HIUS 2201 Midterm Vocab

Roles of racial scripts and political ideologies in defining American identity

Gleason argues that, unlike most nations, American identity rests on a shared set of political ideas (liberty, equality, republican self-government) rather than common ancestry. Molina's "racial scripts" show the catch: ideas about race learned from how one group is treated (Black, Native, Asian, Mexican) get reused to judge others, so the ideology of inclusion coexisted with a racialized definition of who could truly belong

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur

French-born farmer and author of Letters from an American Farmer (1782). He asked "What then is the American, this new man?" and answered that Europeans of many nations were "melted" into a new people, transformed by land ownership and opportunity. His vision was celebratory but limited to European settlers.

Colonial grievances against the British

Taxation without representation (Stamp Act, Townshend duties), restrictions on western settlement, and British limits on naturalization and migration to the colonies (a charge in the Declaration of Independence). Shared complaints pushed separate colonies to see themselves as one people with common interests, shifting identity from British subjects to Americans and eventually citizens of a nation

Naturalized citizens and political office holding (debates during the Constitutional Convention)

Delegates argued over how long immigrants should wait before serving in government, balancing fear of foreign influence against the value of foreign-born talent. The compromise: 7 years of citizenship for the House, 9 for the Senate, and a natural-born citizen requirement for president.

Naturalization Act of 1790

First federal naturalization law. Limited naturalization to "free white persons" of good character after two years' residence, and made the minor children of naturalized parents citizens. It wrote race into the law and excluded Native Americans, enslaved people, free Blacks, and (later) Asians.

Naturalization Act of 1795

Replaced the 1790 act. Raised the residency requirement to five years, added a declaration of intent three years before naturalization, and required renouncing foreign allegiance and titles of nobility. Kept the "free white person" requirement.

Naturalization Act of 1798

Passed by the Federalists amid war fears with France. Raised the residency requirement to fourteen years (with five years' notice of intent), largely to slow the naturalization of French and Irish immigrants who tended to support Jefferson's Republicans.

Naturalization Act of 1802

Passed by Jeffersonians after they won power. Repealed the 1798 act and restored the 1795 standard of five years' residency, while adding record-keeping requirements for arriving immigrants.

Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798

Four Federalist laws: the 1798 Naturalization Act, the Alien Friends Act (let the president expel non-citizens judged dangerous), the Alien Enemies Act (allowed detention or removal of enemy-nation citizens in wartime), and the Sedition Act (criminalized "false, scandalous" criticism of the government). They targeted immigrants and Republican critics alike and are an early model of federal deportation power. Most expired by 1801, though the Alien Enemies Act remains law.

Citizenship status of Native Americans, women, Black slaves, free blacks at the founding

Native Americans were treated as members of separate nations ("Indians not taxed"), not citizens. Women were counted as citizens but with sharply limited rights under coverture. Enslaved people were property, counted as three-fifths of a person for representation. Free Blacks held an uncertain, state-by-state status; some could vote in some states, but the 1790 Act excluded them from naturalization.

Birthright citizenship at the founding

The Constitution did not define citizenship. Practice drew on the English common-law rule that birth on the soil made someone a subject, now a citizen, but exclusions for Native Americans and enslaved people meant the rule never applied universally. It wasn't written into the Constitution until the Fourteenth Amendment (1868).

Push-pull Theory

Explains migration as the result of "push" factors driving people out of the homeland (poverty, famine, land shortage, political or religious repression) and "pull" factors drawing them to the destination (jobs, cheap land, higher wages, freedom). Its limit, which Gjerde stresses, is that it treats migrants as responding to conditions rather than making choices shaped by family, networks, and information.

Lowell Factory (displacement of native born women workers by immigrant labor)

Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills first employed young native-born New England women. As mill owners cut wages and sped up work in the 1840s, those women protested and left, and mills replaced them with cheaper, more compliant immigrant labor, especially Irish. It is a standard example of how immigration and changing labor conditions fed native-born resentment.

