If it happens, the move would be the largest single mass revocation of visas in U.S. history and would likely face legal challenges.

“The decision in Wong Kim Ark’s case marked the culmination of a three-year legal battle and reflected two decades of sustained efforts to deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of Chinese…

This excerpt is a part of the Not From Here blog series highlighting sections of undergraduate students’ research. IEHS recognizes the intellectual labor involved in undergraduate research an…

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A panel of UC Berkeley scholars unpack how the 1875 law helped institutionalize racially targeted exclusion at the border and laid the groundwork for the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and later U.S. immi...

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize.  About the award: "The William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize is awarded annually to the best book in the field of American legal history by an early career scholar. The prize is designed to recognize and promote new work in the field by graduate students, law students, post-doctoral fellows and early career faculty. The work may be in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, but scholarship in the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference." This year's award went to Sarah L. H. Gronningsater (University of Pennsylvania) for The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture and the Making of National Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024). The citation: Elegantly rendered and beautifully constructed, Sarah Gronningsater’s  traces the experiences of a formative generation of New Yorkers – people born into the quasi-freedom granted by New York’s emancipation laws. By using a varied and creative source base, Gronningsater chronicles how their lives were shaped by gradual emancipation, and how their experiences and struggles within that legal regime translated into political activism in their later years. Gronningsater convincingly shows how legal consciousness gained early in life connected a generation of freedpeople who later used that knowledge to influence the larger national conversation about citizenship and racial equality in the United States. Congratulations to Professor Gronningsater! -- Karen Tani  

Kevin Kenny and Maddalena Marinari, Rituals of Migration: Irish and Italians on the Move (New York University Press, 2025). In Rituals of Migration, editors Kevin Kenny and Maddalena Marinari—with …

Abstract. Drawing on women’s writing, family oral histories, and legal records, this article reveals how a patchwork of state and federal laws systematical

The twenty-seven-year-old labor contractor Kanshi Ram was a family man. On March 21, 1910, he was writing to them from a workers' bunkhouse after a long da

Since the earliest days of the Republic, American citizenship has been contested, subject to the anti-democratic impulses of racism, suspicion, and paranoia.

Since the earliest days of the Republic, American citizenship has been contested, subject to the anti-democratic impulses of racism, suspicion, and paranoia.

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