The Problem Of Immigration In A Slaveholding Republic

Download The Problem Of Immigration In A Slaveholding Republic full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online The Problem Of Immigration In A Slaveholding Republic ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!

The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic

Author : Kevin Kenny
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0197580084
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (975 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic by : Kevin Kenny

Download or read book The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic written by Kevin Kenny and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Immigration presented a constitutional and political problem in the nineteenth-century United States. Until the 1870s, the federal government played only a very limited role in regulating immigration. The states controlled mobility within and across their borders and set their own rules for community membership. This book demonstrates how the existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery shaped immigration policy as it moved from the local to the national level. Throughout the antebellum era, defenders of slavery feared that if Congress had power to control immigration, it could also regulate the movement of free black people and perhaps even the interstate slave trade. The Civil War removed the political and constitutional obstacles to a national immigration policy. Admission remained the norm for European immigrants until the 1920s, but Chinese immigrants fell into a different category. Starting in the 1870s, the federal government excluded Chinese laborers, deploying techniques of registration, punishment, and deportation first used against free black people in the antebellum South. To justify these measures, the Supreme Court ruled that authority over immigration was inherent in national sovereignty and required no constitutional justification. The federal government continues to control admissions and exclusions today, while the states play a double-edged role in regulating immigrants' lives, depending on their politics and location. Some monitor and punish immigrants; others offer sanctuary and refuse to act as agents of federal law enforcement. By examining the history of immigration in a slaveholding republic, this book reveals the tangled origins of border control, incarceration, deportation, and ongoing tensions between local and federal authority in the United States"--

A Nation by Design

Author : Aristide R. ZOLBERG
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674045467
Total Pages : 669 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis A Nation by Design by : Aristide R. ZOLBERG

Download or read book A Nation by Design written by Aristide R. ZOLBERG and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 669 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to the national mythology, the United States has long opened its doors to people from across the globe, providing a port in a storm and opportunity for any who seek it. Yet the history of immigration to the United States is far different. Even before the xenophobic reaction against European and Asian immigrants in the late nineteenth century, social and economic interest groups worked to manipulate immigration policy to serve their needs. In A Nation by Design, Aristide Zolberg explores American immigration policy from the colonial period to the present, discussing how it has been used as a tool of nation building. A Nation by Design argues that the engineering of immigration policy has been prevalent since early American history. However, it has gone largely unnoticed since it took place primarily on the local and state levels, owing to constitutional limits on federal power during the slavery era. Zolberg profiles the vacillating currents of opinion on immigration throughout American history, examining separately the roles played by business interests, labor unions, ethnic lobbies, and nativist ideologues in shaping policy. He then examines how three different types of migration--legal migration, illegal migration to fill low-wage jobs, and asylum-seeking--are shaping contemporary arguments over immigration to the United States. A Nation by Design is a thorough, authoritative account of American immigration history and the political and social factors that brought it about. With rich detail and impeccable scholarship, Zolberg's book shows how America has struggled to shape the immigration process to construct the kind of population it desires.

Inventing the Immigration Problem

Author : Katherine Benton-Cohen
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674985648
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Inventing the Immigration Problem by : Katherine Benton-Cohen

Download or read book Inventing the Immigration Problem written by Katherine Benton-Cohen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1907 the U.S. Congress created a joint commission to investigate what many Americans saw as a national crisis: an unprecedented number of immigrants flowing into the United States. Experts—women and men trained in the new field of social science—fanned out across the country to collect data on these fresh arrivals. The trove of information they amassed shaped how Americans thought about immigrants, themselves, and the nation’s place in the world. Katherine Benton-Cohen argues that the Dillingham Commission’s legacy continues to inform the ways that U.S. policy addresses questions raised by immigration, over a century later. Within a decade of its launch, almost all of the commission’s recommendations—including a literacy test, a quota system based on national origin, the continuation of Asian exclusion, and greater federal oversight of immigration policy—were implemented into law. Inventing the Immigration Problem describes the labyrinthine bureaucracy, broad administrative authority, and quantitative record-keeping that followed in the wake of these regulations. Their implementation marks a final turn away from an immigration policy motivated by executive-branch concerns over foreign policy and toward one dictated by domestic labor politics. The Dillingham Commission—which remains the largest immigration study ever conducted in the United States—reflects its particular moment in time when mass immigration, the birth of modern social science, and an aggressive foreign policy fostered a newly robust and optimistic notion of federal power. Its quintessentially Progressive formulation of America’s immigration problem, and its recommendations, endure today in almost every component of immigration policy, control, and enforcement.

