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Books > History > American history
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Counting Americans - How the US Census Classified the Nation (Hardcover)
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Counting Americans - How the US Census Classified the Nation (Hardcover)
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How could the same person be classified by the US census as black
in 1900, mulatto in 1910, and white in 1920? The history of
categories used by the US census reflects a country whose identity
and self-understanding-particularly its social construction of
race-is closely tied to the continuous polling on the composition
of its population. By tracing the evolution of the categories the
United States used to count and classify its population from 1790
to 1940, Paul Schor shows that, far from being simply a reflection
of society or a mere instrument of power, censuses are actually
complex negotiations between the state, experts, and the population
itself. The census is not an administrative or scientific act, but
a political one. Counting Americans is a social history exploring
the political stakes that pitted various interests and groups of
people against each other as population categories were constantly
redefined. Utilizing new archival material from the Census Bureau,
this study pays needed attention to the long arc of contested
changes in race and census-making. It traces changes in how race
mattered in the United States during the era of legal slavery,
through its fraught end, and then during (and past) the period of
Jim Crow laws, which set different ethnic groups in conflict. And
it shows how those developing policies also provided a template for
classifying Asian groups and white ethnic immigrants from southern
and eastern Europe-and how they continue to influence the newly
complicated racial imaginings informing censuses in the second half
of the twentieth century and beyond. Focusing in detail on slaves
and their descendants, on racialized groups and on immigrants, and
on the troubled imposition of U.S. racial categories upon the
populations of newly acquired territories, Counting Americans
demonstrates that census-taking in the United States has been at
its core a political undertaking shaped by racial ideologies that
reflect its violent history of colonization, enslavement,
segregation and discrimination.
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