Charles Edmondson Historical Lectures
The Charles Edmondson Historical Lectures, sponsored by the Department of History at Baylor University, are made possible by an endowment established by Dr. E. Bud Edmondson of Longview, Texas, to honor his father, Mr. Charles S. B. Edmondson. Baylor University and the Waco community are grateful to Dr. Edmondson for his generosity.
The Department of History will feature two free and open to the public events for our 2027 Edmondson Lecture Series, Immigration & Citizenship, featuring Dr. Kevin Kenny.
The lectures will be held on March 22nd and March 23rd at Hankamer Academic Center H101 - Kayser Auditorium, 1401 S. 4th St. Waco, TX 76706. Both lectures will be held from 3:30 - 5:00 pm.
Dr.Kevin Kenny is Professor of History at New York University. His books include Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998; 25th anniversary edition, 2023); The American Irish: A History (2000); Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (2009); Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (2013); The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2023), which won the James A. Rawley Prize and the Theodore Saloutos Award; and, most recently, Rituals of Migration: Italians and Irish on the Move (2025). A Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians, Professor Kenny served as President of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society from 2021 to 2024.
Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Monday, March 22nd, 2027 | 3:30 - 5:00 pm | Hankamaer Academic Center - H101 - Kayser Auditorium
In the United States today, the federal government controls immigration by deciding who to admit, exclude, or remove. Yet during the century after the American Revolution, Congress played only a very limited role in regulating immigration. States and cities patrolled their own borders and set their own rules for community membership. Asserting their sovereign police power to regulate internal affairs, local jurisdictions quarantined sick passengers, imposed taxes and bonds on foreign paupers, and policed the movement of free and enslaved and Black people. To the extent that these measures involved foreign-born people, they constituted the immigration policy of the United States in the antebellum era, when internal migration and foreign immigration were tightly intertwined. Defenders of slavery feared that if Congress had the power to control immigrant admissions, it could also control the movement of free Black people within and across state borders, and perhaps even the interstate slave trade. A national immigration policy did not emerge until the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the timing was no coincidence. The existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery shaped American immigration policy as that policy moved from the local to the national level.
Who Controls Immigration in the United States Today? Contemporary Tensions in Historical Context
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2027 | 3:30 - 5:00 pm | Hankamaer Academic Center - H101 - Kayser Auditorium
The federal government controls immigrant admissions and exclusions today, but states and cities continue to regulate the lives of immigrants once they have entered the country. Many local jurisdictions restrict immigrants’ access to public services, educational tuition, and employment, and pass laws designed to enhance local cooperation with federal law enforcement. Others facilitate immigrant integration by providing access to benefits, education, or work. And, in a striking parallel with state-level opposition to federal fugitive slave laws in the antebellum era, some local jurisdictions provide sanctuary for immigrants or refuse to act as agents of federal law enforcement. Just as in the nineteenth century, states and cities today align their immigration policies with how they define the public good. In a federal republic, these definitions continue to vary widely depending on location and politics. The rights of citizens and persons can be protected most securely when defined nationally and guaranteed by the federal government, but local jurisdictions continue to play a vitally important role in the lives of American immigrants, especially during an era when birthright citizenship and equal protection—forged in a war to end slavery and enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment—are under threat.