CALL FOR PAPERS--Paper People: Documentation, Identity, and Citizenship in U.S. History

Documentation of identity is at the heart of modern citizenship – paper is how individuals are known to belong to this or that nation or, by contrast, to lie beyond its pale. States mark their citizens in a variety of ways – with birth certificates, driver’s licenses, passports, and social security cards – and they require that citizens prove their belonging by displaying these documents across a range of administrative settings. Such pieces of paper are the way that individuals access citizenship as it operationalized in concrete forms – the right to be in a certain place, to travel freely, to attend school, vote, gain employment, receive social welfare benefits and marry, to name a few. Because documents link the abstract idea of citizenship to the goods of citizenship, they both open and close doors. Throughout U.S. history, citizenship has been marked by inequality and exclusion, and the administration of such inequality has, too, relied on documents to function.

Though historians have long used state and ecclesiastical documents (such as birth, death, and marriage certificates, censuses, and passports) as sources of information about populations and individuals, they have too often viewed them as transparent windows onto the past. Recently, however, scholars have argued that we need to interrogate the production and meaning of documents, to recover the logics and concrete practices that lie behind them, and to consider the critical role that such information-gathering played in statecraft.  To date, most of this scholarship has detailed the development of centralized European states or colonial administration. Recent scholarship on race and immigration in the United States has shown that documentation practices are critical to the construction of basic categories of identity, but accounts of the rise of a documentary regime in the United States are surprisingly thin. When it comes to the politics of government population knowledge, U.S. historians usually scrutinize the federal, decennial census in spite of the fact that census records are not a legal form of identification.

This conference aims to gather together historians and social scientists who work on the history of documentation and identity in the United States with the aim of producing an edited, scholarly collection. Extant collections on the history of documentary identity focus largely on Europe and there is no stand-alone volume on the topic for the United States. This is a serious hole in scholarship on the history of the state, citizenship, race, and identity in the United States – it is a testimony to the lingering hold of exceptionalism on US historians who, even as they have disavowed it for more than a generation, still do not write histories of state practices of identification akin to scholars who work on other parts of the world. While there are books on the history of the birth certificate and the US passport, there are many holes left to fill and much conceptual work yet to be done. Participants in this conference are invited to submit papers on a wide range of identity documents and their use -- freedom and manumission papers, slave passes, indenture contracts, social security cards, driver’s licenses, naturalization papers, and more informal documentary systems such as family bibles and baptismal records. Papers should directly address the role that such documents play in the construction of identity and the administration of citizenship.

Paper People will be small (10-12 participants) and run workshop style. Participants are expected to submit 25-30 page papers in advance; papers will be precirculated and each paper will be discussed by the whole over the course of the two days. Provided that a suitable venue can be found, the aim is to publish the proceedings in an edited volume. The conference will take place at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois on May 2-3, 2025. Lodging expenses and most meals will be covered, and each participant will receive up to $400 to support their travel expenses.

Please send inquiries and 200-300 word paper proposals to Susan Pearson, [email protected].  Proposals are due November 15, 2024.