Led by: Prof. Madeline Hsu (University of Maryland)
Course Number: AMHI 680
Semesters: Spring 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2023, Fall 2024
Image: James Burton, “The New Immigrant Station on Ellis Island,” Harper’s Weekly, January 19, 1901 (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC09790)
Widely considered a wellspring for US greatness, immigration has also been an abiding site of our deepest conflicts. The republican foundations of the United States with its promises of democracy and equality for all seem to strain against high numbers of immigrants from parts of the world barely conceived of by the Founding Fathers, much less as sources of new citizens. What is the breaking point for the assimilating powers of US democracy, and how much does national vitality rely upon continued influxes of a diversity of immigrants with their strenuous ambitions and resourcefulness? Today we remain embattled by competing beliefs about how immigration shapes our nation’s well-being and to what ends we should constrain whom we admit, whom we exclude, and who can become citizens and in what numbers. This course guides students to better understand the terms by which immigration functions as a core aspect of US national identity and its contested history into our present quandaries.
Madeline Hsu, Director, Center for Global Migration Studies, University of Maryland
Madeline Y. Hsu is professor of history at UMD College Park where she is director of the Center for Global Migration Studies and Affiliate Faculty with the Asian American Studies Program. She was born in Columbia, MO but grew up in Taiwan and Hong Kong between visits with her maternal grandparents at their store in Altheimer, AK. She received her undergraduate degree in history from Pomona College and MA and PhD from Yale University.
Her first monograph, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (2000) received the 2002 Association for Asian American Studies History Book Award. Her second monograph, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (2015), won the 2016 Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize, the 2015 Theodore J. Saloutos Book Award, the 2014–2015 Asian Pacific American Librarians Association Adult Non-Fiction Honor Book, the 2015 Chinese American Librarians Association Award for non-fiction, and the 2017 Association for Asian American Studies History Book Award. Her third book is Asian American History: A Very Short Introduction (2016).