1. A different mirror. Pt 1. Boundlessness : Before Columbus : Vinland. 2. "Tempest" in the wilderness : the racialization of savagery. Shakespeare's dream about America

World turned upside down. 3. "Giddy multitude" : the hidden origins of slavery. View from the cabins : White and Black laborers in early Virginia

"English and Negroes in armes"

Wolf by the ears.

Pt 2. Borders : Prospero unbound : the market revolution. 4. Toward the stony mountains : from removal to reservation. Andrew Jackson : symbol for an age

Land-allotment strategy : the Choctaw experience

Treaty strategy : the Cherokees' Trail of Tears

Where the buffalo no longer roam. 5. No more peck o' corn : slavery and its discontents. Racial borders in the free states

Was Sambo real?

Slave son, White father

Black nationalism : nostalgia in the Niger

"Tell Linkum dat we wants land". 6. Emigrants from Erin : ethnicity and class within White America. Irish exodus

"Immortal Irish brigade" of workers

Irish maid in America

Irish "ethnic" strategy. 7. Foreigners in their native land : manifest destiny in the Southwest. "In the hands of an enterprising people"

"Occupied" Mexico

Making of a Mexican proletariat. 8. Searching for gold mountains. Pioneers from Asia

Chinese Calibans : the borders of exclusion

Twice a minority : Chinese women in America

Colony of "bachelors".

Pt 3. Distances : the end of the frontier. 9. "Indian question" : from reservation to reorganization. Wounded Knee : the significance of the frontier in Indian history

Father of the reservation system

Allotment and assimilation

Indian new deal : the remaking of native America. 10. Pacific crossings : seeking the land of money trees. Picture brides in America

Tears in the canefileds

Transforming the land : from deserts to farms. 11. Between "two endless days" : the continuous journey to the promised land. Exodus from the Pale

Shtetl in America

In the sweatshops : an army of garment workers

Daughters of the colony

Up from greenhorns : crossing Delancey Street. 12. El Norte : the borderland of Chicano America. The crossing

Reserve army of Chicano labor

Internal borders of exclusion

The barrio : community in the colony. 13. To the promised land : Blacks in the urban north. Black exodus

Urban crucible

Yearning for blackness in urban America

"But a few pegs to fall" : the Great Depression.

Pt 4. Crossings : the ashes at Dachau. 14. Through a glass darkly : toward the twenty-first century. A war for democracy : fighting as one people

America's dilemma