Immigration and Urban History Seminar

The Spaniards Marcelino Garcia and Manuel Diaz immigrated to the United States as young men, founding what became by the 1930s the most important shipping agency in the Iberian Atlantic world. As ardent Franco supporters and apparent Nazi sympathizers, these agents maintained an elaborate network of support for the Axis during World War II from their perch in New York City. This paper explores why, despite knowing all about this, Allied strategists allowed these men and their transatlantic merchant traffic to remain in play for the duration of the conflict.

This project is dedicated to documenting and preserving the tile vaulted works of the Guastavino Company. In lieu of reading a paper, participants will tour the exhibition “Palaces for the People” with the presenter, and a discussion will follow.

This seminar paper chronicles the rise, fall, and re-emergence of immigrant voting. It examines the arguments for and against noncitizen voting—as well as proponents and opponents—and its impact on policy and American political development.

This paper explores the implementation of deportation policy during the 1850s, when anti-Irish nativism reached its zenith with the rise of nativist politicians, the Know Nothings, in state politics. In particular, it examines the contradiction between the defense of African Americans’ personal liberty and the seizure of Irish immigrants by exposing the tangible presence of nativist force in the antislavery movement.

This essay will explore Broadway as the central location for many of Jaffe’s case studies of cultural entrepreneurs as well as the subject and site of new ways of seeing in the city. His research includes Currier & Ives lithographs, John Rogers sculptures, E. & H. T. Anthony Stereographs, and Harper's illustrations.

This paper explores the paradox of bodybuilders such as Atlas espousing eugenics principles while highlighting their own allegedly innate weaknesses as a marketing strategy for their diet and exercise regimens. It also argues that both techniques functioned as assimilation strategies for the immigrant and ethnic bodybuilding community at a time when the U.S. was less than hospitable to foreigners.

This discussion will focus on two papers, “Honorable Citizens, Ethnic Militias in Chicago, 1855-1879,” by Mimi Cowan of Boston College, and "African American and Irish Political Coalitions in Boston, Massachusetts, 1881-1890,” by Millington Bergeson-Lockwood of George Mason University. Cowan’s paper highlights the ways in which participation in volunteer military groups sometimes helped immigrants to combat nativism and, at other times, fueled nativists’ concerns about foreigners. Bergeson-Lockwood’s paper identifies three areas where African Americans and Irish immigrants established coalitions and laid claim, not only to a historic resistance to oppression, but also to participation in the founding events of the United States.