Meaning of the Cover of the Book

At the end of writing a book, one of the last and very consequential choices is that of choosing a cover. When I posted the cover reveal of Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship last month on Bluesky, it received an overwhelmingly positive response. One follower, I think it was Laura Tamman, said she thought the cover was compelling and conveyed the stakes and seriousness of the subject. Thomas Keck asked what meaning I was trying to convey with the choice of the image.

I knew early on what I didn’t want. I was sure in a book about slavery, Native American dispossession, and Chinese exclusion, that I did not want images of people, which would be exploitative. I considered briefly an image of the US Constitution since the book is in part about constitutional development and lines of legal doctrine. And I jettisoned that idea as well since this book is, I hope, not about dry legal theory. It is a policy history and the effects of policy and law on real people, including how they protested and thought of unjust laws.

So I selected the cover image of a US flag, which represents America broadly, and an image of a person behind the flag. It is unclear whether the part is just part of the background of the flag, or, whether the stripes on the flag are like bars restricting the person like prison bars. I liked the ambiguity of that image which left room for interpretation even as iit left no doubt that the book in the end, is about people.