Laws Harsh As Tigers

Author : Lucy E. Salyer
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807864319
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (643 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Laws Harsh As Tigers by : Lucy E. Salyer

Download or read book Laws Harsh As Tigers written by Lucy E. Salyer and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing primarily on the exclusion of the Chinese, Lucy Salyer analyzes the popular and legal debates surrounding immigration law and its enforcement during the height of nativist sentiment in the early twentieth century. She argues that the struggles between Chinese immigrants, U.S. government officials, and the lower federal courts that took place around the turn of the century established fundamental principles that continue to dominate immigration law today and make it unique among branches of American law. By establishing the centrality of the Chinese to immigration policy, Salyer also integrates the history of Asian immigrants on the West Coast with that of European immigrants in the East. Salyer demonstrates that Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans mounted sophisticated and often-successful legal challenges to the enforcement of exclusionary immigration policies. Ironically, their persistent litigation contributed to the development of legal doctrines that gave the Bureau of Immigration increasing power to counteract resistance. Indeed, by 1924, immigration law had begun to diverge from constitutional norms, and the Bureau of Immigration had emerged as an exceptionally powerful organization, free from many of the constraints imposed upon other government agencies.

States of Belonging

Author : Tomas R. Jimenez
Publisher : Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN 13 : 0871544814
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (715 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis States of Belonging by : Tomas R. Jimenez

Download or read book States of Belonging written by Tomas R. Jimenez and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political turmoil surrounding immigration at the federal level and the inability of Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform have provided an opening for state and local governments to become more active in setting their own immigration-related policies. States largely dictate the resources, institutions, and opportunities immigrants can access: who can get a driver’s license or attend a state university, what languages are spoken in schools and public offices, how law enforcement interacts with the public, and even what schools teach students about history. In States of Belonging, an interdisciplinary team of immigration experts – Tomás R. Jiménez, Deborah J. Schildkraut, Yuen J. Huo, and John F. Dovidio – explore the interconnections among immigration policies, attitudes about immigrants and immigration, and sense of belonging in two neighboring states – Arizona and New Mexico – with divergent approaches to welcoming newcomers. Arizona and New Mexico are historically and demographically similar, but they differ in their immigration policies. Arizona has enacted unwelcoming policies towards immigrants, restricting the access of immigrants to state resources, social services, and public institutions. New Mexico is more welcoming, actively seeking to protect the rights of immigrants and extending access to state resources and institutions. The authors draw on an original survey and in-depth interviews of a cross-section of each state’s population to illustrate how these differing approaches affect the sense of belonging not only among immigrants, but among the U.S.-born as well. Respondents in Arizona, regardless of whether they were foreign- or native-born or their ethno-racial background, agreed that the state is unwelcoming to immigrants, and they pointed to Arizona’s restrictive policies as the primary factor. The sense of rejection perceived by Latinos in Arizona, including the foreign-born and the U.S.-born, was profound. They felt the effects of administrative and symbolic exclusions of the state’s unwelcoming policies as they went about their daily lives. New Mexico’s more welcoming approach had positive effects on the Latino immigrant population, and these policies contributed to an increased sense of belonging among U.S.-born Latinos and U.S.-born whites as well. The authors show that exposure to information about welcoming policies is associated with an improved sense of belonging across most population groups. They also find that the primary dividing line when it came to reactions to welcoming policies was political, not ethno-racial. Only self-identified Republicans, Latino as well as white, showed reduced feelings of belonging. States of Belonging demonstrates that welcoming policies cultivate a greater sense of belonging for immigrants and other state citizens, suggesting that policies aimed at helping immigrants gain a social, economic, and political foothold in this country can pay a broad societal dividend.

