US Agencies at the Mexican Border were overwhelmed in 2014 as tens of thousands of unaccompanied children arrived from Central America. Unprepared to receive migrants of this particular kind, the US government deployed troops to carry out a new border mission: the feeding, care, and housing-of this wave of children. This event highlights the complex social, economic, and political issues that arise along international borders. In American Crossings, nine scholars consider the complicated modern history of borders in the Western Hemisphere, examining them as geopolitical boundaries, key locations for internal security, spaces for international-trade, and areas where national and community identities are defined.
This volume provides a systematic analysis of American-Israeli cultural differences in commercial, bureaucratic, professional, and social settings. the authors Act as cultural translators, interpreting Israeli norms and behavior patterns.
This text is an account of the vibrant international network that the American soci-political reformers constructed - so often obscured by notions of American exceptionalism - and of its profound impact on the USA from the 1870's through to 1945.
Migrant Crossings examines the experiences and representations of Asian and Latina/o migrants trafficked in the United States into informal economies and service industries. Through sociolegal and media analysis of court records, press releases, law enforcement campaigns, film representations, theatre performances, and the law, Annie Isabel Fukushima questions how we understand victimhood, criminality, citizenship, and legality. Fukushima examines how migrants legally cross into visibility, through frames of citizenship, and narratives of victimhood. She explores the interdisciplinary framing of the role of the law and the legal system, the notion of "perfect victimhood", and iconic victims, and how trafficking subjects are resurrected for contemporary movements as illustrated in visuals, discourse, court records, and policy. Migrant Crossings deeply interrogates what it means to bear witness to migration in these migratory times--and what such migrant crossings mean for subjects who experience violence during or after their crossing.
This book argues that the invention of Asian American identities serves as an index to the historical formation of modern America. By tracing constructions of "Asian American" to an interpenetrating dynamic between Asia and America, the author obtains a deeper understanding of key issues in American culture, history, and society. The formation of America in the twentieth century has had everything to do with "westward expansion" across the "Pacific frontier" and the movement of Asians onto American soil. After the passage of the last piece of anti-Asian legislation in the 1930's, the United States found it had to grapple with both the presence of Asians already in America and the imperative to develop its neocolonial interests in East Asia. The author argues that, under these double imperatives, a great wall between "Asian" and "American" is constructed precisely when the two threatened to merge. Yet the very incompleteness of American identity has allowed specific and contingent fusion of "Asian" and "American" at particular historical junctures. From the importation of Asian labor in the mid-nineteenth century, the territorialization of Hawaii and the Philippines in the late-nineteenth century, through wars with Japan, Korea, and Vietnam and the Cold War with China, to today's Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation group, the United States in the modern age has seen its national identity as strongly attached to the Pacific. As this has taken place, so has the formation of a variety of Asian American identities. Each contains a specific notion of America and reveals a particular conception of "Asian" and "American." Complicating the usual notion of "identity politics" and drawing on a wide range of writingssociological, historical, cultural, medical, anthropological, geographic, economic, journalistic, and politicalthe author studies both how the formation of these identifications discloses the response of America to the presence of Asians and how Asian Americans themselves have inhabited these roles and resisted such categorizations, inventing their own particular subjectivities as Americans.
Edward L. Ayers monumental history, Promise of the New South, was praised by the eminent historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown as "A work of frequently stunning beauty," who added "The elegance and sensitivity that he achieves are typical of few historical works." Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize for Best Book on American Race Relations from the Organization of American Historians, and the Frank Lawrence Owsley and Harriett Chappell Owsley Award from the Southern Historical Association, and finalist for the 1992 National Book Award, the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for History, and the 1993 Southern Book Award, Promise of the New South established Ayers as one of the foremost scholars of the American South. Now, in this newly revised edition, Ayers has distilled this remarkable work to offer an even more readable account of the New South. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts--a time of progress and repression, of new industries and old ways. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic "Redeemers" swept away the legacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. He explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing the importance of each in the emerging New South. Here is the local Baptist congregation, the country store, the tobacco-stained second-class railroad car, the rise of Populism: the teeming, nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages. And central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crow laws and disenfranchisement. Ayers weaves all these details into the contradictory story of the New South, showing how the region developed the patterns it was to follow for the next fifty years. A vivid portrait of a society undergoing the sudden confrontation of the promises, costs, and consequences of modern life, this is an unforgettable account of the New South--a land with one foot in the future and the other in the past.
