The Birth Certificate: An American History

by Susan J. Pearson

Overview

For many Americans, the birth certificate is a mundane piece of paper, unearthed from deep storage when applying for a driver's license, verifying information for new employers, or claiming state and federal benefits. Yet as Donald Trump and his fellow "birthers" reminded us when they claimed that Barack Obama wasn't an American citizen, it plays a central role in determining identity and citizenship.

In The Birth Certificate: An American History, award-winning historian Susan J. Pearson traces the document's two-hundred-year history to explain when, how, and why birth certificates came to matter so much in the United States. Deftly weaving together social, political, and legal history, The Birth Certificate is a fascinating biography of a piece of paper that grounds our understanding of how those who live in the United States are considered Americans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469679334
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	02/01/2024
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Susan J. Pearson is associate professor of history at Northwestern University and the author of The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

An exceedingly fine book, deeply and impressively researched, excavating a story that modern American historians simply did not know until now.... The scholarship is stellar: both thorough and thoroughly digested. And Pearson's discoveries about the part the birth certificate has played in American political, social, and organizational life are stunning."—Sarah E. Igo, author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America



This is an engaging and original book, interweaving social and political history to tell the story of a small document with a big impact on American life. What really stands out is the discussion of race—and how birth registration was not a neutral policy but one used to enforce the racial caste system in the U.S. for both African Americans and Native Americans."—Lynn Weiner, author of From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820–1980

Editorial Reviews

Absorbing...An accessible, lively study of how a now-standard record came about."—Kirkus Reviews



This impeccable and captivating work of historical scholarship will appeal to any historian of the postbellum United States, but particularly to social historians, intellectual historians, and historians of science and technology.... In The Birth Certificate, Pearson brilliantly weaves together a variety of archival sources to elucidate the intersection between lived experience, state bureaucracy, and systems of epistemic authority."—Journal of Interdisciplinary History



Richly researched, beautifully written.... [A] crucial historical analysis of the vital bureaucratic document that establishes American identity." —American Journal of Legal History



A crucial contribution to the study of age as a category of analysis.... Pearson's work will be thought provoking for scholars and students alike."—Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

From the Publisher

2021-10-13
A study of the development of the birth certificate.

“The single act of registering a birth…serves two functions: it creates real-time population knowledge and a technology for personal identification,” writes Northwestern history professor Pearson. She adds that it wasn’t until 1933 that American states more or less agreed that these made for good reasons to issue records of live births. But even at the dawn of World War II, 60 million Americans were undocumented. Birth certificates were more common along the East Coast than in the interior. Reformists concentrated in Eastern cities were interested in using these documents to help control child labor (by proving that exploited workers were too young to hire legally) and monitor mandatory school attendance. Naturally, in an America wedded to libertarian notions that oppose state control, such efforts were contested, and even today there is no required national birth certificate (though there is a standard federal form), as there is in practically every other country in the world. Indeed, the strongest parts of this absorbing study point to the political uses to which birth certification has been applied. This involves, of course, the Trumpian conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, which itself has antecedents: Birth certificates were rarer among minority populations than among Whites, and of course these papers became instruments allowing people to vote, go to school, purchase property, and the like. Later uses and misuses of the certificate include schemes to restrict the use of restrooms to those that “corresponded to the sex on…birth certificates” and keep paperless Black Americans from claiming pensions while providing scammers with opportunities to sell forged birth records. None of this helped with that “real-time population knowledge” desideratum. Pearson also looks at the positive aspects of the certification efforts in providing key data, which would not have come about without the work of private citizens in support of government-fueled science.

Fundamentally of interest to scholars, but an accessible, lively study of how a now-standard record came about.

Kirkus Reviews