Counting Americans

Counting Americans PDF Author: Paul Schor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199917868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
How could the same person be classified by the US census as black in 1900, mulatto in 1910, and white in 1920? The history of categories used by the US census reflects a country whose identity and self-understanding--particularly its social construction of race--is closely tied to the continuous polling on the composition of its population. By tracing the evolution of the categories the United States used to count and classify its population from 1790 to 1940, Paul Schor shows that, far from being simply a reflection of society or a mere instrument of power, censuses are actually complex negotiations between the state, experts, and the population itself. The census is not an administrative or scientific act, but a political one. Counting Americans is a social history exploring the political stakes that pitted various interests and groups of people against each other as population categories were constantly redefined. Utilizing new archival material from the Census Bureau, this study pays needed attention to the long arc of contested changes in race and census-making. It traces changes in how race mattered in the United States during the era of legal slavery, through its fraught end, and then during (and past) the period of Jim Crow laws, which set different ethnic groups in conflict. And it shows how those developing policies also provided a template for classifying Asian groups and white ethnic immigrants from southern and eastern Europe--and how they continue to influence the newly complicated racial imaginings informing censuses in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Focusing in detail on slaves and their descendants, on racialized groups and on immigrants, and on the troubled imposition of U.S. racial categories upon the populations of newly acquired territories, Counting Americans demonstrates that census-taking in the United States has been at its core a political undertaking shaped by racial ideologies that reflect its violent history of colonization, enslavement, segregation and discrimination.

Counting Americans

Counting Americans PDF Author: Paul Schor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199917868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
How could the same person be classified by the US census as black in 1900, mulatto in 1910, and white in 1920? The history of categories used by the US census reflects a country whose identity and self-understanding--particularly its social construction of race--is closely tied to the continuous polling on the composition of its population. By tracing the evolution of the categories the United States used to count and classify its population from 1790 to 1940, Paul Schor shows that, far from being simply a reflection of society or a mere instrument of power, censuses are actually complex negotiations between the state, experts, and the population itself. The census is not an administrative or scientific act, but a political one. Counting Americans is a social history exploring the political stakes that pitted various interests and groups of people against each other as population categories were constantly redefined. Utilizing new archival material from the Census Bureau, this study pays needed attention to the long arc of contested changes in race and census-making. It traces changes in how race mattered in the United States during the era of legal slavery, through its fraught end, and then during (and past) the period of Jim Crow laws, which set different ethnic groups in conflict. And it shows how those developing policies also provided a template for classifying Asian groups and white ethnic immigrants from southern and eastern Europe--and how they continue to influence the newly complicated racial imaginings informing censuses in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Focusing in detail on slaves and their descendants, on racialized groups and on immigrants, and on the troubled imposition of U.S. racial categories upon the populations of newly acquired territories, Counting Americans demonstrates that census-taking in the United States has been at its core a political undertaking shaped by racial ideologies that reflect its violent history of colonization, enslavement, segregation and discrimination.

Working in Greece and Turkey

Working in Greece and Turkey PDF Author: Leda Papastefanaki
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789206979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description
As was the case in many other countries, it was only in the early years of this century that Greek and Turkish labour historians began to systematically look beyond national borders to investigate their intricately interrelated histories. The studies in Working in Greece and Turkey provide an overdue exploration of labour history on both sides of the Aegean, before as well as after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Deploying the approaches of global labour history as a framework, this volume presents transnational, transcontinental, and diachronic comparisons that illuminate the shared history of Greece and Turkey.

Migration Control in the North Atlantic World

Migration Control in the North Atlantic World PDF Author: Andreas Fahrmeir
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571813282
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The migration movements of the 20th century have led to an increased interest in similarly dramatic population changes in the preceding century. The contributors to this volume - legal scholars, sociologists, political scientist and historians - focus on migration control in the 19th century, concentrating on three areas in particular: the impact of the French Revolution on the development of modern citizenship laws and on the development of new forms of migration control in France and elsewhere; the theory and practice of migration control in various European states is examined, focusing on the control of paupers, emigrants and "ordinary" travelers as well as on the interrelationship between the different administrative levels - local, regional and national - at which migration control was exercised. Finally, on the development of migration control in two countries of immigration: the United States and France. Taken altogether, these essays demonstrate conclusively that the image of the 19th century as a liberal era during which migration was unaffected by state intervention is untenable and in serious need of revision.

Totalitarian Democracy and After

Totalitarian Democracy and After PDF Author: Yehoshua Arieli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135317666
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
This volume, first published in 1984, contains the principal papers from a distinguished colloquium held in 1982. Its avowed purpose is to investigate further the notion of "totalitarian democracy" and to look at its repercussions in the contemporary world.

Women, Work, and Activism

Women, Work, and Activism PDF Author: Eloisa Betti
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633864429
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The thirteen critical and well-documented chapters of Women, Work and Activism examine women’s labor struggle from late nineteenth-century Portuguese mutual societies to Yugoslav peasant women’s work in the 1930s, and from the Catalan labor movement under the Franco dictatorship to workplace democracy in the United States. The authors portray women's labor activism in a wide variety of contexts. This includes spontaneous resistance to masculinist trade unionism, the feminist engagement of women workers, the activism of communist wives of workers, and female long-distance migration, among others. The chapters address the gendered involvement of working people in multiple and often precarious and unstable labor relations and in unpaid labor, as well as the role of the state and other institutions in shaping the history of women’s labor. The book is an innovative contribution to both the new labor history and feminist history. It fully integrates the conceptual advances made by gender historians in the study of labor activism, driving home critiques of Eurocentric historiographies of labor to Europe while simultaneously contributing to an inclusive history of women’s labor-related activism wherever to be found. Examining women’s activism in male-dominated movements and institutions, and in women’s networks and organizations, the authors make a case for a new direction in gender history.

