In this dramatic court case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Japanese were not white and therefore could not be naturalized as U.S. citizens.

Josiah Strong’s influential 1885 polemic, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, represented both America’s sense of manifest destiny and nativist fears as the new immigration began to bring hundreds of thousands of eastern and southern Europeans into the country.

The Oriental Exclusion Act, actually a special provision of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, excluded immigrants who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship from entrance to the United States, even at the new ethnic-based, lower levels.

The Oregon Country was a huge expanse of lightly inhabited territory north of Mexican California, south of Russian Alaska, and southwest of the British trapping lands of the Athabasca Country.