From the Publisher
"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 DifferenceIt 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