Immigrant as an experience of uprootedness/alienation

Oscar Handlin's classic framing in The Uprooted: leaving a stable village life produced loss, isolation, and disorientation in the new society. Later historians, including Gjerde, push back that migrants kept strong ties and resources rather than just suffering rupture.

“The radical attempt to conserve" (immigration as transplantation, Sauk Valley Germans, chain migration)

A phrase tied to the Gjerde reading (confirm in your notes who coined it) for how many immigrants migrated precisely to preserve their way of life, such as family farms, religion, and community, which was threatened at home. Migration was often a conservative act aimed at holding onto the old world, not breaking with it. The view, associated with Rudolph Vecoli and others, that immigrants moved whole communities, institutions, and values across the ocean and rebuilt them in America. It stands in contrast to the "uprooted" model. A German farming settlement in Minnesota's Sauk Valley used by Gjerde as an example of transplantation: settlers recreated village life, religion, and landholding patterns there. (Verify the exact details against your Gjerde notes.) The process by which migrants follow family, friends, or neighbors already in the destination, drawing on letters, remittances, and prepaid tickets. It creates clusters of people from the same village or region in the same American places.

Fredrika Bremer (Für Reading)

Swedish author and traveler who toured the United States in the early 1850s. Fur uses her observations of Native Americans and immigrants to show how the two groups' histories were entangled, since both were seen as outsiders in a nation defined as white and Protestant. (Check this against Fur's article, which I have not read.)

Irish Famine Migration (“American wakes” - Kerby Miller)

Roughly a million Irish died and a million or more emigrated after the potato famine of 1845-1852, many arriving destitute and Catholic in northeastern cities. Their arrival triggered strong nativist reaction and prompted the state-level exclusion measures Hirota studies. Kerby Miller's term for the farewell parties held for Irish emigrants, modeled on funeral wakes because families expected never to see them again. It reflects his argument that many Irish saw themselves as exiles forced out rather than voluntary immigrants.

Nativism

Intense opposition to immigrants, or to a minority group seen as foreign, on the grounds that it threatens the nation's identity, religion, politics, or economy. In the 1830s-1850s it was aimed mainly at Irish and German Catholics.

Nativism as anti-Catholicism (Samuel F.B. Morse, Maria Monk, Lyman Beecher, Organization of United Americans, Politics of impatience, Organization of the Star-Spangled Banner, Know Nothing Party (aka American Party))

The dominant form of antebellum nativism. Protestant Americans claimed Catholics owed loyalty to the pope, were unfit for republican self-government, and threatened public schools and the Protestant Bible. Anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant fears fed each other because most Irish and many German arrivals were Catholic.

• Samuel F.B. Morse: Painter and telegraph inventor who wrote Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States (1835), claiming European monarchies and the Catholic Church were using immigrants to undermine American republicanism.

• Maria Monk: Author (with ghostwriters) of Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836), a fabricated account of sexual abuse in a convent. It became a bestseller and fueled anti-Catholic hysteria.

• Lyman Beecher: Prominent Presbyterian minister whose sermons and A Plea for the West (1835) warned that Catholic immigrants and the pope were plotting to take over the Mississippi Valley. His 1834 Boston sermons preceded a mob burning of an Ursuline convent in Charlestown.

• Organization of United Americans: Nativist secret society in New York in the 1840s (usually called the Order of United Americans) that recruited native-born Protestant men. Check how your notes name it.

• Politics of impatience: Describes the mood behind the nativist political surge: frustration that the Whigs and Democrats ignored or exploited immigration and corruption, pushing voters toward a new party built around nativist demands. Verify the exact usage in your lecture notes.

• Order of the Star-Spangled Banner: Secret nativist fraternity founded in New York around 1849. Members who were asked about it were told to say "I know nothing," which gave the Know Nothings their name.

• Know Nothing Party (American Party): Political party that grew out of the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner and won major victories in the 1854 elections, particularly in Massachusetts. It called for a much longer naturalization wait and for barring the foreign-born and Catholics from office. Millard Fillmore ran as its presidential candidate in 1856. Disputes over slavery split it, and it collapsed soon after.

