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2009 OAH Exhibitor Information Request an advanced copy of Gary Gerstle's paper to be presented at the meeting
2009 TAH Symposium
Read the Call for Presentations for the meeting |
Identifying Strangers and Regulating Migration in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World Friday, March 27, 2009; 01:45 PM This session focuses on the “creative uses” that may be in store for Dayton and Salinger’s research on an extraordinary source, Robert Love’s warning out records in pre-revolutionary Boston. A petty clerk appointed at age 65 to identify and warn to depart all “strangers” arriving in Boston, Mr. Love kept detailed notes on the over four thousand men, women, and children he encountered. He was an indefatigable enforcer of “warning out,” New England’s peculiar method of registering and surveilling newcomers. The warning system had as its goal protecting the town coffers from paying poor relief for those who had legal inhabitancy elsewhere. Despite its rhetoric, the warning system actually allowed the vast majority of newcomers to sojourn in Boston (for the many using the town as a temporary way-station) or to stay and settle, as long as they found work and were not disorderly. Love’s records, complemented by biographical research on travelers’ lives and fates, shed new light on both the regional labor market of colonial port towns and the migrants circulating through the British Atlantic World in the wake of the Seven Years War. Ostensibly structured as a single paper session with three commentators, the panel is intended to be a hybrid, blending research presentation with discussions of comparative history, teaching, and public history. The three commentators have agreed to read our book manuscript in advance. For the sake of the OAH audience, Dayton and Salinger will make a brief (20 minute) presentation, highlighting their findings. Dan Kanstroom, author of the recent book, *Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History*, will address on the resonances of colonial policies with 19c-21c immigration and deportation practices, thus illuminating the long trajectory of U.S. policies of interrogating and removing strangers. Billy Smith, a social historian of the “down-and-out” and the working poor in early North American cities, will comment on what new perspectives the Boston warning records offer for understanding poverty, homelessness, disability, mendicancy, and the search for employment among people who were on the move in the mid-18th century. Finally, Peter Mancall will comment on what this microhistorical study brings to early modern Atlantic world studies, and how one could use it as the basis of creative assignments in a variety of history courses. Elaine Forman Crane has agreed to chair, to bring her expertise on colonial port economies and women’s subsistence strategies to bear on the discussion, and to facilitate interaction with audience members after each presentation/comment and in the final 15 minute block. In general, themes to be discussed among the panelists and with the audience include: what a related website (which we plan as a future project) should look like; how this new research, which has entailed compiling partial biographies of hundreds of poor and middling folks, can be useful in college and secondary level classroom instruction and to public historians such as National Park Service interpreters in Boston; and what new angles are offered on the military and political history of British North America. Sharon Salinger, University of California, Irvine Cornelia Dayton, Univ. of Connecticut Chair/Commentator: Elaine Forman Crane, Fordham University Commentator: Daniel Kanstroom, Boston College Law School Commentator: Billy Smith, Montana State University |
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