Stranger Citizens - by John McNelis O'Keefe (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Stranger Citizens examines how foreign migrants who resided in the United States gave shape to citizenship in the decades after American independence in 1783. During this formative time, lawmakers attempted to shape citizenship and the place of immigrants in the new nation, while granting the national government new powers such as deportation.

John McNelis O'Keefe argues that despite the challenges of public and official hostility that they faced in the late 1700s and early 1800s, migrant groups worked through lobbying, engagement with government officials, and public protest to create forms of citizenship that worked for them. This push was made not only by white men immigrating from Europe; immigrants of color were able to secure footholds of rights and citizenship, while migrant women asserted legal independence, challenging traditional notions of women's subordination.

Stranger Citizens emphasizes the making of citizenship from the perspectives of migrants themselves, and demonstrates the rich varieties and understandings of citizenship and personhood exercised by foreign migrants and refugees. O'Keefe boldly reverses the top-down model wherein citizenship was constructed only by political leaders and the courts.

Thanks to generous funding from the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and the Mellon Foundation the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Review Quotes

Stranger Citizens offers a unique perspective on the issue of citizenship, arguing that migrant groups were actively and politically engaged in defining citizenship in a way that worked for their survival and success. Recent events have brought the idea of citizenship back into the mainstream. The immigrants who were actively pursuing their rights in the new United States during the period of the Early Republic have shown today's migrants what they need to do to navigate the rights and privileges of American citizenship.

In clear and often exquisitely concise prose, O'Keefe traces how inherited conceptions of legal personhood gave way, always incompletely, to a context of nationalized and racialized conceptions of citizenship. One of the subtler, yet consequential, implications of the book is that far from disappearing, problems of legal personhood inherited from the multivalent legal landscape of British imperialism continued to challenge any attempt to draw clean lines around citizenship in the new nation.

Ultimately, citizenship as shaped by migrants illustrates their perspective and the rich varieties of citizenship and individualism as exercised by foreign migrants and refugees. In describing this, O'Keefe shows how modern events reflect earlier periods in which citizenship was constructed only by white political leaders and the courts.

About the Author

John McNelis O'Keefe is Associate Professor of History at Ohio University-Chillicothe. Follow him on X @johnokdc.