Immigration and Urban History Seminar

Korean adoption, which Oh argues has been crucial to the development of intercountry adoption, began in the 1950s in the aftermath of the Korean War. Moved by the plight of mixed-race "GI babies" and "full-blooded" Korean children alike, American adoptive parents embraced these children as their own, and American GIs, missionaries and adoption brokers supported the establishment and growth of Korean adoption. A number of important convergences in the early 1960s facilitated the systematization of Korean adoption: amateur adoption brokers and professional social workers came to agreement on the procedures and philosophies governing intercountry adoption; complementary U.S. immigration law and Korean emigration policy oiled the increasingly efficient machinery of the developing Korean adoption industry; and poor Korean families relinquished their children to Americans who faced a shortage of desirable (that is to say, white) children domestically. Korean adoption had first arisen in response to a perceived need to evacuate mixed-race Korean children. But long after it had "solved" the GI-baby problem, the practice persisted such that South Korea was annually sending thousands of children abroad by the 1970s and continues to be a top 5 sending country today.

In early 1944, Italian POWs arrived in Boston to serve in Italian Service Units (ISUs), wearing simplified American military uniforms and doing essential wartime work locally in exchange for increased liberty. Their presence, and more specifically, their level of freedom, led to a local (and eventually national) outcry, accusing the U.S. Army of "coddling" the enemy. Yet the content of these accusations and their rebuttals, couched starkly in the terms of "friends" vs. "enemies," reveals larger ethnic and racial conflicts within the city's fractured wartime social structure over who was fully "American" and deserving of that identity's perceived "rights" in terms of quality jobs, adequate housing, and free personal association.

The problem of policing the U.S.-Canadian boundary, initiated under Chinese exclusion in 1882, evolved into a multi-faceted, multi-racial challenge by the early twentieth century. The threats posed by Chinese and Japanese migrants and smugglers and white and South Asian radicals brought the United States, Canada, and Britain together in defense of national and imperial borders in the North American West. Collectively, these self-proclaimed white men's countries developed a transnational surveillance network to police illegal migrants, monitor and track revolutionary nationalists, and suppress labor militancy and revolt across the U.S.-Canadian boundary and across the Pacific. This presentation looks at the formation of the northern border, showing how it was a product of intercolonial cooperation and exchange in which Anglophone empires supported each other's prerogative to imperial rule in Asia and the Pacific. In doing so, it argues that Asiatic exclusion was as much about defending and preserving the empire as it was about keeping out undesirable and inassimilable foreigners.

When the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion opened in December 1964, it solidified the image of Los Angeles as a first class city of growing national importance. The Pavilion was the first of a three-building theater and music complex constructed in the heart of downtown Los Angeles atop Bunker Hill and anchoring the city's reconstructed Civic Center Mall. The Music Center's other buildings, the Mark Taper Forum and the Howard Ahmanson Theater, opened in 1967 to similar fanfare. This research makes two important and related contributions to the standard narratives on postwar urban renewal and cultural institution building. First, it highlights a momentous yet under-analyzed shift in federal urban policy between 1949 and the 1954 Federal Housing Act. Second, the Music Center's construction illuminates the role of urban policy in crafting cultural spaces in the United States after World War II. Situated at the nexus of urban history, cultural history, and policy history, this research looks beyond the traditional topics of housing and economic growth to frame a new set of questions about the ways in which cultural construction came to fruition through urban renewal policy.