(Source: HUP)
Harvard
University Press is publishing a new book which deals i.a. with aspects of the
history of US emigration/immigration law.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The riveting
story of forty Irish Americans who set off to fight for Irish independence,
only to be arrested by Queen Victoria’s authorities and accused of treason: a
tale of idealism and justice with profound implications for future conceptions of
citizenship and immigration.
In 1867 forty
Irish-American freedom fighters, outfitted with guns and ammunition, sailed to
Ireland to join the effort to end British rule. Yet they never got a chance to
fight. British authorities arrested them for treason as soon as they landed,
sparking an international conflict that dragged the United States and Britain
to the brink of war. Under the Starry Flag recounts this gripping legal saga, a
prelude to today’s immigration battles.
The Fenians, as
the freedom fighters were known, claimed American citizenship. British
authorities disagreed, insisting that naturalized Irish Americans remained
British subjects. Following in the wake of the Civil War, the Fenian crisis
dramatized anew the idea of citizenship as an inalienable right, as natural as
freedom of speech and religion. The captivating trial of these men illustrated
the stakes of extending those rights to arrivals from far-flung lands. The case
of the Fenians, Lucy E. Salyer shows, led to landmark treaties and laws
acknowledging the right of exit. The U.S. Congress passed the Expatriation Act
of 1868, which guaranteed the right to renounce one’s citizenship, in the same
month it granted citizenship to former American slaves.
The small ruckus
created by these impassioned Irish Americans provoked a human rights revolution
that is not, even now, fully realized. Placing Reconstruction-era debates over
citizenship within a global context, Under the Starry Flag raises important
questions about citizenship and immigration.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lucy E. Salyer
is Associate Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and the
author of Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern
Immigration Law, which won the Theodore Saloutos Book Award for the best book
on immigration history. A former Constance E. Smith Fellow at the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study, Salyer has received the Arthur K. Whitcomb
Professorship for teaching excellence and fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the American
Council of Learned Societies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue: Erin’s
Hope and the Forgotten Right of Expatriation
I. The Fenians
and the Making of a Crisis
1. Clonakilty,
God Help Us!
2. Exiles and
Expatriates
3. The Fenian
Pest
4. Civis
Americanus Sum
II. Citizenship
on Trial
5. A Floating
Rebellion
6. The Voice
from the Dungeon
7. All the
World’s a Stage
III.
Reconstructing Citizenship
8. Are
Naturalized Americans, Americans?
9. This Is a
White Man’s Government!
10. The Politics
of Expatriation
11. Private
Diplomatizing
12. Treating
Expatriation
Epilogue: Exits
Notes
Acknowledgments
Credits
Index
More information
here
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