"All peoples in the Americas, long settled or newly arrived, had experience with social structuration and government. But [white] intellectual elites came to hold the power of definition and the control over public memory. They wrote the agency of “indigenous” peoples, of slaves, free Africans, and of Euro-origin women and the lower classes out of history texts [and] conjured it out of public memory. In nineteenth-century nation-state narratievs, the respective author’s nation usually appears at the top of human evolution or, at the least, better than the neighboring nations."

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Migrants and Migration in Modern North America: Cross-Border Lives, Labor Markets, and Politics

-Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires

Reblog - 9 months ago with 3 notes