Nancy L. Green

The Politics of Exit: Reversing the Immigration Paradigm*

In 1813, a “Gentleman of the City of New York” argued that it should be “no crime for a man to leave that country, where, by chance, he commenced his existence.”2 He argued strenuously that emigration devolved from a natural right of departure and that all laws to prevent it were unjust and highly tyrannical. Yet, in the imaginary dialogue he constructed between a king and a subject, the king saw things from another perspective. The prosperity of a kingdom depends upon its manufacture and commerce. Emigration would interfere with this process, entailing the loss of skill to foreign nations. Above all, argued the king, allegiance, based on birthplace, is inalienable; departure must be considered not a natural right but a permission, subject to recall. Worst of all, if a subject took up arms against his home country, that would be “the heighth [sic] of enormity, and deserving death.” In a cri de coeur, the king protested: “Does not every good man love his country?”3 The king and subject dialogue raises important issues that have most often been ignored in the historical literature on migration. Even for our mostly

Time and the study of assimilation

This article seeks to explore the ways in which efforts to classify assimilation (and its various opposites) are linked to notions of time—the relative rate of incorporation—and are themselves produced in different historical periods. The concept of assimilation incorporates different time-scales and generations into its analysis but the use of the term also has its own cycles of usage. ‘Assimilation’ therefore needs to be re-examined not simply as a description of immigration history per se but as an analytic category constructed by sociologists and historians over time and using different time frames.

Religion et ethnicité. De la comparaison spatiale et temporelle

Résumé Les États-Unis et la France sont deux pays d’immigration qui parlent de leurs immigrés de façon différente. « Ethnicité » et « religion » sont devenues des catégories hautement médiatisées mais aussi utilisées en sciences sociales dans ces deux pays. L’Autre est perçu de manière différente dans ces deux sociétés mais, sans la comparaison, les catégories semblent n’être que de simples données explicatives. Comparer l’image de l’Autre dans deux pays permet de mieux questionner à la fois les catégories et la façon dont celles-ci sont déployées dans le temps et l’espace.

The Comparative Gaze: Travelers in France before the Era of Mass Tourism

This article examines early accounts of visitors to France (the agriculturalist Arthur Young, the medical student James Mason Warren, and the writer Edith Wharton) and asks questions about the ways in which travel and cross-cultural study yield inherently comparative tales that often tell as much about home as about the foreign country. This first element of analysis is fundamentally spatial, comparing home and abroad. Second, knowledge about a place visited is also embedded in the particular reason for the journey itself. Third, the comparative perspective is also affected by the length of stay. Both self-knowledge and formal research are activities of continual knowledge accretion. First impressions (of space and place) are constantly revised along with the accumulation of knowledge and information. Travel thus provides both a spatial and temporal comparative vision.

The Trials of Transnationalism: It’s Not as Easy as It Looks*

The observant and even the not so observant do not need a Google Ngram to note that “transnationalism” has become a favorite scholarly term in the last couple of decades. The term may be traced back to the nineteenth century and most poignantly to Randolph Bourne, who, in 1916, used it to defend immigrant America against the xenophobic naysayers. Political scientists Joseph S. Nye Jr. and Robert O. Keohane launched the term in their field in 1970. But since the early 1990s its popularity has jogged up the graph in contexts well beyond Bourne, international relations, and political science, as it has been used to describe everything from a critique of American exceptionalism to migration studies. The termmeansmany things to many people, from crossing physical borders to crossing intellectual ones. The study of international relations is having a comeback in a newlywrought form, and the histories of international nongovernmental organizations are getting new attention. Many use transnationalism (like global history) to argue that one cannot do history in one country. Others use it to seek the interor extranational in local contexts, the question then being whether to put the accent on the global, the local, or that unfortunate but evocative neol-

Uneasy asylum. France and the Jewish refugee crisis, 1933-1942

1. Introduction 2. Refugee policy and middle-class protest during the Great Depression, 1933-36 3. The conservative crackdown of 1934-35 4. The great invasion I, 1933-36 5. Loyalties in conflict: French Jewry and the refugee crisis, 1933-May 1936 6. Refugee policy during the popular front era 7. Breaking the impasse: colonial and agricultural schemes during the popular front era 8. The deluge: from the Anschluss to Evian 9. The impact of appeasement 10. The crosscurrents of 1939 11. The missed opportunity: refugee policy in wartime 12. The great invasion II, 1936-40 13. The politics of frustration: the remaking of the Jewish relief effort, 1936-40 14. The path to Vichy: continuities and discontinuities in Jewish refugee policy 15. Conclusion.