perpetrated against the US and stemming from it. 3 This turbulent epoch calls ever more for an examination and reflection of the seismic shocks that remain and have manifested themselves in the stories of our times. Theorist Judith Butler suggests in her 2004 book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence that most Americans “have probably experienced something

Looking back twenty‐three years: An analysis of contributors and contributions to the journal of borderlands studies, 1986 (volume 1, number 1) to 2008 (volume 23, number 2)

We review the contributors and contributions to the Journal of Borderlands Studies from the journal's inception in 1986 through volume 23, issue 2 (2008). In these 45 individual issues of the JBS, 419 authors have contributed 270 research papers. These authors are affiliated with 150 institutions in 25 countries. Additionally, these authors write from 40 different disciplinary perspectives from Accounting to Urban Planning with Economics, Geography, Political Science and Sociology most heavily represented. Authorship in the Journal of Borderlands Studies is open to faculty of all ranks and multidisciplinary in representation. While the journal has made a concerted effort to publish papers concerning borders on every continent (with the exception of Australia), articles that are geographically focused on North American borders make up more than 72% of published manuscripts.

Befriending the “Yellow Peril”: Chinese Students and Intellectuals and the Liberalization of U.S. Immigration Laws, 1950–1965

AbstractThe extensive literature concerning America's exclusion of Asians has emphasized primarily the domestic contexts for restricting trans-Pacific migrations. Fears of a “Yellow Peril” invasion and conquest were used to justify the earliest American attempts to limit the entry of races and nationalities deemed too different and incompatible to integrate and participate on equal terms in a republic dominated by European arrivals and their descendants. Asian American Studies scholars in particular have mined the rich vein of documents delineating the formative legacy of anti-Asian laws, ideologies, and institutions shaping the still deeply troubled patrolling of American borders today. Less attention has turned to the influence of foreign policy considerations and their role in carving out categories of migrants exempted from exclusionary laws. For example, the Chinese Exclusion Law of 1882 made exceptions for merchants, merchant family members, students and teachers, diplomats, and tourists.