Quitting the Nation

“Quitting the Nation is an important contribution to the fields of borderlands history and citizenship studies. Historians of nineteenth-century American expansion, diplomacy, and legal cultures will also need to engage with the book’s analyses. . . . Quitting the Nation is exceptionally well written. . . . [A]n accessible and people-driven narrative. The book would be a great way to sneak legal history into undergraduate courses covering the pre-Civil War United States.”—American Historical Review

“Quitting the Nation makes significant contributions to an emerging body of scholarship about migration, naturalization, and citizenship in the early republic and the antebellum era.”—Journal of the Civil War Era

“Schlereth’s exploration of the United States as a 'nation of emigrants' is a pathbreaking study which will both challenge and inspire scholars in a wide range of fields to rethink the nation’s history.”—Lucy Salyer, University of New Hampshire

“Covers a very important topic and does so well with one eye clearly on the present state of debates over immigration and citizenship. . . [and] conveys the unstable and contested nature of American citizenship in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”—Alan Taylor, author of American Republics: A Continental History, 1783–1850