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Podcast: New Books in Law
Episode: Eric R. Schlereth, "Quitting the Nation: Emigrant Rights in North America" (UNC Press, 2024)
Description: Perceptions of the United States as a nation of immigrants are so commonplace that its history as a nation of emigrants is forgotten. However, once the United States came into existence, its citizens immediately asserted rights to emigrate for political allegiances elsewhere. Quitting the Nation: Emigrant Rights in North America (UNC Press, 2024) recovers this unfamiliar story by braiding the histories of citizenship and the North American borderlands to explain the evolution of emigrant rights between 1750 and 1870.Eric R. Schlereth traces the legal and political origins of emigrant rights in contests to decide who possessed them and who did...