Almost All Aliens

Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity

Paul Spickard, Francisco Beltrán, Laura Hooton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781317702061
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Almost All Aliens offers a unique reinterpretation of immigration in the history of the United States. Setting aside the European migrant-centered melting-pot model of immigrant assimilation, Paul Spickard, Francisco Beltrán, and Laura Hooton put forward a fresh and provocative reconceptualization that embraces the multicultural, racialized, and colonially inflected reality of immigration that has always existed in the United States. Their astute study illustrates the complex relationship between ethnic identity and race, slavery, and colonial expansion.

Examining the lives of those who crossed the Atlantic, as well as those who crossed the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the North American Borderlands, Almost All Aliens provides a distinct, inclusive, and critical analysis of immigration, race, and identity in the United States from 1600 until the present. The second edition updates Almost All Aliens through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, recounting and analyzing the massive changes in immigration policy, the reception of immigrants, and immigrant experiences that whipsawed back and forth throughout the era. It includes a new final chapter that brings the story up to the present day.

This book will appeal to students and researchers alike studying the history of immigration, race, and colonialism in the United States, as well as those interested in American identity, especially in the context of the early twenty-first century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Paul Spickard’s Acknowledgments for the First Edition
• Acknowledgments for the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1 Immigration, Race, Ethnicity, Colonialism
• 2 Colliding Peoples in Eastern North America, 1600–1780
• 3 An Anglo-American Republic? Racial Citizenship, 1760–1860
• 4 The Border Crossed Us: Euro-Americans Take the Continent, 1830–1900
• 5 The Great Wave, 1870–1930
• 6 Cementing Hierarchy: Issues and Interpretations, 1870–1930
• 7 White People’s America, 1924–1965
• 8 New Migrants From New Places: Since 1965
• 9 Redefining Membership Amid Multiplicity: Since 1965
• 10 The Return of White Supremacy?
• 11 Epilogue
• Appendix A: Chronology of Immigration and Naturalization
• Appendix B: Tables
• Illustration Permission Acknowledgements
• Index