Entangling Migration History - (Contested Boundaries) by Benjamin Bryce & Alexander Freund (Hardcover)

About the Book

This collection uses current cross-boundary theories in applied case studies to better understand how people, institutions, and ideas permeate geopolitical lines in North America.

Book Synopsis

"A stimulating collection of new scholarship that brings together three approaches to the history of migration--comparative, transnational, and borderlands--to tell histories of connection across geopolitical boundaries."--Jordan Stanger-Ross, author of Staying Italian: Urban Change and Ethnic Life in Postwar Toronto and Philadelphia

"Highlights how migrants shaped local, regional, and transnational connections across time, place, and ethnicities."--Stephanie Bangarth, author of Voices Raised in Protest: Defending North American Citizens of Japanese Ancestry, 1942-49

For almost two centuries North America has been a major destination for international migrants, but from the late nineteenth century onward, governments began to regulate borders, set immigration quotas, and define categories of citizenship. To highlight the complexities of migration, the contributors to this volume focus on people born in the United States and Canada who migrated to the other country, as well as Japanese, Chinese, German, and Mexican migrants who came to the United States and Canada. These case studies go beyond the confines of national historiographies to situate the history of North America in an international context.

By including local, national, and transnational perspectives, the editors emphasize the value of tracking connections over large spaces and political boundaries and, in so doing, present rich new scholarship to the field. This volume ultimately contends that crucial issues in the United States and Canada, such as labor, economic growth, and ideas about the racial or religious makeup of the nations, are shaped by the two countries' connections to each other and the surrounding world.

Review Quotes

"Offer[s] a great deal of insight on the complex history of Canada and the United States, their relations, and the evolution of borderlands."--Journal of World History "A sense of entanglement pervades the volume, and the reader is continually reminded of the numerous and complex ways in which migration in Canada and the U.S. are intertwined, mutually constituted, and enmeshed in global processes. . . . A superb contribution to North American migration history."--Social History

About the Author

Benjamin Bryce is assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Northern British Columbia. Alexander Freund is professor of history and chair in German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg. He is the editor of Beyond the Nation? Immigrants' Local Lives in Transnational Cultures and coeditor of Oral History and Photography.