Working Toward Whiteness

Working Toward Whiteness PDF Author: David R. Roediger
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 078672210X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
How did immigrants to the United States come to see themselves as white? David R. Roediger has been in the vanguard of the study of race and labor in American history for decades. He first came to prominence as the author of The Wages of Whiteness, a classic study of racism in the development of a white working class in nineteenth-century America. In Working Toward Whiteness, Roediger continues that history into the twentieth century. He recounts how ethnic groups considered white today-including Jewish-, Italian-, and Polish-Americans-were once viewed as undesirables by the WASP establishment in the United States. They eventually became part of white America, through the nascent labor movement, New Deal reforms, and a rise in home-buying. Once assimilated as fully white, many of them adopted the racism of those whites who formerly looked down on them as inferior. From ethnic slurs to racially restrictive covenants-the real estate agreements that ensured all-white neighborhoods-Roediger explores the mechanisms by which immigrants came to enjoy the privileges of being white in America. A disturbing, necessary, masterful history, Working Toward Whiteness uses the past to illuminate the present. In an Introduction to the 2018 edition, Roediger considers the resonance of the book in the age of Trump, showing how Working Toward Whiteness remains as relevant as ever even though most migrants today are not from Europe.

 PDF Author:
Publisher: Odile Jacob
ISBN: 2738178855
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description


Rescue, Relief, and Resistance

Rescue, Relief, and Resistance PDF Author: Catherine Collomp
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814346219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
How American labor leaders came to the rescue of political and Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee's Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934–1945 is the English translation of Catherine Collomp’s award-winning book on the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC). Formed in New York City in 1934 by the leaders of the Jewish Labor Movement, the JLC came to the forefront of American labor’s reaction to Nazism and antisemitism. Situated at the crossroads of several fields of inquiry—Jewish history, immigration and exile studies, American and international labor history, World War II in France and in Poland—the history of the JLC is by nature transnational. It brings to the fore the strength of ties between the Yiddish-speaking Jewish worlds across the globe. Rescue, Relief, and Resistance contains six chapters. Chapter 1 describes the political origin of the JLC, whose founders had been Bundist militants in the Russian empire before their emigration to the United States, and asserts its roots in the American Jewish Labor movement of the 1930s. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss how the JLC established formal links with the European non-communist labor movement, especially through the Labor and Socialist International and the International Federation of Trade Unions. Chapter 4 focuses on the approximately 1,500 European labor and socialist leaders and left-wing intellectuals, including their families, rescued from certain arrest and deportation by the Gestapo. Chapter 5 deals with the special relationship the JLC established with currents in the Resistance in France, partly financing its underground labor and socialist networks and operations. Chapter 6 is devoted to the JLC’s support of Jews in Poland during the war: humanitarian relief for those in the occupied territory under Soviet domination and political and financial support of the combatants of the Warsaw ghetto in their last stand against annihilation by the Wermacht. The JLC has never commemorated its rescue operations and other political activities on behalf of opponents of fascism and Nazism, nor its contributions to the reconstruction of Jewish life after the Holocaust. Historians to this day have not traced its history in a substantial way. Students and scholars of Holocaust and American studies will find this text vital to their continued studies.

Empires, Nations and Private Lives

Empires, Nations and Private Lives PDF Author: François-Olivier Dorais
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443889288
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This book brings together a series of papers presented at a University of Montreal interdisciplinary conference held in March 2014 and devoted to various little-known facets of the First World War’s cultural and social history. The commemorative activities of the war’s centennial triggered the conference, as this anniversary had precipitated a lively renewal of historical reflections on the causes and consequences of this global conflict. If the commemoration was an occasion to foster a more civic-minded pedagogical approach regarding the meaning of this major historical event, the conference itself strove to engage the rich and substantial body of research about the war that had evolved over the past few decades. While taking national and regional approaches into account, this book also aligns itself with the recent interest in a global history of the Great War that, by not excluding various national traditions, strives to re-examine the causes and consequences of the conflict from a perspective whose scope extends beyond Europe. By engaging in a broader temporal and spatial consideration of the war, this standpoint not only calls into question the relevance of using the nation-state as a singular political and cultural framework with which to understand the conflict, but also, and especially, strives to more clearly apprehend peripheral geopolitical spaces, particularly Africa and the Americas, in the conflict and to integrate them more effectively.

Nation, Society and the State

Nation, Society and the State PDF Author: Dr. Abraham Weizfeld
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1468545272
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
This work treats the European political philosophy that has engendered the Nation-State concept -- considered to be the logical evolution of human history as a linear periodization into the Modern State. This Modern State concept is treated as the end of history in liberal democratic theory, in spite of it remaining a European phenomenon. Where it has been imposed beyond the European political culture it has provoked a plague of civil wars and occupations, such as in Palestine. In Europe itself it has also resulted in such features as the Spanish Inquisition, the latter-day Spanish civil war and the fascist dictatorship that followed, as well as the Nazi regime and its Holocaust in alliance with the various fascist allies seeking their own Nation-State. Various attempts have followed in Europe itself to overcome the Nation-State itself by means of the European Union which sought to unite the Nation-States with a federated effort to bring some stability to the economy and life of the region in light of the disastrous wars of the twentieth century. The contradictions of the Nation-State and Federalism become ever more apparent as the EU now descends into economic chaos. This sub-title invites a comparison and a contrast between the Jewish political-culture and the Zionist movement. One may consider political-culture as encompassing Civil Society, history, religious theology and law; comprising a collective consciousness, this historical heritage forms a national identity which is currently oriented into nationalism by the State. The endurance of national identity apart from the State and with the extinction of the State is projected as the basis of an independent Civil Society.