Written just after the passing of the 1924 Immigration Act, this book by one of America's most prominent racial thinkers is an in-depth analysis of the racial developments which led to the American Revolution, the Civil War and the mass immigration of the late nineteenth century which disrupted the until-then almost entirely North-Western European colonization of North America. Delighted that the 1924 law effectively stopped all further mass migration, Stoddard devoted the rest of this work to discussing solutions to what he called the existing "racial dilemmas" facing America, namely the threat of illegal Mexican immigration, the growth in black numbers and unassimilable European immigrants. Although the 1924 act was repealed in the 1960s, this book contains many observations on race and the implications of mass migration which are more applicable than ever before. Contents Preface I. The Foundations Of Old America II. The Beginning Of National Life III. The First Forging Of America IV. The Schism Of The Civil War V. The Shattering Of Old America VI. The Alien Flood VII. On The Road To Ruin VIII. The Great Awakening IX. The Closing Of The Gates X. The Will To National Unity XI. The Dilemma Of Color XII. Bi-Racialism: The Key To Social Peace XIII. The Scope Of The Task Before Us XIV. Re-Forging America Index

Written just after the passing of the 1924 Immigration Act, this book by one of America's most prominent racial thinkers is an in-depth analysis of the racial developments which led to the American Revolution, the Civil War and the mass immigration of the late nineteenth century which disrupted the until-then almost entirely North-Western European colonization of North America. Delighted that the 1924 law effectively stopped all further mass migration, Stoddard devoted the rest of this work to discussing solutions to what he called the existing "racial dilemmas" facing America, namely the threat of illegal Mexican immigration, the growth in black numbers and unassimilable European immigrants. "We want above all things to preserve America. But 'America,' as we have already seen, is not a mere geographical expression; it is a nation, whose foundations were laid over three hundred years ago by Anglo-Saxon Nordics, and whose nationhood is due almost exclusively to people of North European stock-not only the old colonists and their descendants but also many millions of North Europeans who have entered the country since colonial times and who have for the most part been thoroughly assimilated. Despite the recent influx of alien elements, therefore, the American people is still predominantly a blend of closely related North European strains, and the fabric of American life is fundamentally their creation." Although the 1924 act was repealed in the 1960s, this book contains many observations on race and the implications of mass migration which are more applicable than ever before. Contents Preface I. The Foundations Of Old America II. The Beginning Of National Life III. The First Forging Of America IV. The Schism Of The Civil War V. The Shattering Of Old America VI. The Alien Flood VII. On The Road To Ruin VIII. The Great Awakening IX. The Closing Of The Gates X. The Will To National Unity XI. The Dilemma Of Color XII. Bi-Racialism: The Key To Social Peace XIII. The Scope Of The Task Before Us XIV. Re-Forging America Index

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection One of President Bill Clinton’s “Best Things I’ve Read This Year” From the acclaimed historian and New Yorker writer comes this urgent manifesto on the dilemma of nationalism and the erosion of liberalism in the twenty-first century. At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America, a follow-up to her much-celebrated history of the United States, These Truths. With dangerous forms of nationalism on the rise, Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer, repudiates nationalism here by explaining its long history—and the history of the idea of the nation itself—while calling for a “new Americanism”: a generous patriotism that requires an honest reckoning with America’s past. Lepore begins her argument with a primer on the origins of nations, explaining how liberalism, the nation-state, and liberal nationalism, developed together. Illiberal nationalism, however, emerged in the United States after the Civil War—resulting in the failure of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and the restriction of immigration. Much of American history, Lepore argues, has been a battle between these two forms of nationalism, liberal and illiberal, all the way down to the nation’s latest, bitter struggles over immigration. Defending liberalism, as This America demonstrates, requires making the case for the nation. But American historians largely abandoned that defense in the 1960s when they stopped writing national history. By the 1980s they’d stopped studying the nation-state altogether and embraced globalism instead. “When serious historians abandon the study of the nation,” Lepore tellingly writes, “nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism.” But liberalism is still in there, Lepore affirms, and This America is an attempt to pull it out. “In a world made up of nations, there is no more powerful way to fight the forces of prejudice, intolerance, and injustice than by a dedication to equality, citizenship, and equal rights, as guaranteed by a nation of laws.” A manifesto for a better nation, and a call for a “new Americanism,” This America reclaims the nation’s future by reclaiming its past.

"How does it feel to be a problem?" asked W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). For Progressive Era thinkers across the color line, the "Negro problem" was inextricably linked to the concurrent "labor problem," occasioning debates regarding blacks' role in the nation's industrial past, present and future. With blacks freed from what some believed to be the protective embrace of slavery, many felt that the assumedly primitive Negro was doomed to expire in the face of unbridled industrial progress. Yet efforts to address the so-called Negro problem invariably led to questions regarding the relationship between race, industry, and labor. In consequence, a collection of thinkers across the natural and social sciences developed a new culture of racial management, linking race and labor to color and the body. Evolutionary theory and industrial management combined to link certain peoples to certain forms of work and reconfigured the story of races into one of development and decline, efficiency and inefficiency, and the thin line between civilization and savagery. Forging a Laboring Race charts the history of an idea-race management-building on recent work in African American, labor, and disability history to analyze how ideas of race, work, and the fit or unfit body informed the political economy of early twentieth-century industrial America. Forging a Laboring Race foregrounds the working black body as both a category of analysis and lived experience. It charts a corporeal map of African American proletarianization via the fields, factories, trenches, hospital, and universities of Progressive Era America.