Quitting the Nation
Quitting the Nation

Author: Eric R. Schlereth

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2024-04-30

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13:

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Perceptions of the United States as a nation of immigrants are so commonplace that its history as a nation of emigrants is forgotten. However, once the United States came into existence, its citizens immediately asserted rights to emigrate for political allegiances elsewhere. Quitting the Nation recovers this unfamiliar story by braiding the histories of citizenship and the North American borderlands to explain the evolution of emigrant rights between 1750 and 1870. Eric R. Schlereth traces the legal and political origins of emigrant rights in contests to decide who possessed them and who did not. At the same time, it follows the thousands of people that exercised emigration right citizenship by leaving the United States for settlements elsewhere in North America. Ultimately, Schlereth shows that national allegiance was often no more powerful than the freedom to cast it aside. The advent of emigrant rights had lasting implications, for it suggested that people are free to move throughout the world and to decide for themselves the nation they belong to. This claim remains urgent in the twenty-first century as limitations on personal mobility persist inside the United States and at its borders.

The Empire of the St. Lawrence
The Empire of the St. Lawrence

Author: Donald Creighton

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2017-06-22

Total Pages: 633

ISBN-13: 1487516819

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Originally published in 1937 as "The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 1760-1850" and re-issued in its present form in 1956, Donald Creighton's study of the St. Lawrence became an essential text in Canadian history courses. This, his first book, helped establish Creighton as the foremost English Canadian historian of his generation. In it, he examines the trading system that developed along the St. Lawrence River and he argues that the exploitation of key staple products by colonial merchants along the St. Lawrence River system was key to Canada's economic and national development. Creighton tells the story of the St. Lawrence empire largely from the perspective of these Canadian merchants, who, above all others, struggled to win the territorial empire of the St. Lawrence and to establish the Canadian commercial state. Christopher H. Moore, historian and Governor General Award winner, has written a new introduction to this classic text.