Results by title

Accent on Privilege looks at the complexities of immigration, asking how native and immigrant construct race, gender, class and national identity. Katharine Jones investigates how white English immigrants live in the United States and how they use their status as privileged foreigners to gain the upper hand with Americans. Their privilege, she finds, is created by both American Anglophilia and the ways they perform their identities as "proper" English women and men in their host country. Jones looks at the cultural aspects of this performance: how English people play up their accents, "stiff upper lip," sense of humor and fashion—even the way they drink beer.

The political and cultural ties between England and the US act as a backdrop for the identity negotiations of these English people, many of whom do not even consider themselves to be immigrants. This unique exploration of the workings of white privilege offers an important new understanding of the paradoxes of how class, gender, and race are formed in the US and, by implication, in the UK.

Despite the force of Oregon’s founding mythology, the Willamette Valley was not an empty Eden awaiting settlement by hardy American pioneers. Rather, it was, as Melinda Jetté explores in At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, one of the earliest sites of extensive intercultural contact in the Pacific Northwest.

Jetté’s study focuses on the “hearth” of this contact: French Prairie, so named for the French-Indian families who resettled the homeland of the Ahantchuyuk Kalapuyans. Although these families sought a middle course in their relations with their various neighbors, their presence ultimately contributed to the Anglo-American colonization of the region. By establishing farming and husbandry operations in the valley, the French-Indian settlers enhanced the Willamette Valley’s appeal as a destination of choice for the Anglo-Americans who later emigrated to the Pacific Northwest via the Oregon Trail.

Upon these emigrants’ arrival, the social space for the people of the “crossed races” diminished considerably, as the Anglo-Americans instituted a system of settler colonialism based on racial exclusion. Like their Native kin, the French-Indian families pursued various strategies to navigate the changing times and Jetté’s study of French Prairie takes on the relationships among all three: the French-Indian families, the indigenous peoples, and the Anglo-American settlers.  

With At the Hearth of the Crossed Races, Jetté delivers a social history that deepens our understanding of the Oregon Country in the nineteenth century. This history of French Prairie provides a window into the multi-racial history of the Pacific Northwest and offers an alternative vision of early Oregon in the lives of the biracial French-Indian families whose community challenged notions of white supremacy, racial separation, and social exclusion.

As much of the world tried to return to normal living and working patterns after World War II, some 70,000 British women chose to be uprooted from the homeland they knew and loved. These were British war brides, a uniformly young group who by marrying American servicemen became part of the largest single group of female immigrants to the United States.
    
Though the women came to the U.S. from all parts of the British Isles, they were an unusually homogeneous group, averaging 23 years of age, from working- or lower-middle-class families and having completed mandatory schooling to the age of fourteen. For the most part they emigrated alone and didn't move into an existing immigrant population.
    
Jenel Virden draws on records in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the Public Record Office in London, as well as questionnaires and personal interviews, in relating the women's story. Virden finds that the marriages actually took place in spite of, rather than because of, the war.
     
And, while the women benefited from special nonrestrictive immigration legislation--and found public welcomes and a good deal of favorable publicity when they arrived--they also had much in common with other immigrant groups, including a strong sense of ethnic identity.
 

The West, especially the Intermountain states, ranks among the whitest places in America, but this fact obscures the more complicated history of racial diversity in the region. In Making the White Man’s West, author Jason E. Pierce argues that since the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the American West has been a racially contested space. Using a nuanced theory of historical “whiteness,” he examines why and how Anglo-Americans dominated the region for a 120-year period.

In the early nineteenth century, critics like Zebulon Pike and Washington Irving viewed the West as a “dumping ground” for free blacks and Native Americans, a place where they could be segregated from the white communities east of the Mississippi River. But as immigrant populations and industrialization took hold in the East, white Americans began to view the West as a “refuge for real whites.” The West had the most diverse population in the nation with substantial numbers of American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians, but Anglo-Americans could control these mostly disenfranchised peoples and enjoy the privileges of power while celebrating their presence as providing a unique regional character. From this came the belief in a White Man’s West, a place ideally suited for “real” Americans in the face of changing world.

The first comprehensive study to examine the construction of white racial identity in the West, Making the White Man’s West shows how these two visions of the West—as a racially diverse holding cell and a white refuge—shaped the history of the region and influenced a variety of contemporary social issues in the West today.

A grounded, tender, and mournful reckoning with the catastrophes that launched poor, white Anglos into their role as itinerant foot soldiers for modern imperialism—now in paperback with a new preface

 

Joanna Brooks’s ancestors were among the early waves of emigrants to leave England for North America. For generations, they lived hardscrabble lives, eking out subsistence in one place after another as they continually moved west in search of a better life. Why, Brooks wondered, did her people and countless other poor English subjects abandon their homeland for such unremitting hardship? The question leads her on a journey through an obscure dimension of American history.

 

Why We Left reveals the violence and dislocation that propelled seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration, presenting a powerful restorying of how we arrived at our present moment of precarity and rootlessness. Following American folk ballads back across the Atlantic to find histories of economic displacement, environmental destruction, and social betrayal at the heart of the early Anglo-American migrant experience, Brooks offers a scholarly and personal account of the intergenerational traumas that shape the history of white Anglos on Turtle Island.

 

She shares folk ballads such as “Edward,” which reveals the influence of deforestation on the dislocation of early Anglo-American peasant immigrants, and “The House Carpenter’s Wife,” which emphasizes the impact of economic instability and the colonial enterprise on women. From these ballads, tragic and heartrending, Brooks uncovers an archaeology of the worldviews of America’s earliest immigrants. This tenth-anniversary edition includes a new preface and develops a haunting historical perspective on the ancestors we thought we knew.