Reasons why federal anti-immigration measures against European Catholics did not pass before the Civil War

The main reasons: states, not the federal government, regulated immigration then; employers wanted immigrant labor; the Democrats courted immigrant voters; nativist energy was concentrated in a short-lived party; and the slavery crisis split the Know Nothings and pulled the country's attention away from immigration.

State-level immigration regulations (exclusion & deportation) - Hirota’s argument

Hirota argues that U.S. immigration policy began in the states, not in Congress. Seaboard states like Massachusetts and New York screened arriving ships and shipped poor, sick, or disabled immigrants back, charging shipmasters fees and bonds to cover relief costs. These policies targeted poverty, especially among the Irish, rather than Catholicism alone. The Supreme Court later struck down state head taxes, which pushed the power toward the federal government

Citizenship status of free blacks from the founding to the Civil War

Unsettled and shrinking over time. Some Northern states allowed Black men to vote after independence, but the 1790 naturalization law excluded them, and by the 1830s-1850s states were removing voting rights, restricting movement, and in the Dred Scott decision the Supreme Court declared they could not be citizens at all.

American Colonization Society

Founded in 1816 by white leaders (including Henry Clay) to resettle free Black Americans in Africa, leading to the colony of Liberia. It rested on the idea that Black people could never be equal citizens, and most Black Americans opposed it.

Black Laws

State and local laws, especially in Midwestern free states like Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, that restricted free Black residents by requiring entry bonds, registration, and barring testimony against whites, voting, and public schooling. They were meant to discourage Black migration and settlement.

Colored Conventions Movement

Series of national and state conventions, starting in Philadelphia in 1830, where Black leaders organized against slavery, colonization, and discrimination, and demanded citizenship, education, and voting rights. A Black-led counter to the Black Laws and colonization.

State regulation of black migration in the antebellum era (Schoeppner’s argument)

Schoeppner argues that states used their police powers to regulate the entry of free Black migrants, for example by quarantining Black sailors (as in South Carolina's Negro Seamen Act) or demanding bonds. Treating Black people as dangerous outsiders to be screened at state borders created early immigration-style controls and also cast their citizenship in doubt. (This is my summary of the article's thesis; confirm against your reading.)

Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857)

Enslaved man Dred Scott sued for freedom after living in free territory. The Court ruled 7-2 against him, holding that people of African descent, free or enslaved, could not be U.S. citizens and had no standing to sue in federal court, and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories.

Justice Taney’s definitions of citizenship status of free blacks and slaves

Taney wrote that Black people had been regarded at the founding as "beings of an inferior order" outside the political community. Enslaved people were property protected by the Constitution, and free Blacks, even if citizens of a state, could not be U.S. citizens.

Justice Taney’s definition of US citizenship

Taney held that U.S. citizenship belonged only to the people who made up the political community at the founding and their descendants, plus those later naturalized under federal law. State citizenship alone did not confer national citizenship.

Missouri Compromise (1820)

Admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state and banned slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Territory north of 36°30'. Dred Scott declared it unconstitutional.

Fourteenth Amendment

Ratified in 1868. Made all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction citizens, and guaranteed due process and equal protection against the states. It overturned Dred Scott and established birthright citizenship, though Native Americans were not considered covered until 1924.

Gold Rush

The 1848-49 discovery of gold in California drew thousands of Chinese migrants (who called it "Gold Mountain") alongside people from around the world. Competition for claims soon produced discriminatory measures such as the Foreign Miners' Tax.

Henry George

Journalist and economist (later author of Progress and Poverty) who argued in 1869 that Chinese labor lowered wages and could not be assimilated. His respectable, economic arguments helped legitimize the anti-Chinese movement.

Anti-Chinese Movement in California

Combination of mob violence, boycotts, political campaigns, and discriminatory laws against the Chinese from the 1850s to the 1880s. It grew sharply after the 1870s depression and became the political base for national exclusion.

