Description:
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.
Brief description: Eric R. Schlereth is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Review Quotes: "Quitting the Nation is an important contribution to the fields of borderlands history and citizenship studies. Historians of nineteenth-century American expansion, diplomacy, and legal cultures will also need to engage with the book's analyses. . . . Quitting the Nation is exceptionally well written. . . . [A]n accessible and people-driven narrative. The book would be a great way to sneak legal history into undergraduate courses covering the pre-Civil War United States."--American Historical Review