Includes proceedings of the 3rd, 5th-6th annual meeting.

Includes proceedings of the 3rd, 5th-6th annual meeting.

In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the United States’ acquisition of an overseas empire compelled the nation to reconsider the boundary between domestic and foreign--and between nation and empire. William D. Riddell looks at the experiences of merchant sailors and labor organizations to illuminate how domestic class conflict influenced America’s emerging imperial system. Maritime workers crossed ever-shifting boundaries that forced them to reckon with the collision of different labor systems and markets. Formed into labor organizations like the Sailor’s Union of the Pacific and the International Seaman’s Union of America, they contested the U.S.’s relationship to its empire while capitalists in the shipping industry sought to impose their own ideas. Sophisticated and innovative, On the Waves of Empire reveals how maritime labor and shipping capital stitched together, tore apart, and re-stitched the seams of empire.

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation of immigrants. At America's Gates is the first book devoted entirely to both Chinese immigrants and the American immigration officials who sought to keep them out. Erika Lee explores how Chinese exclusion laws not only transformed Chinese American lives, immigration patterns, identities, and families but also recast the United States into a "gatekeeping nation." Immigrant identification, border enforcement, surveillance, and deportation policies were extended far beyond any controls that had existed in the United States before. Drawing on a rich trove of historical sources--including recently released immigration records, oral histories, interviews, and letters--Lee brings alive the forgotten journeys, secrets, hardships, and triumphs of Chinese immigrants. Her timely book exposes the legacy of Chinese exclusion in current American immigration control and race relations.

Although American Jews had already embraced the principle of fighting prejudice in all forms, western Jews often did not apply it to specific local issues involving Japanese Americans during World War II. In The First to Cry Down Injustice?, Eisenberg analyzes the range of Jewish responses--including silence, opposition to, and support for the policy--to the mass removal of Japanese Americans as the product of a distinctive western ethnic landscape.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.