Quitting the Nation: Emigrant Rights in North America (The David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History) - Hardcover

Schlereth, Eric R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1469678527 ISBN 13: 9781469678528

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2024

Synopsis

Perceptions of the United States as a nation of immigrants are so commonplace that its history as a nation of emigrants is forgotten. However, once the United States came into existence, its citizens immediately asserted rights to emigrate for political allegiances elsewhere. Quitting the Nation recovers this unfamiliar story by braiding the histories of citizenship and the North American borderlands to explain the evolution of emigrant rights between 1750 and 1870.

Eric R. Schlereth traces the legal and political origins of emigrant rights in contests to decide who possessed them and who did not. At the same time, it follows the thousands of people that exercised emigration right citizenship by leaving the United States for settlements elsewhere in North America. Ultimately, Schlereth shows that national allegiance was often no more powerful than the freedom to cast it aside. The advent of emigrant rights had lasting implications, for it suggested that people are free to move throughout the world and to decide for themselves the nation they belong to. This claim remains urgent in the twenty-first century as limitations on personal mobility persist inside the United States and at its borders.

About this title

About the Author

Eric R. Schlereth is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1469678527
• ISBN 13: 9781469678528
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 310