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Strangers in the Land, Gender, and Immigration Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2012

Deirdre M. Moloney*
Affiliation:
Princeton University

Extract

I first read John Higham's book in an immigration history seminar in my first semester of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. In fact, Higham visited campus that fall to present the Merle Curti lecture, named for his mentor. Higham's influence has remained significant: like many historians of immigration and ethnicity, I have often returned to his book during the course of my own teaching and research, whether on American Catholic history or U.S. immigration policy. My remarks focus on gender issues and immigration policy history in Strangers in the Land.

Type
Forum: Revisiting John Higham's Strangers in the Land
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2012

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References

1 Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns in American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1988)Google Scholar.

2 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 37, 151. Note: Higham did not specify to which Mrs. Astor he was referring, though it was probably Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor (1830–1908), the socialite wife of William B. Astor (1829–1892). Bordin, Ruth, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990)Google Scholar; Blee, Kathleen M., Women of the Klan, Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley, 1999)Google Scholar; MacLean, Nancy, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

3 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 306.

4 Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (Urbana, 1978)Google Scholar; Gabaccia, Donna, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the U.S., 1820–1990 (Bloomington, IN, 1994)Google Scholar. On maternalism, see, for example, Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

5 Bredbenner, Candice, A Nationality of Her Own: Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship (Berkeley, 1998)Google Scholar; Gardner, Martha M., The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870–1965 (Princeton, NJ, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Stern, Alexandra M., Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley, 2005)Google Scholar; D'Agostino, Peter, “Craniums, Criminal and the ‘Cursed Race’: Italian Anthropology in U.S. Racial Thought,” Comparative Studies of Society and History 44 (April 2002): 319–43Google Scholar. Moloney, Deirdre, American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill, 2002)Google Scholar. Lombroso, Cesare and Ferraro, Guglielmo, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman, trans. Rafter, Nicole Hahn and Gibson, Mary (Durham, NC, 2004)Google Scholar.

7 Jacobson, Matthew F., Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York, 2001)Google Scholar; Hoganson, Kristin, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, 2000)Google Scholar; Stoler, Ann Laura, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, 2002)Google Scholar. Choy, Catherine, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 21.

9 Ibid., 123. Davis, Allen F., Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890 to 1914, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1985)Google Scholar.

10 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 3.

11 Ibid., 334.

12 Ngai, Mae, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, 2005)Google Scholar.