Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain
Migration and the Making of the United States
By Samantha Seeley
368 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 13 halftones, 4 maps, notes, bibl., index
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-7432-2
Published: February 2023 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-6481-1
Published: August 2021 -
E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-1-4696-6482-8
Published: August 2021 -
E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-5946-4
Published: August 2021
Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
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Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Awards & distinctions
2022 Merle Curti Social History Award, Organization of American Historians
Honorable Mention, 2022 James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians
2022 Jon Gjerde Book Award, Midwestern History Association
In the country's founding decades, federal and state politicians debated which categories of people could remain and which should be subject to removal. The result was a white Republic, purposefully constructed through contentious legal, political, and diplomatic negotiation. But, as Samantha Seeley demonstrates, removal, like the right to remain, was a battle fought on multiple fronts. It encompassed tribal leaders' fierce determination to expel white settlers from Native lands and free African Americans' legal maneuvers both to remain within the states that sought to drive them out and to carve out new lives in the West. Never losing sight of the national implications of regional conflicts, Seeley brings us directly to the battlefield, to middle states poised between the edges of slavery and freedom where removal was both warmly embraced and hotly contested.
Reorienting the history of U.S. expansion around Native American and African American histories, Seeley provides a much-needed reconsideration of early nation building.
About the Author
Samantha Seeley is assistant professor of history at the University of Richmond.
For more information about Samantha Seeley, visit
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Reviews
"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
“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
“In
“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
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