March 31, 2009

“Are you an American, or are you not?” This was the question Harry Wheeler, sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, used to choose his targets in one of the most remarkable vigilante actions ever carried out on U.S. soil. And this is the question at the heart of Katherine Benton-Cohen’s provocative history, which ties that seemingly remote corner of the country to one of America’s central concerns: the historical creation of racial boundaries. History professor Katherine Benton-Cohen discusses her latest book “Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands” (Harvard University Press, 2009) which explores the changing meanings of race in America through the microcosm of southeastern Arizona's mine and ranch country, as well as the historical context of racial conflict in the area as it relates to current border control issues with Mexico.

Katherine Benton-Cohen is assistant professor of history at Georgetown. She is a historian of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular interests in the histories of women and gender, race and immigration, and the American West. Her first book, “Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands” (Harvard University Press, April 2009), explores the changing meanings of race in America through the microcosm of southeastern Arizona's mine and ranch country. She has published articles on a famous labor incident known as the Bisbee Deportation of 1917, as well as on women's homesteading in the American Southwest. Her current research explores the history of the U.S. Congress's Dillingham Commission, which conducted a massive study of immigration in the early twentieth century and paved the way for the immigration restrictions of the 1920s that ended mass migration to the United States until the 1960s.