ABOUT ME

     Cody Nager is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab and teaches courses to undergraduate and graduate students. He is a historian of American citizenship, law and migration whose work places the United States in a broader Atlantic and global context from colonial times to the present. He received his doctorate in history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, his MA from The College of William and Mary, and his BA from Columbia University. Prior to Stanford, he was a dissertation fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies. In addition to Stanford, he has taught at the City College of New York, the CUNY School of Law, and Texas Tech University. His research has been supported by Stanford University's Hoover History Lab, the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute, and the American Historical Association among other institutions.

     His manuscript, Determined to be American: Regulating Migration and Citizenship in the Early American Republic, 1783–1824, examines how debates over law, diplomacy, national security, territorial expansion, and slavery shaped the creation of legal and political institutions governing who could become a citizen. Internationally, the turmoil of the Atlantic world, such as the French and Haitian Revolutions, ongoing slave resistance, and the Napoleonic Wars buffeted the nation. Domestically, indigenous resistance, European colonial designs, and perceived risk of slave revolts heightened tensions. Meanwhile, a constitutional framework entangled the free migration of voluntary immigrants and the coerced migration of enslaved people. Migrants forced Americans to confront a panoply of political leanings, economic circumstances, and ideologies. Americans thought selecting the “right” migrants would bring economic success, while picking the “wrong” ones would take the jobs of hardworking residents, occupy fertile western lands with unproductive populations, and expand slavery. The evolution of migration regulations not only shaped partisan conflict and the development of Early American institutions but also laid the groundwork for later struggles over citizenship.

     His next project investigates how legal and constitutional frameworks governing American citizenship evolved in response to debates over incorporation at the national fringe. During the incorporation of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, legal disputes arose over whether to grant citizenship to new populations under the terms of the Purchase Treaty or have each individual apply using the existing naturalization procedure. These debates established early precedents for collective naturalization, which were later challenged by the U.S. acquisition of Mexican Territory under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the 1867 Purchase of Alaska, and by victory in the Spanish-American War at the end of the nineteenth century. The acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines forced a constitutional revolution through the 1901-1914 Insular Cases, which established limited rights for territorial inhabitants. However, during the mid-twentieth century, citizenship law encountered stiff geopolitical imperatives, namely World War II and the Cold War. In the Philippines, this led to the deliberate withdrawal of a territorial path to citizenship in preparation for independence. During the Hawaii statehood process, debates over race, citizenship, and statehood were overcome by military service. In Alaska's path to statehood, the Cold War military necessity and controversy over fisheries forced a realignment. Later territorial experiments, such as the Panama Canal Zone, again created complex legal categories of residents who lived under U.S. jurisdiction without clear paths to citizenship until negotiated transitions returned territorial sovereignty to local control. By tracing the evolution of legal debates regarding territories and citizenship, this project reveals how the application of law at the fringes of American society reflected not just constitutional principles, but also racial anxieties, potential disloyalty fears, and geopolitical concerns.