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America classifies the immigrants, from Ellis Island to the 2020 census, Joel Perlmann - alkaline paper
The resource America classifies the immigrants, from Ellis Island to the 2020 census, Joel Perlmann - alkaline paper represents a specific, individual, material embodiment of a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Waubonsee Community College.
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Summary
  • When more than twenty million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1880 and 1920, the government attempted to classify them according to prevailing ideas about race and nationality. But this proved hard to do. Ideas about racial or national difference were slippery, contested, and yet consequential--were "Hebrews" a "race," a "religion," or a "people"? As Joel Perlmann shows, a self-appointed pair of officials created the government's 1897 List of Races and Peoples, which shaped exclusionary immigration laws, the wording of the U.S. Census, and federal studies that informed social policy. Its categories served to maintain old divisions and establish new ones. Across the five decades ending in the 1920s, American immigration policy built increasingly upon the belief that some groups of immigrants were desirable, others not. Perlmann traces how the debates over this policy institutionalized race distinctions--between whites and nonwhites, but also among whites--in immigration laws that lasted four decades. Despite a gradual shift among social scientists from "race" to "ethnic group" after the 1920s, the diffusion of this key concept among government officials and the public remained limited until the end of the 1960s. Taking up dramatic changes to racial and ethnic classification since then, America Classifies the Immigrants concentrates on three crucial reforms to the American Census: the introduction of Hispanic origin and ancestry (1980), the recognition of mixed racial origins (2000), and a rethinking of the connections between race and ethnic group (proposed for 2020).--, Provided by publisher
Table of contents
  • Creating and refining the list, 1898-1906 -- Immigration--especially European--through the lens of race -- First struggles over the list: the Jewish challenges and the federal defense, 1899-1903 -- The United States Immigration Commission, 1907-1911 -- Urging the list on the U.S. Census Bureau, 1908-1910 -- The Census Bureau goes its own way: race, nationality, mother tongue, 1910-1916 -- The second quota act, 1924 -- Immigration law for white races and others: three episodes -- From "race" to "ethnic group": organizing concepts in American studies of immigrants, to 1964-- From social science to the federal bureaucracy? Limited diffusion of the "ethnic group" concept through the early 1950s -- Race and the immigrant in federal statistics after 1965
Language
  • eng
Literary form
  • non fiction
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Publication
Copyright
Note
  • Source of cataloging data: WCP
Physical description
  • viii, 451 pages, illustration, 25 cm
Isbn
  • 9780674425057
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  • Waubonsee: Sugar Grove Campus - Todd Library Borrow it
    Collins Hall 2nd Floor Waubonsee Community College Route 47 at Waubonsee Drive, Sugar Grove, IL, 60554, US
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