And contrary to the claims by immigration critics, the patterns of contemporary migration do not differ fundamentally from those of other epochs. Global Crossings then discusses immigration and culture. To what degree are foreigners culturally different? Can natives adapt? Can immigrants assimilate into the new society? In assessing whether critics are justified in pointing to a major cultural shift Alvaro Vargas Llosa reviews such topics as religion, education, entrepreneurial spirit, and attitudes toward the receiving society. The book analyzes such economic factors as jobs, wages, education, and the welfare state. How can an economy continue to operate even in the face of major legal obstacles, and how have recessions and times of prosperity influenced--more significantly than government efforts--the number of immigrants coming into the United States and other countries? Vargas Llosa finds that immigration's contributions to an economy far outweigh the costs.
The history of Mexican and Mexican-American working classes has been segregated by the political boundary that separates the United States of America from the United States of Mexico. As a result, scholars have long ignored the social, cultural, and political threads that the two groups hold in common. Further, they have seldom addressed the impact of American values and organizations on the working class of that country. Compiled by one of the leading North American experts on the Mexican Revolution, the essays in Border Crossings: Mexican and Mexican-American Workers explore the historical process behind the formation of the Mexican and Mexican- American working classes. The volume connects the history of their experiences from the cultural beginnings and the rise of industrialism in Mexico to the late twentieth century in the U.S. Border Crossings notes the similar social experiences and strategies of Mexican workers in both countries, community formation and community organizations, their mutual aid efforts, the movements of people between Mexico and Mexican-American communities, the roles of women, and the formation of political groups. Finally, Border Crossings addresses the special conditions of Mexicans in the United States, including the creation of a Mexican-American middle class, the impact of American racism on Mexican communities, and the nature and evolution of border towns and the borderlands.
A white man married to a black woman, spurred by a racist joke to feel 'fear and anguish' for children, Washington Post Magazine writer Harrington decided to 'go out and travel America's parallel black world' to explore the nation's racial conundrums. As he traverses the North, South and West, Harrington deftly paints vivid, brief scenes: a black businessman visits prison inmates, a worker in a road crew lights up at meeting Jesse Jackson, students at a small college in southern Illinois discuss interracial dating. He meets 'hard cop' Charleston police chief Reuben Greenberg, filmmaker Spike Lee and novelist James Alan McPherson, who says, 'I'm not a great man, but I'm not just a race person.' Reflecting on his own relationships with blacks, Harrington revisits relatives and former college classmates. While the insight 'racism still rages, but it is for too many blacks also an excuse' hardly merits its presentation as a revelation, Harrington rightly observes that America's racial conflicts also involve culture and class. 'Blacks and whites in America are the same and different,' he concludes, and his thoughtful mosaic should encourage fresh dialogue.
We all know the story of the slave trade—the infamous Middle Passage, the horrifying conditions on slave ships, the millions that died on the journey, and the auctions that awaited the slaves upon their arrival in the Americas. But much of the writing on the subject has focused on the European traders and the arrival of slaves in North America. In Crossings, eminent historian James Walvin covers these established territories while also traveling back to the story’s origins in Africa and south to Brazil, an often forgotten part of the triangular trade, in an effort to explore the broad sweep of slavery across the Atlantic. Reconstructing the transatlantic slave trade from an extensive archive of new research, Walvin seeks to understand and describe how the trade began in Africa, the terrible ordeals experienced there by people sold into slavery, and the scars that remain on the continent today. Journeying across the ocean, he shows how Brazilian slavery was central to the development of the slave trade itself, as that country tested techniques and methods for trading and slavery that were successfully exported to the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas in the following centuries. Walvin also reveals the answers to vital questions that have never before been addressed, such as how a system that the Western world came to despise endured so long and how the British—who were fundamental in developing and perfecting the slave trade—became the most prominent proponents of its eradication. The most authoritative history of the entire slave trade to date, Crossings offers a new understanding of one of the most important, and tragic, episodes in world history.
