The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the 19th-Century United States

by Kevin Kenny

Professor Kenny has a distinguished academic career as a teacher, researcher and writer, with a specialty on migration, especially pertaining to Irish, Jews, Africans and Asians. His latest book offers an original interpretation of “how slavery shaped immigration policy as it moved from the local to the national level in the period from the American Revolution through the end of Reconstruction,” according to his publisher. Massachusetts plays a central role in Kenny’s research, especially in the mid-19th century, “where intense hostility to slavery coexisted with intense hostility to Irish immigrants. As the leading center of nativism as well as abolitionism, Massachusetts passed deportation laws to remove alien paupers alongside personal liberty laws to resist the return of fugitive slaves,” Kenny writes. A professor of history at Boston College from 1998 to 2018, Kenny is currently professor of history at New York University and director of the Glucksman Ireland House in New York City. His previous books include Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (2013); Peaceable Kingdom Lost (2009); The American Irish: A History (2000): and Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998).

Oxford University Press / 344 pages / $29.95 hardcover / April 2023