An Alphabet of Interpretations for “Peopling” the College-Level Survey: Aliens, Borderlands, Culture, and Diaspora

This presentation discusses several recent historical approaches to the topic of international migration as it relates to the United States. For instructors of the U.S. History survey course, it condenses strands of scholarship around four A-D terms.  In the aliens section it compares and contrasts studies with a focus on law and policy implementation, from the creation of the category illegal alien to the gendered applications of immigration control.  This section goes beyond typical textbooks, including material into the twentieth-first century.  "Borderlands" covers the importance of this term in historical writing as geographic space, mental cartographies, and people who traverse national lines.  Race factors heavily in this literature. For the section on elements of culture the presentation turns attention to studies of religious practice, panethnic cultural mixing, transnational family ties, and the realm of ethnic foodways. The final theme, diaspora, illustrates the tension between national histories and mobility that goes beyond them. It examines competing definitions of the term diaspora and contrasts research on African slaves, Chinese and Irish migrants. In all, the presenter details how scholarship on migration demonstrates several types of interpretations, among them political, social, cultural, and demographic.  Historians' choices of topic and scale, questions and sources, create different histories of mobile populations across time in a history of the United States.