Acknowledgments
Note on Illustrations and Tables
Note on Terminology
Introduction
Part I: The Origins of the U.S. Census: From Enumeration of Voters
and Taxpayers to "Social Statistics," 1790-1840
Chapter 1: The Creation of the Federal Census by the Constitution
of the United States: A Political Instrument
Chapter 2: The First Developments of the National Census
(1800-1830)
Chapter 3: The Census of 1840: Science, Politics and "Insanity" of
Free Blacks
Part II: Slaves, Former Slaves, Blacks, and Mulattoes:
Identification of the Individual and the Statistical Segregation of
Populations (1850-1865)
Chapter 4: Whether to Name or Count Slaves: The Refusal of
Identification
Chapter 5: Color, Race, and Origin of Slaves and Free Persons:
"White," "Black," "Mulatto" in the Censuses of 1850 and 1860
Chapter 6: Color and Status of Slaves: Legal Definition and Census
Practice
Chapter 7: Census Data for 1850 and 1860 and the Defeat of the
South
Part III: The Rise of Immigration and the Racialization of Society:
The Adaptation of the Census to the Diversity of the American
Population (1850-1900)
Chapter 8: Modernization, Standardization, and
Internationalization: From the Censuses of J. C. G. Kennedy (1850
and 1860) to the First Census of Francis A. Walker (1870)
Chapter 9: From Slavery to Liberty: The Future of the Black Race or
Racial Mixing as Degeneration
Chapter 10: From "Mulatto" to the "One Drop Rule" (1870-1900)
Chapter 11: The Slow Integration of Indians into U.S. Population
Statistics in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 12: The Chinese and Japanese in the Census: Nationalities
That Are Also Races
Chapter 13: Immigration, Nativism, and Statistics (1850-1900)
Part IV: Apogee and Decline of Ethnic Statistics (1900-1940)
Chapter 14: The Disappearance of the "Mulatto" as the End of
Inquiry into the Composition of the Black Population of the United
States
Chapter 15: The Question of Racial Mixing in the American
Possessions: National Norm and Local Resistance
Chapter 16: New Asian Races, New Mixtures, and the "Mexican" Race:
Interest in "Minor Races"
Chapter 17: From Statistics by Country of Birth to the System of
National Origins
Part V: The Population and the Census: Representation, Negotiation,
and Segmentation (1900-1940)
Chapter 18: The Census and African Americans within and outside the
Bureau
Chapter 19: Women as Census Workers and as Relays in the Field
Chapter 20: Ethnic Marketing of Population Statistics
Epilogue: The Fortunes of Census Classifications (1940-2000)
Conclusion
Notes
Abbreviations
Sources and Bibliography
Index
Paul Schor is an associate professor of history at the Université de Paris.
"Paul Schor has written a superb book on the history of population
counting in the American census since 1790. The story is told in
depth, systematically and comprehensively, using deep archival
exploration of government sources, explication of long-forgotten
debates about the supposed inferiority of people from some 'races'
or 'national origins' compared to others, and the alleged threats
of people from various parts of the world to the true American
experiment. It's a cautionary tale in the context of our current
policy questions about immigration, citizenship, racism, and the
future of American society" -- Margo J. Anderson, author of The
American Census:
A Social History
"An informed account of the twists and turns in the long history of
Census efforts to color-code Americans-to get it right. We learn
that 'getting it right' has not happened and probably cannot
happen, a deeply instructive lesson about the space in which the
census meets politics" -- Kenneth Prewitt, Director of the US
Census Bureau, 1998-2000
"Through the painstaking reconstruction of Congressional debates,
internal Census Bureau reflection on racial classification, and the
grassroots practices of enumeration, Paul Schor presents a
startling insight: that official US racial categories which appear
to have been stable over time-because they were used continuously
from one census to the next with little overt change-in fact
embodied varying meanings and notions of difference depending on
their
historical context. The result is an unparalleled history of US
census racial classification that offers new empirical knowledge
and understandings of the categories that Americans live with to
this day" --
Ann Morning, author of The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and
Teach about Human Difference
It has become commonplace to identify racial categories as being
social constructs, and Counting Americans offers extensive
documentation of this claim." -- Population and Development Review,
Vol. 44.1
"[T]here is plenty of meat there to satisfy the most voracious
'clio-vore.' This reading will appeal especially to social
scientists, who, like this reviewer, have made use of postwar
census data in their own work, but are likely to know little of the
fascinating history and evolution of the Census Bureau's own
development and its ever-changing questionnaires and published
reports from earlier times."--John Graham, H-Socialisms
"For scholars who consult the US Census in their research,
historian Schor's outstanding book is invaluable....The research is
impeccable, especially Schor's use of congressional archives to
determine political thinking over a period of almost a century and
a half. Most revealing is the author's discussion of the division
between the North and South concerning blacks during slavery and
Reconstruction....Essential."--CHOICE
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
