Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain

“Throughout this deeply researched and compelling narrative, Seeley offers a story of citizenship formation in the early United States that is complicated and discursive. . . . By tying removal to the country’s foundation and British colonialism, the book highlights how important drawing boundaries is for the establishment of nations and their citizen populations. Students of citizenship, state formation, race, and American history will find much wisdom in this fascinating book.”—Contemporary Sociology

“Highlights important issues to consider as further research on Indian Removal is tied to historiographies on slavery and the rights of free people of color in antebellum America.”—North Carolina Historical Review

“Timely and essential. . . . Cross-Border Cosmopolitans is convincingly driven by a premise, that of the need to ‘excavate, recover and reconstruct’ the history of the African diaspora in North America which Adjetey argues is an important part of the history of the Atlantic world.”—Ethnic and Racial Studies

“A remarkable history of migration, removal, and how these ideas and policies intersected in the experiences of Indigenous peoples and free African Americans in early America. . . . [T]his book helps us recognize that [removal, belonging, and migration] are a part of a longer history in the matrix of Indigenous sovereignty, Black freedom, and attempts at exclusion.”—Journal of African American History

“[Seeley’s work] reminds us that, from its origin, the United States has been a multiracial society, a project built by hands of many colors. There was no all-white founding of the nation. In our current fraught political moment, this book is a timely and meticulous documentation of this fact.”—American Indian Culture and Research Journal

“Seeley bridges the historical gap between social and political migration studies by foregrounding the removal experiences of everyday Native and Black people and centering them as ‘decisive participants in determining what kind of nation the United States would become.’ . . . [Thus] Seeley demonstrates how ordinary Americans made and altered American borders and transformed understandings of space.”—Chronicles of Oklahoma

“In , Samantha Seeley studies, in tandem, the efforts by United States politicians and reformers to push Native Americans farther west and expel free African Americans from specific states or the nation as a whole.”—Indiana Magazine of History

“Recommended. . . . This work demonstrates the central role removal occupied in the creation of the American Republic.”—CHOICE

“This fine study shows that removal, as a set of foundational ideas and policies, has made a deep imprint on the United States in ways that we are only beginning to fully appreciate.”—H-Net

“By intertwining the migrations—forced, voluntary, and in between—of white, Black, and Native people in the early Republic, Samantha Seeley makes us see the long era of removal in an entirely new way. A revolutionary book and a model for telling all our histories together.”—Kathleen DuVal, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill