HISTORIOGRAPHY

Question 1

INDIAN REMOVAL

What was the significance of British dominance over vying French/Spanish colonial powers in the 18th century - Perde

Answer 1

• ‘set in motion a series of events which culminated in Indian removal in the 19th century’

Question 2

INDIAN REMOVAL

Why did some Americans have a desire to civilise the Indians, and how did they go about this, in the late 18th century?

How successful were they?

Includes historiography (Perdu)

Answer 2

• Partly because of civilised they would give up traditional lifestyles and, therefore, their land
• But, Perdu argues, ‘genuine altruism motivated many whites’

HOWEVER - Most federal officials viewed the civilisation programme as a means to an end

• Federal gvt. provided funding for teaching Indians to be domestic/agricultural, and for missionary expeditions

SUCCESS?

• Little or no religious change, and Creeks resisted the establishment of a school
• However, some indoctrinated with Western values/cultural beliefs
• Leaders increasingly indoctrinated and others followed them

Question 3

INDIAN REMOVAL Perdu on the significance of the Louisiana purchase

Answer 3

• “Thus the U.S. Governments removal policy officially was born”

Question 4

INDIAN REMOVAL Why were ‘traditionalists’ (Perde) unwilling to leave?

Answer 4

• Westward migration was intended to be a safe haven for unassimilated Indians, but many who moved Westward were acculturated and migrated ‘for economic reasons’ (Perde)

Question 5

INDIAN REMOVAL

Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost their Land
on the long view of Indian Removal

Answer 5

• But most of the features of U.S. government policy that are conventionally thought to make up Indian removal were nothing new. If the 1830s were an era of removal, so too were the previous two centuries.

Question 6

INDIAN REMOVAL

Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost their Land

What did ‘removal’ mean to Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries?

Answer 6

Removal was an intransitive word simply meaning ‘to move’

EVIDENCE

Benjamin Franklin, Information to Those Who Would Remove to America 1782

Question 7

INDIAN REMOVAL

What factors affected the rate of removal?

Answer 7

• Resistance
• Degree of acculturation
• Geographical area: Northern cities grew far quicker, so efforts to encourage removal were concentrated in Northern cities

Question 8

INDIAN REMOVAL

Banner on the significance of Georgia to Indian Removal

Answer 8

Significant factor at play was when Georgia began to enact discriminative legislation. State vs federal power?

Question 9

INDIAN REMOVAL

Banner on why Cherokees refused to leave?

Answer 9

• Economic pragmatism
• Had adopted Anglo-American agriculture
• Religious significance of land was equal across tribes. Agricultural value was the significant variable

Question 10

INDIAN REMOVAL

Why do Banner and Perde take different views of consent?

Answer 10

• ‘Transient right of occupancy’ point overstated by Perde

EVIDENCE
- ‘The New England lawyer and re- former Jeremiah Evarts, essay, pub- lished under the pseudonym “William Penn” in the Washington Na- tional Intelligencer.

“the whole history of our nego- tiations with them, from the peace of 1783 to the last treaty to which they are a party, and of all our legislation concerning them, shows, that they are regarded as . . . possessing a territory, which they are to hold in full possession, till they voluntarily surrender it.”

Question 11

EXCLUSION

Why, according to Zolberg, is ‘economic rationality’ an insufficient explanation for restrictionist legislation?

Answer 11

• Cheap chinese/immigrant labour was good for industrial elites - doesn’t necessarily make economic sense to halt it
• Lower class labourers had concerns about immigrant labour but they didn’t write the legislation

–> Needs to be further explanation

Question 12

EXCLUSION

Who and why, according to Zolberg, advanced restrictionist regulations?

Answer 12

• Their linguistic and religious distance from
  the hegemonic anglo-germanic, Protestant culture, was expected to make their assimilation into the mainstrea more difficult; and it was reckoned that the difficulty of Americanizing them would be compounded by the sheer mass of newcomers, as well as by that fact that many of them saw themselves as temporary migrants, who had little incentive or opportunity to adopt American ways.

