Elections and Citizenship: Discussing the Canadian Election and Brendan Shanahan's "Disparate Regimes"

Please join the Yale Canadian Studies Committee for an exciting discussion of Canadian politics and American citizenship history. Jay Gitlin (Senior Lecturer–History, Director–Canadian Studies, Yale), Robert J. Cottrol (Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law, Professor–History, George Washington University), and Brendan A. Shanahan (Lecturer–History, Associate Research Scholar–Canadian Studies, Yale), will each offer remarks.

Shanahan will first offer a rapid-fire analysis of the 2025 Canadian Federal Election. Topics of likely discussion include: a breakdown of the election results along partisan, regional, and factional lines, a recap of the issues that drove the campaign, and where the race stacks up within broader Canadian political history and alongside elections held around the globe in recent years. A question-and-answer session will follow this election retrospective.

The discussion will then turn to Shanahan’s new book: Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States 1865–1965 (Oxford University Press, 2025). The book shows how state governments greatly shaped the political and economic rights available to noncitizen immigrants in the United States between 1865 and 1965. Shanahan argues that legal and political disputes in these domains not only created disparate regimes on a state-by-state basis but also helped to invent many American citizenship rights as citizen-only rights. After Shanahan offers a brief snapshot of Disparate Regimes, Cottrol will offer remarks about the book’s interventions, and Gitlin will highlight the narrative’s many connections to Canada and Canadians.