HIST 341: Comparative North American Borderlands (HC)

Scholarship on immigration to America is a coin with two sides: how did America change immigrants, and how did they change America? Were the immigrants uprooted from their ancestral homes, leaving all behind, or were they transplanted, bringing many aspects of their culture with them? Althoughhistorians agree with the transplantation concept, the notion of the melting pot, which suggests a complete loss of the immigrant culture, persists in the public mind. The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity explores how Americans think of themselves and how science, religion,period of migration, gender, education, politics, and occupational mobility shape both this image and American life. Since the 1965 Immigration Act opened the gates to newer groups, historical writing on immigration and ethnicity has evolved over the years to include numerous immigrant sources and to provide trenchant analyses of American immigration and ethnicity. For the first time, this handbook brings togetherthirty leading scholars in the field to make sense of all the themes, methodologies, and trends that characterize the debate on American immigration. They examine a wide-range of topics, including pan-ethnicity, whiteness, intermarriage, bilingualism, religion, museum ethnic displays,naturalization, regional mobility, census categorization, immigration legislation and its reception, ethnicity-related crime and gang formation. The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity explores the idea of assimilation in a multicultural society showing how deeply pan-ethnicitychanged American identity over the time.

"Everything you know about Indians is wrong." As the provocative title of Paul Chaat Smith's 2009 book proclaims, everyone knows about Native Americans, but most of what they know is the fruit of stereotypes and vague images. This book presents an accurate and comprehensive history of the indigenous peoples who lived-and live-in the territory that became the United States. Thirty-two leading experts, both Native and non-Native, describe historical developments, focusing on moments of upheaval and change, histories of indigenous occupation, and overviews of Indian community life.

The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas offers penetrating, original, and authoritative essays on the history and historiography of the institution of slavery in the New World. With essays on colonial and antebellum America, Brazil, the Caribbean, the Indies, and South America, theHandbook has impressive geographic and temporal coverage. It also includes a generous range of thematic essays on comparative slavery, the economics of slavery, historical methodology in the field, slavery and the law, for instance. While obviously indebted to the foundational works of the 1960s and 1970s, current writing on the history of slavery and forms of unfree labor in the Americas has taken decidedly original, new, often ingenious turns. A younger generation of scholars has shown a healthy respect for that traditionwhile posing new, often interdisciplinary, and theoretically informed questions, considering, for example, the nature and definition of slave resistance in the Americas, evolving meanings of gender and race under slavery, the complicated nature of class formation in unfree societies, the elaborationof proslavery and antislavery ideologies, the origins and subsequent elaboration of race-based slavery, and mechanisms of emancipation. Written by an international team including some of the field's most eminent historians and the most innovative younger scholars working today, The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas seeks to explain the enduring importance of the earlier historiography, identify current trends anddevelopments, and offer suggestive but informed commentary on future developments in the field for a global scholarly audience.