Legal discrimination against the Chinese in California

Included the Foreign Miners' Tax, a 1854 ruling (People v. Hall) barring Chinese testimony against whites, school segregation, special taxes and head taxes on Chinese arrivals, laundry and "cubic air" ordinances, and the 1879 state constitution's restrictions on employment.

Central Pacific Railroad

Company that built the western half of the transcontinental railroad (finished 1869) using thousands of Chinese workers, who made up most of its labor force. After completion, many were left looking for work, which sharpened competition and resentment

Niche occupations

Jobs where Chinese immigrants clustered, including laundries, restaurants, domestic service, farm labor, and fishing, often because discrimination and hostility pushed them out of other work. It's how many Chinese carved out economic space and also how critics accused them of undercutting white workers.

Chinese resort to the courts

Chinese immigrants and community organizations used lawsuits and diplomatic complaints to fight discriminatory laws, often winning (for example, Yick Wo). Erika Lee uses this to show that Chinese migrants actively resisted exclusion instead of passively accepting it

Workingmen’s Party

California party founded in 1877 amid economic depression, built around anti-Chinese politics and hostility toward railroad and monopoly power. Its slogan was "The Chinese must go!" and it shaped the state's 1879 constitution

Denis Kearney

Irish-born labor agitator who led the Workingmen's Party and held "sandlot" rallies in San Francisco denouncing the Chinese and capitalists

Page Act of 1875 (see Erika Lee, At America’s Gates, Ch. 1)

The first federal law restricting immigration. Barred entry of contract laborers and women brought for prostitution from "China, Japan, or any Oriental country," but in practice was enforced against Chinese women through invasive interrogations, sharply reducing their numbers.

Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

Suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years and barred Chinese from naturalization, the first federal law to exclude a group on the basis of race and nationality. Merchants, students, teachers, and diplomats were exempt, and Chinese residents needed certificates to reenter. Congress extended it repeatedly (Geary Act 1892, made permanent in 1902) until repeal in 1943.

Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886)

The Court struck down a San Francisco laundry ordinance enforced almost entirely against Chinese owners, holding that the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause covers all persons, including non-citizens, and bars discriminatory enforcement of neutral laws.

Angell Treaty 1880

Treaty with China, named for negotiator James B. Angell, that let the U.S. "regulate, limit, or suspend" but not totally ban Chinese laborers. It gave Congress the diplomatic opening for the 1882 Exclusion Act.

Rock Springs Massacre (1885)

White coal miners in Wyoming Territory attacked their Chinese coworkers, killing at least 28 and burning their homes. No one was convicted, but the incident led to a diplomatic crisis with China.

Indemnity

A payment for damages. After Rock Springs, the U.S. paid China an indemnity to compensate victims' losses (while denying legal liability), a rare case of the government acknowledging the harm.

Chae Chan Ping v. United States (Chinese Exclusion Case), 130 U.S. 581 (1889)

A Chinese laborer with a valid reentry certificate was barred after the 1888 Scott Act canceled such certificates. The Court upheld the law, ruling that Congress's power to exclude foreigners is an attribute of national sovereignty that can override treaties and earlier statutes.

Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 149 U.S. 698 (1893)

Upheld the Geary Act's requirement that Chinese residents carry certificates of residence and be deported without one, extending the sovereignty reasoning from exclusion to deportation.

Nishimura Ekiu v. United States, 142 U.S. 651 (1892)

A Japanese woman was refused admission at San Francisco. The Court held that immigration officials' decisions on admission are final and that courts need not review them, so due process for arriving immigrants is whatever Congress provides.

Plenary Power doctrine

The principle, rooted in Chae Chan Ping and Fong Yue Ting, that Congress and the executive have nearly unlimited authority over immigration, so courts largely defer and ordinary constitutional limits apply weakly. It remains the foundation for broad immigration authority today.

Castle Garden (1855)

New York State's immigrant landing depot at the tip of Manhattan, which processed roughly eight million arrivals until 1890. It was run by the state to protect newcomers from swindlers and to screen out the poor. It ended after the Supreme Court limited state control over immigration and the federal government took over.