The movement to restrict immigration was thus initiated by traditional social elites of the East Coast, and quickly gained widespread support among what would be termed in a later age the “silent majority’’.

Question 13

EXCLUSION

What date does Zolberg give for the ‘reorientation’ of Immigration policy?

Answer 13

1896

In this year, both houses approve literacy test that would bar immigrants from southern/eastern Europe

Vetoed by successive presidents, but eventually passed in 1917

Question 14

EXCLUSION

What was the long term implication of restrictionist legislation for American society, according to Zolberg?

Answer 14

Beyond this, the adoption of the “zero baseline norm” contributed to the naturalization of nativism, that is, of a cultural construction whereby national societies are viewed as self contained population entities with a common and homogeneous ancestry, growing by way of natural reproduction alone.

Question 15

EXCLUSION

Erica Lee on anti-Chinese agitation as the reason for exclusion

Answer 15

Race was the ‘most important’ factor shaping immigration restriction and had the most significant implications for racialising immigrants later

Question 16

EXCLUSION

Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate - what does he view as the cause of exclusion?

Answer 16

Politicians - not California, not workers, not national racist imagery, ultimately supplied the Agency for Chinese exclusion

Question 17

EXCLUSION

Calavita, Kitty, ‘Collisions at the Intersection of Gender, Race, and Class: Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Laws’,

What haven’t some historians paid attention to?

Answer 17

• Says class ie how some Asians exempt from exclusion by occupation has been understated.
• Gender equally ignored

Question 18

EXCLUSION

What does Ngai view as the ‘central theme’ of the process that led to the passage of the 1924 Act?

Answer 18

-The central theme of that process was a race-based nativism, which favoured the “Nordics” of northern and western Europe over the “undesirable races” of eastern and southern Europe

Question 19

EXCLUSION

What, according to Ngai, were the long-term implications of the 1924 act?

Answer 19

The Immigration Act of 1924 thus established legal foundations for social processes that would unfold over the next several decades, processes that historians have called, for European immigrants, “becoming American” (or, more precisely, white Americans), while cast-
ing Mexicans as illegal aliens and foredooming Asians to permanent foreignness.

Question 20

EXCLUSION

John Higham on the racial origins of nativism in Anglo-Americans

Answer 20

The origins of the racial theories regarding Europeans lay in what Higham calls the Anglo-Saxon nativist tradition, which held that Europeans of English or generally North European origin were the group that embodied the
best of the white race.

Question 21

EXCLUSION

What factors does Lehtinen cite as the most important contemporary arguments for Immigration Restriction?

Answer 21

‘The debate on immigration restriction in the first half of the 1920s turned mainly on three questions: the economic impact of immigration, the danger
posed by foreign, radical ideas, and the racial character of the immigrants.’

Question 22

EXCLUSION

What was the crucial difference between restrictionist arguments against ASIANS and SOUTHERN & EASTERN EUROPEANS?

What does Lihtinen think about the significance of racial attitudes to Europeans?

Answer 22

“It should be noted, however, that the significance of racial views regarding European immigration can be overstated.”

• Normally a mix of cultural and historical arguments rather than a ‘coherent racial ideology’

Question 23

Judy Hefland on whiteness

Online Paper

Answer 23

Whiteness is shaped and maintained by the full array of social institutions–legal, economic, political, educational, religious, and cultural.

The dualism inherent in whiteness is clearly illustrated in the foregoing discussion of immigration policy. There are only two categories that matter–white and non-white. Whiteness is defined by determining who is not white

Question 24

Henry Lopez on the significance of immigration restriction in the creation of whiteness

Haney Lopez, I. F. (1996). White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press.