Remaking the Republic

Author : Christopher James Bonner
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 0812252063
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Remaking the Republic by : Christopher James Bonner

Download or read book Remaking the Republic written by Christopher James Bonner and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a book in African American history. It is about African Americans' efforts to define citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States. The definition of citizenship in the Constitution is vague, and African Americans used that ambiguity to claim specific rights, thereby crafting the definition of citizenship for all Americans"--

Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labor and Modern Slavery

Author : Prabha Kotiswaran
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9781316613610
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (136 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labor and Modern Slavery by : Prabha Kotiswaran

Download or read book Revisiting the Law and Governance of Trafficking, Forced Labor and Modern Slavery written by Prabha Kotiswaran and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades following the globalization of the world economy, trafficking, forced labor and modern slavery have emerged as significant global problems. States negotiated the Palermo Protocol in 2000 under which they agreed to criminalize trafficking, primarily understood as an issue of serious organized crime. Sixteen years later, leading academics, activists and policy makers from international organizations come together in this edited volume and adopt an inter-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach to revisit trafficking through the lens of labor migration and extreme exploitation and, in the process, rethink the law and governance of trafficking. This volume considers many key factors, including the evolving international law on trafficking, the relationship between trafficking, slavery, indenture and domestic migration law and policy as well as newly emergent techniques of governance, including indicators, all with a view to furthering prospects for lasting economic justice in a globalized world.

Smuggler Nation

Author : Peter Andreas
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199301611
Total Pages : 1815 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (993 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Smuggler Nation by : Peter Andreas

Download or read book Smuggler Nation written by Peter Andreas and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-16 with total page 1815 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America is a smuggler nation. Our long history of illicit imports has ranged from West Indies molasses and Dutch gunpowder in the 18th century, to British industrial technologies and African slaves in the 19th century, to French condoms and Canadian booze in the early 20th century, to Mexican workers and Colombian cocaine in the modern era. Contraband capitalism, it turns out, has been an integral part of American capitalism. Providing a sweeping narrative history from colonial times to the present, Smuggler Nation is the first book to retell the story of America--and of its engagement with its neighbors and the rest of the world--as a series of highly contentious battles over clandestine commerce. As Peter Andreas demonstrates in this provocative and fascinating account, smuggling has played a pivotal and too often overlooked role in America's birth, westward expansion, and economic development, while anti-smuggling campaigns have dramatically enhanced the federal government's policing powers. The great irony, Andreas tells us, is that a country that was born and grew up through smuggling is today the world's leading anti-smuggling crusader. In tracing America's long and often tortuous relationship with the murky underworld of smuggling, Andreas provides a much-needed antidote to today's hyperbolic depictions of out-of-control borders and growing global crime threats. Urgent calls by politicians and pundits to regain control of the nation's borders suffer from a severe case of historical amnesia, nostalgically implying that they were ever actually under control. This is pure mythology, says Andreas. For better and for worse, America's borders have always been highly porous. Far from being a new and unprecedented danger to America, the illicit underside of globalization is actually an old American tradition. As Andreas shows, it goes back not just decades but centuries. And its impact has been decidedly double-edged, not only subverting U.S. laws but also helping to fuel America's evolution from a remote British colony to the world's pre-eminent superpower.

Civic Ideals

Author : Rogers M. Smith
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300078770
Total Pages : 740 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (787 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Civic Ideals by : Rogers M. Smith

Download or read book Civic Ideals written by Rogers M. Smith and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is civic identity in the United States really defined by liberal, democratic political principles? Or is U.S. citizenship the product of multiple traditions--not only liberalism and republicanism but also white supremacy, Anglo-Saxon supremacy, Protestant supremacy, and male supremacy? In this powerful and disturbing book, Rogers Smith traces political struggles over U.S. citizenship laws from the colonial period through the Progressive era and shows that throughout this time, most adults were legally denied access to full citizenship, including political rights, solely because of their race, ethnicity, or gender. Basic conflicts over these denials have driven political development and civic membership in the U.S., Smith argues. These conflicts are what truly define U.S. civic identity up to this day. Others have claimed that nativist, racist, and sexist traditions have been marginal or that they are purely products of capitalist institutions. In contrast, Smith's pathbreaking account explains why these traditions have been central to American political and economic life. He shows that in the politics of nation building, principles of democracy and liberty have often failed to foster a sense of shared "peoplehood" and have instead led many Americans to claim that they are a "chosen people," a "master race" or superior culture, with distinctive gender roles. Smith concludes that today the United States is in a period of reaction against the egalitarian civic reforms of the last generation, with nativist, racist, and sexist beliefs regaining influence. He suggests ways that proponents of liberal democracy should alter their view of U.S. citizenship in order to combat these developments more effectively.

Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain

Author : Samantha Seeley
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469664828
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain by : Samantha Seeley

Download or read book Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain written by Samantha Seeley and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who had the right to live within the newly united states of America? In the country's founding decades, federal and state politicians debated which categories of people could remain and which should be subject to removal. The result was a white Republic, purposefully constructed through contentious legal, political, and diplomatic negotiation. But, as Samantha Seeley demonstrates, removal, like the right to remain, was a battle fought on multiple fronts. It encompassed tribal leaders' fierce determination to expel white settlers from Native lands and free African Americans' legal maneuvers both to remain within the states that sought to drive them out and to carve out new lives in the West. Never losing sight of the national implications of regional conflicts, Seeley brings us directly to the battlefield, to middle states poised between the edges of slavery and freedom where removal was both warmly embraced and hotly contested. Reorienting the history of U.S. expansion around Native American and African American histories, Seeley provides a much-needed reconsideration of early nation building.

The Routledge History of Irish America

Author : Cian T. McMahon
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1040047165
Total Pages : 886 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Routledge History of Irish America by : Cian T. McMahon

Download or read book The Routledge History of Irish America written by Cian T. McMahon and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-23 with total page 886 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume gathers over 40 world-class scholars to explore the dynamics that have shaped the Irish experience in America from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. From the early 1600s to the present, over 10 million Irish people emigrated to various points around the globe. Of them, more than six million settled in what we now call the United States of America. Some were emigrants, some were exiles, and some were refugees—but they all brought with them habits, ideas, and beliefs from Ireland, which played a role in shaping their new home. Organized chronologically, the chapters in this volume offer a cogent blend of historical perspectives from the pens of some of the world’s leading scholars. Each section explores multiple themes including gender, race, identity, class, work, religion, and politics. This book also offers essays that examine the literary and/or artistic production of each era. These studies investigate not only how Irish America saw itself or, in turn, was seen, but also how the historical moment influenced cultural representation. It demonstrates the ways in which Irish Americans have connected with other groups, such as African Americans and Native Americans, and sets “Irish America” in the context of the global Irish diaspora. This book will be of value to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as instructors and scholars interested in American History, Immigration History, Irish Studies, and Ethnic Studies more broadly.

Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835-1860

Author : William Jason Wallace
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Press
ISBN 13 : 9780268044213
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (442 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835-1860 by : William Jason Wallace

Download or read book Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835-1860 written by William Jason Wallace and published by University of Notre Dame Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. Jason Wallace examines three antebellum groups and argues that the divisions among them stemmed from disagreements over the role that religious convictions played in a free society.

Borderlands of Slavery

Author : William S. Kiser
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812249038
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Borderlands of Slavery by : William S. Kiser

Download or read book Borderlands of Slavery written by William S. Kiser and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Borderlands of Slavery explores how the existence of two involuntary labor systems—Mexican peonage and Indian captivity—in the nineteenth-century Southwest impacted the transformation of America's judicial and political institutions during the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras.

Illiberal America: A History

Author : Steven Hahn
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393635937
Total Pages : 625 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (936 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Illiberal America: A History by : Steven Hahn

