In 1882, the United States launched an unprecedented experiment in federal border control--which promptly failed. The Chinese Must Go examines this formative moment when America's lackluster attempt to bar Chinese workers provoked a wave of anti-Chinese violence across the U.S. West. In 1885 and 1886, white vigilantes in over 150 communities used intimidation, harassment, bombs, arson, assault, and murder to drive out their Chinese neighbors. This...

"How did Americans in the generations following the Declaration of Independence translate its lofty ideals into practice? In this broadly synthetic work, distinguished historian Richard Brown shows that despite its founding statement that "all men are created equal," the early Republic struggled with every form of social inequality. While people paid homage to the ideal of equal rights, this ideal came up against entrenched social and political practices...

"Immigration presented a constitutional and political problem in the nineteenth-century United States. Until the 1870s, the federal government played only a very limited role in regulating immigration. The states controlled mobility within and across their borders and set their own rules for community membership. This book demonstrates how the existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery shaped immigration policy as it moved from the local to the...