Answer 24

‘… the categories of White and non-White became tangible when certain persons were granted citizenship and others were excluded. A “white” citizenry took on physical form, in part because of the demographics of migration, but also because of the laws and cases proscribing non-White naturalization and immigration.’

Question 25

Brodkin on how labouring occupations impacted the definition of whiteness

Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race In America, Rutgers University Press (1999)

Answer 25

Brodkin writes that the European immigrants who “took their places as the masses of ‘unskilled’ and residentially ghettoized industrial workers … found that they were being classified as members of specific and inferior European races, and for almost half a century, they were treated as racially not-quite-white.”

Question 26

Judy Hefland (online essay) on why Irish tried to ‘become’ white

Answer 26

• Hefland suggests that Irish become white, as opposed to ‘not white’ was conscious effort to elevate and protect their economic status

Question 27

Ignatiev and the concept of ‘white men’s work’

Answer 27

“White” workers performed more skilled labor, while non-skilled, hard and dirty work was reserved for non-white workers, including “Hunkies” or “Italians” or other European groups not yet enfolded into whiteness as fully white.

Question 28

Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, on the initial status of irish immigrants

Answer 28

It was by no means clear that the Irish were not white

Question 29

Roediger on the value of whiteness for immigrants

Answer 29

Irish-Americans instead treasured their whiteness

, as entitling them to both political rights and to jobs .

Question 30

Roediger on the idea that Irish Racism was part of a desire to protect their economic status

Answer 30

But to go from the fact that Irish workers really
fought with Blacks over jobs on occasion to the propoition that Irish racism was really a cover for job competition is an economic determinist misstep that cuts off important parts of the past

• If jobs were important, why stress competition with blacks and not whites?

Question 31

Ignatiev and Kerby Miller, historiographical debate in How the Irish Became White

Answer 31

Kerby Miller has written that “Often without capital or skills, unaccustomed to work practices in their adopted country, the Famine Irish usually entered the American work force at the very bottom, competing only with free Negroes or-in the South-with slave labor for the dirty,
backbreaking, poorly paid jobs that white native Americans and emigrants from elsewhere disdained to perform. Even ifthey aspired to higher status, most Irish males probably worked at least part of their lives in North America as canal, railroad, building construction, or dock
laborers. Those who rose later to more remunerative or respectable employment remembered bitterly that as ‘Labouring men’ they were ‘thought nothing of more than dogs … despised and kicked about’ in the
supposed land of equality.”

109
Milleris right overall. Yetin spite ofthe misery to which the Irish immigrants were subjected-misery so severe that it was estimated that their average length of life after arrival was six yearsllO-no system of caste confined them to the pick and shovel in the way color discrimination
kept black workers as “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

Question 32

What thoughts or desires did the Irish project onto Blacks, according to Roediger?

Answer 32

The pychological wages of Irish whiteness were sometimes of the sort based on rational, if horribly constrained, choices - HOW CAN ONE KNOW THAT?

Question 33

What, according to, WHITENESS OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS AND THE ALCHEMY OF RACE Jacobson, Matthew Frye, was the difference between white and non-white?

Answer 33

‘To become Caucasian in the 1920s and after, then, was not simply to be white; it was to be conclusively, certifiably, scientifically white.’

Question 34

What factors led to the concept of whiteness as colour, as opposed to the separate white races, taking hold in the 1920s?

WHITENESS OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS AND THE ALCHEMY OF RACE Jacobson, Matthew Frye,

Answer 34

• Passing of quota acts meant reduced traffic from ‘undesirable’ white races and less attention given to the divisions
• Civil Rights movement/anti-Jim crow at mid-century made whiteness into ‘a monolith of privelege’ against blackness. More binary distinctions, different white races were, again, less relevant
• By 1920s-1960s, Irishness not a visual trait but a cultural one.