Download or read book Illiberal America: A History written by Steven Hahn and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2024-03-19 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If your reaction to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol was to think, 'That’s not us,' think again: in Illiberal America, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian uncovers a powerful illiberalism as deep seated in the American past as the founding ideals. A storm of illiberalism, building in the United States for years, unleashed its destructive force in the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021. The attack on American democracy and images of mob violence led many to recoil, thinking “That’s not us.” But now we must think again, for Steven Hahn shows in his startling new history that illiberalism has deep roots in our past. To those who believe that the ideals announced in the Declaration of Independence set us apart as a nation, Hahn shows that Americans have long been animated by competing values, equally deep-seated, in which the illiberal will of the community overrides individual rights, and often protects itself by excluding perceived threats, whether on grounds of race, religion, gender, economic status, or ideology. Driven by popular movements and implemented through courts and legislation, illiberalism is part of the American bedrock. The United States was born a republic of loosely connected states and localities that demanded control of their domestic institutions, including slavery. As white settlement expanded west and immigration exploded in eastern cities, the democracy of the 1830s fueled expulsions of Blacks, Native Americans, Catholics, Mormons, and abolitionists. After the Civil War, southern states denied new constitutional guarantees of civil rights and enforced racial exclusions in everyday life. Illiberalism was modernized during the Progressive movement through advocates of eugenics who aimed to reduce the numbers of racial and ethnic minorities as well as the poor. The turmoil of the 1960s enabled George Wallace to tap local fears of unrest and build support outside the South, a politics adopted by Richard Nixon in 1968. Today, with illiberalism shaping elections and policy debates over guns, education, and abortion, it is urgent to understand its long history, and how that history bears on the present crisis.

Black Resettlement and the American Civil War

Author : Sebastian N. Page
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 110714177X
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (71 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Black Resettlement and the American Civil War by : Sebastian N. Page

Download or read book Black Resettlement and the American Civil War written by Sebastian N. Page and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive, comparative account of nineteenth-century America's efforts to resettle African Americans outside the United States.

This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions about the Civil War-Era North

Author : Andrew L. Slap
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 0823245683
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (232 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions about the Civil War-Era North by : Andrew L. Slap

Download or read book This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions about the Civil War-Era North written by Andrew L. Slap and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays range widely throughout the history of the Civil War North, using new methods and sources to reexamine old theories and discover new aspects of the nation's greatest conflict. Many of these issues are just as important today as they were a century and a half ago. What were the extent and limits of wartime dissent in the North? How could a president most effectively present himself to the public? Can the savagery of war ever be tamed? How did African Americans create and maintain their families?

At Freedom's Edge

Author : William Cohen
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807116524
Total Pages : 364 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (165 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis At Freedom's Edge by : William Cohen

Download or read book At Freedom's Edge written by William Cohen and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1991-03-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even after the Civil War, blacks despaired of being treated as equals in a white man’s world. They were deprived of many of the most basic rights of citizenship, and were often cheated and exploited. As a result they clung tenaciously to that most important of new rights—the right to move. At Freedom’s Edge is William Cohen’s comprehensive history of black mobility from the Civil War to World War I. Cohen treats mobility as a central component of black freedom, crucial in the emergence of a free labor system, and equally crucial as an obstacle to the persistent southern white effort to reassert hegemony over blacks in all areas of life. This study has a rigorously southern focus. Most historians of black migration concentrate on telling how the migrants adjusted to northern life, but Cohen provides detailed accounts of internal southern movement and efforts to leave the South. He also examines the relative absence, during this period, of significant migration to the North. Cohen presents a thorough treatment of the efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau to restructure the southern labor system, showing how heavily this organization was influenced by questions involving black mobility. He also gives the fullest picture yet of the postwar emergence of the occupation of the labor agent. Among the migration episodes he considers are the Liberia movement, the Kansas exodus, the movement of blacks from Georgia and the Carolinas to Arkansas and Mississippi, and the migration to Oklahoma. The post-Reconstruction era was marked by a concerted white thrust to destroy black freedom. Cohen shows that while whites succeeded in establishing almost total dominion in the political and social realms, they failed when they tried to erect a system of involuntary servitude that would seriously limit black movement. Cohen argues that the difference here arose from the fact that whites were largely united on matters such as suffrage and segregation but were divided on the desirability of immobilizing the black labor force. Those who depended on black labor sought legal formulas aimed at stopping black movement. They met resistance, however, from those who did not share their economic interests. This study, then, is almost as much a legal history of white efforts to interdict black movement as it is a history of black migration. At Freedom’s Edge is a probing study of the black search for freedom within freedom.