Immigration Act of 1882

The first general federal immigration law, passed the same year as Chinese Exclusion. It imposed a 50-cent head tax on each arriving immigrant, used to fund their care, and barred convicts, "lunatics," "idiots," and anyone likely to become a public charge.

Immigration Act of 1891

Moved control of immigration from the states to the federal government by creating the Bureau of Immigration and federal inspection stations. It also widened the excluded classes (people with contagious diseases, polygamists, and others), banned assisted passage, and made it possible to deport people who entered unlawfully.

Bureau of Immigration

The federal agency created in 1891 (under the Treasury Department) to run inspection at ports and enforce the new law. It was the ancestor of the later Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Ellis Island

Federal inspection station in New York Harbor, opened in 1892, that processed some 12 million immigrants until 1954. Arrivals faced a medical exam and a brief legal inspection. Most were admitted, but a small percentage were detained or turned back for illness or likelihood of needing public support. It is the classic European gateway.

Angel Island

Immigration station in San Francisco Bay (opened 1910) that mainly processed Asian arrivals, especially Chinese. Detention could last weeks or months, and interrogations were designed to catch fraudulent claims under exclusion; Chinese detainees carved poems into the barracks walls. Contrast with Ellis Island: it screened people out rather than welcoming them in.

Sojourning

Pattern of migrating temporarily to earn money with the intent to return home, strongly associated with Chinese laborers (and with European "birds of passage"). Restrictionists cited it as proof that Chinese would never assimilate, even though exclusion made returning risky and pushed many to stay.

Foran Act of 1885 (Peck reading)

The Alien Contract Labor Law, which banned bringing in foreign workers under contracts made before they arrived. In his article, Peck shows that it grew out of a free-labor ideology that condemned immigrant padrones (labor bosses) and contract laborers as "unfree," even though many immigrants used these arrangements to find work. Confirm the details of his argument against the article.

Americanization program at Ford Motor Company

Henry Ford's 1914 effort to turn immigrant workers into disciplined "Americans," pairing the Five-Dollar Day with home inspections by a Sociological Department and an English School. Graduates took part in a ceremony in which they stepped out of a "melting pot" in immigrant dress and emerged in American clothes. It illustrates how employers tied assimilation to productivity and loyalty.

Anti-radicalism (Assassination of President McKinley by Leon Czolgosz, Immigration Act of 1903)

Fear that immigrants, especially anarchists, socialists, and labor radicals, were importing subversive politics that would overthrow American institutions. It became a reason to exclude and deport people based on beliefs, not just on race or health. Czolgosz, an American-born anarchist of Polish immigrant parents, shot McKinley, and the killing triggered a wave of anti-anarchist and anti-immigrant fear. Passed in the wake of the assassination, it barred anarchists and people advocating violent overthrow of the government, the first ideological exclusion in federal immigration law. It also added other excluded categories.

Immigration Restriction League

Organization founded in Boston in 1894 by young Harvard-educated Brahmins, including Prescott Hall, to push for stricter limits on immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. It lobbied hard for a literacy test, using the language of race and eugenics.

Scientific racism

Pseudoscientific theories (including eugenics) that ranked human groups as biologically superior or inferior and treated differences between "races" as hereditary. Erika Lee's chapter on the "inferior races of Europe" shows how it was applied to Italians, Jews, Slavs, and other Europeans to argue they would not assimilate.

Prescott Hall

Boston lawyer and co-founder and long-time leader of the Immigration Restriction League; a leading eugenicist and promoter of the literacy test.

Francis Walker

Economist and head of the U.S. Census who argued that new arrivals from southern and eastern Europe were lower in quality than earlier immigrants, and that immigration depressed native birth rates, a version of "race suicide."

Henry Cabot Lodge

Massachusetts senator and Immigration Restriction League ally who sponsored the literacy test in Congress for two decades, helping its eventual passage in 1917.

Literacy Test (immigration)

Requirement that immigrants be able to read in some language, intended to exclude southern and eastern Europeans, who had lower literacy rates. Presidents Cleveland, Taft, and Wilson vetoed versions of it, but Congress finally passed it over Wilson's veto in 1917.

