| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Desmond King. The Liberty of Strangers: Making the American Nation. New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 229. $29.95.
In this sweeping synthesis, Desmond King aims to reinterpret American nationalism by considering its relationship to the shifting ethnic and racial heterogeneity of the United States in the past century. His book highlights how public officials have responded to a question that remains crucial to American democracy: who belongs? That this question resounds so acutely in our political life today, as immigrants rally in the streets and a heated debate continues about the status (and the loyalties) of undocumented immigrants in America, helps to make King's book both timely and ultimately disappointing.	1
King argues that although American nationalism has rested on the notion of the United States as a one-people nation bound by an allegiance to individualism, this ideology contradicts the reality of racial and ethnic group-based identities and communities in America. King's overview chronicles the moments when nationality, identity, and citizenship came under scrutiny. From the 1890s to World War II, nationalism was driven by a commitment to assimilation (which sometimes enhanced group identity) and complicated by nativist beliefs in racial and ethnic hierarchies. Here King discusses efforts to Americanize immigrants and Native Americans, the problematic status of Filipinos and Puerto Ricans after the Spanish American war, eugenics and popular racial typologies, immigration policy restrictions, segregation, nationalism during both world wars, and Japanese internment. After 1945, group demands for rights accelerated, driven by grass roots movements and the United States' new role as defender of the free world. King's discussion here includes the Double V campaign and civil rights struggles; decolonization, the United Nations' role as a forum for human rights concerns and Cold War imperatives for domestic democratization; the abolition of exclusionary national origins quotas; affirmative action and group demands for compensatory redress for past injustices.	. . .

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