Question 35

Kolchin’s criticism of Roediger on his discussion of Irish fantasies projected on blacks

WHITENESS STUDIES: THE NEW HISTORY OF THE RACE IN AMERICA

Answer 35

He also provides an intriguing IF HIGHLY SPECULATIVE psychological argument that as the country industrialized, the increasingly controlled and disciplined white population came to view blacks as their former, uninhibited selves

Question 36

WHITENESS OF A DIFFERENT COLOR: EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS AND THE ALCHEMY OF RACE Jacobson, Matthew Frye, criticisms of Roediger

Answer 36

Indeed, he suggests that in focusing too heavily on "class
 and economics," Roediger is overly deterministic and misses "the full complexity of whiteness in its vicissitudes."

Warranted?

In chapter four, Roediger: But to go from the fact that Irish workers really fought with Blacks over jobs on occasion to the propoition that Irish racism was really a cover for job competition is an economic determinist misstep that cuts off important parts of the past’

Question 37

What does Kolchin see as a problem in the studies of whiteness?

WHITENESS STUDIES: THE NEW HISTORY OF THE RACE IN AMERICA

Answer 37

In an argument further developed by Ignatiev, Roediger asserts that “it was by no means clear that the Irish were white.” They present little evidence, however, that most Ameri-cans viewed the Irish as non-white

‘notable lack of precision’

Question 38

Ignatiev’s thesis

Answer 38

• looks at how the Irish ‘became white’
• Oppressed race left homeland and began to engage with the system of race heirarchy in America
• ‘To enter the white race was a strategy to secure an advantage in a competitive society.’
• To Irish laborers, to become white meant at first that they could sell themselves piecemeal instead of being
  sold for life, and later that they could compete for jobs in all spheres

‘white skin made them eligible but did not guarantee them admittance’ - AGREES WITH ROEDIGER

Question 39

Eric Arnesen’s criticisms of whiteness studies in WHITENESS AND THE HISTORIANS’ IMAGINATION

Answer 39

‘potentially fatal methodological and conceptual flaws’

‘differences of nativeness - culture, language and religion, and perceptions of race - though not necessarily whiteness, operated to keep them apart’

‘by manipulating definitions and putting words into historical subjects’ mouths, the Irish became white because historians, not their contemporaries, first made them ‘not white’ before making them ‘white’

to much psychoanalysis by Roediger

Overall, problems make it ‘a problematic category for historical analysis’

Question 40

Ngai on the significance of the 1924 immigration act to the construction of whiteness

The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the
Immigration Act of 1924

Answer 40

At another level, the law constructed a white American race, in which persons of Euro- pean descent shared a common whiteness that made them distinct from those deemed to be not white

Question 41

What was the difference between the legal and ‘common’ constructions of whiteness?

Lopez, Ian H. White by Law: the Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York UP, 2006. Print., p. 4

Answer 41

“’Common knowledge’ rationales, appeal[ing] to popular, widely held conceptions of races and racial divisions”,[7] and “scientific evidence” rationales, which “justified racial divisions by reference to the naturalistic studies of humankind”

Question 42

Historian Joshua Zeitz in his White Ethnic New York states that….

Answer 42

“whiteness did not equal sameness. Jewish, Italian, and Irish Americans continued to view the world through distinct prisms, and to interpret a range of political,
social, and cultural issues differently from each other. In grafting race so tightly onto ethnicity, historians have lost perspective on the diversity among and between different white urban dwellers in midcentury America.

Question 43

Kevin Kenny ‘Twenty Years of Irish Historiography’

Answer 43

To pose the well-known question of “how the Irish became white” presupposed that the Irish did
become white. But this presupposition introduced an often fatal element of circularity into the argument

Question 44

Bayer, ‘Another look at whiteness’

Answer 44

whiteness is a valuable concept for understanding how groups considered white generally benefited in American society with regard to wage, occupational mobility, and acceptance

The conclusion is that a white racial identity has been overstated but does exist, and ethnicity in the form of cultural patterns, values, and behaviours can still be relevant over generations