Madison Grant

Eugenicist and author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916), which promoted the supremacy of the "Nordic" race and warned of its decline from immigration. His ideas influenced the national origins quotas of 1924.

Impact of WW1, 1917 Bolshevik Revolution on xenophobia and immigration law and policy (Red Scare)

The war sharpened suspicion of German Americans and "hyphenated" loyalties, and the revolution made radicalism look like a foreign threat. Together they strengthened support for restriction and for deporting people with suspect politics. Postwar panic over bombings, strikes, and Communist influence. Government raids (the Palmer Raids) arrested thousands of immigrants and deported hundreds, and the climate helped pass permanent quotas.

Immigration Act of 1917 (Asiatic Barred Zone)

Major restriction law that imposed the literacy test, created the Asiatic Barred Zone, raised the head tax, and added further excluded categories. Region stretching from Afghanistan and India through Southeast Asia to the Pacific whose residents were barred from immigrating. It extended the racial exclusion first aimed at the Chinese to nearly all of Asia (Japan and the Philippines were handled separately).

Emergency Quota Act of 1921

The first numerical limits on European immigration. It capped each nationality at 3 percent of its foreign-born population in the 1910 census, and set a yearly ceiling of roughly 350,000, favoring northern and western Europeans.

Immigration Act of 1924 (especially national origins quota system)

Cut the cap to about 150,000 a year and based quotas on the nationalities of the U.S. population (initially 2 percent of the 1890 census, then a national origins formula), deliberately favoring northern and western Europe and sharply limiting southern and eastern Europe. It also barred "aliens ineligible for citizenship," which excluded Japanese and other Asians, while leaving the Western Hemisphere free of quotas.

Julian Lim’s “hybrid” borderlands

In Porous Borders, Lim describes the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a mixed, multiracial space where Mexicans, Chinese, Native peoples, Black Americans, and whites interacted, and where racial categories were fluid rather than fixed. Border enforcement was shaped by this hybridity, since officials tried to impose clearer racial and national boundaries on a population that kept crossing them.

Why the admission of Mexican migrants was not limited by the 1924 national origins quota system

The 1924 act imposed quotas only on the Eastern Hemisphere, leaving the Western Hemisphere unrestricted. Southwestern agricultural employers lobbied hard to keep Mexican labor available, and the U.S. government also had diplomatic reasons to avoid antagonizing Latin American countries.

Non-immigrant border crossers

Residents of the border region who crossed regularly to work, shop, or visit family and were not counted as immigrants. This classification kept them exempt from many immigration requirements and shows that the border was a lived, local space.

Zimmerman Telegram

A 1917 message from Germany proposing a military alliance with Mexico against the United States, in exchange for the return of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Its release helped push the U.S. into World War I and heightened suspicion of the Mexican border as a security threat.

Impact of Immigration Act of 1917 and Passport Act of 1918 on border residents

The 1917 act applied the head tax and literacy test to Mexicans entering at the border, and the 1918 passport law added wartime documentation requirements. Together they disrupted routine crossings, forced border residents into inspection, and turned some previously ordinary crossings into "illegal" entries.

A “sectional” immigration policy on the U.S.-Mexico border

Policy at the Southwest border was set differently from the rest of the country, shaped by regional economic interests such as agriculture, mining, and railroads, which wanted flexibility to import Mexican labor. Officials used waivers and exemptions rather than treating the border like the Atlantic and Pacific ports.

World War 1 agricultural labor program

Temporary program (1917-1921) allowing Mexican workers into the United States for agriculture and other wartime jobs, set up after employers complained of labor shortages. Tens of thousands came, many stayed, and it became a model for later guest-worker programs like the Bracero Program.

Literacy test waiver

Exemption granted to Mexican workers in the wartime labor program (along with the head tax and contract labor ban), showing that the government suspended restrictions when employers needed workers.

Border crossing cards

Documents issued to regular border crossers so they could move across without being processed as immigrants each time. They helped officials manage non-immigrant traffic while keeping track of who crossed.